Reading for Pleasure QuestionnaireFollow

I do agree with you about that last question. As for your second part I respectfully disagree, as do many authors. Audiobooks are great becuase you can be doing menial tasks while listening, or if you really want to get into the scene close your eyes and let your brain go to town imagining everything. I've listened to the Harry Potter books 3 times, read them twice. I also have Enderverse (Enders Games series and Ender's Shadow series) and one of them had Orson Scott Card do the intro where he stated he felt like audiobooks were better.

Now I don't disagree with you about bad VA, but when VA is done right (again Harry Potter series, i swear they got Hagrid from the movies to do the books) it's great, but I have listened to a few series where I liked no voice acting, just plain reading too.

Yeah, the draw of books vs TV is really the lack of visual stimuli, you can create the images in your mind without the restrictions of some directors view of how the story should look, it also allows you to peer into the minds of the characters because the pace doesn't have to be real-time so narration of a character's thoughts isn't a showstopper. Audiobooks are sort of a happy medium. Done well they provide most of the benefits of a book without the drawback of having to stare at the page. Good for the gym.

For me, my dislike of audiobooks stems from the fact that I can read so much faster than anyone else can speak. The same book will take me an hour to read as it would someone two or three hours to say aloud.

I suspect it's more of a feedback loop, really. Probably with some sort of phenotypal ceiling approached in a horizontal exponential asymptote like way.

Do you have a source for that? I don't buy it. While people's personality and level of intelligence do not often change, with the right stimulus and effort, they certainly can. And just for the record, we don't ever stop making new pathways. Y'know how we used to get told that we're born with a specific amount of brain cells and once you reach a certain age and you stop developing you never make more? Science has recently discovered that that isn't true.

It's probably not something that you'll find a single source for easily. You can find it quoted in just about every product marketed to parents with young kids though.

I doubt you'll find many people arguing that there's no mental development after age 5, just simply that a lot of the development takes place in the first few years of life, and it grows increasingly difficult to make fundamental changes to a child's mental capacity as time progresses.

Well yeah, I'm not saying that it's easy and that anyone can do it, but I don't buy that it isn't possible. I've seen interviews of kids who had absolutely zero interest in school or reading before they came across a certain teacher who changed their minds. Now granted, I know that's not the same thing as intelligence, but I do think it's along the same lines.

This, hence the "pretty much" in my statement. There is certainly development throughout your life, but you generally won't see fundamental changes past the preschool ages. Changes in behavior and interest are much more common, they happen all the time. People who suddenly decide to apply themselves because of a good teacher and become the smartest people in their class were always intelligent, they just didn't show it.

Filled out your survey, Captain Bree.

Reading too much was my educational downfall. I became obsessed with Stephen King (we had to read and report on SK as freshmen) then fancied myself as the Trashcan Man and tried to blow up my school. They didn't really want me back after I got out of jail.

O_o

True story?