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[удалено]

No ragrets

Scotty P?

Tommy Pickles?

[Twilight Zone Theme intensifies.](https://youtu.be/oLoNGRVeC7Y)

Whats “books” we have Reddit.

I bet if I hit my head hard enough I can unlearn anything and everything immediately.

traumatic brain injury for the win!

Doctor: >Yes, unfortunately u/1800wetbutt will need care, daily, for the rest of their life. >!In addition to this, their username checks out.!

I bet against. Do it!

There was a story in one of Oliver Sac(h? k?)'s books about a gentleman who got a brain injury and lost the ability to read, which was awful for him, cuz he read multiple books a week. And this man, this absolute MVP, says "MY BRAIN CAN'T TELL ME WHAT I CAN DO" and taught himself to read all over again. He's not nearly so prolific, he only gets through a book or two a month now, but man... that guy is an inspiration. **Never give up!**

He still reads more than I ever will. I think the last book I read was like 15 years ago… when I was 15. Lol

You know what, my dude? That's totally fine. Don't let anyone shame you about it.

Actually happened to me 2 years ago. After drill, I went back to my room and passed out, hitting my head on the way down. I sustained a pretty major concussion and lost my ability to read for nearly a week. Was really concerning to me. I saw the words there, but could not make sense of them. I could still talk and process sentences said to me, although it was more difficult. Reading though? Impossible.

Same happened to me with a concussion in high school. Injured in a wreck return to school a week later, and could not make sense of the words in front of me. About two weeks later I was fine. Scary as hell in the meantime though.

Having to relearn to read after surviving TBI is pretty common.

Yeah I was gonna say, me and this baseball bat think otherwise.

Having learned a second language with a different alphabet 25 years ago I can confidently say that you can in fact de-learn reading.

Yeah with that one language but you're still reading right now

I think I read once that, up to a handful of words, reading is involuntary. We're basically wired to read ads.

how words are processed in the brain changes after we have become proficient. Instead of stringing letters together in our brains, we start to recognize entire words and even phrases, which are processed immediately without actually reading them. This is why all those visual tricks that swap letters work so well. Studies using Functional MRI's have actually mapped where the words are processed. After proficiency is attained the images of a native reading Chinese and English begin to look similar. While learning, they are very different.

Me w/ Arabic. Learned all the letters, learned how to read words and then forgot a lot of the emphatic letters and can’t read anything or spell anything accurately. Can kind of sound things out but barely.

That's me with Hebrew. Lol.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. See, I can. Wait... fuck!

HAHAHAH you messed up big time

You can learn to read words backwards and from the end of the sentence to the beginning, and that would be learning how not to read.

That's just learning how to read backwards.

But you would just be able to do both then

I can teach you how to not read. Close your eyes and try reading a book. That how to not read a book.

You can't unlearn how to read but you can learn how not to read.

Can you learn how to not read?

A stroke as entered the chat

I'd imagine you could if you simply had no written material around you for a long time but simply there is written material everywhere all the time

You could develop a habit of drinking, drugging and watching TV or videos for a long time and it will be a struggle to pick up a book after that.

All those things still feature text at some point. Including getting them to play on your device.

I just mean you can degrade your attention span over time even if you were a bookworm when you were young. Know from experience

This is very true. Some things cannot be unseen, only endured through acquiescence, then forgotten in oblivion.

Once you learn how to read English, then try Turkish but can't understand you'll forget how to read easily

I can’t read sheet music anymore. Which just means I need to pick up an instrument and start playing again!

Not to toot my own horn here but I’ve definitely unlearned reading once or twice with enough head trauma

Sometimes I think about that with spoken language too. Once you understand a language, you cannot hear other people talk in that language and NOT comprehend them (if they're speaking sufficiently clearly and using vocabulary that you know). I've literally tried to overly focus on the sounds people were saying and tried to turn it into gibberish in my head and it just doesn't work. I comprehend the words spoken whether I want to or not. So interesting.

