With meme stocks, on the other hand, that’s exactly what’s happening: The small investors on the r/Wallstreetbets subreddit are taking part in a conscious collective effort to drive the prices of these stocks up.

How are they doing it? By embracing companies that Wall Street, for good reason, hates: beaten-down firms in legacy businesses with weak economic fundamentals. The Redditors don’t love these companies because they think their future prospects are genuinely great, even if in most cases there’s been some catalyst that suggests the underlying business could improve going forward. Instead, what meme stocks all have in common is that they start off with a cheap stock price and a relatively low market cap, and they’re heavily shorted, meaning that hedge-fund managers are betting that these stocks are going to fall. (GameStop, for instance, was and still is one of the most heavily shorted stocks on Wall Street.)

Reading and listening are two fundamentally different modes of learning. Reading is a standalone activity, but it tends to create stronger memories because your brain needs to fill in many gaps that listening pre-populates. What does the setting look like? What do the voices sound like? Reading uses back-tracking eye movements to maximize retention. Turning pages is a built-in break, giving you time to process what you’ve read. Reading also provides structural cues from punctuation, and physical books give you a spatial sense of where you are in the story at all times, both of which help improve your memory.

Listening, on the other hand, is a more social experience. You can glean information from one’s intonation, volume, and speed. Because you can’t rewind a conversation, you tend to focus on extracting the most important points. Listeners thrive on interaction and spontaneity. They love hearing multiple angles until one clicks, and that’s when the words magically roll off their tongue in response.

The biggest difference between the two is that listening still works when you do it passively — you can let the information run over you like a waterfall, and your subconscious will save the most relevant bits as they pass by — while reading requires constant attention. It is entirely active, like a treasure hunt.