There is a lot one can learn from what others are sharing. Assuming there is that willingness to learn, the problem then reduces to finding what to learn and knowing how to quickly learn from what we have found. Finding what to learn is a lifelong pursuit and is not the topic I am pursuing today. The latter is. And the reason is simple. Most of us do have a book sitting somewhere in our home waiting to be read.
You have found that book.
I want to help you read it quickly.
To teach our brain what we intend to learn, most of us have fairly well developed five doors — sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. This assumes my lack of knowledge of any other door available for learning. Is there something which can directly talk to my neurons? I don’t know and most of you don’t know either. So let’s just go ahead with what we have.
Let me also say upfront that I firmly believe that information that sticks best to you is the one which uses a maximum of these five doors. We even enjoy that process. For example you vividly remember a movie because it gave you a nice experience through sound and sight. Some Japanese researchers want to add smell to your theatrical experience. However, at the moment I am only looking at the most efficient single channel mode of learning.
Let’s say I have discovered Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and I want to learn that story in the least possible time. The doors of taste and smell for sure don’t sound like possibilities. And let my lack of knowledge claim the decision to ignore them for the time being. That leaves us with sight, sound and touch.
Touch
Touch brings me to a curious question — can I learn that story by touch? Reading a Braille version of the story sounds like a possibility. But is it faster than reading? I am not sure and I am going to assume it is not.
Sound
Someone reading out the story is another possibility that may work. But can that be faster than reading it myself? Can I fast forward an audio book so that I understand it faster? Or can my secretary tell me the gist of that story so that I can understand just that — the gist. However, would that be as enjoyable as the entire story? I doubt. So off goes sound.
Sight
Watching a video or a play of the story is definitely going to stick with me. However, I again can’t fast foward that video to learn it faster. If a video is 50 minutes, you and I will take 50 minutes to go through it. You maybe great at watching videos (whatever that means) but you can’t boast of having finished that video in lesser time without any loss of information.
And that somewhat haphazard derivation brings me to the point I anyway had in mind —
Reading is the best door for consuming content faster.
Look around you. There are countless books, magazines, blogs, articles, posts and so on wanting to be read. It is not easy to convert them to rich content with sound, pictures and animation. So we have got to find a way to read them better and faster. The world is moving in this direction — what else is LOL anyway?
In this context, I can take two roads. One road makes you efficient in reading the language you already know. If that is English, methods taught by Norman Lewis and others can come to your rescue. Do that nonetheless. Read his book “How to read better and faster?”
The second road, which as you know I have already taken, probes into the language itself.
And here is my point — if I can’t read fast doesn’t necessarily mean I am stupid. It can also mean there is problem in the written language itself.
How do I know I am reading the best form of script possible out there?
How do I know that the formation of letters and spaces between them is apt for my brain to comprehend them most efficiently?
That made me curious. I googled, “which language is fastest to read” without losing out on comprehension. It turns out that Japanese and Spanish may be faster to read but when it comes to density of information conveyed, all languages pretty much fare the same (I am still exploring this so don’t take my word for it) (as if you were).
The writing of a language was only invented once and that was 5000 years ago by the Canaanites. I believe it is high time that a new written language is invented. Even something that makes me read twice as fast can reduce the unread content around me by half.
So my humble request to the PhDs and intelligentsia out there, kindly proceed. ☺