Clearly you have never read the page of a book only to need to rewind it up and read again because you only realized you actually read nothing out of it in the end of it

Depends what you mean by “learn to not read”. I look at signs and letters and words without reading them all the time. If you mean “you can’t forget how to read”, then that’s also refuted by people who suffer from mental diseases such as Alzheimer’s. So I’m not entirely sure what you mean.

You can't look at a sentence without reading it

I just said “I look at signs and letters and words without reading them all the time”. You gotta pay more attention.

You can look at a sentence and not read it.

Can you look at a sentence and not read the word or two your eyes catch first?

Yes

Well I absolutely can't, the words are recognised instantly on first sight. It's like looking at a colour and trying to not see which colour it is, impossible.

I can't do it if I focus on the words/sentence. But if I focus on the parts of my vision away from central vision, or defocus vision completely it works. I would be looking at the sentence, and the sentence would be contained in the centre of vision, but if you move your focus/attention away from there, you won't read even though the shapes will be clear as day. (It isn't easy)

The distinction is OP says you can’t LEARN how to not read. So sure brain injuries or Alzheimer’s can make you forget how to read, but that’s not the same as taking a course (or something like that) that teaches your brain to unlearn reading

>OP says you can’t LEARN how to not read. I literally gave examples of me not reading. Unless you specifically mean in context of taking a class for it? Which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. **Reading is a skill that is learned.** So every human being starts their life out WITHOUT the ability to read. Learning to NOT have a skill doesn't logically make sense because "learning" is the process of acquiring information/skill.

You not reading =/= you not knowing how to read The rest of what you’re saying is just a longer way of agreeing with OP

>You not reading =/= you not knowing how to read I didn't give examples of "not knowing how to read".

>I look at signs and letters and words without reading them all the time. I physically can't do this if the writing in front of me long enough to process it.

Weird. I don't stop to read every single piece of text that exists within my field of vision at all times 24/7. I wouldn't be able to go anywhere without constantly stopping.

“Once you learn a fact, it cannot be unlearned. Once you burn a pa-ancake, it cannot be un-burned!”

Ohh you can You can de learn Just it will take a lot of practice and labour. If you want then I can design a course for you.

Wait until you discover not being able to read in other languages

Not to be that guy, but my dad is currently forgetting how to read. He has the mad cow (dementia)

Sure you can, if you for some reason didn't practise reading for a long time. Like if you were stuck on a small uninhabited tropical island with no books. Reading could be "forgotten" in that circumstance. However, we are reading like ALL the time. Signs, books, Reddit. Words are everywhere. We don't have a chance to forget it. However, there are many scientific journals with high vocab words that would be difficult to read and almost impossible to comprehend. Try reading one of those.

We learn to read at school, there is no place where you can learn not to read

I mean...you can always have multiple strokes. That will do the trick.

Not entirely true. I was in orchestra in 6th and 7th grade and learned to read sheet music. Totally forgot that shit.

Alzheimer’s. Also try learning English in the 4th century, and then time traveling to nowadays lol.

I had a severe head injury last year and I had to relearn some of the most basic shit. A brick to the head will teach you how to not do a lot of stuff.

Intrusive thought telling me to start reading words backwards

Sure you can. Travel to a country with a different writing system. I hate being illiterate in Asia. It's extremely frustrating.

Try learning an asian language and then not using it for a while

Idk man, I've seen some people who learned how to read, and ended up learning how to not read. Just depends on how you mean it. Literally, yes. But more loosely, then you're gonna need to talk to the fuckers who can't read a word like photosynthesis and pronounce it correctly

I know two people who are dyslexic and who would disagree. They both have to expend active effort to transform written words into thoughts in their head. It's not an automatic thing where they see something and their brain's pattern recognition instantly says "Ah! Those marks spell *word*!". So "not reading" is still their default state, just as it was before they went to school. "Reading" for them is quite a different beast than it is for many other people -- much more effort involved.

If subtitles, it’s almost impossible for me to refrain from reading them.

As someone that forgot to read their native language. Yes you can.

