Robin Hanson, over at the blog Overcomming bias, has written a short blogpost which I found to be spot on, mainly because he conceptualize something I've been thinking about for a long time in a good way. In his post, he talks about two different ways in which people read a text; in search mode or in chase mode. He writes:
With searching you look for something to chase. With chasing, you have a focus of attention that drives your action. [...] It seems to me that while reading non-fiction, most folks are in searching mode. Most would be more intellectually productive, however, in chasing mode. It helps to have in mind a question, puzzle, or problem, and then read in order to answer your question, explain your puzzle, or solve your problem.
There is nothing worse (well, relatively speaking) than reading through a book and not being able to recap any of the content afterwards. I find this to often be a result of reading in search mode, without even switching to chase mode every now and then, when something interesting comes up. It's when I close the book, really think about what I've just read, and try to answer whatever question that comes up (even if I in the end can't answer it) that I really feel that I've learned something new.
All this might be obvious to a lot of people. Even so, I think far to many of us goes into skimming-through-just-to-finnish-the-book-and-pick-up-a-new-one mode all to often.
