There are many times when we read and we forget what we are reading. Our mind has a very short attention span, some say 8 seconds. The truth may be closer to that, I think. Just recall your last experience of reading a book (or you can enact the scene now). Did you reread what you've read on the same paragraph because you seem to lost the direction of the writings? It is especially evident when the book is expressing complex ideas, which our mind needs more time and attention to dissect the words into meanings to us.
*speaking of meanings to us: In average, people can not understand something new and complex in a very short time. Our mind requires us to associate new knowledge with existing schemata, and that for each item, we can relate it to a few schemata by different categorization methods, eg. color, shape, size, etc. We can only internalize new information when we separate it into different categories*
Think about Product Differentiation.
What can you think about product differentiation?
Do you have prior knowledge about it, or is this the first time you heard about this term? If it's your first time, perhaps you're googling the phrase and trying to read it in a wikipedia entry of the term. When you read it, take note on your attention span. Where did you pause? Which part did you re-read? Which part you are interested but not sure of, that you highlight it, right click, and search on google? Notice the pause, because that's the moment when you are building new knowledge database in your brain.
We stop when we are unsure. Inside our mind we have a missing linkage where new entry that we've observed on the article could not register quickly into our existing knowledge, and thus we take a pause to further analyze it. Are we going to perform another reduction and understand it from smaller parts? (For example, differentiation is reduced to being different, act of differentiating, etc) Or are we going to employ external information to supplement the current puzzle? (Eg. non-differentiated products, niche market, etc) There are many angles which we could penetrate when we deal with new encounters.
Teach yourself new things, you may be surprise by how much we can learn from even the smallest things in life.
