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Oct. 26, 2010 - Skeptoid
16:01
Skeptoid #229: Speed Reading

Speed reading classes claim to be able to turbocharge your words per minute. Save your money; it doesn't work. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Speed Reading Trade-Offs 00:14:27
If some company packages up a product or service and then offers it for sale, we tend to just naturally assume that it's real and it works, right?
But if we take a second look, we all know there are plenty of useless snake oil products on the market.
How do we know which is real and which is flim flam?
Today we're going to point our skeptical eye at the perfect candidate for such an examination.
Speed reading.
And we're doing that right now on Skeptoid.
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Speed reading.
We've all seen films of speed readers going through books nearly as fast as they can physically turn the pages.
It's enough to make anyone envious.
Who among us wouldn't love the ability to pick up any book, flip through its pages in just a few minutes, and then put it down in record time with nearly 100% retention?
When I look at my vast stacks of unread books, the idea is certainly a compelling one.
Fortunately for slow readers like myself, our demand-driven economy has responded with a product we can buy.
Classes and techniques purporting to be able to turbocharge our reading speeds to thousands of words per minute.
The most often cited speed reader is the late Kim Peake, the famous savant upon whom the Rainman character was based.
His mental abilities were so vast and varied that speed reading was hardly the most remarkable, yet it was still really something.
He read two pages at a time, the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye.
Estimates of his speed vary, but 10,000 words a minute is the number I found most often.
Peake had a unique hardware arrangement driving this ability, though.
He was born without a corpus callosum, the connection between the two brain hemispheres, and it's possible that his two hemispheres were able to process the pages he read in parallel.
Kids don't try this at home.
The most famous speed reader is probably John F. Kennedy, who spoke about it often and is said to have had his staff take Evelyn Wood speed reading classes.
1,200 words per minute is the number cited for Kennedy.
However, we'll look a little more closely at this in a few moments.
The Guinness Book of World Records does list a fastest reader, Howard Berg, who claimed 25,000 words per minute, nearly as fast as one can fan the pages of a book.
Berg is best known for amazing stunts of speed reading and comprehension on television shows, including one with Kevin Trudeau, who sold his speedreading course, Mega Reading.
But his claims were not without controversy.
First, his TV stunts were incredible, but they never came near approaching 25,000 words a minute.
Second, the Federal Trade Commission filed suit against him in 1990 for false and misleading advertising after a blinded study found that none of his customers gained anywhere near as much as he said they would.
Still, the fastest of those tested had quadrupled their speed to 800 words per minute.
How fast is 800 words a minute?
It doesn't sound all that great compared to some of these other speeds, but apparently 800 would be extremely fast.
for anyone without Kim Peak's hardware.
Fast speeds require skimming, and comprehension drops off dramatically.
It's always a trade-off.
At 800, there's a massive loss of comprehension.
To truly measure reading speed, we'd have to draw a line at some minimal acceptable level of comprehension.
Ronald Carver, author of the 1990 book, The Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement, is one researcher who's done extensive testing of readers and reading speed and thoroughly examined the various speed reading techniques and the actual improvement likely to be gained.
One notable test he did pitted four groups of the fastest readers he could find against each other.
The groups consisted of champion speed readers, fast college readers, successful professionals whose jobs required a lot of reading, and students who had scored highest on speed reading tests.
Carver found that of his superstars, none could read faster than 600 words per minute with more than 75% retention of information.
Keith Raynor is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and has studied this for a long time too.
In fact, one of his papers is titled Eye Movements in Reading and Information Processing, 20 Years of Research.
And he published that in 1993.
Rayner has found that 95% of college-level readers test between 200 and 400 words per minute, with the average right around 300.
Very few people can read faster than 400 words per minute, and any gain would likely come with an unacceptable loss of comprehension.
So before you embark on a speed reading course, understand that knowledgeable professionals have devoted their careers to studying this and have conclusively found that any gains you're likely to achieve are probably nowhere near the numbers printed in your class's marketing brochure.
At least, not without massive loss of retention.
But let's take a look at the strategies that speed reading courses teach.
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One of the basic goals is the elimination of sub-vocalization, claimed to be the thing that slows readers down the most.
Sub-vocalization is the imagined pronunciation of every word we read.
