J. Emerson asks: Is it really possible to
learn to speed read and if it is what are the best methods? 95% of college educated individuals read at
a rate between 200-400 words per minute according to extensive research done by University of
Massachusetts Amherst professor Dr. Keith Rayner. However, there exists a small, but rather
vocal subset of people who insist that they can read several times faster than this using
various speed reading techniques. With very little searching, you'll also find
many-a-company claiming that after going through their program or using their app regularly,
you can easily read even as many as 1,000 words per minute. Tim Ferriss of Four Hour Work Week fame offers
a method for increasing speed in reading for free on his website, claiming with this method,
you'll see an average increase in reading speed of about 386% in just three hours of
practice. So is any of this really possible? When it comes to reading, comprehension is
everything. Reading text twice as fast as someone else
isn't often very helpful if, after you're done, you don't understand or retain most
of what you read. And this is where most speed reading programs
break down. Studies have repeatedly shown that speed readers
almost universally score significantly worse on reading comprehension tests than people
who consume the text at a more normal pace. Perhaps the most famous test concerning this
was conducted by one Dr. Ronald Carver, author of The Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement. Among many other studies he's done over the
years looking at reading speed and comprehension, in one notable one, he painstakingly sought
out the best speed readers he could find, choosing his subjects via testing a large
group of college students for their speed reading and comprehension abilities and then
selecting the top scorers; selecting people whose jobs required exceptional amounts of
daily reading, such as a writer from the New Yorker; and selecting a few very prominent
individuals who'd built reputations on their speed reading abilities. What Carver was hoping to do here was collect
the best of the best among individuals who'd previously demonstrated great aptitude for
speed reading while maintaining high levels of reading comprehension. He wanted to see if they really had abilities
much outside of a normal college educated individual when tested in a scientifically
rigorous fashion. It turns out, not one of these elite readers
could achieve a 75% reading comprehension level (C average) while reading above 600
words per minute. While this is decidedly faster than an average
college educated adult, it should be emphasized again that Carver meticulously screened the
candidates in his study to find the best of the best in terms of speed readers. And the best from that group still could only
achieve about a C average in terms of reading comprehension at a maximum of 1/3 faster than
what is generally considered the normal ceiling of an average college level reader. To quote the aforementioned Professor Keith
Raynor, author of Eye Movements and Information Processing During Reading: 20 Years of Research,
"Very few people can read faster than 400 words per minute, and any gain would likely
come with an unacceptable loss of comprehension." Dr. Raynor goes on to state,
“You can probably push yourself to get a little over 500 words per minute, but you're
limited by the eyes and the anatomy of the retina. To understand text you need to move your eyes
to put the fovea (the part of your eye responsible for sharp, central vision) on the part of
the text you want to focus. Acuity drops off pretty markedly outside the
fovea and you can't discriminate the words and text far from the fovea. So, that's the rate limited factor, as is
how fast the brain can process information.” An indeed, many speed reading techniques try
to focus on cutting down on eye movements that on average take about a tenth of a second
each movement or "saccade". These techniques claim you can reduce the
number of eye movements by doing things like reading two lines at once or taking in as
many words as possible before an eye movement. But, as Raynor notes,
“The other claim is that you can take in more information per eye fixation, but there's
no evidence that says we can do that. What we know about the physiology of the retina
is against the notion that you can take in two lines of text at the same time.” Another common speed reading method is to
try to eliminate subvocalization (saying words in your head while reading). Raynor notes that working towards this end
can help, but ultimately, "Research shows that when you do that and the text is difficult,
comprehension goes to pieces." Essentially, your brain needs that time to
not just see the word, but understand its meaning. Take away that "pause" while you subvocalize
and while you might have looked at a lot of words on a page, you're not going to understand
or remember them later. Everyone has experienced something like this
at one point or another where they read a page, but are either thinking of something
else or spacing out. You get to the end of the page and realize
you have no clue at all what you just read even though your eyes looked at all the words. Further, both Carver and Raynor found that
completely eliminating subvocalization while reading just isn't possible, even for skimmers. This has been proven via hooking up electromagnetic
sensors to the throat. It turns out, when you're saying the words
in your head, your brain also is sending nerve impulses to your speech controlling muscles,
whether you notice or not, which can be picked up via these electromagnetic sensors. Even the best of speed readers who claim to
have eliminated subvocalization have been shown to have this happen. Your eyes can only focus on so much at one
time and your brain also has processing limitations. Once the words start getting streamed into
your brain too fast, your ability to comprehend their meaning and retain anything from them
sharply declines. So while speed reading apps that do things
like flash words at you on a single point so you can get rid of the time it takes to
actually move your eyes to focus on a new point can potentially speed up your reading
a bit, there is still the problem of how fast your brain can actually process a word. Apps that use this method tend to push the
upper limit and overload your brain's ability to comprehend, while also not letting you
glance back at any words your brain finds trickier than others. Needless to say, comprehension levels tend
to be extremely poor using this speed reading method because of this. As such, one real method for increasing your
abilities as a reader, not to astounding levels claimed by many-a-speed reading course or
app, but at least getting to the upper part of that 200-400 word per minute curve, is
to work on your recognition vocabulary- your ability to see a word and comprehend its meaning. You can achieve this by simply reading a lot
and working at increasing your vocabulary. The increase in reading speed by broadening
