Is Speed Reading Actually Working?

For those of us who love reading, the problem of finding time even for the best books is a real struggle. If you are like me, you probably put “learn speed-reading” in your new year resolutions and maybe even gave it a shot. But is speed reading actually possible?

    The average person reads about 200-400 words a minute, excluding the situations of dealing with unfamiliar concepts. Reading is a mechanical process, which is made of “fixation” – looking at a word or several words, and “saccade” – moving your eyes to the next word group. After that, you stop to apprehend the phrase you just looked at.

    Speed-readers are claiming their ability to read 1000-1200 words a minute by cutting down on subvocalization– the voice in your head that is reading everything out loud for you and takes extra time from understanding the text.

    As a result of cutting this voice, the speed-reading is supposed to reduce regular fixation time of .25 seconds to 0.3-0.5 seconds, says an eye tracking researcher Keith Rayner from the University of California, San Diego.

    The idea of speed reading came around in the fifties and several techniques promising you to speed up your reading were developed. Some of the most popular methods are skimming, meta guiding, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, and others, as Lifehacker.com writes.

    For instance, skimming encourages you to concentrate on important parts of the text instead of going through every bit of information. It is convenient for, let’s say, going through your college books, but unfitting for the pastime literature. Also, recent studies found that skimming doesn’t help you to remember the details of the read material afterwards.

    Yet, no matter how many methods are available, scientists say speed reading is technically complicated.

    “You can probably push yourself to get a little over 500 words per minute, but you’re limited by the eyes and the anatomy of the retina,” says researcher Keith Rayner to Lifehacker.com, “To understand text you need to move your eyes to put the fovea on the part of the text you want to focus. Acuity drops off pretty markedly outside the fovea and you can’t discriminate the words and text far from the fovea. So, that’s the rate limited factor, as is how fast the brain can process information.”

    Rayner points out that if you train yourself reading faster, you would probably lose comprehension of the text. That is exactly the issue I came across when I’ve been training myself to read with Tim Ferris’s technique some time ago (Ferris suggests reading several lines at a time which Rayner found no evidence to be working). I increased my speed within a couple of hours, but it felt like I was chasing something and losing pleasure from the wording of the text.

    Looking through the data on speed-reading methods, it seems like it is a genie wish which comes with the price – comprehension. Yet, there is no evidence that it is indeed absolutely impossible. Warren Buffet still manages somehow read more than 400 pages a day which I am sure has a speed-reading behind it.