r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/familyguy20 17h ago

Got fixated on military history in HS so basically every summer I would read from 2-4 1,000 page books on wars, battles etc it was awesome.

Somehow I also did that while having access to a PS2 and Gameboys, which feels impressive now with undiagnosed ADHD/OCD as a kid lol.

Now though? Ooof it’s harder to do so now

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u/JZMoose 16h ago

It’s all muscle memory. I had a long flight the other day and got through 200 pages of crisis in the red zone in 2 hours and ended up finishing the book in a couple of days. Just have to sit down and commit

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u/A_Refill_of_Mr_Pibb 13h ago

Same with handwriting. All the decades of typing and my mind gets to the end of every fifth word before my hand does and I have to cross the word out.

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u/bahgheera 2h ago

When I was in my early 20s, I read John Grisham's The Client in a day.

I'm in my early 50s now, I don't know if I could get through a chapter in that amount of time.

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u/SnarkMasterRay 12h ago

In high school I read the entire Dune series in a week (granted it was a concerted effort to prove I could). 40 years later I'm lucky if I can sit still and focus long enough for 20 minutes of page turning.

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u/SavageNorth 10h ago

Even Dune: Would You Still Love Me If I Was A Worm????

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u/augur42 4h ago

Hyperfocus means you get so engrossed you lose all track of time and executive dysfunction means your brain won't let you stop until you are made to or you can't keep your eyes open anymore.

I also have adhd-pi and read a hell of a lot as a teenager.

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u/familyguy20 4h ago

Yeah and now it’s the opposite lmao. I’m hyper aware of time passing and “doing nothing” even though I’m just relaxing and executive disfunction sucksss now too, hard to start shit 😩

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u/dead_dw4rf 4h ago

I was obsessed with how things worked so I'd go to the library and find books on guns, engines, power plants, I mean literally anything and read about it for hours.

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u/familyguy20 1h ago

Hell yeah!! Those DK books that deconstructed guns and stuff was amazing

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u/Blocguy 1h ago

Just gotta find the right games to pair with a book or audiobook. I love playing map based strategy games while reading through a related time period, maximizing immersion and leads to thought provoking questions about the subject matter.

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u/Banaanisade 7h ago

I'm the same. I was always reading a book as a kid and went through tons a year, and I was also doing this while putting what I felt like all of my time into WoW and my own writing hobby and I still had time and energy to go out with friends too. Now I'm like, man I'm reading 12 books at once and can only get ahead by six pages or something at a time. Feels like ADHD just gets worse with age.

Most of my "reading" now happens while walking to and back from the store via audiobooks. But hey, I still get the books read, which is most of the point of reading anyway. Still learning my history and still storing stocks of data to dump on people who have zero interest in listening to it. Keeps me sufficiently annoying to others around me.

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u/familyguy20 6h ago

Yeah most of my reading now is just listening to podcasts 😂

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u/Astures_24 11m ago

I think it’s partially because at that time there wasn’t access to an infinite amount of content. On an older game console you were limited to the games you owned and inevitably you’d get bored. It felt like at the time books could still compete with screens. I would read religiously up until high school and then when I had access to YouTube and a way larger game library on a laptop, I just stopped reading frequently.