Ask HN: Are there any studies about book reading retention rates vs. audiobooks? I commute a lot now and find it much more convenient to listen to a book sometimes. However if it's something non-fiction or technical I understand the value of having a physical copy to be able to grab, or even an ebook to access on screen. Thoughts? |
There have been studies looking at the relative retention rates of visual vs auditory stimuli where the visual typically comes out ahead:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2667065/ https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/iusburj/artic... http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
However, I would posit that the main reason for this discrepancy is that memory is linked to the level of stimulation, and we typically have developed to place a far higher weighting on our visual systems, not to mention the fact that the visual signal typically has a far higher information content, linking to many existing mental structures.
Once these sort of links are removed, with the stimuli being decontextualized, the two tend to be more similar: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00447078
The problem with audiobooks vs reading is far more constrained, and possibly environmentally determined.
One study found that visual vs auditory retention rates for a short block of text were virtually identical: http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1978-21860-001
But another again shows the superiority of the visual system: http://scholar.utc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1171&cont...
But this was done in a controlled environment where the subjects' full attention was focused on the audio. In such a case, it makes sense that retention rates would be comparable, as the same language centers in the brain are used for processing the input once it is transferred from the appropriate input sense.
The big problem with audiobook retention is that we typically listen to them whilst being involved in other tasks, and there are are a myriad of studies showing that humans are inherently extremely bad multi-taskers, with high task-switching costs even in people who claim to be otherwise.
Aside from just sitting with my eyes closed and listening, I find that retention is maximized with audiobooks when there is a split between System 1 and System 2 activity (ala Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman). If I am doing something like driving, using System 1, my System 2 can be fully focused on the audiobook, until something darts out in the middle of the road and then I end up having to rewind and re-listen to what I missed.
Source: anecdotal evidence
You can easily convert a couple and run some A/B tests
1. Driving slowly, so as to still have safety as the most important priority, and so that you miss lesser moments when you have to take your mind away from listening and to the things happening on the road (talking about Bangalore's i.e. India's traffic here). The slight gain in commute time (I think it should be around 10% and definitely not more than 20%) is completely worth it. This actually made my driving safer in general too.
2. I have a 'repeat last 30 seconds' functionality at my fingertips. You'll invariably miss a portion after which (sometimes) the story will stop making sense. The attitude which worked for me here is, it's okay to spend a lot more time to re-listen a part multiple times, than to let laziness take over by thinking it's anyway an unimportant portion and okay to miss.
3. Take out 5-10 minutes after a commute is done, to write notes about what I thought are important learnings and should not be forgotten with time. I believe if the goal is to not let the commute time go waste, then this notes-writing time is also a part of it, without which your learning is incomplete. This is way better than only remembering something like <2-5% of the book after a year. I use Microsoft OneNote (this trumped over using Vim because I can edit/read my notes while on the go without a laptop). One area of improvement is, I need some way to _remind_ myself to read those notes :)
4. Forcing myself to re-listen books which I found too useful to let my mind forget in any way, instead of jumping over to that next interesting book. I read mostly non-fiction books of a specific category (scientific-study-oriented books about humans, their interactions, behaviour and their flaws). Forcing re-learning is partly due to the fact that after a time I thought I'm reading less important books (i.e. I'm running out of extremely good books in this area), and partly due to forgetting to transfer that new book to my phone to listen.
5. I've lately realized that cramming all your free time to reading/learning is not helpful too. You should have a reasonable time to 'ruminate' in the day, each day, i.e. time when you're doing nothing (social network, news, sports, or any screen-time in general, doesn't count)
Feel free to ask questions. Also, feel free to provide suggestions and book recommendations. I'm all ears :)
I will stick with my paperback books for retention.
I have similar issues with lots of online services for more than just ebooks, but it seems like the e-ink devices (I use a Kobo) tend to be more minimal and focused on simple functionality.
Nothing will replace the smells and sensations of turning a physical page, but a basic e-ink device has made it much easier for me to read far more than I used to be able to (vastly more portable being the biggest improvement).
