You’re Not Stupid: How to Quickly Understand Difficult Books

imagine being able to open any difficult book ignore all distractions and understand it immediately we might not be able to do this but we definitely seem to be expected to with every passing Year my books seem to get harder and distraction stronger I've always been a speed reader but with hard topics the issue isn't how fast my eyes read words I'm limited by my comprehension tiredness and drifting Focus eventually feeling slow and stupid so what if I told you I've found a way you can increase the speed with which you understand very difficult texts and it's through never being allowed to speedread adding a bunch of extra stuff to the words and retraining the reading voice in your head let me show you how to train your brain your focus and your eyes for advanced speed reading training your brain the playright technique let's say I gave you this text and told you you have 5 Seconds to tell me what it's about did you read the block of text at the top or did your eyes skim the dialogue first probably the latter our brains love dialogue and story studies show that we are much quicker at reading stories than informational text and with dialogue specifically we are much quicker at reading and understanding direct quotes than indirect quotes even when they have the exact same words characters plots and story lines make things much easier for our brains to grasp to benefit from this you can teach yourself to turn any sort of text into a Story in real time all you need to do is retrain the reading voice in your head if like me you always read out loud in your head there's not just one way to do it if you're still using the way that we were taught as children to read the text word for word in your head like you would a novel you're not only going to be reading informational books slower you're also going to be understanding them a lot slower the reason being when you do things this way you first have to tell your brain out loud the words that are on the text then you need to ask yourself what it means and then you need to explain to yourself what you think it might mean because these texts are difficult abstract and nonvisual it's very easy to feel like you are stupid and slow when you're reading in this way so this is what I do instead when reading something complex I picture myself as a playwright I think I've been given Source material and I need to turn it into a play I don't think of understanding abstract Concepts and information I think of characters plot lines stories visuals the scene very crucially the voice in my head is not reading out the words on the paper my eyes are looking at the words but the voice in my head is only speaking the new story that I am creating so let me show you what this looks like in real time let's say I'm reading the echocardiography of heartbe failure this is quite an abstract and semi complex topic this is what I would do if I was reading the first paragraph So I have my sick hard failed heart on the scene and it has these valves which have gotten narrower and sometimes they are like calcified and hard and thicker and now we also have this Doppler which is like an ultrasound machine which is my second character and when the Doppler sends these ultrasound waves towards the heart then it's going to have these loud Echoes of course cuz the valves are harder they're not going to be as flexible and moving as well so now this Doppler machine has come on and it's going to check what the pressure is in the chambers on both s sides of these damaged valves now this Doppler ound is really professional and super sensitive and it can check if the blood is going in the wrong direction through the valves now the specific type of heart failure which is when the heart muscle has gotten really really loose on on both sides of these valves it's loose both when the heart is resting and that's when it's like on holiday and it's also loose when the heart has just come back from like a contraction so a workout and this means that because it's been um like really widened these muscles are looser these Chambers are bigger and it doesn't have that elasticity that the heart used to have when it was younger so it doesn't get as small and big as it should be so the general theme of what I do in these cases is I will humanize specific characters in the story so it can be the heart has decisions to make and characteristics and feelings and choices and consequences it can be electrons can feel this way so by being a character it's much more easy for me to think of what they're doing to add extra dimensions of making sense in my head and much easier for me to visualize and transform the text by completely skipping my internal voice reading it's rather focusing on creating this logical breakdown on making sense of things and giving them to me so that I can understand this definitely can take practice especially if you want to become faster and faster at it but I want to emphasize it's probably something that we've all done to some extent when we've read something that doesn't make sense and we go wait wait wait what do you mean or if you've ever had The Misfortune like me of reading a manual without images you're kind of confused and you just go wait let me let me let me break this down and you try to create okay step one it does this then it does this so it's the exact same Instinct that we have for simplifying things for visualizing them but just leaning into it a lot more intentionally to make this reading faster now between my studies for University and research for this YouTube videos the amount of information and text that I need to go through on a daily basis and see and speedread and organize and save and keep is insane and it's absolutely essential for me to have a really really tight and good organizational system to keep all of this stuff so before I go on to training our focus and training our eyes I want to show you where a lot of this information sits and how I organize it online now as a bit of a productivity organizational and reading junkie I've tried and use so many different apps to keep my things in order but the one thing that I have never changed since first using computers over a decade ago is my web browser I'm sort of person who non-reg really always has 50 plus tabs open I need everything to be there I hate having to remember the name of a website or the name of a paper or something that I need to look at will just keep things open all the time and I cannot shut them because it FS me with so much guilt and to be honest it's not a really sexy conversation that people really talk about shopping for web browsers but I'm so so grateful that I was convinced by the sponsor of this video doio sigos to give them a go if your brain seems to work anything like mine you really need to give this at least the free trial a quick go because it completely transforms everything it's so intuitive you can pick up the workflow within a few minutes and to show my own personal workflow and how I use it I've