Chapter 1 - Role of Memory and Attention in Reading

As a reader, I know that my wish to remember everything and maintain attention throughout my reading, is an impossible wish. Somehow, things get sorted out, filtered, registered, missed, stored, or discarded, seemingly beyond my control. Why did I miss this important fact the first time I read this text? Did I not pay attention, and if so why? Is my attention the problem or is it the way the text was written? But what if I did pay attention but do not remember reading about that fact. Is my memory the problem, or is it the way the text was written? If only I knew how memory and attention worked in reading, their mode of action, and also their limitations, I could understand how to read better, and even how to write better.

Memory

Memory’s mode of action

Reading is a fantastically complex task. When your eyes scan text, your mind decodes and stores the meaning of the words in short-term memory. When you read “a red car,” you create in your mind’s eye the image of a red car. In other words, you have decoded the written word (a high level of abstraction) and encoded it into something different, the image of an anonymous car. As you read through the sentence, your mind processes reading in chunks of information buffered in the short-term memory.

The image in your brain is diffused and static at first, then crystallizes and becomes dynamic when the droplets merge to form rivulets that streak down the window—the missing context. The image then changes dynamically to include the windowsill. The words create a wide cinematic tilt down zoom out effect. The writer is the cinematographer. Could you produce in writing the reverse cinematographic effect?

In summary, the immediate task of the short-term memory is to help the reader store both the words and the images they create long enough for the reader to reach a point of closure in the sentence. Once a sentence is understood, the memory does not carry forward its cargo of words into the next sentence. It carries only the smallest of baggage in its briefcase.

In that memory briefcase are four things:

• the few words that end the sentence
• what this sentence is about (its topic)
• if the words created an image, that image, a sound, that sound, a smell, that smell, a feeling, that feeling
• if the sentence created expectations, these expectations

The last words in a sentence linger briefly in short-term memory to help the reader see the connection between two successive sentences.

Myself with Meaulnes is repeated in Both of us. The repetition acts as a handshake to help the reader see how the two sentences connect.

A sentence has a verb, the verb a subject—the actor of the verb’s action.

Grammatically speaking, the topic of a sentence is often the subject of the verb in that sentence. The sentence is about “Mary,” and the rest of the sentence describes what she does. The topic (here Mary) acts, so attention keeps it in your mind’s eye, as it is expected to reappear in the next sentences. You would not expect the next sentence to start with “The man was cleaning the dishes”. However, if it started with “She let its soothing peace penetrate her soul,” it would make sense because the new sentence stays on topic.

While being read, concrete words form an image.

Whenever I read a sentence like this one, the same silent image comes to mind, that of a scenery in French Brittany with Mont Saint Michel in the background. The image that comes to your mind is bound to be different from mine, and that’s fine. Even if I showed you the scene I photographed, it would not recall (it does for me) the smell of damp air that lingered after the downpour, and the incredible feeling of peacefulness. Whatever image you recall, it encodes a richer summary of the sentence than the words sheep, graze, meadow, brooding sky, flood, and quiet. Such visual sentences are a great example of the expression ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’

Read each of the following sentences, pausing after each one to consider its mental image.

Pause to reflect on the picture that you formed. Now read this!

See anything? With the last sentence, I saw a ball flying towards a person ready to catch it with a gloved hand. Another person I asked even saw a stadium besides the ball, the catcher and his mitt. His mind had automatically added the context. In contrast, the first sentence uses the word “flight,” an intangible concept. One can see, hear, and grab a flying ball, but one cannot see, hear, or grab flight. Similarly, one can see a falling man, but not a fall from grace, as the first is concrete and the other abstract. The more concrete words a sentence has, the easier it is for the reader to visualize the situation described.

The sentence raises the expectation that the writer is about to expound what changed. The word drastically heightens curiosity. Your attention focuses on a new target: the changes. Should the writer fail to deliver on the expectations raised, or should the claim of drastic change be unsupported, you would be disoriented and frustrated. On the other hand, should the writer deliver on these expectations, you would move speedily through the text, pulled forward by them.

Our reading brain is in pursuit. It constantly anticipates the near future based on the past. Therefore, fuel anticipation by writing expectation-raising sentences.

Knowing what our working-memory contains, how can we write to benefit from the memory’s mode of action?

1. Write the end of a sentence with great care. It plays a pivotal role.
2. Write sentences that create images. They are easier to remember.
3. Write so that the main actor in the sentence is clearly identified.
4. Write to create expectations.

Memory’s drawbacks and limitations

1- Long-term Memory is reprogrammable. It can be altered and overwritten by short-term memories of similar events.

