[vchakra]

I can read fast when I want to - easily upwards of 1000 wpm, but the main focus IMHO must be to just read (without trying to comprehend), and then trust your unconscious mind to absorb the information. The biggest problem I see with people speed reading is that they always link reading with immediate comprehension and understanding, rather than making it two independent processes. This leads to re-reading and trying to make more sense of the words by going back to them rather than acquiring more information in order to see the big picture.

Especially when I'm trying to cover a new field (right now, dsp and speech recognition) I just follow a scorched earth reading process where I read a few dozen papers and articles. In the beginning none of it makes sense, but a day/week/month later things just click, and the whole thing makes sense.