I do this a lot, and it limits my reading speed to virtually the same as my talking speed.
Sub-vocalization is even accompanied by minute movements of the tongue and throat muscles.
Nearly every speed reading class promises the elimination of sub-vocalization.
Here's the problem with that.
You can't read without sub-vocalization.
Carver and Rayner have both found that even the fastest readers, all sub-vocalize.
Even skimmers sub-vocalize key words.
This is detectable even among speed readers who think they don't do it, by the placement of electromagnetic sensors on the throat which pick up the faint nerve impulses sent to the muscles.
Our brains just don't seem to be able to completely divorce reading from speaking.
NASA has even built systems to pick up these impulses, using them to browse the web or potentially even control a spacecraft.
Chuck Jorgensen, who ran a team at NASA in 2004 developing this system, said, Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or without actual lip or facial movement.
A person using the sub-vocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal cords do receive speech signals from the brain.
In fact, scientists have a term for reading in this way.
They call it roding, a combination of the words read and audio.
To truly comprehend what your brain is seeing, nearly all of us must rod the words, fastest speed readers included.
Fast readers need not be fast speakers.
They simply have what's called a larger recognition vocabulary.
Rodding an unfamiliar word is sub-vocalized more slowly than a word already stored in our recognition vocabulary.
We've learned that your recognition vocabulary and thus your reading speed can actually be improved, but the real technique is the opposite of what's taught in speed reading classes.
Focus instead on reading comprehension.
This will improve your recognition vocabulary and you will probably begin to read faster.
Thus, elimination of sub-vocalization is a gimmicky claim.
It sounds logical and it's an easy sell.
By skimming a text, you can sub-vocalize less of it, and you will comprehend less of it.
Rodding the complete text is the only way to actually read it.
Another strategy taught in speed reading is special eye movements.
These are usually things like reading lines backwards and forwards and taking in several lines of text at a time.
Again, this gimmick sounds like an attractive superpower to have, but it's counterintuitive to the way our brains actually process text.
Those of us who aren't Kim Peak need serial input.
Here's what's happening when you read.
First, your eye lands on a point in a printed sentence.
This is called a fixation, and it lasts on average a quarter of a second.
Your eye then moves to the next fixation, and this movement is called a saccad, and takes a tenth of a second.
After several saccades, your brain needs time to catch up and comprehend.
This takes anywhere from a quarter to half a second.
Half a second is a long time, and that's the rotting catching up with the saccades.
Is it possible to fixate once in a group of 10 lines of text and actually take it all in?
Maybe, but only with a sufficient pause to comprehend before moving on.
Speed reading teaches you to skip this pause, and thus your brain will not process the majority of what your eyes pass.
If we look back at the test that found Howard Berg's students improved to as much as 800 words a minute, we have to keep in mind that speed and comprehension are a trade-off.
Whether 800 words a minute constitutes a passing score depends on what kind of comprehension threshold is set, and also what kind of text it was.
When the straight dope administered its own speed reading tests, they found that people who had not read the texts at all often scored nearly as well on comprehension questions as the speed readers, when the text was general enough.
In other words, it's very easy for professionals like Evelyn Wood or Howard Berg to control the conditions of the test to produce amazing results, good enough to impress television hosts and to sell classes to lay people.
So what about John F. Kennedy and his 1200 words a minute?
Kennedy biographer Richard Reeves looked into this.
The 1200 number comes from an off-the-cuff guess made to Time magazine's White House reporter.
The reporter called the Evelyn Wood School where Kennedy had taken his speed reading class, but found that he had no score, as he'd never completed the class and actually been timed.
But in what the reporter figured was a bit of PR posturing, the school told him that Kennedy probably read 700 to 800 words a minute.
Carver's educated guess is that Kennedy likely read 500 to 600 words per minute, but may have been able to skim as fast as a thousand.
So take the Kennedy claims with a grain of salt.
Test yourself at your normal reading speed, and you'll probably be surprised to learn that what you thought was slow is actually right in that normal range of around 300 words a minute.
If you're much faster than that, you're among the few people with a highly developed recognition vocabulary.
To improve this, stay away from gimmicky techniques that ignore the way the brain processes printed text and focus on your comprehension.
To read faster, concentrate on reading slower and read more often.
Welcome Adrienne Hill 00:01:31
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