How We Learned to Stop Learning
How we got sold a lie about learning, and why the real science points back to the page.
Conviction
One sharp idea each week about what and how we consume, why we crave it, and how it shapes culture.
My Working Thesis
Three weeks ago I wrote about “Resuscitating Meaningful Consumption” and why friction makes consumption more memorable….this week I’m diving deeper into that. Much much much deeper.
This week’s edition of Conviction will be significantly longer than most. Thank you for your time.
This newsletter is me writing my way to the answers.
Last week, I watched a friend of mine defend his TikTok habit with the confidence of someone citing peer-reviewed research. "The Learning Pyramid proves that watching videos gives you 30% retention, but reading only gives you 10%," he said, scrolling through a feed of 60-second economics explainers. "I'm basically learning faster than people who read books."
He isn't alone. Millions of people make similar arguments every day, armed with what appears to be solid educational science. The Learning Pyramid, with its neat percentages showing that we retain only 10% of what we read but 90% of what we teach others, has become the go-to justification for video-heavy learning diets. It gets cited in corporate training sessions, education conferences, and countless social media debates about the superiority of visual learning.
I know this pattern intimately because I lived it. A few years ago, I found myself caught in the same doom-scrolling cycles I now research as someone who studies consumer behavior. Despite being a heavy reader for most of my life, I watched my attention span fragment as I convinced myself that consuming quick hits of information was just as valuable as sustained reading.
Here's the thing though: the research behind it is materially flawed.
In 2020, education researcher Ken Masters published a thorough review in Medical Education titled "Edgar Dale's Pyramid of Learning: Further expansion of the myth." His findings were damning: the pyramid's precise retention percentages have no credible scientific source. The National Training Laboratories, supposedly the origin of these statistics, claims their original research was "lost." What we're left with are unverifiable numbers that have been passed around for decades like an academic game of telephone.
The pyramid isn't entirely wrong, active learning methods generally do outperform passive ones. But the specific percentages (10% for reading, 90% for teaching) that people cite with scientific confidence are essentially educated guesses that someone decided sounded reasonable.
This revelation should change how we think about learning. We've been making decisions about how to educate ourselves based on pseudoscience, while the real research points in a completely different direction.
What Actually Happens When You Read
While education myths were spreading, neuroscientists were busy scanning actual brains to understand how different types of learning work. The results tell a fascinating story about what reading does to your mind.
When children read physical books, MRI scans show robust activation in brain networks that integrate memory, attention, language, and imagination. Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf describes this as the "reading brain" engaging "analogical, inferential, empathic, and background knowledge processes." Reading forces you to create mental images from words, follow complex chains of reasoning, and hold multiple ideas in working memory simultaneously. Your brain has to work harder, and that work builds lasting cognitive infrastructure.
Compare this to screen consumption. When researchers scanned the brains of children listening to stories on digital apps versus having books read to them, they found something striking: far less activation in language-related brain regions during digital consumption. The least brain activation? When children interacted with e-books on iPads.
The pattern is pretty clear. Reading appears to be a full-brain workout, while video consumption, especially the rapid-fire clips that dominate our feeds, primarily stimulates audiovisual processing areas and reward circuits. It's not that video is inherently bad, but passive watching often lets your brain coast while reading demands active engagement.
Think of this. The very things that make reading feel harder than watching videos are exactly what make it more effective for learning.
The Friction Factor
Cognitive psychologist Robert Bjork has spent decades studying what he calls "desirable difficulties." These are learning conditions that introduce effort and struggle, which "trigger encoding and retrieval processes that support learning, comprehension, and remembering." When your brain has to work a little harder, you remember more.
Reading naturally provides these beneficial difficulties. You have to decode symbols into meaning. You need to follow an author's logic across paragraphs and pages. You must pause to consider unfamiliar concepts or re-read complex passages. There's no algorithm serving up the next dopamine hit, rather you have to choose to continue.
Modern platforms? They do exactly the opposite. They're engineered to remove all friction between you and an endless stream of content. TikTok's design "removes any natural stopping points, making it harder to stop the scroll." YouTube's autoplay countdown seamlessly feeds you the next video before you can decide whether you want to keep watching.
This frictionless design feels good in the moment, but it's the enemy of deep learning. When everything is easy and instant, your brain doesn't have to build the sturdy neural pathways that support long-term understanding.
Think about two different learning experiences. In the first, you read a chapter about the Roman Empire, pause to think about unfamiliar concepts, maybe re-read a complex section about political structures, and finish with questions about how the empire's decline might apply to modern situations. Your brain worked hard. You felt some confusion. But you emerged with a deeper understanding.
In the second, you watch a series of TikTok videos about Roman history. Each one is entertaining, visually engaging, delivers facts in bite-sized chunks. You feel informed and entertained, but when someone asks you about Roman political structures a week later, you struggle to recall the details or connect them to broader patterns.
