ORIGINAL ARCHIVE · July 5, 2022 · 22 min
Why ‘Play the Movie in Your Mind’ Is Incomplete Reading Advice
Matt Bardin explains why comprehension must move beyond mental pictures to meanings, ideas, sensations, and abstract language.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE
Open in Apple Podcasts ↗“Play the movie in your mind” sounds like useful reading advice. Matt Bardin thinks it points in the right direction, but leaves out much of what comprehension actually requires.
Bardin, founder of Zinc Learning Labs and a longtime educator and tutor, joined Timmy Bauer to explain why readers must do more than form pictures. They also have to turn words into sensations, meanings, ideas, experiences, and connections, especially when a text becomes abstract.
The result is not a rejection of visualization. It is a more complete way to describe what skilled readers do, often without realizing it.
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
- why visualization is useful but insufficient as a complete comprehension strategy;
- how readers move from concrete sensory language to abstract ideas;
- what Bardin means by “zinking” a text;
- why the right level of difficulty and psychological safety matter; and
- a practical sequence teachers and tutors can use with struggling readers.
Why the Movie Metaphor Is Incomplete
Bardin agrees with the impulse behind the familiar instruction. Teachers want students to move beyond pronouncing words and begin comprehending them.
The problem is that written language can move instantly between concrete pictures and ideas that cannot be filmed. A writer can give readers a ship on the horizon, then shift into memory, freedom, longing, or disappointment. Nonfiction depends even more heavily on language that does not create a literal scene.
“It’s turning those words into images, experiences, meanings, and ideas.”
A mental movie may be part of reading, but it cannot carry the whole job.
Reading Runs From Sensation to Abstraction
Bardin asks students to think across a spectrum. At one end is sensory language. A phrase such as “swimming in a pond in the rain” may bring up sights, sounds, temperature, movement, and physical sensation almost immediately.
At the other end are abstract phrases such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” There is no single picture that explains them. Readers have to connect the words to examples, definitions, experiences, and their own understanding of the world.
Timmy’s immediate connection to “the pursuit of happiness” was entrepreneurship, growth, and the freedom to make one’s way in the world. Another reader may make a different connection. The point is not to find one approved image. It is to make the language meaningful enough to understand.
What Matt Means by “Zinking”
Bardin wanted an actionable word for the step between decoding language and comprehending it. He calls that step “zinking.”
“It’s turning the words into meanings, images, ideas, experiences. It’s what successful readers are just doing automatically.”
The invented term gives teachers a way to name the invisible work. A student may pronounce every word correctly and still reach the bottom of a page without having made anything happen mentally. Naming the missing process makes it easier to notice and practice.
What Proficient Readers Can Miss
Many educators became teachers partly because reading already worked for them. That strength can make it difficult to see the steps that are not happening for another student.
Timmy and Bardin both recognized the experience of reading several paragraphs, accurately processing the words, and suddenly realizing that nothing had registered. No reader works like a barcode scanner. Attention drifts, meaning breaks down, and the reader has to return to the text.
For a student who experiences that blankness continually, reading is predictably boring and frustrating. The problem may not be an unwillingness to read. The text may never be becoming an experience in the first place.
A Practical Way to Teach the Skill
Bardin described a sequence teachers and tutors can use one-to-one or adapt carefully for a classroom:
- Begin with the senses. Ask which words create something visual, auditory, physical, or otherwise sensory.
- Pause on a key image. Give the reader two to five seconds to let the image develop and notice the thoughts or feelings that come with it.
- Compare what the image changes. Bardin used Zora Neale Hurston’s ships at a distance, then asked how the effect would change if the line used trucks on a highway instead.
- Move toward abstract language. Ask for a real example, personal connection, paraphrase, or definition when a phrase cannot become a literal picture.
- Practice continuously. One successful exercise is an introduction, not a finished skill.
The goal is not to interrogate students until they produce a teacher’s preferred answer. It is to help them experience language becoming meaningful.