I mainly use audiobooks now for mostly fiction and narrative strong content like history, biographies/memories, or communication around domains like sales, public speaking, marketing, and relationship books.
I found a lot more interesting things about being more strategical in using the right medium(print vs ebook vs audio) depending on the nature of the content I'm consuming as well as my energy levels[1].
Most frequent contexts were: - Cooking - Working out - Airplane - Subway Rides (If the train is too crowded to read I'll switch to listening to an audiobook) - Walking Places - Focused listening before bed
This, combined with having a workflow for consistently reviewing my highlights[1] has improved my (admittedly self-reported) retention significantly. There's plenty of science that supports how effective spaced repetition is for retention.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000827...
[1] https://readwise.io -- disclaimer: I built this, but I genuinely think it's helpful here.
In my personal experience, audio has a lower retention rate compared to reading. However, you can train yourself to do better. The benefit is I can listen at 2x, and get a lot books in during my commute.
http://www.youngscientist.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/... - "From the results, it was concluded that visual information is recalled the most effectively, followed by audio/visual and then audio information."
From my understanding, listening and reading activate the brain in different ways. Listening also takes a higher effort to turn information into memory. It seems that if you're practiced at information processing through listening (e.g. you've listened to a lot of audiobooks or are a practiced storyteller) then there's less of a difference.
Part of me thinks that reading leads to better comprehension and information recall because it's very easy to re-read a sentence versus rewinding audio. Anecdotally, I know I've been in a scenario where I was reading the end of a paragraph and realized I had stopped paying attention and was quickly able to go back and re-read it.
I highly recommend speeding/slowing your audiobooks to the perfect point where your mind doesn't wander.
In my case, retention is much lower for listened content compared to read content. So much so that I now only listen to things which I consider entertainment. For anything technical, or that I'd want to retain longer than a few weeks I read with an actual book.
I hesitate to speak for everyone on this, but I will say that a few friends I've spoken to about it have said they see the same lesser retention in audio content.
The secret for audiobooks, for me, is to listen to them while walking. Currently doing about 50 miles / week, which gets me through 1-2 audiobooks (1.5x, but I rewind and replay a LOT).
I notice my attention is crucial, and varies depending on interactions while walking. When by myself, not crossing streets (down by the walking areas of my town), I can retain a ton.
YMMV, but for me the sweet spot of information consumption is while walking, so audiobooks + exercise beat reading, hands down.
For example, if you read a book, chances are you're 100% focused on the book, probably sitting or laying down in a quiet room.
On the other hand while listening to an audio book you might be driving, running errands or cleaning. Most of that is probably on auto-pilot but I have to imagine trying to multi-task whatever you're doing while absorbing content is going to cause a huge hit to retention.
I think it's worth exploring the above because I find that other than first hand experience I learn best by watching videos. It could be someone talking into a camera, or just slides, but in both cases I feel like I retain information better than just reading. However in this case, I'm also 100% focused on the task as if I were reading. Most of those videos could have just audio and it's basically the same thing (comparable to audio books).
Maybe it's different outside of the US but in the US, most of the time you have a teacher talking to a bunch of students with a blackboard. This goes from about age 6 to 18.
Learning is very much audio driven, and text books were used as supplements (and for homework).
My experience is that retention depends mainly on two factors: the amount of attention and quality of the reader. I prefer when the author is the one reading because many of them add comments and a special "energy" to the book.
I find the "car mode" on Audible very convenient to add bookmarks without disruption while I'm driving and I use at the gym as well.
Some books that I want to reference later I buy a paper-copy and mark with a highlighter on the same places I bookmarked on the Audible App.
While listening, the faster I play, the more attention I pay. I start at 2X and if I'm listening to the audiobook a second time, I can go up to 3X. 1X and 1.5X are for engaging parts or when I can't understand what is being said.
One thing I don't do is: listen while not able to pay attention. While dring it can be while going through a toll or navigating through unfamiliar streets.
With all said, the feature that I think is the most useful for retention is the Pause button. This way I can reflect on what I just heard and save the information on my brain's long-term storage.
