Speed-reading is for skimmers. Slow-reading is for scholars.

Reading, after all, is not the simple vacuuming of words from a page into our brains. It’s is a far more complex process — involving, at its very core, language comprehension.

Research paper after research paper has concluded that as reading speed goes up as a result of effortful speed-reading, comprehension goes down.

Speed-reading has its use case. It’s sensible to use it (if you’re capable) when you want to skim and get the gist of a text. But it doesn’t make sense to skim-read when your goal is to acquire knowledge.

If you’re reading to learn, you need to engage with the content and associate the new concepts with your existing knowledge.

Slow-reading is for scholars. The more slow-reading you do, the more your knowledge base will expand.

As we encounter experiences in the world, we store information initially in Sensory Memory. Sensory memory receives the sum total of all sensory input, and it’s an overwhelming firehose of data.

Sensory memory input is overwhelming and fortunately, it has a very short half-life. You can only store less than a second of it at a time before it vanishes.

A small percentage of sensory memory does survive and is passed to short-term memory. Short-term memory is also fleeting, lasting somewhere on the order of 10 seconds up to 30 seconds.

What I’ve just described is the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model or Multi-Store Model of memory. But today, cognitive psychology has a much deeper understanding of how memory works.