Choose Texts Worth the Effort
Bardin emphasized that the text has to be challenging enough to create an “aha” moment but meaningful enough to reward the effort. If it is already effortless, students may not notice the process. If it is inaccessible or embarrassing, they may shut down.
That is one reason he favors individualized practice. Students can grapple with language at an appropriate level without feeling publicly exposed.
Timmy suggested another bridge: transcripts of sophisticated YouTube videos students already care about. A familiar subject or voice could let students encounter challenging written language with more context and motivation than an arbitrary passage provides.
Keep the Evidence Claims Honest
Near the end of the conversation, Bardin said he is convinced that advanced reading helps the brain grow and speculated that written language may challenge the brain in ways spoken language does not. He was also explicit that he did not yet have proof for that particular claim and had been trying to interest researchers in the question.
That distinction matters. The episode offers a practical model drawn from teaching and tutoring experience, along with a hypothesis Bardin believes deserves study. It does not present that hypothesis as settled neuroscience.
His broader concern is clear: Readers need the capacity to work through sophisticated written language, think critically, participate in civic life, and prepare for work that demands more than passive consumption.
Practical Takeaways for Educators
- Keep visualization, but do not make it your only description of comprehension.
- Ask what a reader sees, hears, feels, understands, connects, or concludes.
- Treat abstract phrases differently from concrete images.
- Make invisible comprehension work explicit and nameable.
- Use texts that are relevant, appropriately difficult, and safe to struggle with.
- Separate useful classroom experience from claims that still need research.
The best version of “play the movie in your mind” may be: Make the language real. Sometimes that means a picture. Sometimes it means an idea, a memory, a feeling, or a connection that finally gives the words somewhere to land.
Links and Resources From This Episode
Read the complete episode transcript22-minute timestamped transcript
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Why “play the movie in your mind” is incomplete reading advice
This timestamped transcript was generated from the original episode audio and lightly edited to correct names, punctuation, and obvious transcription errors. Use the player above to hear the conversation in its original form.
Introduction
00:02Timmy Bauer: What’s up, literacy advocates? It’s me, your host, Timmy Bauer, and my guest today is Matt Bardin. He is someone who has had a combined 35 years in education. He’s been a New York City teacher for years. He taught middle school and high school English, was involved with Teach For America at the beginning, and has been a tutor ever since. He’s also the founder of Zinc Learning Labs, and I’m really excited to have him as a guest today. Matt, welcome to the show.
00:28Matt Bardin: Great to be here, Timmy. Thanks.
Why the Movie Metaphor Falls Short
00:30Timmy Bauer: I’m really excited to talk to you because the last time we talked, you said something that I hadn’t heard anybody say before. I like to ask everyone about a commonly held belief they disagree with, and you mentioned the idea of kids reading and a movie playing in their head. You disagree with that way of thinking about it, and I’ve heard a lot of teachers say that. What do you mean when you disagree with it?
01:06Matt Bardin: I 100 percent agree with the impulse that’s driving it. As teachers, we’re trying to get our kids to actually comprehend. When they sound out the words correctly, why aren’t they getting it? Why aren’t they understanding it? We call that understanding ‘zinking’ because there’s no word for it. It is definitely not making a movie. When you think of making a movie, that’s our experience with video. We live in a video culture. But the thing about reading is that a writer can plunk down any image they feel like in the middle of a text.
01:41Matt Bardin: When Zora Neale Hurston says, ‘Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board,’ she doesn’t mean literal ships. You do want to imagine that image and feel it, but a writer can suddenly be talking about peanut butter when we were on an actual ship, or whatever. Kids get very confused by that instruction when there’s a whole other experience writers want us to have and can give us. In many ways it’s a much richer experience because they can throw in any image, sound, smell, sensation, idea, or meaning. We’re imagining it. Reading is turning those words into images, experiences, meanings, and ideas, not making a movie.
02:34Timmy Bauer: I think about reading fiction. If you’re reading a fiction novel, it’s not too hard to have, I guess, a movie. I would probably use the phrase, ‘I’ve got a movie playing in my head.’ Is it just that, in order to encompass all genres, you don’t think we should think about it that way? Or do you even think it’s wrong to think about fiction that way?
