Speedreading - myth vs reality? your thoughts.
btilly: Speaking personally I find that my reading speed varies greatly depending on what kind of material I have been reading lately.  If I've been reading light material that I don't have to pay attention to details on (sci-fi/fantasy is a good example), then my overall reading speed on other kinds of material increases.  If I've been reading serious material like a math textbook, then I slow down.Speaking from experience when I read quickly it feels like I'm "pipelining" stuff.  Normal people read a bit, process, integrate, then read some more.  I am able to read, process, and integrate in parallel at different speeds.  I'll get to the end of my reading, and internally I am not done the material.  This lets me read much more quickly.As an illustration let me describe the one time I measured my speed on a long piece of work.  I have a habit of reading in the bath, and one day in high school I began reading Clan of the Cave Bear at the beginning of a bath.  I got sucked in, read the whole book, then finished the bath.  My mother wondered where I had been all day.  I told her the story.  She didn't believe that I could have done it.  She asked for a summary of what happened.  I couldn't give it and explained that it usually took a day or so for me to properly digest a book like that after I read it.  She really didn't believe me.So as proof I gave her the book, told her to open to a random passage and start reading.  After a couple of paragraphs I proceeded to tell her what was going on at that point in the book, had her hand me the book then quickly found the paragraph.  After repeating several times she was convinced that I read the book.She then took a count of pages, a count of lines on pages and a count of words/line for several lines then estimated how many words the book was.  We calculated how long the bath was and it turned out that I had read the book at over 900 words per minute.Oh, and the next day?  My brain had finished integrating everything and I was able to give her a plot summary for the book.