Reading: NT's encouraged

Post Reply New Topic

So I was slaving through 40 pages (the size of a large paperback) of WWI history in 2 1/2 hours trying to read it as quick as I could. What I found was I retained nothing and daydreamed often.

They say autistics have profound talents for visualization in their minds (this has a technical term, which I have forgot) and I tend to mentally illustrate whatever I read. This process is even slower than 40 pages in 3 hours but I'll never forget it.

How fast does everyone else here read? Neurotypicals, does my example above sound like you?

I tend to read fiction very quickly, even finishing a book within 24 hours if I really like it. However, non fiction books aren't nearly as interesting to me, so it takes more attention and concentration. Consequently, my reading pace slows way down. I find that I need to make a mind map or take notes, or even read aloud. Or, if I can get the book in an audio-format, that's even better.

I tend to read fiction quickly, but, if it's something I really like, I will consciously slow it down. That way I can spend a longer time feeling the comforting warmth of a campfire on a frigid night, the citrusy explosion of juice as I bite into an orange, the fluttering in my stomach as I realize HE is walking towards ME [finally!] and the laughter I suppress just before I whip out the handgun from my pants leg and blow away the would-be rapist.

To both experience and remember something I read well, rather than visualize it, I have to feel [or often taste or smell] it.

In terms of reading you can increase retention by;
avoiding reading while hungry
avoiding reading when there is loud noise to distract
avoid reading in public places (like people who read ebooks in coffee shops)
avoid reading when horny (yet another distraction)

And finally the big one...
Read just before you go to bed. I guarantee you will remember virtually everything due to "recency effect" on the brain remembering the last thing you do before you head of for REM sleep and the information will be hardcoded into your long term memory...rather than spill out of your short term memory....easy

I say I read slow if I'm trying to actually make meaning of it, picture it in my head, but if I just want to get through it I can read fast.

You say you 'slaved through' the book, which seems to indicate you weren't particularly having a good time with it (or am I misreading here?).

The trick behind reading fast, at least in my experience, is that you cover more ground with one glance. I take it at normal reading speed, you take in an entire sentence all at once, and process it. Now, when reading fast, you'll want to expand this to an entire paragraph. Of course, with larger paragraphs it's physically impossible to soak it up in a split second, so naturally you're going to actually read the whole thing sentence for sentence (not necessarily word for word, since a lot of function words [prepositions, conjunctions and the like] will be inferred and filled in by your internal mental lexicon), but at a speed of about a second per sentence. You make note of the main point of the paragraph by dwelling on its first and last sentence a tad longer (only takes a fraction of a second).

By then, you've stored the meaning of the paragraph, and you move on to the next (which likely builds upon the previous one if it's a flowing narrative). The subconscious is more powerful than many people give it credit for.

With the above method, I managed to cram down about 10 books (for a book report deadline) in a minimum amount of hours and retaining the main storyline and characters of it while also remembering details of particularly intriguing passages, something I had previously thought myself incapable of as I am by preference a slow reader who likes to go through a book (fiction as well as non-fiction) at about 30 pages per hour. My recent reading experience has seen this figure racked up to 50 pages under an hour, but I kind of 'jog' through these books though without skipping paragraphs or sentences.