![]() ![]() So if you want to read faster, your best bet is to start reading more, so you can expose yourself to as many words and linguistic nuances as possible. According to Zacks and Treiman, reading and understanding text more rapidly is all about improving language comprehension, not vision. Ultimately, the factor that most effects a person's reading speed isn't how efficient their eye movements are, it's how extensive their vocabulary is. The same phenomenon occurs with written text." Have you ever tried listening to an audio recording with the speaking rate dialed way up? Doubling the speed, in our experience, leaves individual words perfectly identifiable - but makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning. In their op-ed, Zacks and Treiman used this analogy: That means when you're speed reading, you're not understanding the text as deeply compared to if you were reading normally - even if you see every single word. So while speed reading courses can indeed help you perceive more words in a given glance, that doesn't guarantee that your brain will have enough time to actually process everything you're seeing. Unlike perception, language processing involves stringing words together in order to derive a broader meaning from them. One of the biggest issues they identified, which also applies to reading apps like Spritz, is that people fail to understand the difference between perception (simply seeing words) and language processing. And in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, they delivered their thoughts on the matter under the blunt headline "Sorry, You Can't Speed Read." ![]() Zacks and Rebecca Treiman, speed reading claims have always sounded too good to be true. The Science of Speed Readingįor psychology professors Jeffrey M. Check out the GIF below for a sample of what it's like.īut can this more efficient method of reading really help you read faster? Or does it merely make you think you're reading faster, when in reality you're not retaining as much information? (i.e., is "speed reading" really just another term for "skimming"?)īased on the available research, it definitely appears that the latter is more likely than the former. This leads to a highly efficient style of reading. In fact, by flashing individual words in rapid succession, such apps don't just reduce back-and-forth eye movements, they essentially eliminate them. Modern speed reading apps, like Spritz, rely on the same basic principle. In other words, if you could absorb more information with each glance (e.g., through only focusing on every other word, or through honing in on just the beginnings and ends of sentences or paragraphs), you could, in theory, drastically reduce the time it takes you to read something. The underlying theory was that you could improve reading speed through improving reading efficiency. As with many of the speed reading courses that would follow, Wood's course focused on minimizing the number of back-and-forth eye movements a reader made while scanning a page. Speed reading courses have been around since the 1950s, with educator Evelyn Wood introducing one of the more popular ones - Reading Dynamics - in 1959. So, what's going on here? Is Jones really able to read at word-per-minute rates far greater than what the typical, non-super human is capable of? Or is there some other, more scientific explanation behind what's happening?īefore we dive in, let's take a moment to understand how speed reading (allegedly) works. And to prove that she wasn't simply rifling through pages with reckless abandon in order to make it seem as though she was speed reading, Jones was able to successfully summarize the major plot points of the book afterwards, suggesting that she actually retained information. As New York Magazine reported, that works out to 4,200 words per minute - more than 10 times faster than the pace "good readers" read at. Take six-time world speed reading champion Anne Jones, for example, who read all 784 pages of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in just 47 minutes. ![]()
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