02:59Matt Bardin: It’s not that it’s wrong. I think it’s much better than nothing. The problem speaks to a bigger issue for educators, which is that almost all of us who are educators were readers. We love reading, or we did at one point. But you have to understand that adult-level readers in this country are 13 percent of the population. Most people never achieve that level of comprehension. When you say, ‘Make the movie,’ to someone, it’s just the wrong instruction. It’s missing a lot of the elements that go into successful reading.
From Sensory Language to Abstract Ideas
03:39Matt Bardin: If I’m trying to apply that idea as a student and I’m reading something with all this other language, a lot of language, especially in nonfiction, is not imagery. It’s not a movie at all. You actually have to make that language real for yourself in order to comprehend.
04:00Timmy Bauer: When you say, ‘Make that language real,’ what do you mean?
04:05Matt Bardin: When we talk about zinking, we ask students to think on a spectrum from using your senses. Take words like ‘swimming in a pond in the rain.’ As soon as I say that, your brain is making the movie. You’re seeing it, and you can feel the sensation, even the sounds of raindrops or the cold or heat of the air. All of those things are sensory. But when you read something that says, ‘Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ what is your brain supposed to do with that?
04:37Timmy Bauer: It’s not a movie. It’s an idea.
04:42Matt Bardin: Right. We call those ‘make it real’ phrases. If you really want to understand ‘pursuit of happiness,’ that’s a tricky one. What does your brain actually do with that? You have to grab something.
05:01Timmy Bauer: It’s pretty vague. If you want to fully understand it, what is a pursuit of happiness? When I think of it, I think of doing entrepreneurial things for growth and acquiring stuff. That’s a hard thing.
05:16Matt Bardin: Right, and it can be interpreted in a lot of other ways too. The way your brain actually understands words like that is not to make a movie. You have to enact it. You have to make it real, connect your own example. In your case, entrepreneurship, the opportunity to make your way in the world, to pursue wealth. Some people would say it’s an opportunity to pursue all sorts of other things. Reading is being able to handle that whole spectrum of language from something really concrete to something abstract. To enjoy reading, you want to be skilled at those things, be used to them, look for them, and enjoy them.
Naming the Invisible Work
06:17Timmy Bauer: You’ve used the made-up phrase a couple of times, ‘zinking.’ What is zinking?
06:27Matt Bardin: Obviously, I made it up because there wasn’t a word for it. ‘Make the movie in your head’ is not effective. It’s not what’s going to get a student who doesn’t naturally do that to understand what they need to do. I was looking for actionable feedback to give a student. When you’re reading, you have to sound out the words well and know what they mean. Those are definitely foundational to successful reading. But this other step was what I really saw missing for so many students.
06:57Matt Bardin: They’re reading, and of course it’s boring. It’s insanely boring if you’re trying to read a language you don’t understand. Even if it’s a language you do understand, if the words aren’t forming into these kinds of experiences in your brain, nothing’s happening. So we made up a word for it: zinking. It’s turning the words into meanings, images, ideas, and experiences. It’s what successful readers are just doing automatically. The big revelation to me was realizing that it’s not happening for everyone. Of course, they hate reading.
07:38Timmy Bauer: The fact that that’s not happening for the majority of people is wild to me. Again, I studied to be an English teacher. You were an English teacher.
07:43Matt Bardin: Right. I say it happened a long time ago, or we wouldn’t have pursued that career.
When the Words Do Not Register
07:50Timmy Bauer: Probably. Although, honestly, and you’ll probably agree with me, don’t you have moments when you’re reading when you’re like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa. Nothing was happening’?
08:00Matt Bardin: Yeah, literally. We can all relate to that. Almost everyone. No one’s brain is a barcode scanner. Reading is not a natural thing to be doing at all.
08:17Timmy Bauer: It’s crazy that your brain can go through the process of reading the words on page after page. You could read 300 words and actually read all of those words, but nothing else happened. You were in a completely different la-la land.