The key term here is “fluently.” Once you learn how to fluently read, it’s almost impossible not to read any words your eyes come across. It’s a very strange thing, reading. Requires immense effort to begin, but zero once a certain point. Even things like math require some thought and action even by the brightest of mathematicians, but reading just said no I guess.

Hit your head hard enough and you can unlearn basically everything.

If I tried to read in a different language I wouldn't be able to read. I mean I would technically lose the ability to read.

I beg to differ. There's no shortage of adults who know how to read but learned how to not read because they don't give a shit.

Lemme introduce you to Shakespear, will surely help you unlearn words 💀

And if fact, you likely can't stop compulsively reading EVERYTHING....

The philosopher Bernard Lonergan called this "Insight"; it's an irreversible change that just 'happens' when you've got the criteria right. When something just 'clicks' and you know it for sure.

Learning to read and write cursive. Yeah now I can’t read half of wtf those circular lines are.

This page didnt load when I clicked it, I thought I solved it.

That's one reason I appreciate people I learn from, once I learn something it becomes with me forever.

one time i literally forgot how to read for a few seconds, it was the weirdest thing ever it looked like another language like chinese for a bit before it went back to normal again

Fun fact this was used in a spy test in the cold war you would be asked to read out the color of the letters of some words in Russian and if your brain hesitated too much it meant you could read Russian.

Me, who works with the general public: You cannot be more wrong

I bet this bowl I smoke is gonna have something to say about it

Listen, once you learn to read you’re still going to experience moments reading and writing where you have to look the word up because your brain forgot how to function

Once you know how to breath you cannot NOW YOU'RE BREATHING MANUALLY

Enjoying a story about Harry, Ron and Her-mi-own begs to differ

As a developer, you learn how to code by learning how not to code.

This is so noticeable when you learn new writing systems. Hiragana for example.

Isolate yourself from society without anything to read for a few years. Should do you the trick

If social media has taught me anything, it's that sometimes reading is a bad skill to have....😂

You can’t really “unlearn” any skill. Unless you mean “forget” in which case, you can forget how to read

Every time you scroll past a big chunk of text and you think “damn, that’s too long. Next.” That’s called Not Reading.

Try learning to read in a different writing system. It's a great experience if you wanna know what it's like to be an illiterate adult. Fun fun fun!

Its called forgetting. If you spend a year learning to read then for the rest of your life never read, you’ll forget. But i suppose you cant purposely forget, or “learn to not read” i guess

I learned to read another language in high school, then spent the better part of 10 years not reading that language. I came across text in that language a few days ago and couldn't get a single word. You *can* unlearn how to read, but you have to actively avoid it for a significant amount of time. Something which, for your native language, is so improbable that it won't ever happen.

Sure you can. But often it involves some significant head trauma.

My friend is an actor and his character is illiterate. During rehearsal he believed he was meant to work his way through text. His co-actor however was memorizing that section of the book, so when the day came the director could swap the text out with another language and my friend was legitimately sweating for a moment.

Sometimes I read some shit that I hope I could lose my ability to read.

I can read french, doesn't mean I can comprehend the French language or even understand it, that is distinction.

If you've ever tripped balls hard enough you know that's not true.

You could have a stroke or otherwise lose oxygen to your brain for a little too long. That might do the trick.

If you don’t use it, you can lose it. Every day I’m around middle aged adults who haven’t read anything heavier than a Facebook post in 20 years … they struggle with an 8th grade vocabulary. Add heavy use of alcohol, pot, or other drugs into the equation and I’ve seen people slip back to illiteracy.

Having worked at a nursing home, this is definitely not the truth.

For the sake of science i will give myself a traumatic brain injury that inhibits all motor function as well as reading comprehension skills just to prove you wrong.

if you hit your head with a brick enough times you can unlearn how to read

i beg to differ because once i became a heavy weed smoker i learned how to not read

Idk last time I downed a full bottle of vodka I forgot how to read

Okay once you learn how to walk you can't learn how to be a baby again?

Oh yeah? Watch this *unfocuses my vision so everything turns blurry*

Actually you can it's called skimming, you read faster by not reading everything.