5 ms·

Obviously there are many ways people process text, but my early efforts at speed reading (and speed listening) were much like yours. With practice, however, I r

Obviously there are many ways people process text, but my early efforts at speed reading (and speed listening) were much like yours. With practice, however, I reached a point where I could bifurcate input processing and ideational processing. It was almost as though my eyes were passively accepting information and throwing it at my mind in useful chunks, rather than my mind actively going out to get information and then churning it. The best analogy I've found is Hofstadter talking about the process of becoming good at Jumbles (where you have to unscramble letters to find the word). Early in the process, he had to actively, at the forefront of his mind, rearrange letters and test them. As he got better, that active task was offloaded to some barely-conscious 'letter combining capacity' that would only toss up fairly plausible combinations. It might not be a real word, but it had a high level of salience, whereas his active thinking-about process would make bizarre, impossible combinations that would include letters not even in the jumble. Similarly, the 'active' task of reading is, for me, a pretty passive process now, and I actually have more of my mind to devote to thinking about what I read while my eyes do the boring work of getting the input 'inside'.

brokenmindsets 16y ago
hi boredguy8, I am really interested in the type of speed reading that you are describing and have started trying to learn to do it myself. I say "your type" since people seem to mean a lot of different things when they say "speed reading". What I specifically want to learn is the ability to rapidly read while maintaining comprehension by making the process less of a conscious activity. How did you learn this skill? Did you automatically start doing this or was it something you intentionally learned? If you intentionally learned it was there any particular method or book you used? I know there are a lot of books/products about the topic but I don't know which ones actually have value and which don't so I have just been trying them one at a time. I have only met a few people in real life who seem to have this skill and they typically are not able to describe how they are doing it. Any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated, even if it is just a description of the process you went through. Thanks!
- boredguy8 16y ago
  First, I think some of this is just a 'the way we're wired' thing. I picked up the 'reading fast' habit when I was in a program that had me reading hundreds of pages of literature a week with the need to be able to discuss the texts at both a detail-oriented, "What does this line mean?" and a broad-scope, "What is the project of this text?" scale. Many people in my class had painstaking notes: I was able to build up an internal model nearly always. But maybe that's just me. Second, I think another big component was my involvement with academic competitive debate. This required learning how to process a lot of information, both verbal and written, as quickly as possible, and maintaining an internal map of how various 'nodes' of argumentation interrelated. Having to then organize that into extemporaneous speeches puts it into practice. Anyway, I don't have a good 'route to get here' because I didn't really catalog the transformation. A few things I do, though. First, I read paragraphs at a time (I also speak in paragraphs at a time: most people speak in sentence fragments at a time). I do this by tracking two points every 2-3 lines: one about 25% of the way in, the other about 75% of the way in. For a long time early on, I was reading with my index finger and pinkie finger touching the page tracing down as I read. I know people talk about "reading down the middle" but that's never really worked for me, but the 'double bounce' does. YMMV. I don't trace now because my hands just get in the way. Second, I learned to stop "saying" what I was reading. Now, for whatever reason I was never one of those people who said the words out loud while they read. But I was 'saying' them in my head and then translating them. I don't know how to express this clearly: I learned to 'listen' to my eyes, I guess, and I sortof mentally hang out in the 'what does this mean?' zone. So it's still being processed at the word/clause level, but it's 'preprocessed'. I think part of this is because I'm constantly asking "what's going on?" in the text, so there's always a context. The times that doesn't work well, though, is in more rapid dialog. I'll lose track of who is saying what. I also have a tendency to skip names (I'm bad with names in general) and so it becomes, say, "K-lady" instead of "Kahlan". (In my defense, Goodkind ends up making all his characters 'generic good' or 'generic bad' anyway.) Anyway, hope that helps. Feel free to ask questions: thinking about what I'm doing when I read isn't something I practice much. One thing I learned in high school was to not read where I sleep. I later learned the body gets 'confused' which sortof makes sense to me. I tend to read sitting up with the book at nearly eye level (not in my lap). I also read in the tub a lot (hope that's not TMI).

brokenmindsets 16y ago

hi boredguy8, I am really interested in the type of speed reading that you are describing and have started trying to learn to do it myself. I say "your type" since people seem to mean a lot of different things when they say "speed reading". What I specifically want to learn is the ability to rapidly read while maintaining comprehension by making the process less of a conscious activity. How did you learn this skill? Did you automatically start doing this or was it something you intentionally learned? If you intentionally learned it was there any particular method or book you used? I know there are a lot of books/products about the topic but I don't know which ones actually have value and which don't so I have just been trying them one at a time. I have only met a few people in real life who seem to have this skill and they typically are not able to describe how they are doing it. Any information you can provide would be greatly appreciated, even if it is just a description of the process you went through. Thanks!

boredguy8 16y ago
First, I think some of this is just a 'the way we're wired' thing. I picked up the 'reading fast' habit when I was in a program that had me reading hundreds of pages of literature a week with the need to be able to discuss the texts at both a detail-oriented, "What does this line mean?" and a broad-scope, "What is the project of this text?" scale. Many people in my class had painstaking notes: I was able to build up an internal model nearly always. But maybe that's just me. Second, I think another big component was my involvement with academic competitive debate. This required learning how to process a lot of information, both verbal and written, as quickly as possible, and maintaining an internal map of how various 'nodes' of argumentation interrelated. Having to then organize that into extemporaneous speeches puts it into practice. Anyway, I don't have a good 'route to get here' because I didn't really catalog the transformation. A few things I do, though. First, I read paragraphs at a time (I also speak in paragraphs at a time: most people speak in sentence fragments at a time). I do this by tracking two points every 2-3 lines: one about 25% of the way in, the other about 75% of the way in. For a long time early on, I was reading with my index finger and pinkie finger touching the page tracing down as I read. I know people talk about "reading down the middle" but that's never really worked for me, but the 'double bounce' does. YMMV. I don't trace now because my hands just get in the way. Second, I learned to stop "saying" what I was reading. Now, for whatever reason I was never one of those people who said the words out loud while they read. But I was 'saying' them in my head and then translating them. I don't know how to express this clearly: I learned to 'listen' to my eyes, I guess, and I sortof mentally hang out in the 'what does this mean?' zone. So it's still being processed at the word/clause level, but it's 'preprocessed'. I think part of this is because I'm constantly asking "what's going on?" in the text, so there's always a context. The times that doesn't work well, though, is in more rapid dialog. I'll lose track of who is saying what. I also have a tendency to skip names (I'm bad with names in general) and so it becomes, say, "K-lady" instead of "Kahlan". (In my defense, Goodkind ends up making all his characters 'generic good' or 'generic bad' anyway.) Anyway, hope that helps. Feel free to ask questions: thinking about what I'm doing when I read isn't something I practice much. One thing I learned in high school was to not read where I sleep. I later learned the body gets 'confused' which sortof makes sense to me. I tend to read sitting up with the book at nearly eye level (not in my lap). I also read in the tub a lot (hope that's not TMI).