08:31Matt Bardin: Exactly. Yet I think it’s increasingly hard because we live in such a video culture. For kids and for us too, when I’m tired I’d rather go on YouTube and watch my sports. I don’t want to read something really challenging. But at the same time, I have the capability, so if I need to or want to, I can turn it on. I do find it deeply satisfying to read a great book. It is actually more satisfying.
09:00Matt Bardin: To me, the analogy is junk food versus a really delicious meal. I don’t mean health food that tastes terrible. That’s not how I feel about the Richard Kapuściński book I’m reading right now. I’m enjoying it. It is a little more effort than watching baseball highlights, which are also wonderful.
Where ‘Zinking’ Came From
09:28Timmy Bauer: How did you come to the idea of zinking? Was it something that happened while you were tutoring? How did you end up naming it zinking? What’s the story of that?
09:43Matt Bardin: It definitely came from tutoring. I’m a test-prep tutor, and I need to get results. The basic tricks that everybody teaches in test prep work amazingly well for a small percentage, maybe even 20 or 25 percent. But for so many kids, when they’re reading, the wall comes down. Very quickly they’re going to get frustrated and give up. I just figured out that this is what’s happening.
10:23Matt Bardin: A friend of mine was talking about reading. He said something like, ‘Hey, don’t bother me, Mom. I’m zinking,’ as if it was a thing to do. I just needed a word for it.
Teaching the Skill
10:45Timmy Bauer: For teachers listening who are on board with the concept of zinking, how do you get not just 13 percent, but the majority of students to be able to do this regularly and easily?
11:11Matt Bardin: Great question. We’re building software, and if there are any teachers listening, please reach out to me at matt@zinclearninglabs.com. We’re building these tools because, in my experience, you really have to get students to experience it. It’s like riding a bicycle. Once you’re doing it and actually noticing what the words are doing, you have to give them a text that is somehow meaningful to them and get them to experience it with that text.
11:45Matt Bardin: It also has to be kind of above their pay grade. If it’s so easy that they just get it automatically, then it doesn’t have that ‘aha’ moment of, ‘Oh wow, I get it now, and I enjoy it.’ The reason we built software is that it is individualized. It gives each kid their own level and set of challenges. Because it’s one-to-one software, it allows them to grapple with a text on their own.
12:18Matt Bardin: I think it’s very hard in a classroom. You have to be very careful because kids feel humiliated. They feel called out, and that never works. It only works if you can give them that positive experience.
Choosing the Right Text
12:35Timmy Bauer: How does your software go about choosing text?
12:43Matt Bardin: There are various parts of the software that have different texts. We look for things we know are going to be meaningful to a middle- or high-school student, which is the target for this, and some college students as well. The key component is an experience called Ignition. You log in, do a level placement with a series of short paragraphs, and it figures out your comfort level. Then it starts giving you a lot of practice with these skills using a variety of texts.
13:25Matt Bardin: I’m always looking for something where I believe that if a kid puts in effort, there’s a payoff. It has to be something I feel will be meaningful and interesting, because it’s hard to find that. It’s not going to be one size fits all. I’m very interested in creating these kinds of texts. We’re still teaching The Catcher in the Rye. That’s a great book, but come on, it’s 80 years later.
14:06Timmy Bauer: Something I’m surprised no one is doing is having students read transcripts of YouTube videos, like some of the best YouTubers. Any of MatPat’s channels, Game Theory or Film Theory, would be interesting and challenging texts, but it’s such a familiar format that they could probably read it. To use the phrase we’re trying not to use, that movie would be playing in their head. They already know the way he talks.
14:43Matt Bardin: Who’s MatPat?
14:47Timmy Bauer: MatPat has three really popular YouTube channels: Game Theory, Film Theory, and Food Theory. One is about food, one is about movies, and one is about games. His scripts are really sophisticated, so it would be interesting to have students read those if they’re struggling to zink. How did you say it? Zinking is when you read and you’re able to have experiences, meanings, and images?
15:04Matt Bardin: Experiences, meanings, ideas. Those are the four that come to my mind for what is meant to happen in your head.
