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I have recently embarked on improving my reading speed. I thought I’d sign up for one of Jim Kwik’s courses but after some digging, a book seems to be a better option and more cost effective, which is proving to be the case. The gist is - there is no shortcut to reading faster. You just have to practise reading faster and so far, this book Breakthrough Rapid Reading has provided very useful exercises.
Today I had an unexpected side effect. I was trying to train myself not to subvocalise the words as I read, and at some point, my eyes were reading the page but my mind was working double time. I wasn’t just comprehending the words in front of me, I was also thinking about something else at the same time, a problem I thought I could solve at work. It reminds me of running. The act of running, although the legs know what to do, the mind had the capacity to work on other things too.
This is quite the breakthrough for me, proving that subvocalisation actually exerted cognitive load and once freed up, allowed the mind to work on other things. I’m not sure if this only happens with me so would be glad to hear your experience with reading too.
