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speed-read·ing (spēd'rē'dĭng) n.
A method of reading rapidly by assimilating several words or phrases at a glance or by skimming.
Speed reading or rapid reading is a selective reading process in which a reader increases their reading rate while attempting to
retain as much comprehension of the text as possible. This can be helpful only when looking for specific information. Some
courses and books on speed reading, often sold through popular psychology literature, promote skimming habits rather than reading
ability. While skimming increases reading speed it results in a significant decrease in comprehension (under 50%) compared to
normal reading for comprehension (over 75%).
Someone who speed reads habitually is called a "speed reader".
Some Speed reading techniques emphasize forming cognitive models of the ideas in printed text by developing high-speed
visually oriented mental processes rather than subvocalization. Subvocalizing is imagining that oneself is saying words
being read out loud, understanding written material by using the mental processes for listening to spoken words. This is a
reading technique that the vast majority of children learn
in school because it is a natural extension of existing childhood language skills
of listening to people talking. A typical subvocalizer reads approximately 240 words a minute, whereas a typical person who
learned to read without slowing down to subvocalize each and every word (often times called a "natural speed reader") reads about
800 to 1000 words per minute.
The difference in reading speed between the two reading styles has over time created the somewhat dramatic and ambiguous term
"Speed Reading" which applies to all forms of reading that involve the elimination of the habit of pretending to hear words
spoken. A person who practices speed reading is often called a "speed reader" or a "super reader".
History
The psychologists and educational specialists working on the visual acuity question devised what was later to become an adopted icon of early
speed reading courses, the tachistoscope. The tachistoscope is a machine
designed to flash images at varying rates on a screen. The experiment started with large
pictures of aircraft being displayed for participants. The images were gradually reduced in size and the flashing-rate was
increased. They found that, with training, an average person could identify minute images of different planes when flashed on the
screen for only one-five-hundredth of a second. The results had implications for
reading, and thus began the research into the area of reading improvement.
Using the same methodology, the U.S. Air Force
soon discovered that they could flash four words simultaneously on the screen at rates of one five-hundredth of a second, with
full recognition by the reader. This training demonstrated clearly that, with
some work, reading speeds could be increased from rauding rates to skimming rates. Not only could they be increased but the improvements were made by
improving visual processing. Therefore, the next step was to
train eye-movements by means of a variety of pacing techniques in an attempt to improve reading. The reading courses that
followed used the tachistoscope to increase reading speeds, and assumed that readers were able to increase their effective speeds
from 200 to 400 words per minute using the machine. The drawback to the tachistoscope was that post-course timings showed that,
without the machine, speed increases rapidly diminished.
Following the tachistoscope discoveries, Harvard
University Business School produced the first film-aided course, designed to widen the reader’s field of focus in order to increase reading speed. Again, the focus was on visual processing as a means of
improvement. Using machines to increase people's reading speeds was the trend of the 1940s. While it had been assumed that reading speed increases of 100% were possible and had been attained, lasting
results had yet to be demonstrated. It was not until the late 1950s that a portable,
reliable and 'handy' device would be developed as a tool for promoting reading speed increases.
The researcher this time was a school-teacher with a passion for underachievers and reading, named Evelyn Wood. Not only did she revolutionize the area of speed reading, but she committed her life to the
advancement of reading and learning
development. Her revolutionary discovery came about somewhat by accident. She had been committed to understanding why some people
were natural speed readers, and was trying to force herself to read very quickly. While brushing off the pages of the book she
had thrown down in despair, she discovered, quite accidentally, that the sweeping motion of her hand across the page caught the
attention of her eyes, and helped them move more smoothly across the page.
That was the day she utilized the hand as a pacer, and called it the Wood Method. Not only did Mrs. Wood use her hand-pacing
method, but she combined it with all of the other knowledge she had discovered from her research about reading and learning, and
she introduced a revolutionary new method of learning, called Reading Dynamics in 1958.
