How to absorb information faster, ie reading, written information?

[Bob]

A few books.

A certain amount of time.  Not enough time to read through the books thoroughly.

Brand new topic.  New ground.



Time is the issue.  I need to be as prepped up and intelligent about this material as possible.  There's no way I can read through all of the shhhtuff though.  Not in this amount of time. 

And I should absorb the material, but appearances count too.  Looking intelligent is probably more important than actually mastering this reading material.


How can I cover all this stuff?

Any ideas?  Thoughts?  Strategies?



If I do get through all this stuff, there's plenty more.  No end actually.  That type of preparation.  When you're done, there's plenty more to read.  I don't find that very motivating really.

I need to produce some type of result.  Make a good show of it.  I also need to learn some of this material. 

The basic question is -- How to aborb and digest a book as fast as possible?  I need to know what the book is about, the argument, sometimes all the details.

Nice vague question here. 

[0range]

The basic question is -- How to aborb and digest a book as fast as possible?

Marinade with a nice red wine sauce and serve over a bed of rice? 

/unhelpful

[quantum]

As one of my teachers once expressed there is a maximum saturation point within a given time span the brain can effectively absorb information.  Data also needs time to be processed and sorted out so it makes sense to you.


What I would do skim through the material first to get a general overview.  Just the skeleton, the main ideas.  Maybe read the end of chapter summaries or something like that.  A table of contents is good summary material.  Once you know what you will be learning about then you slowly start to fill in details.  Read the material multiple times, start filling in the gaps.  Not really aiming for memorizing every detail, but getting the general idea so you build on your skeletal conception.

When time is up you will probably not know everything you need, but you will know something about everything so you can at least have something to say about it.

****

Option 2:

Read first page, read middle page, read last page.

Form an opinion about what you read.   You cannot be accused of being wrong about your own opinion.

Example.  Here is an opinion of my above post:

A large number of different agar media for recovering
Helicobacter pylori have been described (1, 6). There are
two main types of media: (i) nonselective media based on
nutrient agar such as brain heart infusion agar or brucella
agar supplemented with 5 to 10% sheep or horse blood,
serum, activated charcoal, or soluble starch (2, 7-9) and (ii)
selective media based on supplemented nutrient agar containing
antibiotics (3, 7-9) and 2,3,5-triphenyltetrazolium
chloride (5, 10). Only minimal work has been conducted to
establish which of these media is best for isolating the
organism (1). Likewise, it is not known whether media which
are suitable for the primary isolation of H. pylori are useful
for repeated subcultivations, e.g., to establish a collection of
viable stock cultures. Furthermore, even though several
preservation mixtures have been described (4, 6, 11, 13),
exact data comparing the efficiency of various preservation
procedures are still lacking.

[lostinidlewonder]

Do a speed reading course. You learn to ignore a lot of words and still understand everything you read. Use your finger to push your reading rate, and learn to read multiple lines at the same time. I did a speed reading course from the worlds faster speed reader Howard Berg, it was good but like everything requires daily effort to get proficient.

[Bob]

That's the trouble.  Some of this I really need to read word for word.  Though that is a good point.  So much of it is just extra filler garbage.  And it's really not about reading, if it's reading for information.  It's just pulling out the ideas. 

One idea I think is to find the right summary of a topic or material.  Something nice and concise.  That's if you're diving into a new topic blindly.