Shownotes
Kimberly Hatch Harrison (co-founder of Socratica) hosts this podcast that celebrates the joys of reading. In this episode, Kim discusses the book “Stir of Echoes” by Richard Matheson. Matheson is maybe best known for penning several books that were later made into thrilling movies, as well as some timeless Twilight Zone episodes.
If you would like your own copy of the books discussed, they are available here:
Remembrance (collected letters of Ray Bradbury)
A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson
Neuro Transmissions video about Hypnotism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMQ9mCadSzM
Kim’s book: How to Be a Great Student
ebook: https://amzn.to/2Lh3XSP
Paperback: https://amzn.to/3t5jeH3
Kindle Unlimited: https://amzn.to/3atr8TJ
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Socratica Reads is sponsored by The Socratica Foundation as part of their Literacy Campaign.
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Transcript:
Welcome Everybody! To Socratica Reads. My name is Kimberly Hatch Harrison, and I’m the co-founder of Socratica. We are known mostly for our YouTube channel, where we teach college-level STEM topics, as well as how to be a great student. We have quite a number of other projects—an educational nonprofit called The Socratica Foundation, a channel for the youngest learners, Socratica Kids, and more recently we started Socratica High.
These are all obviously connected to each other in terms of education. A bright line of curiosity and learning links these experiences you had from way back when you’re a kid. Remember back then, what that’s like? You can’t get enough about dinosaurs or space. This enthusiasm can carry you a long way when you’re a kid. But you might come back to Earth hard, and land awkwardly in high school where it’s a lot more work, and very often you have to learn something even if you’re not ready, or you don’t see the point.
There’s a little bit of a disconnect then between our high school channel and our main “grownup” channel, Socratica. For the most part, people who are watching Socratica LOVE STEM. They love math, they love computer science, they love biology, chemistry, physics, all of that good stuff. So there’s a kind of survivor bias. We see all the people who survived algebra. Survived their brushes with rough classes where they were in over their head, or dull classes where they were bored, or you know, sometimes you don’t get to study what you’re REALLY interested in until you get to college. Like let’s say your main interest is in Anthropology or Psychology or Planetary Science, odds are you didn’t get to study what you were passionate about until you got older.
So the question becomes what SUSTAINS you during those years when your classroom learning just isn’t doing it for you. As my father would say, I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two don’t count.
READING.
I mean, of course I’m going to say reading, on this podcast celebrating reading. But truly, this is it, this is your secret weapon, or your invisibility cloak, or your hidden armor of mithril. When you are surrounded by dullness and work that does not inspire you, but you have to do it, day in, day out. READING is the cure.
I want to remind you that this is really the WHY behind this podcast. Reading inspires a lot of the work we do at Socratica. If I spent ALL my time just doing YouTube work, or more broadly let’s say digital creator work—if I only read things that would directly, immediately impact that work, I would probably lose those creative sparks that Make SOCRATICA what it is.
This is why this podcast is supported by the Socratica Foundation’s Literacy Campaign. Reading is one of those skills that you need to be employable, but more importantly it is a personal asset, a source of strength. It’s something that can sustain you through some tough times and can show you new ideas, new vistas. You can go to the library and read for free. Speaking of tough times. It’s hard to beat free.
There is something to be said though, for actually OWNING a book—there’s this research that shows having books in your house when you’re a kid is associated with academic success. Now clearly it isn’t causative in one step. Buying a book and putting it on your shelf isn’t going to instantly make you a great student. It’s more what happens next, what do you do with those books. I think part of it is that you have immediate access, day or night, you can keep coming back to YOUR book, and getting more out of it each time. Once you’ve decided to have books in your house, certain events like that become more likely. I know books are very expensive, so I’m going to recommend library sales and goodwill.
If you can go to a thrift store and buy a book there for a dollar, read that book, and then reread it. You’ll be amazed how much more you get out of it the second time you read it. If you read it a third time, watch out, you’re on your way to doing literary analysis, because you’ll start to understand the mechanism of what holds the book together. This is what I recommend. It’s much better to thoroughly digest a few books than to race through a whole list.
Now these don’t have to be CLASSICS of literature, although that is richer material. But maybe this season’s hot paperback isn’t a book you’re going to get a lot out of with multiple re-readings. That’s more like light entertainment, that’s more disposable. I don’t mean literally throw it in the trash, just hand over those books to a friend or swap them for another book in a Little Free Library. What you want is a book that has some IDEAS, ideas that you will come back to even years later. There’s something about it that intrigues you.
This is bringing me back to how reading will sustain you through times when you need something to keep your mind active. School isn’t doing it, work isn’t doing it—so you pick up your book at the end of the day and there’s this BIG IDEA that just feeds your brain.
In the last episode of our podcast, I shared something I found from Ray Bradbury talking about how Charles Beaumont was an IDEA man, and how his books were so intriguing to adolescents, and inspired them to talk about these ideas, and go on to create their own stories. I think of today’s writer as a spiritual brother to these men. Richard Matheson. All three of these writers created teleplays for The Twilight Zone—talk about a platform for BIG IDEAS.
You may know Richard Matheson best for his Twilight Zone episode Nightmare at 20,000 feet, starring William Shatner and a mysterious creature out on the wing of the airplane. My personal favourite is Little Girl Lost, about a girl who fell out of bed into another dimension. That there were other dimensions of space that we couldn’t see, that was a pretty BIG IDEA to be introduced to as a kid. Many of his books have been made into quite good movies, which is rare.
Today’s book from Richard Matheson is one that I came across in the 90s. Stir of Echoes. And the BIG IDEA that really intrigued me at the time, and still to this day, is that our minds have all sorts of capabilities that we only have hints of. Sometimes we can see glimpses of them using tools like hypnotism.
In the late 80s, when I was in high school, I attended a school assembly with a hypnotist. I was one of the volunteers, and I was VERY SUCCESSFULLY hypnotized. One of the things they did was balance me on the back of a chair. Now there’s NO way I could do that in real life, but under hypnotism, I was very easily able to tap into this potential capability. The fellow suggested that my spine was like an iron bar, very strong, very straight, and it seemed like the most obvious, true thing.
So I’ve studied the brain a bit, in classes about neurobiology, and psychology, and I’ve worked doing research in a few neuro labs. There’s this big divide between the scientific literature studying the brain’s capabilities and books that are meant to intrigue, and spark your imagination. There REALLY aren’t many books that have to do with hypnotism, but I was happy to come across this one from Richard Matheson. And in it there is a chair balancing demonstration! So I felt like I was in good hands. Here’s someone who understands some of the oddities that hypnotism can unlock, and if we expand on that idea, where does it go. So today I’ll share a little bit of this book.
Are you ready? Let’s begin.
{Kim reads excerpt}
There’s such a synchronicity at work in our world. The day I picked up my copy of Stir of Echoes to reread it, I got a notice on my YouTube account that there was a new video from a channel I follow. My fellow edutuber friends Micah and Alie run a channel all about the brain, neurobiology, neuroscience, and psychology called NeuroTransmissions. And guess what their video was about. Hypnotism. So clearly there’s something at work that brought me to revisit this topic this month. I’ll link to the Neuro Transmissions video in the show notes, please go visit their channel and say hi.
I’d love to hear about your own experiences with hypnotism, if you’ve been hypnotized. Our Discord Server is open to all of our YouTube channel members, and our Patrons from Patreon. You can join at patreon.com/socratica. Thanks for listening.