I'd say reading is a more active, taxing endeavour than TV. If you've had to drive into work, do a tough 9-5, cook meals, look after the family etc I can absolutely understand why someone wouldn't have the mental energy to read literature and reach for the remote.

To paraphrase HG Wells, it's all about application: specifically, the application of the seat of the trousers to the seat of the chair.

I have been making time to read and play an instrument for 74 years now. I have always put those two things first in life, after earning a living. It has been a daily strategy and now in retirement I do chores, watch a few KZfaqrs in the morning and most days start reading after lunch and on till sleep time, with a brief break for a walk and dinner. I was advised to prioritise the "good stuff" as there are so many good books that there is no need to read trash. I have stuck to that and have eclectic tastes, history, classics both ancient and modern, biography, criticism , and essays. I totally agree about notifications and sub-vocalisation. I have a Onyx boox tablet, which although colour and has access to Play Store, is dedicated to reading. It has Gmail for those sites that send ebook links by email, and access to the internet. All notifications are off and, apart from security apps, all apps are for reading. For other stuff, I have a Samsung tablet which is off when I am reading. I am a very selective watcher of TV and am seriously thinking of dumping it. I never watch more than an hour, and most days none.

​@@michaeldallaway1988I agree that life is busy and can make you too tired to read. I am sometimes too tired to read after work or an otherwise busy day, but it isn't true every day. We all make choices and sometimes it's tv watching. But I agree with Steve that people who say they never have time to read are not truthful. They don't have time every day possibly but never isn't true.

also, there's an interesting video by Chad Haag called 'How To Read A Book A Day' that adds more technical info like how to actually get that subvocalization down: not reading words but "idiomatic groups": collocations, idioms, phrasemes that you see all the time but can begin to group instead of reading word by word

Well, obviously I don't think anybody needs to read so much that they start skipping words!

Subvocalizing is good.

@jasperantonelli4822 Most definitely. I need to get it under control.

@jasperantonelli4822 Yes, it's something I need to work on.

I've known so many people who told me the same thing - that the amount of drinking they did stopped them from doing all kinds of things they wanted to do. I strongly recommend taking steps to get it under control!

When I drank, drinking itself was the distraction - and not just a distraction from reading or writing....

@@saintdonoghue Thanks Steve

I would love to hear from others about their path from subvocalising to not-subvocalising. Personally, I'm somewhere along that route in that I don't hear echoes of each word on the page (if I were to hear words at the speed I read, it would sound comically sped up), but at the end of a sentence, if I stop and think about it, there is still some shade of an auditory imprint for several of the (typically key) words. Do others experience this effect? Is the next/final step just to take a leap of faith into the silent void and push a little faster to prevent even those shadows from appearing? Any advice for sticking through the early stages of anxiety that you've missed everything in the text? Sadly, when trying to find real talk online about the process of shedding remaining subvocalisation, I find I'm just inundated with bro-tube Evelyn Wood clones trying to make a buck.

@@bradwaller7057 So when you read, do you just kind of glance over the sentences and your brain picks out keywords? After Steve pointed out how it's so ingrained in us from a young age, it made me realize that I can't even picture a way of reading without subvocalizing.

​​@@dplol_ I find that when I try to read faster than my comfortable pace, what drops first are the smaller words (articles, forms of be, etc.) but that I still retain pretty much the same comprehension because frankly, it's rare that those carry much semantic weight or shift the meaning of a sentence more than slightly. I tend to be more aware of the jumps/saccades in this mode, and unless I'm mistaken, I do fewer of these and rest slightly longer on each one, taking in at least the visual impression of a phrase or small group of words at the same time. (Note: for me there's always a danger of letting the jump rhythms take over, as if my eyes are snapping to an internal metronome while attention might wander if it isn't consistent. It takes some effort not to do that, but it's something I've gotten better at over time. Curious if this happens to other people trying to push beyond their comfort zone) For the few words in my visual focus at any time, I don't get the feeling that I'm processing them through an auditory pathway because the time they're in focus doesn't last long enough to hear them in sequence. (And hearing them simultaneously sounds even more comprehension-destroying than anything else mentioned in this whole comment section. :D) So what I'm wondering is whether a small sequence of words, taken in visually, is inevitably going to activate the neurons associated with their pronunciations so that, even if I'm not hearing them in my head as I read, I still have the impression at the end of the sentence of something auditory having gone on and thus tell myself that I still subvocalize to some degree. Incidentally, some of this overlaps with a book I read last year that I first learned about on this channel when Steve book hauled or mail hauled it called The Science of Reading by Adrian Johns. Curious if anyone else (or @saintdonoghue, who I'm sure did) read this and what they took from it.

Plus practicing this with A.S.Byatt’s “Possession” is not easy

You are indeed wrong! You yourself read without subvocalizing every day!

@@saintdonoghue I will most certainly try to notice this happening, as it is clear that you are somewhat of a reading expert.

Why is it a problem?

@@folksurvival Subvocalizing? Just makes you read slower. Is it a problem..? Good question. I guess if you have a bunch of books you’re anxious to get to it will just take longer. 😊

I never subvocalized, but oh my, I sympathize with how difficult it is to stop!

If you’ve never subvocalized how can you know how difficult it is to stop? Or even if it is possible to undo it

Well, ACTUALLY vocalizing - reading aloud - is vital for any kind of proofreading or checking your own written work. Your ear will catch problems your eye just misses

Hah! No, it's not a hack - it's natural way your brain works!

@@saintdonoghue I don’t know about my brain… I even subvocalize when I see Stop signs haha!

Hah! I'm betting the number is zero! He's a legitimately busy guy - which just proves my point: look at how much he nevertheless manages to read!

Sure, but never let the truth get in the way of a good story.@@saintdonoghue