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Anime VS VN: Do VN make you smarter?


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This question is based off the following articles I found:

http://bigthink.com/21st-century-spirituality/reading-rewires-your-brain-for-more-intelligence-and-empathy

https://medium.com/thrive-global/how-books-and-television-affect-your-brain-differently-according-to-science-82c3b14f789b

Even though there hasn’t been any studies on this phenomenon, but what do you guys think? Especially, when compared to anime?

Do visual novels make you smarter? 

 

 

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VN's are like any other "entertainment". As an example books, tv shows, animes, movies and so on....

Does it make you smarter if you just watch animes or TV shows every day? 

Well, you will learn something new but do you will get a job or do will become better in school/university or at your work? I don't think so.

Like any other "entertainment" they are there to bring out some feelings (to make you laugh, to motivate yourself, to become angry, to feel saddness, some people even get a depression) in you and entertain you. Furthermore sometimes they are also there to escape from the reality and do something else. Just forget your stress and relax. 
It's just a hobby and like any other hobbys you'll learn something new.

It dosen't mater if this knowlegde is valuabe or not. For each person it has a different meaning and that's why my answer is: YES and NO!

It also depends what you are reading... if you are just reading a Nukige, then NO you won't get smarter, Bro... :yumiko:

Edited by -soraa
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I think VN's have more detail and exposition, which does make you a little bit smarter.

1 hour ago, -soraa said:

It's just a hobby and like any other hobbys you'll learn something new.

It dosen't mater if this knowlegde is valuabe or not. For each person it has a different meaning and that's why I my answer is: YES and NO!

I agree with what soraa said. You'll see and experience new things, but you're not doing analysis probably so it's not a direct brain exercise. Maybe reading various types of prose will make your mind flexible unlike mind-numbing TV. But performance in other areas depends on skill and experience which aren't going to transfer at all from VN's.

Edited by Chronopolis
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Does reading make you "smart" or is being "smart" turning you into a reader ? ("Smart" in the sense used in the article)

Tough questions to find answers to.

As he says, reading is a skill you have to take time to improve. And with time, tastes evolve. The more you read, the more you'll enjoy it and the more you'll be demanding. Same for anime.

Edited by Guest
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Whenever I read something like this, I always wonder about one major issue, which is unavoidable when investigating issues like this: cause and effect. Will reading make you smarter or are smart people more likely to read?

New Zealand has tested a bunch of people for decades and now they can say the more TV a 10 year old child watches, the lower the grades.... or was it IQ... Either way the question is if the brain is damaged by TV or if it is because children, who are already bright have too much going on in their heads to accept passive entertainment for a long time.

Another one is breast feeding (take that prude Americans:P). Substitute in a bottle is less perfect for brain development and the child will lose 3 IQ points on average as grown up if fed by bottle. Is it the food or is it because stupid parents are less likely to breastfeed, meaning children who are breastfed will statistically have genes for higher IQ?

Answering such questions is not an easy task because how to tell those two apart and how can we be sure it's not a combined effect of both? The same is an issue in the first article. The second article seems to have the same issue with the Japanese study while the Pompeii counters this issue better by having a before and after test, which should help to filter out the differences between people and get more precise readings of the effect of the book reading. As such, that specific study is more trustworthy than the other studies in regard to the effect.

I would say the premise for the studies are severely simplified and you can't say any TV show vs any book. For instance you will likely get completely different effect from a documentary than you will get for slapstick comedy. Likewise there are good books and then there are horrible books. I was forced to read one of the latter in school and the only thing I remember from it was the story was really boring and the author had spelling mistakes, which were not fixed prior to printing. I don't think there is any positive effect from reading such a book.

Quote

The results found that watching TV resulted in lower amounts and quality of communication between the mother and child. During an educational TV program, mothers made few comments to their children, and if they did, it was unrelated to what their children said.

On the other hand, reading books together increased the amount and level of communication. Mothers were more likely to ask their child questions, respond to their child’s statements and questions, and explain concepts in greater detail.

Sounds to me like the issue here has less to do with TV vs book and more to do with parents using the TV as babysitter rather than spending time reading a book for the child.

 

As for VNs vs amine. I would say it's likely that VNs are better for your brain than anime. Anime will likely have the same effect as TV shows. Generally speaking, anime is fast paced, has a tendency to be shallow and in any way acts like sitcoms. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they aren't brain challenging. If it is say a sengoku era anime and you pause whenever there is a name and try to remember what the real person did, then you become active and push/train your brain and as such train your memory.

VNs on the other hand can be beneficial, but they don't have to be. It depends on how it's written and what goes on. If it's a machine translated nukige, then good luck trying to convince yourself you will benefit from it. If it is a well written story where you try to keep track of past events in order to understand what is going on and perhaps see if you can predict anything, then you train your brain and you could benefit from it.

Another factor, which should not be overlooked is the reader. If you read a masterpiece and speedrun through it without digging into the story, pausing to recollect the scenes etc, then you will not get the benefits other people might get from reading the very same title. This is yet another layer, which makes the question even harder to answer. Your language skills comes into play as well. If you have language shortcomings and miss out on the details, you will not benefit as much if at all from having a well written VN. You might benefit from the training of a foreign language though.

Edited by tymmur
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Well, i think that in tv vs books, books have a large advantage cause of the power of imagination, but when we are talking about vns that factor diminishes with the inclusion of the visual aspect, so the biggest point is what anime and what vn are we talking about, in ideal conditions, my guess is that a visual novel could delivery more information than an anime, especially in consideration of the length of a vn  that could easily surpass 20 hours when a two seasons anime have generally 10 hours of contents ( including something like 1 hour of opening/endings).

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They're good for trivia. If the pieces in question specialize in something specific, like punk bands, astronomy or gliders, you are bound to lock away something useful in that brain space. 

