You’re Not Slow: Become a Speed Reader in 15 Minutes

[Music] so um this times 20 which is about 200 books is how many books i read because i can speed read so let me show you how i do that last year alone i read over 200 books and that is while being a medical student and working full-time and a huge reason for this is just being able to read really fast if you currently identify at all as being an average speed reader i promise you that using the three techniques in this video you'll be able to at least triple your reading speed in just a few minutes of practice now i feel that a lot of modern books or self-help books or business books literally have more chapters than legitimate points to make and it becomes almost a fight for me to be able to save my time and not waste it on reading a lot of fluff and useless things now before i get cancelled i just want to say this is not a technique that i recommend or use myself for things like shakespeare or philosophy or works of literature or anything nice like that this is for the sort of authors that have one good idea and instead of tweeting it write a whole book on it and it's therefore very frustrating to go through all of these things super super slowly and also i use this in my exam papers or other places where speed reading tends to be a huge benefit now this has been a lifelong journey for me and i think it's something to do with the fact that my attention span has more commitment issues than me so when i was younger i would have to read faster and faster and faster to kind of be able to still not be distracted or stop reading at all so yeah i just developed this really fast reading skill and i've broken it down into three steps for how to learn to read the first is to train your eyes the second is to train your brain and the third is to train your attention and that's what i'm going to be breaking down today now let's jump straight into it with the first part which is training your eyes and to do this i would use a physical book potentially that doesn't have a lot of images or weird text or things in them but just has normal text which is preferably uninterrupted with pictures inside and the reason for this is because it's a lot easier to train depending on how fast you want to learn or depending on how good you are at the moment you ideally want to pick a text which is slightly larger because the smaller the text the harder this is going to be so hard mode small text easy mode bigger text and i quite like the size of the text in this book um i think this is perfect to try to practice then but you might want to go for even something slightly bigger than this to start with the first thing you want to do is to pick a book that you haven't read please don't pick a book that you've been reading again and again because if you have remember what you're reading it's not going to be fair you're not actually going to be kind of stretching your skills a lot and you might be cheating unintentionally by just knowing what comes up next so pick a book which you've wanted to read in a long time but you've never read before the first thing you want to do is establish your baseline there are between 250 to 500 words in a single page on a book depending on how big the spacing is so just have an estimation of how many words are on a page and then try to see how long it takes you to read two or three pages and divide that by the number of words so you have your baseline starting rate of reading this is absolutely not necessary i don't do these measurements because i don't care but if you want to see that you have kind of a huge change or to see where you can get to it might be fun to quantify this if you're into that okay so this is where we're going to start training our eyes to read faster and what we're going to be doing here is something that you can learn in literally 30 seconds now in this video and that is to just use your peripheral vision and what that is is basically if you've ever had a cranial nerve exam or in medical school this is what we're learning to do to patients is you will ask a patient to look at you straight in the eye so you can do this on camera now so if you look at me straight in the eye can you see my fingers move you probably can because you're using your peripheral vision and the same thing for me even though i'm staring straight at the camera i can see my fingers move on both sides and this is what peripheral vision is so how this helps with speed reading is that what i would usually do or what we usually do when we read is we put that center of our focus so we have the central vision and then we have our peripheral vision at the side so what we usually do is we use our central vision this like straight direction of our eyes on the very first word and then we take it all the way across to the last word and then we go again and again and again so the core laser of our focus goes all the way from left to right from left to right from left to right and we're not taking advantage of this peripheral vision on the side and we can imagine that we have this huge wasted space here when our center of the focus is over here and you can see how that would take so much longer to go through the whole text so what we want to do is instead of skipping our eyes from the start of the sentence and the line to the end we just want to skip it throughout the middle so instead of going from here to here to here to here what we're doing is flicking through the center of the text and using our peripheral vision to read the sides so this is something you can legitimately do right now so if you just pick up a book from anywhere or even as you're watching this video if you can just see me and pay a bit more attention off that side focus you can start to kind of realize just how much more you're looking at than you are normally paying attention to and that's what you'll be doing with the text so just draw two lines down the center of the page or you can try and just like do it naturally with your eyes but just try to flick between the middle of the page as much as possible and just really flick only in the middle and be able to read everything from the sides so this is how you can physically do the speed reading part but of course we have to also account for comprehension because you can see how potentially this is just scanning the text and not actually understanding everything so this is what leads me to my second point which is how to train your brain to be able to be a fast reader now this is the biggest issue that i run in when i'm trying to teach people in person how to speed read i've done it to my family and they always say the same thing oh i didn't understand anything or i understand things so much worse i can't do this and this is where i start to get a bit frustrated i'm like no no it's normal it's good it's fine you just have to do that a lot longer and then you get over it so basically when we're reading very slowly it's obviously a lot easier to comprehend everything that we are reading but when we are speed reading there will be a huge amount of comprehension loss which is basically reading things but not actually absorbing what we are kind of seeing so this is what we need to start getting used to and what we need to start challenging if we're always reading at our 100 comprehension we won't be able to read faster and faster because the moment that we start to not understand things we're just going to stop and go back to our original speed so i think we need to use a text that we are not studying or that's just a practice paper or a practice book and we just need to practice reading at 70 or 80 comprehension so yes i'm literally saying you want to read something while you're only able to understand 70 of it and when you're at that stage then you can start challenging yourself okay how can i make myself understand this better and this is where i'm going to get to my top tip which is visualization this is so so so important so no matter what the speed that you're reading at sometimes even when i'm reading very very slowly and i'm just lying in bed i'm sure we've all had this feeling where we just read a paragraph it