The difference isn't just about the medium. It's about what each medium encourages your brain to do.
The Slot Machine in Your Pocket
The platforms we use for learning weren't designed for education. They were designed to capture and monetize attention, and they're extraordinarily good at it.
Tristan Harris, a former Google design ethicist, explains the psychology: "When we pull our phone out of our pocket, we're playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got." Every swipe delivers a variable reward. Sometimes you get something amazing, sometimes nothing special, and that unpredictability is precisely what makes slot machines so addictive.
Former Facebook executive Sean Parker admitted they designed features to give users "a dopamine hit" to "consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible."⁶ This isn't speculation; it's the explicit business model.
The result is what researchers call a "dopamine cycle." Each TikTok video gives a small neurochemical reward, reinforcing the desire to keep scrolling. Over time, this can actually desensitize your brain's reward system, making normal activities that don't provide constant stimulation feel unbearably dull.
Reading a book starts to feel impossible not because books got boring, but because your brain has been trained to expect instant gratification every few seconds.
This conditioning affects more than just attention spans. It shapes what kinds of ideas we're exposed to and how we process information. Platform algorithms optimize for engagement, not truth or understanding. A sensational or simplified take on quantum physics might get more views than a nuanced explanation, so that's what the algorithm promotes. Even educational creators feel pressure to make their content more clickable, dramatic, or controversial to survive in the attention economy.
Which brings us to a common defense...
The Curation Trap
"But I've curated my feed to be educational," you might say. "I only follow science channels and history creators."
Look, I understand the impulse. There's genuine educational content on these platforms. YouTube has brilliant long-form explainers and university lectures. TikTok has creators who break down complex topics into digestible chunks. But curating your feed is like trying to build a meditation studio inside a casino.
No matter how pure your intentions, you're still surrounded by systems designed to distract you. Even if your feed starts educational, the algorithm's job isn't to educate you; it's to keep you engaged. Often, the most engaging content isn't the most accurate or nuanced.
The platform will notice that you watched that 60-second quantum physics explainer, but it will also notice that you lingered longer on the funny reaction video that popped up afterward. Gradually, your "educational" feed starts drifting toward edutainment, then toward pure entertainment, because that's what the engagement metrics reward.
Reading offers something these platforms can't: sustained focus on a single author's coherent argument or narrative. When you read a book, you're following one person's careful thinking from beginning to end. There's no algorithm deciding what you should think about next.
The author has structured their ideas in a deliberate sequence, building concepts that layer on top of each other. You can't get the full argument from random snippets any more than you can understand a symphony by hearing individual notes played out of order.
The Comfort of Discomfort
Maybe the most important difference between reading and video consumption isn't cognitive but emotional. Reading teaches you to sit with intellectual discomfort, and that might be the most valuable skill of all.
When you encounter a difficult passage in a book, you can't swipe to something easier. You have to wrestle with the ideas, maybe re-read a section, or pause to think through an argument. This process can feel frustrating. But it's building something precious: the ability to engage with complexity.
Our media environment has made us allergic to this kind of mental effort. If something doesn't make sense immediately, we move on. If an argument challenges our assumptions, we scroll past. Even a moment of boredom sends us reaching for the next distraction.
But real learning often happens in those moments of confusion and effort. The questions that arise from reading aren't bugs; they're features. They're your mind grappling with new ideas and making connections.
Nicholas Carr, author of "The Shallows," puts it perfectly: "I think intellectual discomfort is a sign you're stretching yourself. If you only consume information in the form that's easiest, you'll never experience that productive discomfort of engaging with a long, complex book or argument."
This applies beyond learning to how we engage with the world's most important problems. Climate change, political polarization, economic inequality — these issues are complex and don't lend themselves to simple solutions or quick explanations. If we lose the ability to think slowly and deeply about difficult problems, we become vulnerable to oversimplified solutions and tribal thinking.
Reading builds what Maryanne Wolf calls "cognitive patience" — the ability to think slowly and deeply about complex problems. Our rapid-consumption culture is eroding this capacity just when we need it most.
The Satisfaction You're Missing
Here's what I want you to try: the next time you finish a great book, notice how you feel compared to how you feel after closing TikTok.
After a good book, there's a sense of accomplishment. Of having journeyed somewhere and returned changed. You might find yourself thinking about the ideas days later, connecting them to other experiences, seeing the world slightly differently. The satisfaction is deep and lasting.
After a scroll session, even an "educational" one? The feeling is different. You might have learned some facts, but they feel disconnected, floating free without context. You're stimulated but not satisfied. Entertained but not enriched.
This isn't just subjective experience; it reflects real differences in how your brain processes and stores information. Reading builds knowledge networks — interconnected webs of concepts that can be applied to new situations. Video consumption often creates isolated facts that don't connect to anything else you know.