More recently speed reading courses and books have been developed promising the consumer even higher increases in reading
speed at high comprehension. Using pseudoscience principles, they have
even claimed to be able to extract meaning out of consciously unnoticed text from the para-conciousness or subconscious. These
courses go by various titles such as photo-reading (1994), mega-speedreading (1997) and alpha-netics (1999). They tend to be
accompanied with the sale of expensive electronic machinery, or mind altering accessories. Reading experts refer to them as
snake oil reading lessons due to their high dependence on the suspension of the
consumer’s belief.
Subvocalizing
Some speed reading courses claim that it is a common misconception that reading without subvocalizing is a reading process
that is akin to skimming, and that this misconception is a product of the prevalence of speed reading classes that claim a person
can learn to speed read in a weekend seminar. Such programs produce a very high percentage of people (typically 95% or greater)
who abandon their new skills within a few weeks or months after taking the course. This minority of speed reading course claim
that such classes have given the whole concept of "Speed Reading" a very bad name.
These courses also claim that reading visually is a skill that improves with practice like any other. That most of that
practice must necessarily involve developing mental habits geared towards the comprehension of written material rather than the
focus on speed that characterizes most "Speed Reading" programs.
This minority of speed reading courses also claims that reading techniques, both visually oriented and subvocalization
oriented, that focus upon teaching the reading techniques of active mental involvement in the material and reading every
word have historically produced students with the highest comprehension rates. The claim is that they also produce the
highest proportions of students who claim to continue to use the techniques they learned years after learning the skill. The
convenient psuedoscientific explanation is that people who have succeeded the most as readers have been those people who have
visually oriented thinking and word recognition processes in part because their minds are not "clogged" with spending most of
their attention on the sounds of words.
A technique for eliminating subvocalization
Most readers who have not been exposed to visual reading are so habituated to reading the way they do that they have no
concept that they are subvocalizing, or that it is possible to read in another way. In order to clarify the point about the
differences between visual reading and subvocalizing, we present an excercise for the reader:
- First off, the reader must have an up to date eyeglass
prescription. A visual reader's eyes move rapidly and must focus rapidly. This will not happen with a poor eyeglass
prescription. Everything within the vision span must be sharply in
focus.
- The best material to start with is a large print non-fiction book.
- The reader traces his fingertip underneath the printed text lines starting at 3/4 of an inch from the left hand margin to 3/4
of an inch from the right hand margin at a steady even speed. The finger, scanning beneath the text of each and every line acts
as a pacer which eyes will naturally follow.
- Humming a familiar tune out loud scrambles the audio processing centers of the brain. This makes it impossible to
subvocalize. The end result is a very unsettling and disorienting experience for someone who learned to read by subvocalizing.
The brain is forced to recognize words in the field of vision as if it has gone "deaf". The brain is forced into a new way of
recognizing words without taking the time to laboriously subvocalize each and every word.
- The fingers should trace under the printed text at a speed of approximately 2/3rds of a second to a second per line. At this
speed, the reader's eyes will typically only be able to make three or four fixations along the line. At each fixation the
reader's eyes will "grab" words in groups of three to five words. At first, a reader who is accustomed to reading by
subvocalizing will not be able to make any sense out of the text. In the beginning the goal is to train the brain to recognize
groups of words. With practice, over days, weeks or sometimes months, the brain will retrain itself to link groups of words
captured in this new way so that it makes sense out of the words it is looking at.
- To develop visual reading as a skill, practice this tracing exercise for about 15 minutes a day - ideally early in the
morning after breakfast and coffee. After a few days the visual reading experience will become more natural.
- To develop speed, a commonly taught exercise is to attempt to read twice as fast as the reader can make sense out of the text
for a minute or so and then slow down to the speed at which one can make sense out of the text. This is done by moving one's
finger twice as fast under the text. This forces the brain to make as many adjustments as it can to the higher rate of speed. The
effect is similar to driving down a road at 30 miles per hour, accelerating to 60 and slowing down to 30 miles per hour again.