might happen very slowly and at the end of it someone asks that asks us what we read and we're just like i i have i have no clue we just looked at the text we technically read it but we didn't understand everything and this happens at every single speed it's just so much easier to do at a faster speed so the key around this is to visualize what you are reading so you're not looking at the text you're not scanning the text you're properly interpreting this as a mental image in your mind and you're constantly building this image as you are reading visualization for reading is absolutely so so important it helps me so much with my comprehension at any speed and it helps me so much with my learning every time that i'm reading something i'm drawing a mental image and of course if i'm doing this in science it will mean that i have to read very very slowly to kind of picture the molecules or what i imagine the molecules to be but if i'm reading a literary book or if i'm reading a business book it's so much easier for me to visualize these things which allows me to go to very fast speeds so i would challenge yourself to learn to visualize what you are reading about anything can be visualized like molecules atoms can be visualized literally anything that we are reading it's very easy to draw a mental picture i honestly think this is why i love reading so much it's kind of like seeing a movie but even better um but yeah if you visualize then you'll be able to comprehend so much more so again you want to use a book that you haven't read because you should not be cheating at the stage but you want to try to build a picture of whatever is written in the text and then try to do this as fast as possible as you are reading and you will realize that eventually even though you are maintaining this really fast speed with peripheral vision you are able to build this picture in your head and you might get up to 90 or more percent comprehension of what you're actually reading this training your brain part involves firstly visualizing everything that you are reading secondly being comfortable with comprehension loss but challenging this very harshly at every single stage and always trying to train yourself to read at a level where you are at 70 or 80 comprehension because that is how you can get faster and faster at what you are doing and lastly it's such a good train for your focus because when you're doing this you want to be in a very comfortable position you want to be in a space that is potentially quite quiet so you can focus 100 on what you are doing and i found speed reading to be such a good way for me to train my focus which is usually quite scattered but through training myself to speed read i have gotten very very good at being able to laser focus on something when i need to and you do need this laser focus because otherwise you're just playing around with your eyes rather than actually involving your brain and comprehending what the hell is happening on paper and lastly we get to our third point which is training our focus and maintaining this exercise without exhaustion and i will say it is genuinely the most tiring thing in the world if you are speed reading really really fast for kind of like an hour or a prolonged period of time it genuinely feels like someone just took out your brain and beat it with a baseball bat because it is so so so so so tiring it takes so much energy and so much focus and it leaves you so drained in the end that sometimes i guess it's kind of um like not worth it almost and it would be worth it to read a book slower but for example if i'm in an exam i think it's much more worth it for me to speed read through my exam paper because i know it's only going to be two or three hours and then after that i can be as tired as i want but i've been able to do this a lot more efficiently or sometimes for a book i'm like oh do i want to waste five hours on this horrible book or do i want to speed read it in an hour and then kind of take the four hours to do something fun but i have the same amount of information so these are the kind of calculations that i'm making when i'm speed reading but yes it is extremely extremely tiring which means that the more that we can adjust our environment to make this more comfortable for us the better the first thing i will say is don't try to do this with books that have really really small writing um if they're physical books with really small text that will be so much more exhausting so i would recommend actually to use a kindle or an ipad to read or a computer to read this as much as possible because on all these devices you can very easily adjust the brightness and also adjust the size of the text so the bigger the text the easier it is to speed read and to use our peripheral vision so i would say ideally if you want to speed read a book and you know in advance that this is going to be a bit of a crappy book that you want to blitz through then i would prefer to buy that on a kindle rather than buy the physical book version because then i know i can speed read it a lot faster so that's the first thing adjusting the screen brightness so either when it's very dark to have it to a dark screen so it doesn't tire out my eyes or when it's daylight to have it to quite a bright screen so again i can actually see what i'm reading is really really helpful and also lastly um this is a bit of a cheating thing but it really really helps with speed reading and that is to spread the attention across many of my senses so what this means is that sometimes if i want to speed read a book i will also buy the audible version of the book or i will buy the audiobook too so i will have the physical book in front of me and i will also be listening to the audiobook because what that means is it really really helps me maintain my focus because for example if i'm speed reading and i just get tired it's very easy for me to just do this and leave but if i have an audio book it's so much faff to kind of pause the audio book at the right spot and then take a tiny break and then start again so it kind of forces me to not stop which i mean sounds a bit toxic but it's all self-imposed so it's fine um so i will just play the audiobook while i'm reading and that will help me speed and breeze through the book as fast as possible also things like using your finger to trace what you are reading might really help but i think the main thing here is using a large size text and that genuinely makes the biggest difference and also using an audio book at the same time also really really helps kind of maintain that focus for prolonged periods of time and lastly of course do take breaks because it's really really tiring it's genuinely almost like a physical sport and a competitive activity so it's not just an easy casual thing that you're doing at the side it's actually quite hard to do so breaks are really really important don't speed read books back to back because you will literally fry out your brain um but yeah do it at small periods at a time i would recommend just trying this exercise for 15 minutes once or twice will genuinely really really increase your reading speed so in that case if you're actually into this for a competitive reason then potentially measuring your speed right now and what it could become in the future will really really help see that you've made a difference but yeah our book fan i have a video up here that people absolutely loved on how i make the most out of the books i read and also here are a bunch of my self-help recommendations which potentially all fall into this category of books to be spread read otherwise thank you so much for sending this time with me i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind to yourself and others and don't believe everything you think thanks bye

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 1,058,891

Keywords: speed reading, how to read faster, read faster, reading, books, how to read, how to read more, booktube, booktubers, note taking, note taking apps, how to read faster and retain more

Id: HB__TF9rp0E

Length: 12min 23sec (743 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 11 2022