Wait. We knew all this already

So, there's this article buzzing around the Internet: "Seven Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe," or some such. The "myths" they list are:

• People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
• We use only 10% of our brains
• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
• Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
• Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
• Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
• Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.

The oddest thing about this article is that I thought we already knew all of these. Haven't articles like this been floating around the medical literature for years? Maybe not all collected in one place, but I know I saw an article about how the "64oz of fluids a day requirement" got translated into the "8 glasses a day myth" last year, and the bit about there not being enough tryptophan in turkey to cause drowsiness is a decade old, at least. Articles pointing out that there's no clinical evidence associating reading in dim light with long-term vision problems have been around at least since 2003.

I'm just surprised to see it all coming out so quickly; fully eight percent of my "You must read this" RSS feed was that one article, or some report on that article. It's just weird.

There's a lock on the TV for a reason.

Last night, Kouryou-chan and I played a couple rounds of Boggle, the word game where you're given a grid of sixteen random letters and told to make up as many words as you can, with rules about letter re-use and letter proximity to limit your possibilities. It's a great game; I've always enjoyed playing it. And needless to say, I did indeed kick her butt at it, with scores like 21 to 8, but the fact that she kept trying, even when she knew I was going to win, was very heartening.

Afterward, I gave her a couple of puzzles, and she came up with some on her own, based upon the notion of abstraction. It was typical "one of these things" testing: Hammer, Saw, Axe, Log. I pointed out to her that people who don't read (and I mean, don't read at all) can't see any difference between these; their brains don't have the abstracting ability of readers. Preliterate cultures think our abstraction "tool" is somewhat crazy: when forced to make a decision, one group (Russian villagers in the 1940s) tossed out hammer on the grounds that saws, axes, and logs were all components of the task "make firewood."

We had a conversation about categoricals; one list she had was "snow, lights, pine trees, flowers," and I said "lights" because it was man made, and she said, "no, flowers, because the rest are all Yule things." I pointed out that "lights" wasn't enough to go on; we had lights all the time and she meant "decorative lights."

I mention all of this because the National Endowment for the Arts has released it's 2007 survey of readership (useful: Executive Summary (PDF)) and discovered that, while in 1982, 56.9 percent of Americans had read a novel for pleasure, it had fallen to 46.7 percent in 2002. This year, the NEA reports, the number of Americans who can "compare viewpoints in different editorials" has fallen from 15% to 13%. (Holy moly; 87% of Americans can't discern the viewpoint of an editorial‽‽‽ No wonder we're all so screwed up!)

I mean, think about this: I read a little every day. I have a stack of "to read" books a half-mile high. This puts me (and you, I bet) into the 36% minority of the population that reads every day for pleasure, who experience "that fruitful miracle of a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately," as Proust described it. (I feel a little guilty writing that; I tried, I really did, to read In Search of Lost Time; so many people I trust have told me that finishing it is a life-changing experience, but it was so windy and slow I couldn't. Maybe I should conquer that, just so I can say I did it. I might even understand Serial Experiments Lain better. I'm told the Davis translation is better than the Moncreif, but it's not available as an e-book.)

All told, the evidence is mounting that my best bet would be to throw out the television altogether, but I'm not quite willing to do that yet. Kouryou-chan is nearly addicted to the thing, and this week has been hard on her since she lost all TV privileges earlier because of misbehavior (mostly, lying to us about how much TV she had watched and sneaking down to watch more when she'd used up her daily time). Part of the problem,I think, is that when I'm reading I don't look like I'm reading; I'm just holding a shiny metal box that I always have with me. It's not "a book," it's my planner-- calendar, notepad, agenda, todo list, address book, shopping list, meditation timer, English-Japenese dictionary, client tracker, and, oh yeah, an e-book reader with 50 novels in it at the moment.

Still, it's more grist for my mill. Ironic that you're reading this, no?

[Hat tip: Caleb Crain, Twilight of the Books, New Yorker magazine, December 24, 2007]