15:22Timmy Bauer: It is kind of like making the movie, but there’s so much other stuff that needs to go on for you to succeed.
A Tutoring Exercise
15:33Timmy Bauer: On the how side of things, since you said you believe this is a very one-to-one kind of thing, what about in a tutoring context? How do you help a kid who is not zinking be able to zink?
15:54Matt Bardin: A lot of it is picking the right text. The first way is to use your senses. Find the words or phrases that are auditory, visual, or mostly visual, but also sounds, smells, or whatever. If it says ‘swimming in a pond in the rain,’ are you really experiencing that? Secondly, within that is what we call key images. That’s where the writer brings in an image and wants you to fully experience it.
16:30Matt Bardin: I use a passage from Zora Neale Hurston about ships at a distance carrying people’s wishes. It’s such a heavy, intense line. But she says ships at a distance, so really picture those ships. When a writer uses a key image, your job as a reader is to take two to five seconds and notice what goes with an image. Let that image manifest in your imagination and feel it. What are the thoughts and feelings that go with ships at a distance?
17:23Timmy Bauer: I’m thinking about looking out at the ocean and the sky. I see the ships that are at a distance. I see the sails. I imagine there are sailors on board.
17:36Matt Bardin: When you really see them at a distance, very far away on that dock, what does that image feel like? This isn’t an SAT question. There’s something peaceful. Kids will say exciting or adventurous. A lot of people say lonely or sad. I don’t know what you’re getting, but I think it’s there.
18:00Matt Bardin: Notice that she could have said, ‘Trucks on a highway have every man’s wish on board.’ How would that be different? What are trucks on a highway doing? For me, it’s asphalt and oil. I’m at a truck stop. There’s the smell of gas fumes. It’s intense, harsh, and commercial. These are all images the writer puts in. As soon as you get a kid actively doing that, it actually feels good, especially if you find the right text.
18:36Matt Bardin: Then you have to make sure they’re doing it continuously. That has to be practiced to build the skill. There’s a lot of competition out there for their attention, so if we expect them to just have it now, it probably won’t work that way. You really have to work at this.
Why It Matters
19:02Timmy Bauer: My last question for you, Matt, is why does this matter so much, ultimately? Why is this something you have devoted so much of your time and life to?
19:17Matt Bardin: It matters in so many ways. First of all, I’m convinced that advanced reading helps your brain grow. Your brain runs on language. It’s almost like the operating system of the brain. I don’t have any proof for this, and I’ve reached out to neuroscientists who are school and adolescent brain-development experts, but I haven’t found any takers yet. I think it’s going to rewire your brain to deal with written language and to practice it.
19:53Matt Bardin: What you said before about a podcast or YouTube may work, but spoken language can never achieve the sophistication of written language. I think there’s something there for our students and for everyone, even as adults, to keep challenging ourselves, growing ourselves, and seeking out that satisfaction, especially in an era of cheap calories that we’re constantly bombarded with.
20:30Matt Bardin: I’m convinced this is going to be like exercise. A hundred years ago, we got rid of the need for heavy labor for most people living in the world we live in. Then we started producing all these inexpensive calories that were wonderful when you were hungry and starving. During our lifetimes, people started realizing, ‘Oh no, I need to eat better food, and exercise feels good.’ I think this is going to be the same. I also think we need an educated populace to sustain a democracy. There are going to be jobs for people who are able to think critically, so I’m very worried about the future. This is one little part of it that I hope to contribute something meaningful to.
Where to Find Matt Bardin
21:19Timmy Bauer: Great. I love it. Matt, this has been a great conversation. Where are you most active online, and where would you like the listeners to connect with you?
21:29Matt Bardin: We have an Instagram, Zinc Learning Labs, and LinkedIn. Like I said, any teachers out there who hear this and are interested can email me directly or email info@zinclearninglabs.com. I really appreciate the opportunity to be on here with you, Timmy.
21:48Timmy Bauer: Absolutely. All those links are in the description. Matt, thank you so much for being on.
21:54Matt Bardin: Right on.