made a separate private video link below that you can watch if you want to have a peek onto how I chaotically organize my things because I really want to do it justice and drive home the point of how much this transforms your online work and your reading and organizing things online there's separate Works spaces for absolutely everything all the Hat I need to where student writer editor YouTuber procrastinator all of these have their different spaces all of the main websites are locked in and stay there if I want to open something that's already open somewhere else Sigma will take me to that tab rather than me having to duplicate things again and again opening and closing things is so much easier things are organized in a logical way where if you open a sub page it becomes like underneath and not a main tap it's insane it's incredible you can split screen to check something really quickly so you don't need to get distracted from the main thing that you're working on and all Google Chrome extensions especially video speed controller for making videos faster all work on it too I have a link below that will give you free access for trial and also that video of my full workfl if you want to have a look as to how these videos and studying and things come together so now let's get back to increasing our Focus for speed reading difficult things training your focus T is for troll it does sound crazy but adding more words to your text eventually makes you read faster let me try to explain one of the main reasons I stop reading difficult things is because I just get bored it's either too tiring or I'm not invested or engaged enough and there's just much more interesting things and what I do to increase my focus and therefore to read more is that when I feel that my focus is dwindling and I'm about to quit I will then become a Critic if the text is being hard to me I will be difficult right back as I'm reading something I will start to judge the way that it's written so I'll say in my head well that makes absolutely no sense or why would you phrase this this way this is the absolute worst or oh my God that's such a good way of making that point that's incredible inedible or wait wait wait wait how did you just say this where where's your proof or you can't jump to this conclusion without explaining it beforehand oh my God and it sounds like you don't even know what you're talking about how am I supposed to understand now these are value judgments on the writers please forgive me an apologies to all of them add another layer of interaction with the text they put you in the mindset of a teacher someone who's criticizing someone's essay things that I really need to do a lot when I was a tutor I used the same sort of harsh judgment on what they're saying being hypocritical in this way makes me hang on to every single word catching them for a mistake or trying to prove to them that they're saying something wrong it increases my motivation and laser focus on the words on the text but also it helps me emotionally because instead of feeling like I am helpless and stupid for not understanding something I can even though it's completely fake put myself in the position of I am your manager I am the book editor when you sent this in and let me show you you how you've written all of this wrong this sort of like semi confidence boost really helps with increasing focus and is very necessary sometimes when dealing with complicated things to learn at the very least what he gives me is a few extra minutes of focus and sometimes that's all I need in order to understand something or find the text interesting again and it's this really good kind of motivation and focus patch that can get me going on for a lot longer three training your eyes there is no going back this might be the most counterintuitive point of all but I'm arguing that you need to train your eyes to stop going back to the beginning of the text when you haven't understood something we've all had this habit I've had it too where I read something I wasn't paying attention or it was too difficult or I just don't know and I go through it and I'm like I have no idea what I just read and my instinct then is to go right back to the beginning of the chapter or the beginning of whatever I was reading and go through it again I argue you should never ever ever do this as this is so bad and I'll try to explain why if you are thinking I don't know what I just read or I don't know what this is about or I don't understand what's going on all of these in my opinion are terrible reasons to go back to the beginning of the text what I argue that you should do instead is power on and keep reading start paying attention now keep reading until you have a specific question until you have wait how does this thing work then when you have that question you can go back to find specifically where the answer for it is so rereading something just because you weren't paying attention the first time and have no clue is a bad reason to go to the beginning you want to have a specific question that you want to answer and that's where you can jump back to that part only the reason for doing this is that having to redo something which is semi-familiar is one of the biggest causes of motivational drop even in computers not just in people we do not like to go back to the beginning it is exhausting it is energy draining and it really takes takes away any sort of motivation that we have to go through something we have reduced our novelty even if we don't understand anything our eyes have seen this again they're not going to care and in the long run if you keep jumping back and back and back to the start your motivation is going to be nowhere you're going to trash every sort of Desire that you initially had to get this thing done and you're much more likely to close the book and keep doing something else so try to power on you will have missed out on things but those gaps you can fill in where they need to be and when you understand why you need to know them in the first place do not redo boring things and even if you started reading something a long time ago don't restart it again start from where you stop and then keep continue going to the back when you really want to because this is just a very very easy way to make yourself more motivated to read longer and eventually faster please do give me any tips that you have for speed reading or understanding things better or for final your medical students because they would be greatly greatly appreciated if you made it so far thank you so much for spending this time with me I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind to yourself and others and do believe everything you think thanks bye

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 87,302

Keywords: reading, books, how to read, how to read faster, how to read more, booktube, booktubers, note taking, note taking apps, speed reading, read faster, how to read faster and retain more

Id: 6ZBz1AaUNPM

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2023