Yeah, something clicked while I was reading an old encyclopedia sometime around age 7; I remember it quite vividly. My brain started being able to process chunks of text at a time instead of single words, so I could sort of focus on the middle of a short sentence or phrase and read the whole thing at once. I went from reading at about one-quarter conversation speed, to about ten times conversation speed, over the course of a few minutes. I still don’t quite understand what the process was that enabled the change; I just sort of experienced it happening.
One trade-off is that I don’t have full conscious recall of each word when I read things that quickly—but I do tend to be able to pull up a reasonable paraphrasing of the information later if I need to.
I can see both pros and cons to this talent. The pro is obvious; faster reading. The con is that it may cause trouble parsing subtly-worded legal contracts; the sort where one misplaced word may potentially land up with both parties arguing the matter in court. Or anything else where exact wording is important, like preparing a wish for a genie.
Of course, since it seems that you can choose when to use this, um, snapshot reading and when not to, you can gain the full benefit of the pros most of the time while carefully removing the cons in any situation where they become important.
Huh. You read in a different way to what I do; I normally scan the line left-to-right. And I insert the pauses when I do so.
It sounds like a clipped robot to me too.
Yeah, something clicked while I was reading an old encyclopedia sometime around age 7; I remember it quite vividly. My brain started being able to process chunks of text at a time instead of single words, so I could sort of focus on the middle of a short sentence or phrase and read the whole thing at once. I went from reading at about one-quarter conversation speed, to about ten times conversation speed, over the course of a few minutes. I still don’t quite understand what the process was that enabled the change; I just sort of experienced it happening.
One trade-off is that I don’t have full conscious recall of each word when I read things that quickly—but I do tend to be able to pull up a reasonable paraphrasing of the information later if I need to.
I can see both pros and cons to this talent. The pro is obvious; faster reading. The con is that it may cause trouble parsing subtly-worded legal contracts; the sort where one misplaced word may potentially land up with both parties arguing the matter in court. Or anything else where exact wording is important, like preparing a wish for a genie.
Of course, since it seems that you can choose when to use this, um, snapshot reading and when not to, you can gain the full benefit of the pros most of the time while carefully removing the cons in any situation where they become important.
I call that “skimming”, but maybe that’s something else?