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I'm using exactly the same technique but I have a completely different explanation. It's not someone else processing the data, it's you getting around the topic ins and outs.

Here is a long story if you want to know how I discovered this method.

When I was young (12 year old), I usually go to school to learn things. The process is simple. You start from the basics and you build upon this knowledge. In the end of the trimester, you accumulate knowledge which is pretty much limited to what teachers taught you. This is because you (I) don't go and read books or articles.

This knowledge quickly evaporates. I usually find myself learning and learning the same stuff again and reviewing it every-time I have an exam. It went like that and I succeeded every year.

When I was 17, I noticed an interesting fact: I'm quite good at programming. I have been doing it since 10 and reading anything that just comes in my way. Article about programming? Just read and think about it, discuss it on communities, read comments and contribute to coding forums.

Why I'm better/different than the other guys? Simply: I have a wider and deeper knowledge. When I read a programming book about Ruby On Rails, it doesn't take 30 days to write my first program. I can do it from the first hour. This is because I already know how to install a program, what a server is, what a HTTP request is, and have a good coding knowledge.

What you are doing is exactly this: You are broadening your spectrum of knowledge about that particular topic so when you read the said book, you get the gist out of it quickly and easily. No one/thing is doing the work for you, you are just using a different method.

For me, and the reason why I use this is because the book/resources are quite boring to read. They don't also cover lot of topics that I don't know about and reading them will make the topic feel like quite difficult to master and understand.

I'm reading books different way than people I know. I'm skipping many fragments, I think I read maybe 10% of the whole text. This applies to fiction and technical books as well.

I'm doing this automatically, without thinking about it, some time ago I've discovered this, when at 2nd reading of the book I've stumbled at a fragment that made my understanding of the whole story "reevaluate" :) Somehow I've missed the fragment before, and the whole book made less sense.

I've tried to understand how my brain decides what to skip, and the heuristic is sth like this - read all things that starts with "-" (dialogs are the most important), beginning of the paragraphs, and the places that have many whitespaces, skip most of the other text, if you don't know what you are reading about - think for a while to deduce what's going on, if you don't know - go back and read more. That's not the whole heuristic, but that's what I can easily notice.

Especially the skill to "wait for a few pages to see if something you don't know yet will explain by itself, or can be deduced from what you know" is usefull. That way I read faster than most people I know, and I'm good at quickly learning material for exams (but without using the information I quickly forget what I've read. I even don't remember sometimes if I've read this book at all - mostly happens with fantasy books - they are all similiar :) ).

I'm also very bad at remembering names of real people and book heroes. I remember them "functionaly" - the one that is the uncle of the bad guy, etc.

Interesting. I read about the same way, and I find that I'm using something very similar to your heuristic (looking for dialog signs, skip-reading long descriptions, etc.)

I call this 'reading for the plot'.

I also suffer from the same issue with remembering names. I wonder if the two phenomena are related.

This might sound facetious, but it's not meant to be: if you are reading for the plot, then what is the advantage of reading a book compared to reading its summary on Wikipedia or some other site?

I sometimes wonder about where the value of reading (fiction) comes from: is it the plot and trying to figure things out before they are explicitly explained? The little details? The long, lyrical passages? The act of reading itself? Something else? I'm curious what your thoughts on this are.

Well, if you think percentage wise, I guess for a given book I'm reading 50-90% of the text. That's far more than a summary.

Emotionally, it's certainly enough to get attached to characters, which is the point. But the way my brain likes to read (it's not a conscious decision, just the way I do it), is to skip a lot of the description, and get to the interesting bits (dialog, action scenes, etc).

I certainly miss out some subtleties, but if you and I read the same book we could have a meaningful discussion about it, probably without you realizing that I likely read it in half the time and only paid attention to about 80% of the content.

Hmmm, I hadn't thought about the social aspect before. Now that I think of it, I do sometimes have a hard time being social after being deep into some complicated problem.