River wrote:
Also, do you always (or frequently) feel tired after you read? Does it just kind of drain you? Regardless of whether or not you find the reading material to be fascinating or boring or anywhere in between.
I find I get tired
writing when I'm under strain. I really notice this on the few occasions when I'm ill in bed with a medium-term illness like flu or glandular fever -- if I get tired of reading and try to write stuff like a journal entry by hand I feel strained and slightly sick, as if it's harder work than I can cope with. I suspect this may be because I learned the fine motor control for handwriting quite early, but it takes up quite a few 'processing cycles'. Similar to the way many auties can cope with more than one voice in a room or fluorescent lighting until it trips their personal threshold for 'too much right now'. So I don't find what you're saying hard to understand; maybe it just takes your brain a lot of effort.
Popular neurologist Harold Klavans has been known to say reading is a bodge in evolutionary terms. Our brains haven't evolved to read the way they've evolved to speak, and shifting modalities between sound (for words) and vision (for written words) offers all sorts of opportunities for things to go wrong.
In my case I find reading seems natural to me; this is almost certainly because (due to the fact I have a slight physical disability) I picked up reading when I was about three, and felt words, songs and stories didn't hold me back the way the lack of physical skills did. I was writing by hand when I was about six, probably, so it probably takes more mental effort for me than reading.
I'm adding a voice from the other side of your argument:
Quote:
I have always been a slow reader, and the higher up in my education I get, the more it feels to be a problem.
I'm the other way round. I read too fast for my own good, and often realise I've missed out something important. There's probably an optimal speed between 'too fast' and 'too slow'. If you're really incredibly slow so that you've forgotten the beginning of the sentence by the time you get to the end, that probably is bad, but in general 'slow-ish' could be a better grounding for 'understanding and retaining' what you've read than 'too fast'.
How does your speed of reading affect your comprehension? I think it's only in the case that it gets in the way of understanding what you read where it's necessarily a problem, or if it tires you out so much you feel you want to stop reading after five minutes. There are probably things you can do to help yourself, although it looks as if a lot of the speed reading stuff one sees lying around is advertising. You don't find many articles in the paper or chapters in books mentioning speed reading, but you find tons of advertising. Anything with that ratio of advertising to information should probably be approached with caution.