On 08/30/2012 06:09 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
On Fri, 31 Aug 2012 03:04:58 +0200
"bearophile"<[email protected]> wrote:
Walter Bright:
Speed reading works fine when reading a bestseller novel. It's
a complete failure at reading intellectually dense material.
But if the novel you have speed read was very good you have
missed most of the enjoyment. It's like eating a very good
traditional handmade ice cream: if you gulp it down in few
seconds you miss most of the point of eating it :)
Mostly because the headache you'll inevitably endure will divert all
your attention away from the taste! :)
If speed reading gives you a headache, either you're doing it wrong, or
you need your eyes checked. Probably the latter.
OTOH, it isn't pleasurable. The only use I ever had for it was reading
text in classes I didn't want to take, where I couldn't have forced
myself to read the text while thinking about it. (So it had better NOT
be information dense.) Note that good speed reading requires sufficient
concentration, that one gets neither pleasure nor "disgust" from it. (I
don't know what the correct antonym for pleasure is in this context, but
it isn't pain.) I believe that if one were to do it for very long that
it would cease to be any more stressful than other things requiring
intense concentration. I don't believe that it would ever be pleasurable.
FWIW, it's been decades since I've speed read for more than a page or
two. I like to understand what I'm reading, not just absorb it as raw
sensory input.
