READ IT AGAIN
On our vacation, Steve read me the new book Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture, by the architect Paul Shepheard. Shepheard is a beautiful, compelling writer with fascinating but elusively ideas on the relationship between the natural and artificial. He doesn't exactly make his points in the conventional fashion. (But neither does he use the awful jargon that permeates much of architectural theory these days.) I love his books, but I can't say I entirely understand them. So, after Steve finished reading Artificial Love aloud, I immediately read it again to myself, the better to absorb it.
Doing so led me to an insight that had nothing to do with architecture: Little kids don't make you read them the same story night after night just because it's comforting--adults' favorite explanation. They're trying to get it, to absorb the plot and meaning the way I tried to absorb Paul Shepheard's ideas.
Lo and behold, there is some academic research to back up my vacation insight. In today's NYT, Emily Yoffe writes about why kids want to see the same video a million times. She leads with a 7-year-old who loves Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and says he's seen it 1,000 times. "It's really, really, really, really, really, really complicated," he says. "I can't tell you all the details, but I understand the whole thing"--thanks to all that repetition.
Yoffe quotes communications researcher Marie-Louise Mares, who wondered by surveys of parents showed that kids were less likely to watch videos more than once as they grew older. Wondering why, she interviewed 300 kids:
She found the need for repetition came partly from the children's accurate realization that they just didn't get it. She said one 3-year-old could anticipate scenes in "Mary Poppins" but had little idea of the story being told, let alone the themes being expressed. "She was an expert on 'Mary Poppins,' but also clueless about 'Mary Poppins,' " Dr. Mares said. When Dr. Mares showed children ages 4 and 5 a brief video made by another researcher about not judging people based on appearance, she found that it wasn't until the fourth viewing that they even had an understanding of the sequence of events and the message.
Absorbing truly new material doesn't get all that much easier as we get older. But we don't have the same patience with repetition, which may be one reason little kids are seemingly able to learn so much so quickly. Or maybe the repetition is just too boring. Eventually, I'll probably take another crack at Artificial Love, at least to cull some passages for the benefit of blog readers. It's a really fun book.