After slowing down, the 30 miles per hour feels very slow once the brain made adjustments to 60. To get back to the same
"feeling" it had when it was driving 30 miles per hour, the brain wants to go 40 miles per hour. This usually results in the
reader reading slightly faster than he did before pushing. Repeating this exercise often allows you to develop incrementally
greater speeds every day.
The habit of humming must be eventually be abandoned. Most readers eventually can read visually without the crutch of using
their finger to pace under the text.
Awareness of words
Typically the higher speed visual reader will still be aware that the words he is looking at have sounds associated
with them. In micromotor
tests of throat muscles, high speed non-subvocalizers still move their throat muscles in microscopic amounts in a pattern of
unconscious responses to recognizing words they are reading. This is not the same as subvocalizing which requires taking the time
to sound out the words as if they were being spoken aloud.
Many experienced speed readers who report reading speeds in excess of 10,000 words a minute claim that at some level of their
thinking, they still "hear" every word on the page they are reading - but that they are not making an effort to sound them out or
waiting for the sounds of the words to somehow be completed. A common claim from high speed readers is that they know they have
"missed" a word or misread something if they find that they didn't "hear" a complete sentence, that they instantly realize that
somehow their cognitive models of a sentence is incomplete or corrupted. This often causes the readers eyes to retrace back to
visually take in the words that were missed. Exactly what this means can only be understood by developing high speed reading
skills oneself.
Cognitive window
Experienced speed readers take advantage of a phenomenon in the brain sometimes referred to by the term "cognitive window"
that keeps an extremely highly accurate record of sensory data for approximately one and a half seconds. This is the mechanism by
which the human brain can judge movement and speed of multiple moving objects in the field of vision. Its application to speed
reading is that the human eye can scan across a page visually grasping small parts of several lines of text at once, and then
though visually oriented cognitive processes reassemble the text lines into a linear representation, as if the eyes were
reading one line at a time from left to right. The experienced speed reader's brain functions much more rapidly than his eyes
can, typically processing multiple lines of text in parallel. This allows the brain to effectively read several lines of text at
once, creating an internal illusion that the text is being read one word group at a time. The eyes have to move horizontally
across the text fast enough to capture entire sets of text lines and then have enough time left over to process the text lines
before the cognitive window expires and the brain abandons its sensory data record of the lines just taken in by the eyes.
Utilizing this phenomenon takes a lot of practice.
Most speed reading courses attempt to teach an "advanced technique" in which the reader is supposed read text
backwards. This apparent nonsense is actually an attempt to get readers to utilize the cognitive window. When the eyes
move backwards through text, the brain's visual cognitive functions hold the text line in the cognitive windows memory, and
peruse it from left to right inside the cognitive window's "buffer". Once the student has successfully "read backwards", these
reading systems typically tell the student to read two lines at a time, by reading two lines going forward, then two lines going
backwards. Again, this is to utilize the cognitive window.
Natural speed readers whose eyes appear to pop around the page at random are generally moving their eyes back over an area of
text that they already looked at once in order to reload the cognitive window's buffer memory and restart the decay time on that
section of text. This is often necessary because images decay so quickly. The backwards eye movement is to reload a section they
didn't quite decode yet or are taking some extra time to ponder.
Context memory
The human mind has several types of short term memory. The
most important to understand in the context of rapid visual reading is the cognitive
window discussed above, and what is sometimes referred to as the "context memory".
The context memory is extremely short term memory that holds the current context of thoughts in the human mind. Typically this
is limited to seven or eight concepts that can be associated with the current mental context. If the brain attempts to hold more
than 7 items in the current mental context, the mental circuits "overload" and dump the entire context information.
As an example of this phenomenon for the reader, write down 6 random digits on paper and repeat them out loud while not
looking at the text. Then write down 7 random digits. Repeat these out loud without looking at the text. Then try 8. Most people
cannot manage 9. At some point, the human mind simply is unable to hold the number of items attempted.