your recognition vocabulary can even be measured directly via monitoring the aforementioned
nerve impulses to the muscles in your throat and tongue while you silently read. It has been found that when you encounter
a word you're not very familiar with, you subvocalize it much slower than words your
brain recognizes more readily. The other advantage to a larger recognition
vocabulary is reducing the number of times your eyes have to jump back to re-read a word
or sentence, something that happens a lot, whether you consciously register it or not,
when your brain encounters difficult or unfamiliar words. So are there any legitimate speed readers
(as opposed to advanced skimmers) out there? Yes. Michael Jordans of the reading world exist. But unfortunately for us mere mortals, their
methods can't be taught. For instance, Kim Peek, a so-called megasavant
or "human Google", who served as the inspiration for Rain Man, was one such well known example. While Peek's mental prowess has been subjected
to significant embellishment over the years, it is quite well documented that he could
seemingly effortlessly absorb all of the information on a given page with remarkable speed. While exactly how many words per minute he
could read with almost perfect comprehension was never tested (at least that we could find
documentation of), according to his father who by necessity had to be his "shadow" as
Kim Peek called him, Kim generally averaged about ten seconds a page and then could recall
it with almost perfect accuracy, even years later. This was an ability Kim was more than happy
to demonstrate, including "performing", as it were, in front of over two and a half million
people over the years in various lecture halls and libraries across the United States. Once he came out of his shell a bit after
Rain Man, he'd even often walk up to strangers on the street to demonstrate his astounding
memory and date-processing abilities. This was one of the few ways he knew how to
socially interact with others. However, Peek's abilities were believed to
be the side effect of a serious congenital birth defect known as agenesis of the corpus
callosum, in which the largest band of white matter that connects the two hemispheres of
the brain doesn't develop correctly; in his case, it didn't develop at all and his brain
compensated by making some rather unusual connections, leaving him mentally and physically
handicapped in many ways, while also giving him his truly remarkable memory. In the end, if you count what most think of
as skimming as "speed reading", it is absolutely possible to speed read, and there certainly
are techniques that can help there. For instance, a common, very simple one is
to only read the first sentence of each paragraph in a book. You'll get the general idea of the chapter
without needing to read all the nitty-gritty details. But if you're signing up to a course or downloading
an app that claims it will teach you to read 1,000+ words per minute with the same reading
comprehension levels as when you read at your normal pace, you're going to be sorely disappointed
at the actual results. Universally, these courses are either selling
snake-oil or are going to teach you advanced skimming skills- learning to quickly recognize
what to ignore and what to pay attention to in text on the fly. Being good at skimming can be an extremely
valuable skill in some circumstances, but don't expect to get anywhere close to the
level of reading comprehension you get when reading at your normal pace. After a certain point, the faster you go,
the less you'll understand or remember later. And on that note, a common trick used by many
speed reading courses to show you how much their students have improved their reading
speed while managing to maintain high levels of reading comprehension is to give a test
where even someone who hasn't read the text at all is capable of scoring very high on
the exam covering that text. Bonus Facts:
• While audiobooks and podcasts, such as our exceptionally entertaining and enlightening
BrainFood Show Podcast which you should subscribe to now... Go ahead, I'll wait... ;-), can be very enjoyable
to listen to, it turns out it's a slow way of getting information compared to reading. You see, even the fastest of speakers can
typically only get up to about 250 words per minute, which ends up sounding a bit like
"auctioneer" talk. That said, it turns out, most people's brains
are capable of comprehending speech as high as about 300 words per minute (tested via
speeding up recorded audio), or about the same as we can comfortably read at. For reference, a typical audiobook reader
will read at more like 150-175 words per minute. • Preliminary studies, such as one by Anne
Mangen of Stavanger University in Norway, have shown that reading comprehension is somewhat
worse on electronic devices than it is with paper books. Exactly why this is the case isn't clear. On that note, you should consider buying our
printed book: The Wise Book of Whys ;-) Finally, you may have heard that reading in
a dimly lit area will damage your eyesight. However, studies to date do not support this
notion. And the only issue for reading in a dimly
lit setting, in comparison to reading in an ample lighted setting, is to cause extra eyestrain,
which will go away simply by resting your eyes. That said, it should be noted that people
who read a lot or otherwise focus on things close up for long periods of time, such as
people who work on computers all day or do a lot of sewing or the like, do have a higher
tendency to develop myopia (nearsightedness), but dim lighting doesn't appear to make this
tendency worse, simply that excessive reading seems to contribute to eventually developing
nearsightedness. Why exactly this is the case isn't yet fully
understood, but the correlation is strong enough between groups of people who do a lot
of "close-eye work" and their propensity to develop myopia at a drastically higher rate
than the average, that most optometrists are prepared to say that "close-eye work" is for
some a major contributing factor to developing myopia. The leading theory as to the cause, which
seems plausible enough, is that the near constant straining of muscles focusing the eye, stretching
the eyeball a bit, over the years gradually causes a permanent lengthening of the eyeball,
thus the person developing myopia as they age. Whether reading in low-light or ample light
for lengthy time frames, the resulting eyestrain is not serious and one simply needs to rest
the eyes on occasion. You can do so by periodically taking a break
from focusing on something close up, and instead looking at something far away. Specifically, as a general rule, optometrists
tend to recommend taking a break from focusing your eyes on close up things for a minute
or two every 15-30 minutes. Also, closing your eyes for a minute helps
because, while reading, you typically blink about 1/4 the amount you would normally do,
so your eyes can get a bit dry. Trying to train yourself to blink regularly
while concentrating isn't usually feasible, so the eye-closing method tends to work better
for most people.
