30% comprehension?

[JoeJoe]

I've heard this several times now, and I can't quite believe, that we only understand 30% when we read a text.

Can someone please enlighten me?

 

[Artifice Orisit]

I think this is an average comprehension rate (many people hate reading, or can't read) and is referring to texts of a substantial length, like a book.

 

[walfin]

It depends on your definition of understand.

Much of the time I feel I only understand 30% of a conversation (if body language and nuance are taken into account).

 

[Devercia]

I grow suspicious of any statistic, especially those that quantify what cannot be measured, double that when spoken in such vague terms.

 

[fullerene]

^^practically stole the idea out of my head, devercia. How do you measure 30% comprehension of the ideas in a text? 30% of the ideas taken by number, with each one weighted equally? How much intuition is "allowed" to still count as an idea in a text? Or does it only include ideas that were explicitly stated by the author? It could even be understanding 30% of the definitions of words used (though I doubt that one--assuming you're talking about the recent Coberst post--because he's usually all about critically examining ideas).

That made me wonder, too.

 

[Ermine]

Also, "a text" is way too vague. That could mean anything from a picture book to Shakepeare.

 

[fullerene]

well... the OP (again, if he was talking about coberst's) said it was a difficult text, if I remember right, so I think it was talking about scholarly work. Even that's pretty vague, though... I agree.

 

[Ermine]

Well, with scholarly work, there's a huge automatic bias. Scholarly stuff almost always contains a lot of jargon that the average person wouldn't know unless they were in the field that the paper is about.

 

[Agent Intellect]

perhaps 30% is comprehension of the authors intent and 70% is personal bias. but, that seems like way too much on the side of comprehension.

 

[JoeJoe]

OK, we can agree, that a children's story will give us 100% comprehension right?

e.g.: A boy went to school. In school he built a paper airplane and threw it through the class. The teacher was very angry and sent the boy home. The boy cried.

Unless you count everything that the author imagined (teacher's gender, country, airplane model...) I doubt that there is a grown-up who would understand less than 100% of these few sentences (unless he is or was illiteral recently).


Now I wonder if some people just always understand much more of a text, if they want to and concentrate. (e.g. I've heard that INTPs have an exceptionally high ability to concentrate)

I often experience the following: We read a text in class, then the teacher asks someone to sum up the last paragraph. However, the part to sum up is often so short, that you can't really sum up but have to just retell everything we just read. And then I think: "Well, why didn't we just read the same paragraph again?"

Now I wonder: Is this something to do with being INTP? Or NT? Or something to do with intelligence?