Reading vs. Watching
Reading is an active pursuit. Meaning, we must exert ourselves to gain comprehension, relate to knowledge previously established, and produce insight for a new set of knowledge obtainment. The brain is active as it coordinates between regions to draw insight and create ideas of the information provided. The brain rewards itself with a sense of accomplishment and pleasure for undertaking the skill acquisition process. This process, while entirely mental and not of bodily movement, holds similar qualities to physical skill acquisition, say of learning how to play a sport well. Reading is a skill acquisition process that the mind engages in through comprehension, retrieval, relation, and insight.
On the contrary, watching a motion picture (with sound) robs the mind of that exertion-to-skill acquisition process. The exertion involved in viewing a motion picture is minimal at best. As dozens of frames of picture are compressed together over just seconds of time, the viewer is forced into a docile state as to effectively take in all that is being provided. The key differentiation here is that the information is being provided to its consumer. It requires very little activity on the part of the consumer to search for understanding. Instead, the information is fed to the viewer like a still cow that doesn’t need to move much to feed.
This does not mean that insight cannot yield itself from the watching process as it would from of course reading. The distinction is in what else is gained in the process of either reading or watching. In this respect, the watching process does afford as great of conditions for the mind to become skillful in the adjacent processes involved in the construction of insight, as reading does. Reading creates skill in comprehension, relation from partial or unconnected pieces of information, retrieval from previous information, and insight from the blending of these information to produce new understanding. It also forces imagination and picture creation in the mind to make up what it is discovering in the writing. This is akin to a workout for the brain. The brain is coordinating different regions of itself to pursue understanding of something and to create, for itself, the idea in the form of pictures in the mind. If activity is healthy, then reading is a much healthier process for the body to engage in rather than the docile state of the watching process. It’s important we understand the innerworkings of these processes as to not fool ourselves into the idea of productivity through indolent means.