Read slower: why we read so much and remember so little, what science says about speed reading, and four ways to make an idea stay

Try a sum: how many pieces did you read last week? Count articles, long posts, newsletters, book chapters. Now name three ideas you remember well enough to explain to someone else. For most people the first number is a few dozen and the second is one or none.

In 2008 the writer Nicholas Carr published a piece in The Atlantic under a provocative title asking whether Google was making us stupid. He described how he, once able to read long books for hours, now grew restless after two or three pages and wanted to skim on. A great many readers recognised themselves.

Reading to pass through and reading to keep

We do two very different things and call both of them reading. The first is scanning: eyes run over the words, the brain grabs the gist, done. It suits news and email. The second is reading so that an idea stays and changes how you work. That takes several times longer, and hardly anyone gives it the time any more.

The trouble is that we bring the scanning habit to things that deserve close reading. The result is a feeling peculiar to our time: knowing the names of many ideas and being able to use very few of them.

What about speed reading?

Speed-reading courses promise three or five times the speed with full understanding. In 2016 a group of psychologists, in a review begun by Keith Rayner, pulled together decades of research on eye movements in reading and concluded fairly bluntly: there is no way to read much faster without understanding less. Speed and comprehension trade off. People who read fast and still understand well are usually people who already know a lot about the subject, not people with a special trick.

Woody Allen once joked that he took a speed-reading course, read War and Peace in twenty minutes, and could only report that it was about Russia. The joke summarises the research better than many papers.

Recalling beats rereading

In 2006 the psychologists Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students read a passage, then split them. One group reread it several more times. The other closed the text and wrote down everything they could remember. Tested straight away, the rereaders did slightly better. A week later, the group who had recalled remembered far more.

Rereading gives a feeling of familiarity, and familiarity is easily mistaken for understanding. Recalling is more uncomfortable, but that discomfort is what makes the idea stick. An idea is only really yours once you can pull it out and use it yourself.

Four concrete things

• Read fewer sources and each more deeply. Unfollowing ten things to read two properly is a profitable trade.
• Stop after each section and restate it in your own words without looking. If you cannot, you did not read that section, only looked at it.
• Write three lines when you finish: the main idea, where you disagree, and one thing you will do differently.
• Come back to anything worth it after a week, but before opening it, try to recall what it said. That second meeting gives more than a new piece.

Why the third line matters most

Knowledge does not turn into change without passing through action. An idea you liked but used for nothing in two weeks will almost certainly drift away. Not because your memory is poor, but because the brain keeps what it sees being used.

Reading a lot without thinking it over is like eating a lot without digesting.

The simplest check: at the end of the month, look at whether you are doing anything differently from the start of it. If not, that month's reading mattered less than you thought, and halving it to leave time for thinking would serve you better.

Reading slowly is not reading less out of laziness. It is accepting that the time spent understanding is part of reading, not something extra outside it.