How Do you Physically Search A Certain Text In A Book?

SURELY, THERE ARE PEOPLE, BOOKWORMS IN THIS CASE, who may do this better than others. And while I won't qualify myself as one, it may be interesting to share an experience of being a 'human google' to find something in a physical book.

While I started searching for that "giggle twin" example cited in Haidt's book for the other post, my reading in the book had already advanced to about 100th page. Looking at the chapter index for clues didn't help. The references section was the next place to look up in hopes for a title that might just give away the citation, but references were done rather lazily. So it came to visually locating a paragraph that I had read amongst 100 odd pages. My previous experience with this kind of needle-in-haystack qualified it to be a "patience test", where higher the patience, and slower the pace, usually meant better success rate during the first scan. (Though I like to think that I'm getting better at this, I tend to give up somewhere during or after the 3rd scan unless it is really critical to justify the effort and, more importantly perhaps, to fight against frustration.)

As the scanning began from the Introduction pages onwards, the mind was looking for clues such as the recollection of the physical location of the paragraph on the page layout. This usually serves an important visual markup that accompanies the memory of information in the brain. (e.g. on the left side page, bottom half, second to last para. Or, just after the section title, in the second line.) However, there were no such visual clues -or mental bookmarks- coming to recollection for this search. Though apparently, apart from the eyes, there were other processing faculties also that were 'looking' for any visual patterns that may correlate with the information of interest; mainly the three keywords- twins, ~40 years, same blue dress (incidentally, 'giggle' wasn't a part of it).

About four minutes into the physical scanning, somewhere on page 31, when 'Hemlet' was first encountered, the pace of scanning had to slow down. While there is no apparent connection between Shakespeare's character and the giggle twins of America, from the search patterns perspective there seemed to have some vague recollection of the two together in terms of 'flow of information' that the author had created. And there it was, on page 33, on the top half, the name of one of the twins, Daphne, that suddenly surfaced from the depths of recognition.

Happy for getting better at finding odd references buried into piles of text in rather obscure manners, but which I 'wanted' to remember. Not entirely sure if the faculty would be equally effective for the text I haven't read myself, and thus have the benefit of the visual patterns stored in the memory along with the information.