101–110 of 170 posts
It's not immediately obvious, but many deaf people don't know how to read at all. Sign language (hand gestures) is a completely different language, different from English, Russian, Italian etc. To complicate stuff, there's not a single global sign language.
So reading half a page of a math book at the time would have been completely useless (I was in university at the time).
Wrong guy is wrong. It is possible to speed-read TFA with no loss of comprehension, because it is information-light. Most things available to read are, and when you are obliged to look at them, often a glance at each paragraph tells you all you need to know. Things that are really worth reading are information-dense. Then, the time to think about what is presented dominates, and the time to take in words is negligibl…
You don't talk about speed reading, you talk about skimming. The claim of speed readers is usually: Read 900 words per minute or more with no loss of comprehension.
It's like it takes some time to 'dial in' on what my response to a particular stimuli is going to be, but often the situation demands a response faster than I can provide one that I feel is properly considered. This leads to interesting social stuff sometimes, and sometimes a kind of short-duration l'esprit de l'escalier social anxiety.
As I've got older, I've learned that in a lot of cases the initial reaction is fine, and I can suppress the desire to issue a follow-up correction once the brain has caught up. Younger me was less able to do that and would often blurt out a second response to nobody's particular benefit, or hold off on a response to the point the moment is lost.
So perhaps for this reason, speed reading has never really clicked for me to the point that I've always been 'suspicious' of it. It's as the author says, comprehension is often the bottleneck. Even with fiction, I find I'm relating the current occurrences I'm reading with whatever world the author has built up, and considering ramifications.
My SO reads very quickly, and I often wonder how much of it is being deeply considered as she makes her way through something. It makes me hesitant to recommend any text I've enjoyed for the richness of it, as I fear a superficial read somehow does it less justice than just not reading it at all.
This article kinda confirms what I've felt when I read about speed reading: if you're reading anything other than fiction/romance, comprehension is the bottleneck. So reading half a page of a math book at the time would have been completely useless (I was in university at the time).
For fluff magazine type pieces, the extra speed is helpful however if it's a textbook or anything dense, the bottleneck is usually somewhere else.
Still worth doing though. If you run the math out spending 40 hours like my friend did for even a 2% speed gain is likely a positive return over the course of your life.
The one downside is the feeling of annoyance when hearing anyone else subvocalize as they read. The nagging feeling of "you could be going faster!" is annoying.
I'm what I've come to call a 'slow thinker'. My perception speed is normal, but the gray matter ticks over at a very slow rate of knots and my comprehension of what I'm seeing/hearing/feeling unpacks over the course of several seconds. I've noticed I often have an initial reaction to things, then a 'slow reaction' that is sometimes quite different and factors in more things I know. It's like it takes some time to 'di…
Worth it? I don't know. But if its meaningless calories, sometimes just finishing helps. There is a ton of day to day "reading" in the form of emails and whatever you do on a computer. For everything else its context dependent.
If "visually condensed" languages like that do facilitate faster reading, converting to a different language is the way to go! What a lovely research topic for neuroscientists!
Testing the notion that subvocalization slows you down should be reasonably easy. Just test people deaf since birth. Do they read faster? Visit some deaf communities. It's not immediately obvious, but many deaf people don't know how to read at all. Sign language (hand gestures) is a completely different language, different from English, Russian, Italian etc. To complicate stuff, there's not a single global sign langu…