Something weird happened to me this year that I want to share with you.

I've long been aware that I have a problem reading books. I heard the term "regressive reader" years ago and immediately thought it described the issue to a T. I don't take information in particularly well, and often find myself flicking backwards, rereading sentences and paragraphs that have already passed my eyes. While I've always enjoyed what books have to teach me, I've found the process of getting it off the page rather arduous and unpleasant.

Over time, I've come to think of myself as an aurally aligned person rather than a visual one. I can't take a photograph to save my life. I have no eye for design. My inability to tell one dot on a stave from another has thwarted countless attempts to learn to read music, and wasted an awful lot of time, even though I can play by ear just fine.

For the longest time I thought this was simply me. This is just the way it is.

Then, last Christmas, while I was away house-sitting for a month, I installed an audiobook reader on my phone.

It was a transformative experience. It was like one of those videos of a baby being fitted with a hearing aid and hearing its mother's voice for the first time.

The first book I devoured was The Catcher in the Rye, followed by Kafka's The Trial. I was amazed at how much better listening held my attention than reading, and how much more of the content I could remember afterwards.

So I tried some non-fiction, starting with Marx's Capital, Volume I (boy, that value section needs a rewrite), before going back to classics such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I couldn't believe how well this worked.

Nine months later, I reckon I've consumed ten times as many books as I would have done if I'd been reading them from the page. And, which is why I'm writing this blog today, I think I've finally figured out why.

For every book that arrived via my ears, I now have a library of mental pictures that my mind has constructed. I can see the cramped attic where K visits the painter in The Trial. I can see Gregor's bedroom in The Metamorphosis.

The part of my brain responsible for this visual "imagineering" seems to have been switched off when I was reading words from a page. I have no comparable images in my mind from any of the paper books I've read.

It's as though my mind didn't have enough bandwidth to process the information arriving through my eyes while simultaneously turning that information into pictures.

With audiobooks, to use a computer analogy, my graphics card is free to get creative.

The words arrive through my ears, leaving the visual processing hardware available to construct a kind of virtual reality inside my head. I'm not simply hearing the story. I'm seeing it.

I saw a question in an online forum recently asking: "Is an audiobook cheating, or should you really read a book?"

My experience suggests that, for some of us at least, listening isn't cheating at all. It may be the better way in.

Humans were telling each other stories around campfires for aeons before writing was invented. Writing may be an extraordinarily efficient way of recording information, but listening to stories is the original human interface.

I only wish I'd figured this out years ago.

I'm 64 now, so I don't have an unlimited amount of time left to get through all the books I'd like to read. But at least my rate of progress is significantly higher than it has ever been.

And speaking of the future, there's another development that really impressed me this year: ChatGPT's new full-duplex voice mode, GPT-Live.

"Full duplex" essentially means "both ways". You can speak while the AI is speaking, and it can still hear you. That makes communication feel much more natural than the old model, where one side speaks, then stops, and only then does the other side get a turn.

I think this is a much more significant development than people realise.

Future generations may find it completely natural to talk to a computer system in the same way that we talk to another human being. And if that happens, I can see a day when writing itself becomes obsolete.

If I don't get any comments about that claim, I'll know nobody listened to this blog. 😒