Another study showed some speed reading experts reading around the 600 word per minute level, roughly twice as fast as a normal reader. One study of a course had some students quadruple their speed.
There seems to be some mild evidence here in favor of speed reading. Can we still get moderate speed reading gains? If 500-600 words forms an upper bound, that does suggest that doubling your reading rate is possible, albeit as a hard upper limit. However, according to Raynor, the average college-educated reader only reads at 200-400 words per minute. This was masked because the books I was reading had enough redundancy to make following along possible with impaired comprehension. Even my own perceived gain of 900 word per minute meant that I was probably losing considerable comprehension. The evidence is clear: anything above 500-600 words per minute is improbable without losing comprehension. Is It Possible to Make Moderate Speed Gains Through Training? If there are no pauses in the stream of words, there isn’t enough time to process them and they fall out of working memory before they’re comprehended. Well that processing step slows down regular reading too. Remember reading was a three step process: fixate, saccade and process. Working memory constraints here too, enforce a limit on the upper speed you could use Spritz and still be considered to be “reading” everything. Their website claims to have research showing faster reading speeds, but unfortunately I was not able to find any independent, peer-reviewed work substantiating these claims. Indeed, using the application gives a strong impression that you can read very quickly. If each word appears in the same place on the screen, your eye can stay fixed on that point while words flip through more quickly than you could hunt them down on a page. What about systems like Spritz? Spritz works by trying to avoid the problem of saccades. This just isn’t possible with our limited mental RAM. Parsing multiple lines simultaneously, means that each of these threads of information must remain open until the line is fully read. The brain can hold around 3-5 “chunks” of information at a time. Second, working memory constraints are at least as important as anatomical ones. This means that eyes are physically constrained in the amount of information they achieve per fixation. They need to move around in order to get more details. Processing more information per fixation is limited by the fact that our eyes are rather poor lenses. One, the area of the eye which can correctly resolve details, called the fovea, is quite small-only about an inch in diameter at reading distance. Instead of reading a couple words in one fixation, you can process multiple lines at a time. Speed reading experts claim that they can work around this problem by taking in more visual information in each saccade. Finally, after you jump a few points, the brain has to assemble all this information so you can comprehend what you’ve just seen.Įye-movement expert Keith Rayner, argues that even going beyond 500 words per minute is improbable because the mechanical process of moving your eye, fixing it and processing the visual information can’t go much faster than that. Next, it must make a quick movement to the next fixation point, this is called a saccade. In order to read, the eye has to stop at a part of the text, this is called fixation. Claims that you can read a book as fast as you can flip through a phone book are completely impossible on anatomical and neurological levels.įirst we have anatomical reasons to throw out absurdly high reading rates. Some speed reading claims can be tossed aside immediately. Is It Possible to Read 20,000+ Words Per Minute? Now, nearly a decade later, I decided to do some in-depth research into speed reading to bring you the facts. That meant comprehension, not speed, was the bottleneck I was trying to improve. My reading diet had switched from lighter self-help, to denser and more academic writing. In addition to seeing some flickers of research that made me suspicious about speed reading programs, I had mostly stopped using the techniques I originally advocated. Since that time, I’ve had some lingering doubts about speed reading. I didn’t have any solid scientific research to back my experiments. When I wrote the piece, I based the article purely on my personal experience along with the how-to books I had read. I found I was able to increase my reading speed from 450 word per minute to 900 in the drills, so I published an article entitled, Double Your Reading Rate, which has since become one of the most popular on this website. Seven years ago, I read some books and articles on speed reading and started practicing some of the methods.
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