However, doesn't anime do the same? I guess it's up to whether your brain learns easier from seeing images or reading text. 

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16 minutes ago, UnlimitedMoeWorks said:

Well, if there's one thing that Grisaia no Kajitsu taught me, it's that Anomalocaris was an actual animal that lived on Earth about 540 million years ago in the Cambrian Period.

Thanks Makina Irisu. :makina:

Yeah! Who says esoteric knowledge is useless?


I can imagine it now, UltimateMoeWorks on an archaeological exhibition.

UMW: "I did it! I found a fossilized Anomalocaris!"
Archaeologist: "That's a fossilized signboard..."
UMW: "No, it's a Anomalocaris from the Cambrian Period."
Archaeologist: "It says 'Blockbuster' on it."
UMW: "All the more evidence."

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Fiction Positive Effects on Brain: Books>LN (caveat: well-written)=>VNs>Manga>Anime.  Why?  Imagination.  Imagining what is going on in a fictional story is the part that expands your brain.  LNs and VNs are interchangeable for obvious reasons.

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Well, in Poland there's a lot of talk about something called "re-illiteracy", where people who don't read books and newspapers basically lose basic reading comprehension and writing skills over time. From that point of view, VNs are definitely less of a shitty hobby than watching (dubbed) anime, TV or YouTube videos all day. That only proves that they're "less dumb/mindless" than some other forms of burning time though and probably won't make you regress intellectually.

Beyond that... It depends on what you read. If you go through trashy moege/charage every day, they probably won't challenge you much or expand your horizons. On the other hand, there's a lot of plotge that do interesting, thought-provoking things and build your imagination, probably better than any anime, as they have slower pacing and give you much more (meaningful) textual information to process.

Or that's how I want to think about it at least. Please don't disprove my life choices. :notlikemiya:

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
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5 hours ago, UnlimitedMoeWorks said:

Well, if there's one thing that Grisaia no Kajitsu taught me, it's that Anomalocaris was an actual animal that lived on Earth about 540 million years ago in the Cambrian Period.

Thanks Makina Irisu. :makina:

I know for a fact several brain cells died tragically watching Michiru.:michiru:

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Honestly speaking. I don't expect much from out of a Visual Novel whenever I read them leisurely :sachi:

I just accept them for what they are at face value, if a certain title sucks, then it sucks balls, if the visual novel was compelling and epic in proportion, then lucky me I guess for not wasting my time and got a decent entertainment and learned something new in the process :mare:

People get disappointed for setting high standards and expectations for certain things in life. 

To make life simple and easier, I consider stuffs such as videos games, Anime, books, and Visual Novels in particular as akin to "Food" :wahaha:

Yep sound crazy since I'm one of those :nico: 

All foods could be consume in so many different ways however while they may all be edible, not every food provides the same nutrients and we somehow get fed up from eating the same food everyday that we oftentimes explore other types of dishes in satisfying our taste buds :yumiko:

Same goes with Visual Novels Anime, and video games. All of these are entertainment in general however each offers a unique experience contrary to each other.:maple:

My answer to your question is: It depends on what you make out of your experience from watching anime or reading Visual Novel in general. :vanilla:

 

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2 hours ago, Templarseeker said:

To make life simple and easier, I consider stuffs such as videos games, Anime, books, and Visual Novels in particular as akin to "Food" :wahaha:

Ehhh.... when people say they want to eat out a heroine, they don't actually mean they want to consume her like she is food, even if she might be sugar sweet.

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I see reading VNs on the level of reading manga or LNs. Sure, it has text that you have to read plus some to lots of illustrations, but there is absolutely no way I would call those education material. You aren’t thinking too much when you read through these stories as they’re written in a manner that’s easy to understand... simple vocabulary, simplex syntax, and simple sentence structure. The story is mostly written in a language that is used in daily conversations.

Real education material would be heavy literature novels that always gets the reader thinking about the author’s way or writing. They use more complicated vocabulary and sentence structure that can be interpreted in multiple ways and it sometimes requires some knowledge of history to be able to understand what the text means. These are the books that professors will recommend as good resources when taking intermediate to advanced language classes which can be necessary if you want to be able to understand complicated material.

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On 25/5/2018 at 1:23 AM, WorldofAI said:

I see reading VNs on the level of reading manga or LNs. Sure, it has text that you have to read plus some to lots of illustrations, but there is absolutely no way I would call those education material. You aren’t thinking too much when you read through these stories as they’re written in a manner that’s easy to understand... simple vocabulary, simplex syntax, and simple sentence structure. The story is mostly written in a language that is used in daily conversations.

Real education material would be heavy literature novels that always gets the reader thinking about the author’s way or writing. They use more complicated vocabulary and sentence structure that can be interpreted in multiple ways and it sometimes requires some knowledge of history to be able to understand what the text means. These are the books that professors will recommend as good resources when taking intermediate to advanced language classes which can be necessary if you want to be able to understand complicated material.

Allow me to politely disagree. I won't deny that the prose tends to be pretty straightforward in VNs, and that if your goal is to get used to a more barroque use of the language, you might be better off looking somewhere else. However, I don't think that this fact alone is enough to mark them out as non educational. There are plenty of great authors with a very simple style who wrote very complex stories. Isaac Asimov comes to mind, being a sci-fi fan myself. As long as the story drags you out of your comfort zone, either by making you feel part of another completely different world, or by putting you in very delicate personal and moral dilemmas, I think there is quite a lot to ponder and as a result, you might wind up realising things you never even thought about. I'd call that educational, independently of how complex the prose or the vocabulary gets, which in the end, even if they do add to the atmosphere, belong to the domain of aesthetics. 

Edited by Thyndd
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