I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)
I&#x27;ve been reading (and writing) considerable amounts, pretty much every day all my life since I was 12-ish (and ~15), 37 as I speak. I&#x27;m cognitively no genius by any metric but certainly &#x27;well capable&#x27; relatively to most people (strong points being speed of thought, clarity&#x2F;precision to a fault, powerful synthesis). I however have a bad factual memory in general, I need to &#x27;do&#x27; or &#x27;understand&#x27; things to really memorize (e.g. I suck at poems, lyrics, can&#x27;t even remember mine, but I love systems, physics, logic).<p>Without explanations or hazardous &#x27;hypotheses&#x27; (hum) as to why, here are my observations and personal &#x27;tricks&#x27;. Spoiler: no magic, just directed effort, solving for X.<p>- There is an inverse relationship between speed and depth of information input. The faster you take it in, <i>even if you feel like you understand all of it</i> (and may, factually), the shallower your actual <i>intake</i> will be in the long run. Generally. Emotions act as a catalyzer for memory, but cloud thinking temporarily.<p>- The more massive a piece of content (book, article..), the <i>slower</i> I want to go if I aim at a constant result (comprehension, food for thought, memory, etc). I may speed up when cruising if the content lends itself to that (repetitive, very structured, etc). Essentially, whenever recent memory won&#x27;t cut it to think and remember, because there&#x27;s too much content, or it&#x27;s too complex, I need my long-term memory sparked into activation.<p>- I read fast in general, but it has nothing to do with &#x27;techniques&#x27; related to the act of reading itself: it&#x27;s entirely a mental &#x27;mode&#x27; or &#x27;state&#x27;, that I only ever get otherwise in sports, this moment when you just <i>trigger</i> the beast and <i>commit</i> entirely to victory. When you just won&#x27;t fail, when it&#x27;s &#x27;all-in&#x27;. That level of focus, of concentration, is best exercised with training, of any kind. So indeed you need to <i>think</i>, not just read, and actually want to even <i>write</i> and <i>use</i> the substance if you are to maximize its results on you.<p>- It&#x27;s very important for me to begin slow, whatever the average pace later on. I need to get acquainted with the author, their go-to vocabulary and grammar subsets, the point they&#x27;re making. Sometimes it never clicks and the whole piece is tedious for me. Sometimes it&#x27;s so clear I feel like I could have written it myself, at least the structure of it. It&#x27;s a thing, hard to explain. I guess why all we have our own favorites and dreaded authors.<p>I like people who speak relatively fast because I don&#x27;t get easily distracted or bored when they talk to me, so speeding up audiobooks is a personal treat; but there&#x27;s a limit if I want to retain anything more than fuzzy snapshots of partial points. I may understand 100% on the spot (I actually do nothing else but listen and focus), but it&#x27;s evading memory, evaporating in the long run. Ultimately it means that book won&#x27;t change me beyond a few impressions, it just won&#x27;t make its mark, it never had a chance to imbue my consciousness — only my superficial cognition. However sharp, it can&#x27;t substitute for the real thing.<p>An exercise I do if I really want to use or remember (be &#x27;changed&#x27;) by some piece of content — article, book, chapter, quote, podcast, piece of code... — is to do the &quot;good student duty&quot; of writing a short essay: summarize what you read, raise a few interesting points about it, elaborate a bit beyond (make that new material become food for your thought, <i>use</i> it like it&#x27;s a new word you just learned, or a new math technique).<p>It only takes ~30 minutes or so, easily 10 minutes if the material is easy, an hour if it blew your mind, I don&#x27;t know... well worth it, because it has a lasting power for years. But do it well, because that exercise you &#x27;submit&#x27; to no one but yourself will become part of the memory of that content, you will <i>see</i> your own words sometimes before&#x2F;above the actual author&#x27;s.<p>Hopefully this helps someone trying it my way. The hard way. The no-genius no-magic no-trick way. The way that lets one play in the present with stuff learned 10, 20 years before.<p>TL;DR: the faster you read, the shallower it gets beyond some sweet spot, probably biological but trainable; speed is good when it forces you to focus, but not beyond that — it must not become a distraction from actual understanding. If that is your goal. Using at least in thought what you read is my preferred way to really internalize something, make it <i>mine</i>, thus remember it for <i>long enough</i> usually. At least I probably won&#x27;t be able to forget that it exists, and then I can search it for finer points.