2- Memory recall is not perfect. Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve been somewhere before, while knowing it cannot be so? You have? You are not alone. This happens when there are enough similarities between your location and a memory of where you were in the past. The same applies when someone’s facial features stored in memory resonate powerfully with a face you are seeing for the first time, and you say, “Haven’t I seen you before?” As a lecturer seeing thousands of faces over the years, I have mostly been accurate, and even astonished people with the accuracy of my recollection, but I have also been wrong… and embarrassed!

3- Memory storage is partial. Not everything that reaches our senses is stored. When asked questions about an event, some aspects of the event will be recalled clearly, some will be reconstructed from reason and memories of similar events, and others will not be recalled at all. Was the last package the delivery man dropped at your front door, to the right, the left, or the middle of the doorstep? Chances are, you don’t know, because you don’t care. Memory is strongly guided by attention, which is itself driven by motivation and goals.

4- Recall is cued. When you recite a poem or sing a song you learned, remembering a verse is often necessary for you to recall the next verse (a phenomenon called cued-recall³). Cued recall is best demonstrated in music when a pianist or a singer has to return to the beginning of a piece because they are unable to start from its middle. You probably now the alphabet song A,B,C,D… Try singing the alphabet song from the letter I. Much more difficult, isn’t it? This cued recall is consistent with the recent observations of Denise Cai, a neuroscientist from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She found that events linked in time “share overlapping neurons”⁴.

5- Memory recall is probabilistic. When the strength of the distributed interneuronal connections that make a memory weakens, recollection becomes more probabilistic (from I’m almost certain to I think). Only traumatic events or emotional ones create strong memories (accurate recall) by causing the release of large quantities of neurotransmitters and stress hormones (“Flashbulb memories⁵”).

6- Encoding and recall are affected by stress. Cortisol, a stress hormone, is known to enhance or block synaptic plasticity without which memories cannot form. For simple tasks, high levels of stress hormone actually help encoding and recall, but for complex tasks, when attention is divided, encoding (learning) and recall are both low⁶. You may have experienced needing more time to think when pressed for an answer, yet, as soon as you relaxed, the answer came!

7- Old memories interfere with younger ones. Habits resist change. Neurons are not bowling pins easily knocked out. All the better for us. This rigidity, however, affects the encoding of younger memories. If someone asked for a phone number you recently changed the old number might be the first to come to mind instead of the new one.

8- The memory stores at most 30 seconds in the frontal cortex. This explains why the reader who reads a long complex sentence (50 words and more) is unable to remember its beginning by it ends, especially if it contains long words.

What can the writer do to avoid the drawbacks and limitations of a reader’s memory?
1. Refresh people’s memory (with small recaps, summaries) to combat long-term memory alteration.
2. Before you write down recalled facts, check your recollection. It may not be accurate.
3. If you wish to return to topics you covered in earlier sections of your text, add sufficient context to improve recall.
4. Build contrast in your text. The more you do, the greater the interest and emotions, and the better the recall.
5. Stay on topic. Exhaust everything you have to write on a topic before changing it. Going back and forth between topics divides the attention. It weakens memorization.
6. Write more about what you do than about what others do. Giving other people’s work too much prominence will reduce what readers remember of your work.
7. Write a long sentence as you would build a snowman, starting from a core you roll in the snow. Write such that what a reader first reads helps understand what the reader reads next. That way, the reader has no need to remember the beginning, because it has already coalesced into the rest. If the reader has to wait until the end of a long sentence for its meaning to emerge, chances are that what started it will be forgotten, as seen below.

Attention

Attention’s mode of action

Attention acts as a catalyst and facilitator of thoughts. It puts a do-not-disturb sign on the door, dulls the sense of time, and controls eye focus while the reading brain does its word and thought processing on memory content.

Attention focuses the reader. It does that by subtracting, occulting, or blurring from the mind’s eye what is judged irrelevant or distracting. Odi, the Italian psychologist, mentioned the inhibitive role of attention⁷.

Same effect in text: read separately the text in Bold and the normal text.

Attention is a memory enhancer. The longer we focus, the more we enable the working memory to retrieve from long-term memory what it needs to build a clear image. It is like retrieving high resolution jpeg images from your photo library. They first appear in low resolution and gain full clarity as more and more layers of image details are added.

Attention comes in two varieties: spontaneous and voluntary attention.

*Spontaneous attention is a reflex. The great scientist Pavlov called it the “What is” reflex. It reacts to the new, the unexpected, and the unknown. For example, at night time, when the light does not turn on after you flick the light switch, you do not choose to focus your attention, you react with powerful interest or curiosity… or fear! As a writer, you must therefore master the art of capturing the reader’s attention, using the attention reflex as a tool to keep the reader engaged in your story or argument. We will see how in later chapters.

