Have you been in situation where someone reads the numbers faster than you, reads text faster than you, or understands the relative contexts of long distanced points faster than you?
This is what I call Human algorithms, basically set of rules inside our brains that are so diverse, which makes the major difference in our speeds and comprehension abilities.
Rewiring foundation
More often than not, people think others are just better than them naturally. Which is certainly not the case. Most of these minor skills can be learnt using strategy to understand human brain. And working according to its rules to remodel the wiring and logic how things are processed in the first place.
I’ve been an entrepreneur, therefore I’m sharing my learnings based on my extensive work experience from a business industry standpoint (currently off the positions, and only focusing on academics, because I’m studying masters in US). I’m in no way a trained doctor or medical practitioner and this is not any medical advice.
It’s just my experience, so take it and apply to yourself as you find fit and in whatever quantity as per your life. If it works fine, if it doesn’t, don’t push yourself. Everyone is different and that’s what makes us unique!
Micro Skill 1: Read via scanning and chunking. Use cache memory
Most people read the full word before dictating it to their brain, then brain reconstructs the meaning based on the letters put together. Usually, people’s reading speed is 200-300 wpm. Or words per minute.
One way to read up to 600-800 words per minute is to not read the word fully one by one, process multiple words parallelly. Use your eyes to recognize shapes faster.
This will help you decode the words faster. One more technique I personally use is contextual prediction on the fly, in which while parallelly processing multiple words, my brain tries to predict the upcoming words or comprehension based on context of the previously processed text.
Some people can read fast, that’s true. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they are better than you at comprehension. Reading fast comes with its own trade-offs where a person might read the text 2x fast. But might not be able to comprehend relations to other topics or understand the whole meaning at the same speed or remember the dots to be connected later.
However:
- Faster reading ≠ higher intelligence
- Slower reading ≠ cognitive deficit
Mostly what works best for me is Chunking information into smaller packets together and then processing it parallelly. Meanwhile using my previous knowledge base to predict the upcoming words or content to process faster (it’s like stale-while-revalidate) caching mechanism of the brain to understand common patters in an instant.
That’s why we say the more you learn and the more patterns you recognize, the more you get better at connecting dots. Making you faster and more strategically prepared.
Micro Skill 2: Reading numbers faster
People dealing in finance, entrepreneurship, science or anything that involves reading a lot of numbers, especially large numbers should learn this.
Chunking multiple words together helps you read faster. Similarly chunking numbers in pre-defined pattern help you read them faster.
For example, 1 million in digit can be written as (Remember we are not talking about currency digits here.):
- Indian numeric system: 10,00,000 (Combination starts with 3 digits, from the right towards left, followed by every 2 digits separated by a comma.)
- US numeric system: 1,000,000 (Combination of digits keeps on repeating every 3 digits, from right towards left.)
If you just grasp the basic pattern of recognising the digits count (n) separately in repetition. you can easily read them in chunks and make their meaning come out faster.
Indian numeric system goes from: Ones, Tens, Hundred, Thousand, Ten Thousand, Lacs, Ten Lacs, Crores and then the same scheme from Tens start repeating again. It’s interesting you should learn about it separately. But mostly you won’t need to learn large quantities to begin with.
US numeric system goes from: Ones, Tens, Hundred, Thousand, Ten Thousand, Hundred Thousand, Millions, Ten Millions, Hundred Millions, Billions, Ten Billions, Hundred Billions, Trillion, and so on.
The point is understanding the count of digits in a number is much more important than reading the digits one by one. If you can count the digits is 7, then the number is in millions. With proper practice and mental map, scale of numbers can be made easier to grasp, faster.
I might update the article in future to add more strategies. I hope it was informative and useful for you. Tag me on social media @adityagauravkc to give your feedback, comments or any questions.
All my articles are 100% hand-written by me and no AI is used. Giving you original and real world experience based knowledge.
You may share or adapt the material, but you must provide proper credit for example:
“Article originally published by Aditya Gaurav at https://adityagaurav.com, licensed under CC BY 4.0.“