This phenomenon is extremely pertinent to reading, especially reading at high speeds. The reader must organize his thoughts
such that concepts get bundled into packets of 3 to 5 subconcepts. Attempts to grapple with more subconcepts produce a failure of
the cognitive functions, and a resulting total failure of comprehension and memory.
Some experienced visual readers report that they form visual "tree structures" to represent information that they are reading,
linking concepts together. A well structured paragraph typically has a topic sentence, and then several supporting sentences.
Each supporting sentence gets mentally linked to the topic sentence in the context memory. When there are more than 5 supporting
sentences in a paragraph, the reader's mental processes have to reorganize the structure of the context to put the extra
supporting ideas "underneath" one of the ideas in the active context, grouping them together. With poor quality writing, this
doesn't always work. Typically, a long paragraph with more than 6 supporting sentences or ideas will cause a mental lapse in
which the entire mental model of the paragraph gets dumped in the same manner as trying to repeat 9 digits out loud. In such an
event, the high speed reader typically has to (dramatically) slow down, re-read, and mentally re-organize the poorly constructed
text in order to understand it.
The primary reason for organizing the new material into clumps of no more than 3 to 5 subconcepts is because there must be
something in readers existing knowledge base to "link" the new information to. Adding existing knowledge into the context memory
has a tendency to take the number of subconcepts up to the critical level of 7 or 8, any more of which produces a context memory
failure much like trying to repeat back 9 digits, flushing the whole context right out of the brain.
One of the most significant problems with currently available mass market speed reading courses is that they do not teach
techniques for managing the context memory, they don't teach its behavioral properties (such as flushing on overload), and they
don't even teach that the mechanism exists. The result is that most students of these systems read in a manner which produces a
constant flushing pattern of the context memory, and a resulting lack of comprehension. Beginning speed readers typically report
that they are aware of words, aware of sentences, aware of the ideas, and believe they are reading and understanding, but their
cognitive and memory faculties are in a constant state of failure.
The context memory requires active, conscious management at high speeds in comparison to reading at slower speeds. At slower
speeds the cognitive functions and unconscious thought processes have vastly more time to perform their functions of organizing
information at an unconscious level, which gives them much more time to organize information and to prevent the context memory
from flushing. At high speeds, unconscious information management functions of the brain rarely work with the same functionality
they do at slower speeds. Habits of actively and consciously managing the capacity and function of the context
memory to prevent flushing are critical for comprehension at high speeds.
Grappling with complex ideological structures that are found in many types of reading material is a major mental challenge for
a high speed reader.
Context pool
Items from the context memory that have links to other ideas in long
term memory can be imagined to be placed into a "pool" with other contexts after they have been conceived of by the reader.
There does not appear to be a limit on the number of items that can be placed into this context pool. Contexts which do not have
links to existing long term memory items are disposed of before they can make it into the context pool. In other words,
everything in the pool is new information that builds upon existing knowledge.
The items in this pool share the property of relatively rapid decay. It is as if each item in the pool has a timer associated
with it that is configured when the original context memory item was conceived. Typically the absolute time limit for items in
this context pool is about 20 minutes. Most items decay within 30 seconds if they are not placed into the pool with a thought as
to a reason and a strong emotional impulse associated with them of why they will be needed for long term storage.
Typically, the reader will have a goal in mind. Information that is encountered will be classified against this goal. If a
context is deemed useless as compared to the needs of the goal, the context will be marked for ultra-fast aging and effectively
not be remembered.
Items in this context pool become candidates for being committed to long term memory. They are not automatically committed. For an item to be committed to long term
storage, they typically must be brought to conscious awareness again. This is usually done through repetition, such as
rereading.
The long term memory requires emotional involvement in order to accept a context from this pool and "burn it in". If a context
is not brought from this pool and imprinted with a highly emotional context associated with it, it will decay and not be stored
in long term memory. Contexts which subsequently have an emotion associated with them such as fear, humor, greed, absurdity, or
other become imprinted in long term memory. By far the most effective technique to commit a context to long term memory is to
create a visual image that is a complete parody of the elements involved in the context. Absurd images that are impossible or
extremely improbable in reality for some reason are seized upon by the human memory system and lock long term memories in.