*Voluntary attention is a preparer. It inhibits its feather-trigger spontaneous cousin. It removes the irrelevant and the unnecessary from brain-sight. It empties a memory still encumbered with past things and past thoughts. It prunes the tree of possible actions. As it prepares, it helps us adapt to new situations.

Attention’s drawbacks and limitations

1- Attention exaggerates⁹. It gives greater importance to what it focuses on, at the expense of the rest. Like a magnifying glass, it enables you to emphasize some things while de-emphasizing others, thus creating distortion. One may even argue that writer-raised attention may compromise objectivity and promote writer bias. For example, imagine reading the following sentence in a brochure advertising a gym: “Weight gain can be combated through dieting, choosing healthier foods, and especially, exercising regularly”. In this sentence, the writer is clearly steering the reader’s attention towards exercise—which is fair, since it is written to advertise a gym. But it may also create a biased view of exercise in your mind, as it implies that regular exercise is the most important of all three weight-loss factors, while research shows it is not¹⁰.

2- Attention is strobed, not constant. The orchestration of attention between multiple tasks remains a mystery. A 2018 study ¹¹ reveals that we do not continuously pay attention to a task, but do so at the low frequency of theta waves (4 to 7 times per second). This observation is consistent with the distribution of attention serially across different tasks, and attention’s interruptible nature. Different trains of thought cross the brain while you are writing. Since it is essential to capture them before they escape, you interrupt the logical flow between sentences to insert sentences that describe these new thoughts. Attention-interrupted writing is chaotic writing. Such writing is characteristic of first drafts.

3- Attention fades rapidly. As you read sentence after sentence without clear understanding, or without making progress towards your goal, your brain lacks motivation and stimulation, and your vigilance decreases. When that happens, selective attention removes its “do-not-disturb” sign, loosens its hold on memory, and lets other tasks knock at its door, such as “Hum, I could do with some coffee right now” or “time to stop and wash my car before we visit the in-laws,” or worse “I’ll read this other paper instead, this one is difficult”. Losing reader attention can result in anything from benign distractions to discontinued reading.

4- Attention is partially and temporarily under writer control. The writer may solicit it, but cannot forcefully demand it from the reader who may independently decide that other points deserve attention—points that the writer did not intend to emphasize. Or, the reader may disagree with the writer and disregard sections the writer considers essential. In the tug of war for attention between writer and reader, the reader always wins.

5- Attention distracts. Distraction is an unwanted byproduct of attention. Jargon distracts. An unknown word distracts. I often interrupt my reading to look up a new word in the online dictionary. This detour in reading may be helpful if it helps me better understand the sentence, but at the same time, it decreases reading speed, and I often have to reread the sentence to refresh my memory. Other frequent distractions present in a text are footnotes. Some readers ignore them or read them when they reach the bottom of the page. I tend to read them immediately.

6- Attention is disarmed by habit and emotions. At first, attention helps memory learn, but with repetition the mind uses automatisms that no longer require attention. If we had to pay attention to everything as if everything was new, we would live in a permanent and exhausting state of excitation. Habits are ways to economize attention, but habits also disable our critical sense. Have you ever failed to notice a change in the appearance of somebody you see everyday? I have, frequently! Our own emotions, for example impatience, also divert our attention, by channeling it towards our own feelings, away from our intellect.

7- Attention excludes. Narrowing the scope to better concentrate on what matters has its drawbacks, as the YouTube video demonstrated earlier: told to concentrate on the ball, we missed the bear. Magicians use that characteristic to their advantage.

8- Frustrated attention generates impatience. When you actively look for something that is late in coming, or comes but does not satisfy you, impatience rises. When the progress bar on your computer screen seems to freeze, time, which had lost its acuity when the bar was fast moving, is now perceptible. Attention hungers for constant rewards.

9- Attention may be dependent on intelligence and knowledge. In his “elements of rhetorics”, Richard Whately, Oxford Scholar, and Rhetorician, remarks that, while reading, people who are much quicker at catching the sense of what is expressed [concisely] are incapable of long attention, and are not only wearied, but absolutely bewildered, by a diffuse, [prolix] style.

