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This means the left brain handles information one step at a time, while the right brain looks at whole patterns of information simultaneously.
To read faster you must forget about how fast you are reading and put all your attention on what you are reading.
how to read conceptually.
READING IS COMPREHENSION.
You haven’t read anything until you’ve comprehended it.
Rather than focusing on speed reading, you will be focusing on speed comprehension.
What is most important is that the phrases make sense to you and are easy to imagine.
What you really want is to be able to pick up a book and understand what the author is saying in the least amount of time.
you are trying to collect ideas, to collect experiences, and to collect information and knowledge.
Conceptualizing information and really paying attention to its meaning will increase your awareness of life.
The information itself is cheap—the whole world of information is only a Google search away. The real power of human intelligence is not in the collection of information, but in the connections of information.
The problem is that your chain of comprehension becomes broken when you skip a piece of information.
Phrases are ideas, not sounds; think about what they mean.
If at times you get stuck and lose concentration, stop focusing on speed. Refocus on ideas by forcing your brain to visualize. Concentrate on comprehension and the speed will come.
You don’t want to feel like you are pushing your speed, but rather pulling it along behind your faster, more powerful comprehension.
When they’re resting, neurons fire about twenty-five times per second. When they’re active, that speed increases to around four hundred times per second. And when they’re concentrating really hard on something, they max out at about one thousand firings per second.
Although humans aren’t particularly exceptional at physical abilities, such as strength, speed, eyesight, smell, or hearing; they do excel at consciousness.
This hunger for patterns is unstoppable. We can’t help seeing patterns in everything. The result is more than just faster thinking, but also richer life experiences.
Episodic information is located in time and space.
Semantic information is outside of time and space.
Regardless of age, though, the more you read, the more you exercise your brain. Furthermore, the more you put into your brain, the richer life becomes.
Most of this extra effort will be directed to paying more attention; which requires increasing concentration and focus.
Although the brain only makes up two percent of the body’s weight, it uses twenty-five percent of the body’s oxygen and seventy percent of its glucose.
pretend the reason you are reading something, is to explain it to someone else. Think, “How can I make this information clear? What is the gist of this material? How do the different parts fit together? How could I defend this idea if someone were to disagree with it?”
Your goal is to read and understand the material, so concentrate on visualizing the information, and you will get there faster.
Comprehension is the goal of reading and the only reason for reading.
The path to faster reading is improving comprehension by conceptualizing meaning.
Imagine your reading to be like walking through a museum. You move quickly past displays you’ve seen before, slow down to consider those new and interesting items, and then sometimes stop and stare at the most surprising finds.
Developing more interest in a subject will also change your reading from passive to aggressive. You will find that you’ll tend to aggressively seek information as you read about these subjects, rather than passively wait for ideas to occur to you.
Are these the habits? Subvocalizing Regression Mind-wandering Of course, these are associated with slow reading, but they’re not the cause, but actually just symptoms of poor comprehension.
but of course you’re no longer just recognizing words, but recognizing ideas.
Thinking about your bad habits only strengthens them. Instead of thinking about what you don’t want to do, think about what you do want to do.
Visualizing leads your right brain into automatically doing the following, each one leading to the next: Conceptualize ideas. See the big picture. Read in phrases. Recognize the real meaning. Read in silence. Move forward without regression. Filter out internal and external distractions. Notice connections between new and existing knowledge. Save information in the long-term memory. Comprehend faster. Increase reading speed.
The takeaway is that to learn speed reading, you need to learn speed comprehension, because speed depends on comprehension and not vice versa.
Even each time you reread the same text can be different depending on many internal and external factors. In fact, because of these changing factors, you can never really read the “same” book twice.
You must make comprehension your main, no, your only pursuit.
Just remember to stop when necessary to carefully consider something you’ve learned.
make sure to start off slowly when you restart again, ensuring you’re paying attention to the new material rather than the old.
As Nathaniel Hawthorne put it, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
Reading IS comprehension. That means comprehension is not just a part of reading, it’s all that reading is.