Long term memory works at the speeds of emotions - which are glacially slow. Every item committed to long term memory gets
there because it was associated with the experience of an emotion. It is simply physiologically impossible to speed read huge
volumes of information into human long term memory. What is possible, however is speed reading large volumes of data into the
context pool where it will subsequently be lost after 10 to 20 minutes, max.
There are stories of desperate speed readers who have aced midterm and final exams by rapidly speed reading in the classroom
before an exam, with no other studying all term. By the time the test is over, the context pool decays and they cannot remember a
thing. This is not a reliable or recommended practice.
Speed vs. comprehension
The American Heritage Dictionary defines "comprehension" as:
- The act or fact of grasping the meaning, nature, or importance of: understanding
As we discussed above, it is quite possible to organize information as you read it and put it into context. This qualifies as
"comprehension" according to this dictionary definition.
Reading comprehension, no matter what the reading speed, has been shown to be related to the level of mental involvement in
the text being read. This is generally independent of reading speeds, but highly dependant upon cognitive speed of the
reader.
It is typically argued by speed reading supporters that actual comprehension of material is higher while speed reading because
the brain is not clogging it's cognitive processes by sounding out the words. There is more room for active cognitive processes,
especially for conscious management of information. There is considerable merit to this assertion.
Speed vs. memory
In order to prove that something is understood, it must be remembered so that it can be discussed (or tested). While a
person is speed reading he is forming coherent mental contexts to place information, however those contexts are often lost to
rapid memory decay (or to context memory overload and flushing). Memory is a sticking point for speed readers. It is impossible
to test whether someone actually understood material while it is being read, it is only possible to test the understanding that
lingers in his memory.
On the other hand, a slower (subvocalizing) reader has more time
in which to put what is reading into contexts which have emotional content. The slower reader, because of this, is at a
tremendous advantage where memory retention is concerned. This assumes, of course, that the slower reader has the mental skills
and discipline necessary to organize his thoughts, organise the context memory (through either conscious or more likely
unconscious mental processes since the conscious mental processes are clogged by subvocalizing), and knows how to store those
contexts into the long term memory.
Synthetic memory
Synthetic memories are a pathological problem for speed readers,
who have to juggle information at extremely high speeds. The high speed of mental processes can cause considerable "dropouts" in
memory. The brain wants to be infallible and creates synthetic memories to fill in the gaps. The experienced reader learns
through experience and through reading critical material multiple times how to identify most synthetic memory artifacts by their
vivid nature as unreliable attempts of the brain at event reconstruction. Most new students of speed reading are extremely
surprised at how pervasive this problem is.
A comprehension technique
A highly favored technique among experienced very high speed readers is to imagine giving a Powerpoint presentation to a board of directors about the contents of the material. Typically this requires the
reader to mentally re-organize the material into groups of information that will fit on a Powerpoint card. This technique coaxes the brain to organize the information in ways that do not overload the
context memory.
The reader makes two or three passes through the material, spending no more than 10 minutes on each pass:
- In the first pass, the presentation is outlined, and the cards are mentally configured in the readers head. The goal of
reading during the first pass is to prepare an outline and the cards for the "presentation".
- In the second pass through the material, the original text becomes a visual cheat sheet and mnemonic aid for the delivery of the material - a first rehearsal and fumbling presentation. This presentation is
not given by subvocalizing, but rather by mentally framing exactly
what should be said, as if preparing to speak. The instant each "frame" has been created in the cognitive faculties, the reader
moves to the next one without subvocalizing anything. In this second
pass, the original "cards" created in the imagination during the first pass come to mind immediately because of their
associations with the sight of the original printed text.
- A third pass, if so desired, is a more polished delivery with the goal of extracting information from the reading material
being completely secondary to the active mental act of giving an imagined, polished presentation.
