Last week, we had an episode on Banana Q: a Filipino-flavored podcast where I interviewed Eliza Victoria about what it’s like to be a Filipino author. Aside from talking about her writing process for Wounded Little Gods and After Lambana, she was also very honest about how she doesn’t really earn that much from her royalties and her advice for Filipino writers is to keep their day jobs. You can listen to the full interview below or on any podcast platform.
I was glad that her publisher Tuttle had reached out and asked if we wanted to interview her, and offered to send copies of her books, because it gave me a reason to actually sit down and crack open a book in what seems like ages. I mean, before this, I think the last time I finished a book was in 2020, when I forced myself to do a beach read on my birthday.
OMG. What happened to the bookworm who once always maxed out her library card borrow limit?
This has bothered me for a while now, and I realized I wasn’t the only one when I spoke about this to other friends who were also once bookworms. One day, while scrolling through Reddit, I found the answer. My attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.
Here is an excerpt from the Guardian article linked above:
A small study of college students found they now only focus on any one task for 65 seconds. A different study of office workers found they only focus on average for three minutes. This isn’t happening because we all individually became weak-willed. Your focus didn’t collapse. It was stolen.
Prof Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained one to me. He said “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity”. But we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six forms of media at the same time. When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. “They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – [and] that comes with a cost.” Imagine, say, you are doing your tax return, and you receive a text, and you look at it – it’s only a glance, taking three seconds – and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another”, he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it. When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.”
I found that information so compelling that I had to share it in today’s podcast episode where we tackle the question: Do Filipinos Like to Read Books? Spoiler answer: NO. Most Filipinos, don’t, anyway. You can listen to the rest of the episode below.
I do miss reading books, though. Maybe I just need to find an exciting book that I can’t put down, so I would get back into the habit. My challenge for this year is to read at least one book a month.
My 14 year old self would scoff at this ridiculously easy challenge for her.
My almost 40 year old me, however, is extremely worried that I would fail. Wish me luck.
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