It's funny that he dismisses the more indirect cognitive gains associated with reading as lacking "rigorous experimental evidence" when the value of rote memori

It's funny that he dismisses the more indirect cognitive gains associated with reading as lacking "rigorous experimental evidence" when the value of rote memorization is often just as uncertain. He should just as soon dismiss the value of mothers if you can't vividly remember most of what they say. He needs to read "Moonwalking With Einstein". The real bottleneck is that no matter how rigorously you cram stuff into long term memory, you can keep precious few things - some experts think 2 - 4 is a realistic range - in short terms memory. Most of what's on your mind in any given moment is determined by your environment and activity, and we have extremely limited ability to randomly access bits of information at will (both our own memory and whatever we've gleaned from books and teachers). So I'm sorry, but those connections that we form while learning and experiencing are about all we've got. The upshot is that reading and structured learning seem to be extremely efficient ways of building these connections/schema.