We think that we remember everything we see or hear but that's impossible since in order to remember the data first has to be detected and it has to go through short-term memory before it can be stored in long-term memory. Short-term memory can hold about 7 items at one time. Also, our memory's nature is to forget unless it's important.
So given the above, it's impossible to retain much of what we hear vs reading. We get the illusion that we are capturing everything we hear but we are not. We capture what we think is important but it's going by so fast that it's just bits and pieces with our minds filling in the blanks. Basically, what audio is doing is keeping our minds busy.
So if you want to get the basic idea of a book you listen to it. If you want to retain the most of it you read and you try to recall what you just read.
I've found that I retain a lot more of the details now that I'm listening through the books and I cannot just skim past "the boring parts". I notice the subtle callbacks to details in earlier stories. I notice the little hints or clues dropped by the author (especially in their choice of words). I think I actually enjoy this more because I get a stronger sense of the "craftsmanship" element.
However, this really requires a good reading so that you can distinguish the different voices, emotions, and details.
I can not imagine listening to technical books though (popular science seems to be fine, I’m listening to Walter Isaacson’s Einstein biography right now), the reader must be a fit (Stephen Fry is gorgeous); and I can only use the times when my head is not engaged otherwise (commuting, groceries, food, housework).
To those unaware: Spotify has a huge audiobook collection now. I wish they would add increasing playback speed as a feature, if readers are too slow my thoughts will wander. I also have an Audible subscription, they have a quite convincing library now.
The human brain is hardware-accelerated for encoding and decoding spoken language. That's why alphabets often just represent sounds, why it's so easy for even an educated adult to right homophones, and why professional writers still take into consideration sonic properties like rhythm. It's because, like the article says, even while reading silently, you still hear it.
Speech is primary, writing secondary. So sit back, relax, and enjoy it.
If I really want to study a subject I will listen to the audiobook, and then re-read it in text form.
I've found books that I thought were mediocre were much better as audiobooks because the pace forced me to really listen to and appreciate the quality of the prose.
I do agree that more technical material is more awkward in audio form and really benefits from being able to flip back and forth for reference in a real book.
More seriously, some of this, to me, depends on what I’m listening to or reading. Fiction or easy non-fiction audio books do allow some degree of multitasking. However this doesn’t apply to 90% of my reading. Technical material is much faster for me to actually read.
For example, I saw an interesting paper recently[1]. It’s results are important and I’m happy to have come across them, but there is no way I could have absorbed it on an audio format without taking much more time.
I read technical material like this faster because I can skim over the things I already know (like why the result is interesting, applications of the idea, complex proof steps, math background material, etc) and I can slow down for the key results I want to remember. I can go back and re-read sentences that don’t make sense to me or where I’m confused.
For technical books there is so much that I don’t usually have to learn again, I can just skip to the new stuff.
[1] The Power of Two Choices in Randomized Load Balancing, https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=504343
I do, however, find strong associations between certain book passages and the places where I was when I heard them. Particular road trips are inextricably linked to particular books and vice versa.
As for non-fiction, the last book I tried to listen to is Behave by Robert Sapolsky. Although the narration is good, I simply cannot retain the names of the various brain structures and their function. After listening to a chapter for the 3rd time, I just gave up and decided to purchase the text version.
If someone is painting a picture for me, so to speak, as in narrative fiction, I feel it makes a stronger impression than actually reading the material. But if I'm trying to learn something, I frequently need to pause what I'm taking in, usually to build a mental model.
The only way one of my kids gets through some of the "great literature" he has to read in high school is to listen to it, which I've conceded but on the condition that he follow along in reading the book.
That said, I find it valuable to learn how a writer thinks more so than the technical details of each point they're trying to make. Right now I'm on a deep dive for an author...listening to ~100 hours of their material. It is somewhat like listening to 100 hours of their lecture. I learn different things while listening to a lecture than I do when reading.
But if it's something that's new to me, or highly technical, I'll follow up with a course, physical book, or create a study out of it in a different manner.
If I like an audiobook/podcast/documentary/movie, I'll listen/watch it multiple times. I've listened to my very favorite stuff dozens and even hundreds of times, so I know the content extremely well.