Assimilating concepts and ideas

Cognitive psychologists use the term chunking to describe how

your brain reorganizes concepts and ideas you’ve absorbed in

your short-term memory and applies them to your own experience

so you can understand them. Chunking is essentially what happens

when you retain what you’ve read.

Speed readers are better chunkers — they comprehend reading

material better — because they can hold more advanced concepts

in their short-term memories. Rather than five to seven words or

small word groups, they can hold five to seven complex thought

units. When the time comes to absorb the information and make

it their own, they have more material to work with. More of the

author’s ideas come to them at once.

For example, consider how a slow and a fast reader take in this

paragraph differently:

The rotator cuff is a group of four muscles (and their tendons)

that stabilize and govern movement of the shoulder. The

muscles form a covering around the top of the upper arm bone

(humerus). The rotator cuff enables the arm to rotate.

A slow reader with a narrow vision span can only hold a few of

these concepts at once in short-term memory: rotator cuff, muscle

group, four muscles with tendons, stability, movement. But a fast

reader capable of reading many words at the same time can take

in the entire paragraph in five to seven eye fixations. A fast reader

can take in and assimilate the whole of the author’s ideas.