Therefore, in your writing,
1. Use attention’s power of exaggeration to create mountains in an otherwise flat landscape. But if every sentence is a mountain, your reader will lack perspective.
2. Rewrite and restore order once all your thoughts are captured.
3. Wake up dwindling attention, by resetting it often with paragraph changes, and long-short sentence patterns. Avoid passive sentences.
4. Welcome reader-control of the thoughts your writing triggers. You are having an impact. But beware of miscommunication! Write clearly.
5. Put distractions, or tangential remarks out of sight in footnotes, or remove them altogether.
6. Economize reader attention. Repeat in summaries. Avoid acronyms and unexplained jargon. Do not replace keywords with synonyms, repeat them often. Stay on topic.
7. Separate the paragraphs or sections that cater for a different audience (for example experts vs.non experts), so that readers can easily skip what is of little interest to them.
8. Write summaries for impatient readers. Write your sections using the essential first - details later approach. Use time-saving visuals.

Optional Readings on the Brain Chemistry Behind Memory and Attention

The brain chemistry behind memory

There you are again, standing in front of an open fridge, struggling to remember what you came to fetch. For someone able to understand complex technical documents, not remembering why you got up and walked to the fridge can surprise!

This short-term characteristic of our memory has been known since antiquity. Roman philosopher Quintilian refers to short-term memory as “the abnormally rapid memory [which] fails as a rule to last and takes its leave as though, its immediate task performed, it had no further duties to perform.” Quintilian would never have imagined that a gene (Npas4)¹² would be able to control how our memories are stored in clusters of neurons in the hippocampus. He would never have believed that one can now locate and even erase the specific memory of a past event¹³. He had not yet understood that memory has two filing cabinets, one for short and one for long term storage, and that what is directed to the short-term memory is also simultaneously directed to the long-term memory where it will mature over two weeks¹⁴. Quintilian had many brain waves in his productive life, but he knew nothing about his own neurons firing synchronously to create bursts of high-frequency gamma waves (for content) and low-frequency beta waves (for attention) that interact to provide accurate memory recall¹⁵. He would have been stunned to see that people control devices using these waves only.

Since memories are stored along the synapses, the brain needs synaptic plasticity¹⁶ to allow memories to gel or grow, to enable neurons to rewire themselves in different configurations, and to allow these networks to strengthen or weaken over time through the time-dependent mechanism of •Jargon warning• Long-Term Potentiation¹⁷.

It is difficult to separate long-term memory from knowledge, since most knowledge is memorized. We saw that memory is stored in neurons, each one the size of 4 to 100 microns with hundreds to thousands of synapses. Imagine billions of these neurons, with no neuron king, no master neuron in charge of it all. Imagine them working in parallel, competing, collaborating, facilitating, blocking, consolidating, self-organizing in stable specialized networks also able to modify themselves. Researchers comparing the patterns of neuronal activities in blind and sighted people have found that conceptual knowledge relies on a vastly distributed cortical representation independent of the more local visual or auditory representation¹⁸. What enters the brain through our eyes and other senses is processed efficiently to make up the brain’s semantic knowledge network.

The brain chemistry behind attention

Attention is an entity that is divisible and can therefore be distributed among a number of tasks with different levels of intensity. Divided attention is consistent with the observation of multiple brain neurotransmitters involved in attention: •Jargon warning• acetylcholine may regulate selective attention whilst noradrenaline seems to play a role in raising attention.¹⁹

The attention-sustaining role of •Jargon warning• Dopamine, another neurotransmitter, was established when researchers found that people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder²⁰ do not produce enough dopamine. Dopamine has been associated with the feelings of happiness necessary to renew our motivation²¹. When a reader finds or hopes to find satisfaction in reading, the same neurotransmitter continues to engage the brain in sustaining and renewing reading attention and memory.

Dopamine and its companion neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, are also implicated in brain plasticity which is essential for memorization. Here again we see how closely related attention and memory are.

The physiology of attention

The physiology of attention became a topic of research at the end of the nineteenth century. Physiologists and psychologists at that time observed that, in attentive people, several physiological changes take place: facial muscles contract, giving the face a typical expression (sometimes accompanied by frowns), the body is kept relatively but actively immobile (movement correlates well with lack of attention), and the eye’s lens flattens for greater visual precision and acuity. These characteristics help us determine people who are all eyes and all ears from those who aren’t. Many common idioms describe the physiological traits of people in a state of alert: to be on the edge of one’s seat, to be on your toes, quick on the trigger, etc. Attention increases the speed of our actions. The eyes of an attentive reader will rapidly shuttle between a paragraph and a table or a graph. This rapid eye movement helps ensure the information in memory is constantly refreshed.

Scientists have recently discovered that a part of our brain, •Jargon warning• the Ascending Reticular Activating System²², filters the signals sent from our senses to let us focus on what is important. Attention is directly under its control. But so are our movements, heart pace, blood flow, and more. It should therefore come as no surprise that attention has been associated with modification of breathing²³, pulse patterns²⁴, and regional blood flow in the midbrain²⁵.