Why reciting Ramayana or listening it from loved-ones (those who are interested in your growth and self-realization progress) is any-day better than Idiot box serials and movies depicting Ramayana? (Or Mahabharata or Purana)
Information to Action ratio determines potency of mind, its ability to filter garbage from sense inputs and execute set of information fueled in for own betterment.
In oral learning traditions, due to inherent nature of minds, guide/Guru/Awakener could activate brain areas of listeners/students/Shishya in such a way that students can activate their mind at highest potency level for converting all incoming info/knowledge in action/application/experiment. And this is proved by modern science too[1]. Oral ways occupy mind in conversation, give access to live stream of information from Guru’s mind and on the fly filtration too. Here, learning is a shared activity resulting in a transfer of information across brains, from teacher to student, from speaker to listener. And overall success depends on the speaker/teacher’s ability to influence listener/student’s thought process. Modern science’ limitation is they cannot go beyond brain mirroring. Mind-space, Atma-space are alien territory for them as of now and so full potential of this method is yet untapped in our times.
Prior to visual mediums, in writing traditions, this information to action ratio was still good so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. It was valuable for them to act in life. And this is because brain still tries to process read word by mapping it to most nearest sound in memory. In addition, action-value was important factor for any type of information served.
In our visually dominated information world (See, I have to use picture! 
🙂 ), this sense of potency is gradually diminishing, precisely because the whole world became the context for news/information. Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right of reply too. With this one way traffic most of the times, in terms of passive entertainment & information titbits , it is easy for mind act impotent due to unavailability of potent catalyst and/or absence of action-value. Even if there is a chance for communication, major non-verbal communication link remains broken in virtual communication.
In this chaotic times, it is important for us to give more focus and re-training of a confused impotent mind. Train your mind to act. Act boldly. Train your mind to filter noise from information with high action-value. Face to face learning is best; whichever way suits you.
Research
[1]
Speaker–listener neural coupling underlies successful communication
Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied fMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker’s spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information.