This type of technique is virtually impossible for someone to perform if he is subvocalizing to any extent at all, as the act of subvocalizing completely clogs the cognitive processes. It is virtually impossible for a subvocalizer to
even imagine that it is possible to read like this, but entirely natural for a visually oriented reader.
(It helps to stand up and give the verbal presentation out loud after finishing three passes, using the book as a visual
guide. This really helps cement ideas into memory.)
Varying speed
Reading should be an extremely active mental process. Mental activity ranges in speed from slow and ponderous to
instantaneous. Reading speed should necessarily reflect the speeds of the inner mental processes. Experienced visually
oriented readers who read for understanding typically vary their speed through text.
In contrast to that, most speed reading systems teach a goal of reading for a specific, steady words per minute.
A person who has trained to visually register text at high speed can mentally qualify the quality of the text at full
sprinting speed, and whether it is appropriate to slow down. Truly useless information (that would be pointless for a powerpoint
presentation as described above) can be glossed over. When a passage that warrants attention is encountered, the reader can slow
down or even stop and take written notes.
Regression
Regression is going back and re-reading a section of text that you feel compelled to for whatever reason. Most speed reading
classes/systems assert that regression is anathema to their reading system. In practice, avoiding regression is only advisable
while you are doing excercises to develop your skills, not for actual material that you need to understand. Common sense tells
you that if you are reading to understand something and there is something that you didn't understand, there is merit in going
back and reading something again. The eye movement patterns of "natural" 10,000 WPM speed readers usually appear to be completely
random as they look over a page. Their eyes move both forwards and backwards in order to "fill in the blanks" that they did not
"capture" or "understand". They can often be seen flipping pages backwards to look back at a previous page they already read.
Developing a habit of becoming aware of something you did not completely understand and going back to read it with scrutiny is a
critical habit to develop for comprehension rather than pushing ever forward in the pursuit of speed.
Oxygen
The experienced high speed visual reader practices a habit of taking slow, deep breaths from the diaphragm. For the brain to work at a high level of efficiency,
the human brain requires more oxygen than can be delivered through shallow breathing.
Many people fail in their attempts at speed reading simply because they are not giving their brain enough oxygen to be as active
as it needs to be. An effective exercise is to take as deep a breath as possible, and holding it for ten seconds without clamping
the throat to hold the air in. This stimulates the body into a pattern of deep breathing from the diaphragm. Note that this is very different than hyperventilating.
Care with food
Consuming quantities of foods that have a high glycemic index
(pasta, baked potatoes, white rice, bananas, puffed breakfast cereals, soda pop, fruit juice etc) causes the pancreas to pump out
large quantities of insulin. This has the effect of causing the muscle and fat cells to stabilize the blood sugar by removing the
excess glucose sugar, but it also causes the removal from the blood stream of amino acids (the end products of the digestion of dietary protein).
The brain manufactures critical neurotransmitters out of amino
acids, so the net effect of consuming high glycemic index foods is that
the brain winds up starved of neurotransmitters and cannot function for speed reading. Low and medium glycemic index foods such
as whole grains, beans, and fruit should be dietary staples. Some form of protein should also be consumed with meals prior to
attempting speed reading to provide the amino acids for the brain to build neurotransmitters out of.
Speed reading fiction
"Speed reading" fiction at high speeds does not work very well. This is because
fiction focuses upon the emotional experiences. The human brain is simply not fast enough processing emotions to push the
envelope. At best, a speed reader of fiction remembers an account of events, but does not have the experience that the author had
in mind for the reader.
Reading computer screens
Many people report that it is next to impossible to "speed read" a computer screen at speeds over about 1000 words a minute. A
speed readers eyes move VERY rapidly, settling only for very short periods of time. The computer screen, being redrawn electronically 60 to 100 times a second (called the refresh rate) creates multiple frozen images in the eyes of the reader as his eyes
move between each group of words. To get an idea of the effect, wave your hand in front of a CRT screen as you read this text.
