When we think about a scientist reading, we might imagine them slouching over an obscure academic paper, poring over words printed so tiny they might need a magnifying glass. Ok, I’m exaggerating a bit, but still – nobody really aspires to that kind of reading.
However, there’s a way to read like a scientist that I think anyone could benefit from, even (and maybe especially) if their work has seemingly nothing to do with science. This way of reading can apply to long essays, nonfiction books, and even novels – any kind of reading that requires enough time and energy that you want to make the most out of it.
First, scientists rarely read a paper without already having an idea of what they’re going to get from it. You go to a paper looking for something specific: a method you could borrow, a number you need, or a result that might impact what you’re working on.
Scientists also read adversarially. Not unkindly, but with the assumption that the author is a person making an argument, and that they could be wrong. So they ask, where’s the control group? How many people were in this study?
And they don’t read alone. They constantly share papers with others, and journal clubs have been a fixture of academic life since the 1800’s.
None of this requires a lab. It’s a way to approach any kind of reading, and it’s based on just three key practices.
Practice 1: Formulate a hypothesis
By explicitly stating what you expect to get out of a book, you will instantly make your reading experience more generative.
- “I expect this book to be fun and lighthearted.”
- “I expect this book to teach me how to have better conversations.”
- “I expect this book to change the way I approach productivity.”
- “I expect this book to be mostly about love.”
Your hypothesis doesn’t need to be clever or well-informed. It just needs to be specific enough that the book can turn out to contradict it. This means you’ll be able to talk about the book in more interesting ways: “I expected this book to be X, but it was actually Y.”
And there’s also a useful quirk of memory here. If you’re confident about something, get it wrong and then find out the right answer, you tend to remember the correction better. The gap between your expectation and the actual experience helps you learn.
Practice 2: Exercise critical thinking
Reading a book like a scientist is like turning a one-way experience into a dialogue. Read in conversation with yourself (current and past) and with other authors you’ve read. Where do they agree, where do they disagree?
Whenever you read something on a subject you’ve read about before, ask what the two authors would say to each other. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari and Transcendence by Gaia Vince both tell the story of early human societies, but from a different vantage point. Reading the second one changes how you think about the first one.
Again, that works for novels too! A famous example is comparing 1984 and Brave New World when it comes to their take on what a future dystopia might look like.
Practice 3: Share what you learned
For scientists, knowledge that stays in their head can’t be checked, corrected, or built on by anyone else.
The same applies to your reading. If you can’t say anything about a book a month after finishing it, it probably means you haven’t taken anything away from it.
So, tell a friend about the book, write a note to your future self, share your thoughts on social media – it doesn’t matter which format you choose. What matters is putting the idea into your own words, because that’s when you find out whether you actually understood it (which is the idea behind the Feynman technique).
The good news is, you don’t need a system for any of this. Just pick up whichever book you’re planning to read next and finish this sentence: “I expect this book to…”
Then read it, notice how the experience differs from your expectation, and share what you learned with others. That’s how you read like a scientist.