Some books you read and some you study. This repo is for books I study and by "study" I simply mean I read with a goal of obtaining knowledge. I tend to read more to learn than to unwind - it makes me really dull on vacations but works for me.
My personal technique to gain knowledge effectively is to:
- Speed read
- Mark text
- Transcribe to digital for future reference
This is intentionally a cumbersome process because I need the repetition and use of different brain pathways to take in the information. The old adage for getting something to stick in your brain is to "read it, say it aloud, write it down". That was written before full-text indexes became a commodity. For things where there's no added value in deriving the point from first principles I've traded the writing part for typing. Interestingly, things don't stick in my brain as well when I type but there's more value (to me) to have searchable content. I trust that I forget everything anyway so this is a technique to extend my brain.
I've been doing this for years and storing everything in Evernote. I'm gradually switching to GitHub because it's fun to share stuff.
It isn't a parlor trick. There are techniques you can learn to easily double your reading rate (avg person reads ~240 words per minute).
I learned from Breakthrough Rapid Reading but didn't get through the whole thing because my goal was to double+ and this was easily achieved. The two takeaways are that
- It's easier to speed read non-fiction than fiction
- I can choose the speed I want to read - Once I learned the simple techniques, I can conciously switch gears without a big drop in comprehension.
While the book mentioned above talks about how this is "training the brain" it's just a subjective guess by the author (that is, there's no experimental evidence presented). I don't agree with the author's conjecture that faster reading is due to sub-vocalizing. What I've found is that I need to practice to maintain a certain level of speed and that it naturally falls when I don't. This seems more like a muscle thing to me. In fact, the way eyes work is that they constantly bop around, taking input from lots of slightly different angles and then your brain interpolates. The term is called "saccades". Personally, I've found that I'm better able to control these slight eye jumps the more I practice. This aligns the muscles with the serial input mechanism of reading. Anyway, this is as subjective of an opinion as the author's so YMMV.
It's endlessly frustrating that our brains have this awesome compute power but the communication mechanisms humans have designed are based on serial IO. I'm a fan of doing anything I can to speed this up.