Just finished reading
my sixth book this week! Man, I just love reading
books, 'cause they're so like, packed full of
knowledge, you know? Luckily for me, I know
secret speed reading techniques passed down
from a 22nd degree black belt kung fu
master who reached enlightenment by eating
an entire library. And if you wanna learn
those same secrets and read 18 books a
week, just like me, take my speed reading course. Only 14 easy payments, and
one hard payment of 19.99! Tax, title, license
fee, shipping, handling, and itching powder
removal fee not included. Now, if you'll excuse
me, I need to get back to gaining vast amounts
of knowledge. (hardcore dance music) Ok, let's be real here. The idea that you could
learn to speed read, that is, learn to drastically
increase your reading speeds and plow through more books
than you ever thought possible has been around for
quite a long time. If you're in college, you'll
probably see a flyer on campus at some point advertising
a speed reading seminar that can teach you how to
read at 900 words per minute, 1,200 words per minute,
or even beyond that, and countless bloggers have
talked about the supposed techniques you can use to
learn how to speed read. And so much of it is BS. So I wanted to create
a little series to set the record straight on
speed reading, and also show you how you can actually
realistically increase your reading speeds, and what I
want to do with this video in particular is lay
out the science of how reading actually works. Now, reading is
possible through, wait
for it, eye movement. I know, crazy, right? But
there are actually several different types of eye movement. For instance, there's something
called smooth pursuit, which our eyes do when we're
tracking a moving subject. And you can do it right
now, just follow my finger on screen, and you might be
feeling a little bit sleepy, which, in that case, (coughs)
give me all your money. There's also vergence,
which is what happens when your eyes move closer
together to focus on a subject in the middle
of your field of vision, and also something called
vestibular eye movement, which is what happens when
your eyes are fixed upon a fixed subject, but your
head moves, and your eyes compensate for
the head movement. When reading, though,
our eyes move in quick, jerky movements called saccades. When we're reading
silently to ourselves, the average saccades length
is about two visual degrees, which equates to about
eight letters on a page. And this takes about
30 milliseconds to do. Now, when your eye
stops and focuses on the text, that's
called a fixation. To understand fixations,
first you need to know about the three ranges
of vision your eyes have. First, there's the
foveal, which spans about two visual degrees right in
the center of the retina, then the parafoveal, which
goes about five degrees on either side of
any given fixation, and finally, your
peripheral vision. Your peripheral vision
is pretty blurry, you can make out
shapes and movement, but it can't really pick
up a whole lot of detail. The foveal, by contrast,
picks up detail really well, and this is absolutely
critical for reading. Most of what you can understand
in any given fixation needs to be in
that foveal range. Maybe one or two
letters can be in the parafoveal
range, but that's it. And the average fixation
when you're reading silently takes about 225 milliseconds,
though this is an average. The range is typically
anywhere from 100 milliseconds to
500 milliseconds. Furthermore, your
reading speed isn't just determined by
fixations and saccades. There's also the actual
cognitive processing time that you have to go
through in order to understand what you just read. We'll get more into cognition
and how your brain learns in future videos, but for
now, I wanna make a brief note about your working
memory, which is what you're using when you read. Research has shown that our
working memory can really only handle about four chunks of information at any given time, a chunk being a bundle
of information that is loosely connected
through meaning. Chunks for difficult
material or things you're unfamiliar with will be small,
whereas chunks for things that you are familiar
with will be bigger, but for both, the
concept here is the same. Your brain can only
handle so many at a time, and reading too
quickly can result in a loss of comprehension. That being said, a good
figure to keep in mind is that pauses for comprehension
while you're reading will generally take between
300 and 500 milliseconds. So essentially,
reading breaks down into a three-step
process, we have the saccade that moves
on to the fixation, and finally, the cognitive
processing pause. Now, even though we have
average duration data for all three of these things,
it's not like we can just add it up together and get
an average reading speed. A number of other
factors come into play, including the fact that when
we read we actually skip a lot of the words on the page. Words can be separated
into two different types, there's content words,
the words that actually express the ideas
you're reading about, and function words,
words that express the grammatical relationships
between those content words. Research has shown
that readers fixate on about 85% of the content
words in any given text, while they only focus on about
35% of the function words. On the other hand, reading
also includes a lot of regression, going back to read
over previously read words. Some regressions are
small corrections when a saccade's distance is
too long, whereas longer regressions will be to go
over material that you already read once, but didn't really
understand the first time. For skilled readers, about
15% of their reading time will be made up of
these regressions. Now that you have
a grasp of the main factors that go into
the process of reading, let's look at what a realistic
reading speed really is. Some speed reading
"experts" will tell you that you can boost
your reading rate to around 1,200
