5 Ways to read and understand faster and remember

As a student you are either coming out of an exam, writing an exam, or preparing for an exam, that is to say that exams are an inevitable part of student life. 

 

And if we are honest with ourselves, most times we are trying to catch up with the bulky scheme of work thereby sacrificing understanding, or we are so caught up in understanding a topic that we lag behind the scheme of work for an exam.

 

After this article, you won’t have to sacrifice speed for understanding, and understanding for speed.

 

5 Ways to Read and Understand Faster and Remember

 

1. Focus and Concentration: study completely uninterrupted. No phones, tabs, notifications, or even music. A lot of students these days say they read better with music on, but if we are sincere with ourselves we read faster and understand better with zero distractions, and that means no music too. You can do this using the Pomodoro technique of 25minutes of focus and concentration and 5minutes of break.
2. Skimming before in-depth reading: when studying a resource for the first time it is better to skim through headings and subheadings to grasp the concept of the topic before spending time reading in-depth.
3. Active Recall: This is one very good technique. Students forget what they read because they try to read and store only, but as a good student, you want to read, store, and actively recall. So before you stand up from your study table next time try recalling all you can from what you have read in the last couple of hours. That way you are forcing your brain to remember and reproduce that which you have read.
4. Quizzes and Past Questions: like active Recall quizzes also help you retrieve information from your memory, and as such both quizzes and active Recall fall under a category of effective learning called retrieval practice. It is advised that you try out quizzes and Past Questions immediately after studying, that way you not only get feedback on what you actually recalled but it will also point towards the gaps in knowledge on the topic read, and that is where the next step comes in.
5. Fill-in-the-Gap: the final step to read and understand faster and remember is by filling the gaps in knowledge, and that can be in the short-term—immediately after taking the quizzes you read the areas you missed, or long-term—as you go about your day and you come across a phrase or a concept you have read before but can no longer recall you definitely want to immediately fill-in that gap by browsing about and connecting the dots.

 

How to train your brain to read and understand faster and remember

 

When you begin to make an effort to read and understand faster and remember, it might be quite difficult at first, but with consistency of the laid-down habits and the conscious training of your brain, you can make drastic improvements. Below are 5 ways to train the brain to read and understand faster and remember:

1. Play Strategy Games: The brightest students I have come across are also the students who are quite brilliant in strategy games. They pick up cues faster, see patterns faster, and understand what a game is all about faster. You can spend 10-15 minutes daily solving puzzles, working on logic, or playing chess. A great platform I would recommend is Elevate.
2. Learn New Skills: like other techniques that we will see in this article, learning a new skill like chess, coding, a new language, or any other thing that requires attention, distraction control, cognitive flexibility, and an active working memory will help you train in these required mental systems which are also required to read and understand faster and remember. 
3. Break Your Routines: deliberately eliminate monotony in your day-to-day life. Use your left hand to brush if your right is your dominant hand, and vice versa, take a new route to class. This helps you build cognitive mental systems that aid in reading and understanding faster.
4. Meditate: It has been seen that meditation holds great value for comprehension and attention building, and this is something I use personally to make concepts sit deep and get assimilated fully. What meditation does is train some of the core mental systems that reading depends on: attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and distraction control.
5. Utilize Boredom and Silence: we live in a generation where the noise is highly celebrated, but those who have trained their brain to read and understand faster and remember have mastered the act of utilizing boredom and silence. 
6. Sleep Well: It has been seen that memory is consolidated(strengthened) when we sleep. An all-nighter gives you more study hours, but it removes the biological process that helps lock those hours into memory. It’s like spending six hours typing a document and then refusing to hit “Save.” The work happened, but the storage process didn’t. Research consistently links insufficient sleep with poorer learning and memory performance.

 

All these leverage the brain’s neuroplasticity, that is the brain’s ability to reorganize and form neural pathways for learning, cognition, and memory.

 

FAQ

• How can I read fast and memorize fast?

To remember what you read quickly, use a “Preview and Review” approach. Begin by scanning for key terms and titles, utilize a visual guide such as a finger to keep up your pace, and wrap up by shutting the book to recap the main ideas in a notebook, as if you are in exam condition.

• How to remember what you read without taking notes?

Employing other active recall forms that don’t involve note-taking, such as discussing the material with others, applying the concepts to your daily life, and frequently testing your memory of the key takeaways. 

 

• How to remember what you read in 5 minutes?

After reading a paragraph pause and ask yourself, “What is the author trying to say?”, because books are written in that way-one core idea in each paragraph. That forces your brain to actively recall what has been read.

• What is the 7 3 2 1 study method?

• Day 7: Review the material 7 days after you first learned it.
• Day 3: Review the material 3 days after your Day 7 review (Day 10).
• Day 2: Review the material 2 days after your Day 3 review (Day 12).
• Day 1: Review the material 1 day before your actual test, exam, or real-world application.

This is a spaced repetition technique that tells your brain that this information is important and should be moved from short-term memory to long-term memory.

 

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Conclusion

We live in a time where there is so much information but little wisdom, and so much knowledge yet no understanding, and this places a high demand for those who have mastered control over their mental systems—attention, distraction control, comprehension, working memory by training their brain on the hard but good stuff. By applying the guidelines in this article, you will not just stay informed, but also gain wisdom and understanding having learnt how to read and understand faster and remember.