You will see multiple "frozen" images of your hand rather than a blur. Essentially, this creates about 5 copies of the text
superimposed upon each other as the eyes move between fixations on the text because of the slow decay of visual images in the
human eye. The human eye has to stop long enough to get a good visual image in order to physically see what it is looking at.
When there are multiple superimposed "ghosts" from successive screen redraws, the eye/brain combination gets very confused about
what it is looking at. This "ghosting" effect is more exaggerated with smaller text on the screen.
Usefulness of speed reading
Most reading material containing useful information usually contains between eighty and ninety percent useless information.
This makes high speed skills quite useful. The speed reader, making himself aware of every idea in the printed text, rarely
misses important points (unless tired). Missing important points is a problem that skimming is highly prone to.
The usefulness of speed reading at speeds over about 800 words per
minute is typically restricted to filtering out useless information, searching printed text for useful information that
warrants slower memory oriented reading techniques, and for pre-reading material that one plans to read in a fashion more
amenable to the long term memory faculties of the brain. Reading at high speeds is very useful for understanding something in the
short term, such as reading technical manuals when searching for specific pieces of information. Speed reading is not useful for
studying if you need to remember what you are reading many hours later.
Using speed reading style skills at 500 to 1000 words per minute
without subvocalizing is often more effective than reading at 240 words per minute and subvocalizing because it utilizes
different, often conscious, cognitive functions which are often more reliable than depending upon the unconscious mental
processes that occur when subvocalizing. Reading at an average speed of around 500 words per minute is typically conducive to memory retention if comprehension and memory techniques are
applied.
Controversy
Many people question the concept of speed reading, and the subject continues to be controversial.
A large part of this controversy stems from confusion over the definition of speed reading, which is not standardized. Another
factor adding to the controversy is that most "speed reading" programs have been put together by people who teach the same
techniques they read in books, which continues to propagate the same poor quality system. It is easy to be a detractor of a
system which amounts to "pace with your finger and you will magically read faster!". Virtually none of the authors of speed
reading systems have attempted to convey what skills and cognitive habits have actually been developed over the years by
"natural" speed readers - habits and skills that are critical to master to yield a useful reading system. These programs have
consistently assumed that you will acquire the required mental skills to be able to read faster and better simply by following
finger tracing and pacing exercises such as the one described above.
The World Championship Speed Reading Competition stresses comprehension as
critical. The top contestants typically read around 1000 to 2000 words per minute with approximately 50% comprehension. The
10,000 WPM claimants have yet to qualify in the top slots.
There are autistic savants such as Kim Peek who are known to read at truly stunning speeds with complete comprehension and memory. Kim is known to
have memorized approximately 8,000 books, reading them upside down. Nobody knows how he does it.
A notable article in the International Journal of Instructional Media (found here (http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3756/is_200101/ai_n8948211)) refers to a much
cited study by educational psychologist Ronald Carver, showing an effective
cognitive limit of the human mind of only 300WPM, much lower than speeds claimed by speed reading supporters. These supporters,
on the other hand, criticize studies of this kind for not taking into account the variations of thinking and learning styles that
occur across a broad spectrum of the population. As noted above in the Speed vs. comprehension section above,
comprehension is largely a factor of the cognitive activity of the reader, and visually oriented people have inherently higher
cognitive speeds than auditory oriented people, and can usually keep up with the higher speeds.
There are people who are extremely auditory oriented for whom Carver's study certainly does apply. For auditory oriented
thinkers and learners, speed reading is effectively a weak form of skimming because these people cannot form cognitive models at
the speeds required for speed reading.
Topics in speed reading
References
- Reading Rate: A Review of Research and Theory. (1990) Professor Ronald P. Carver.
- Nell, V. (1988). The psychology of reading for pleasure. Needs and gratifications. Reading Research Quarterly, 23(1),
6-50
- Homa, D (1983) An assessment of two “extraordinary” speed-readers. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 21(2),
123-126.
- "Speed Reading Made EZ" Usenet post [1]
(http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&selm=31a46d1c.38571094%40news.accessone.com&rnum=3),
part of the alt.self-improve FAQ
External links
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