words per minute, which is a figure
that many people cite John F. Kennedy reading
at, and some even say you can get higher than that. But, according to Keith
Rayner, who's a psycholinguist at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst, and who did a huge study
on 20 years of research in both eye movement tracking
and reading speed studies, observations of college
level readers show that most people read between 200
and 400 words per minute. And lastly, there's
the concept of reading flexibility, a lot of
the advice on speed reading assumes that you should be
reading at a constant rate, but in the real world,
this really isn't the case. When you're reading
something where the concepts are presented more
closely, or the material's more difficult,
you're gonna slow your reading rate down
so you can keep understanding what
it is you're reading. And by contrast, when
you're reading something where the concepts
are more spaced out, or you're already familiar
with what it is you're reading, you can increase that
reading rate without a huge loss of comprehension. So here's the final
conclusion that I want you to take from this first video
in the speed reading series. If you're reading
between 200 and 400 words per minute
already, you're in the norm. You're fine. My friend Shane, who runs
the incredibly smart blog Farnam Street, is a
great example of this. Shane reads about three
to five books a week, but he's very clear
on his site that he reads at an average pace. Speed readers who
claim that they can do any more than 400, maybe
500 words per minute tops, are doing so at a
loss of comprehension. In general, reading at
lower comprehension rates should be considered skimming. And that's what
speed reading is. It's skimming. After a certain reasonable
point, you get an inverse relationship between
your reading speed and your level of comprehension. Which one is more
important to you? So, that is where we're
gonna end this video, if you'd like to dig a
little bit deeper into the research I did for it,
I've linked to a lot of sources in the companion blog
post for this video, so you can click
the card right now, or the link down in the
description to read them. Next week, we're
gonna look at some of the common techniques
that speed readers claim will increase
your reading speed, and see if there's any
validity whatsoever to them, and then after that,
we're gonna do a video on how you can actually
increase your reading speeds. So stay tuned for
those videos coming in the next couple of weeks,
if you enjoyed this video, giving it a like definitely
helps this channel, and I will see you
in the next video. (energetic dance music) Hey guys, thanks so
much for watching this first video of my
speed reading series. Now, if you want to get new
videos every single week on being a more
effective student, including the further
speed reading videos, you can click that big red
subscribe button right there. Also, if you want
to read a book on how to earn better
grades, I wrote one, it's absolutely free,
and I'll send you a copy if you click a picture
of the book right there! Like I said, if you
want to get the sources that I used for the
research in this video, and there are a lot of
them, as well as a summary, you can go to the
companion blog post by clicking the orange
logo right there! Last week was a
little bit more of a philosophical video
on how we should give more appreciation
to people in all sorts of different
jobs, so check that out if you haven't seen it, and if
you want to connect with me, I'm on Twitter @TomFrankly, or you can leave
a comment below. Thanks for watchin'!
Hey all!
I haven't posted a video here in a while, as the last few didn't relate specifically to studying so I felt they didn't quite belong. I think this one does, though.
This is the start of a 3-part series I'm doing on speed reading, which will include:
Here's the gist of this first video.
According to data from 20 years of research in eye tracking and reading, most college-level readers can read between 200-400 words per minute while still retaining good comprehension.
Anything going beyond 400-500 words per minute, for the vast majority of people, is getting into skimming territory. At these speeds, you might be able to retain the main points and overall concepts, but details won't be remembered nearly as well.
Reading breaks down into a 3-step process:
Each of these take time, and it's also good to note that your working memory, which deals with all the incoming information, can only process around four "chunks" of information at a time. Reading too fast can overload it.
Reading also involves lots of regressions - going back to read previously-read material. On the other hand, you also skip a lot of words when reading - especially function words (a, and, if, then, he, she, etc).
The video and companion article have a lot more detail if you're looking for it, and the companion article also links to my sources if you'd really like to dig deep.
With this video, I just wanted to lay the groundwork about reading; the third one will have all the actual tips for improving speed and getting through textbook assignments in less time.
That being said, I'll try to answer questions here (they'll probably help me make that video better). Hope this helps! :)
Thank you based Thomas Frank
Reading with the right brain is probably the best thing out there. Basically everything we know about speed reading still applies, you just change where you choose to focus. Each eye movement should allow you to take in another idea/concept.
I feel like I am reading for the first time.
Hey Thomas you are really carrying the content of this sub, your channel benefits from it, too, but that's not a Bad thing. I didn't check nut I hope you have reddit's rule of only x% if posts can link to your own stuff rule in mind. Cheers.
This is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for in this subdreddit! Awesome video, keep up the amazing work!