Consider how this plays out in practical terms. If you've read several books about economics, you develop an intuitive understanding of how markets work, how incentives shape behavior, and how policies might have unintended consequences. This understanding helps you make sense of new economic situations even when they weren't specifically covered in your reading. You can spot flawed reasoning in political debates, understand why certain business strategies succeed or fail, and make better personal financial decisions.
If you've watched dozens of economics videos, you might know many facts about supply and demand, interest rates, and market crashes. But without the sustained engagement that reading provides, these facts are less likely to coalesce into the kind of deep understanding that you can apply to new situations. You might remember that "inflation is bad" but struggle to explain why, or know that "diversification reduces risk" without understanding the underlying principles.
The difference shows up in professional settings too. People who read extensively in their field tend to see patterns others miss, connect seemingly unrelated concepts, and ask better questions. They're more likely to spot the assumptions underlying a proposal, anticipate second-order effects, and communicate complex ideas clearly. These aren't just nice-to-have skills. They're increasingly what separates high performers from everyone else in knowledge work.
The gap becomes even more pronounced when dealing with misinformation. Someone who has read deeply about a topic has built mental frameworks that help them evaluate new claims. They can spot logical fallacies, recognize when evidence is cherry-picked, distinguish between correlation and causation. Video consumption, especially of bite-sized content, doesn't build these critical thinking muscles as effectively.
But I'm not suggesting you throw your phone in a drawer and never watch another video.
A Different Kind of Reward
Technology offers incredible tools for learning when used thoughtfully. But reading offers something irreplaceable: the chance to think your own thoughts.
When you read, you're not being fed pre-digested conclusions. You're working through ideas at your own pace, making your own connections, developing your own questions. Building knowledge from the ground up rather than collecting random facts.
Reading is slow in a fast world. Quiet in a loud culture. Deep in a shallow time. This is exactly what our minds need to develop the kind of focused, thoughtful intelligence that our complex world demands.
The benefits extend beyond individual learning. In any field requiring deep thinking; whether it's medicine, engineering, law, or business, we need people who can engage with complex arguments, consider multiple perspectives, and think through long-term consequences. These are skills that reading cultivates and that rapid video consumption often undermines.
When we lose cognitive patience on a societal level, we become more susceptible to oversimplified solutions, less able to engage with nuanced debates, and more likely to retreat into information bubbles that confirm what we already believe. The stakes aren't just individual here. They're about maintaining a culture capable of thoughtful discourse and evidence-based decision making.
The Path Forward
The research is clear: reading builds stronger neural pathways, improves critical thinking, and provides deeper satisfaction than passive video consumption. But knowledge isn't enough. You have to actually pick up books and experience the difference yourself.
Start with the 15-minute rule. Commit to reading for just 15 minutes a day, ideally at the same time each day. This builds the habit without feeling overwhelming. Many people find that once they start, they naturally read longer, but even if you stop at 15 minutes, you're rewiring your brain for sustained attention.
Choose books that genuinely interest you. Don't start with what you think you "should" read. If you're fascinated by space exploration, try Mary Roach's "Packing for Mars." If you want to understand how your mind works, pick up Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow." If you're curious about modern aging, read Peter Attia’s “Outlive”. The goal is to rediscover the pleasure of sustained engagement.
Create friction for digital consumption while reducing it for reading. Delete TikTok and Twitter from your phone, or at least log out after each use. Meanwhile, make reading easier: keep books visible around your house, carry one in your bag, consider audiobooks for commutes. The idea is to make the good habit easier and the problematic habit harder.
Practice the art of note-taking. When something strikes you as interesting or important while reading, jot it down. This active engagement helps cement ideas and creates connections between different books you've read. You don't need a complex system — even brief notes in margins or a simple notebook will do.
Embrace confusion and slowness. When you encounter a difficult passage, resist the urge to skim or give up. Re-read it. Look up unfamiliar terms. Pause to think about what the author is really saying. This feels inefficient compared to watching a quick explainer video, but it's exactly this cognitive effort that builds understanding.
Start a reading routine that replaces screen time. Many people find success reading for 30 minutes before bed instead of scrolling their phone, or reading during lunch breaks instead of browsing social media. The key is substitution, not just addition. Replace existing habits rather than trying to squeeze reading into an already packed schedule.
This isn't about becoming a digital hermit or rejecting all modern media. It's about reclaiming a form of learning that's uniquely powerful and increasingly rare. It's about feeding your mind real nutrition instead of cognitive junk food.
Your brain has been craving this deeper engagement all along. The research shows it, the neuroscience confirms it, and if you give reading a real chance, your own experience will prove it.
The book is waiting. Your mind is ready. All you have to do is turn the page.
Congratulations! By reading this entire piece, you've accidentally demonstrated everything I've been arguing. You just engaged in sustained, effortful thinking for 15 minutes straight. No algorithm fed you the next hit. You chose to stay with difficult ideas. How does that feel compared to your last scroll session?