Is Speed Reading Real or a Myth?

It was once thought that reading speed was fixed like eye colour or adult height. Some people are fast readers and some are slow. That’s life and there’s nothing you can do about it. This is what Tony Buzan was told at school when he asked the teacher how he could speed up.

There are those who still don’t believe that Speed Reading is real. They think tales of people increasing their reading speed fourfold and beyond is a seductive myth. Is it just wishful thinking and marketing hype or could it be real?

Before answering this question I need to define what I mean by speed reading.

I’m not talking about the techniques which purport to give you speeds of 20,000 words a minute or more. These may be real but I have never seen convincing evidence that they give you sufficient comprehension to be able to answer detailed questions. I would love someone to enter the World Speed Reading Championship and prove that these claims are real. If they are, I’ll radically change the techniques I teach.

I’m not talking about skimming either. A lot of people think that Speed Reading is just glorified skimming and you skip many of the words just dipping in here and there. Skimming is an entirely different technique. It is useful as a preview before reading so you can get the gist of what a book’s about. It helps you to identify which parts are worth reading in-depth and which bits you can safely skip over. It’s not appropriate if you want a deep level of comprehension and certainly wouldn’t cut it in the championship, but it is very fast and an ideal tool for ‘reading around a subject’.

Killy Ridols, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The techniques I teach are based on the work of Evelyn Wood and Tony Buzan with some additional new research in certain areas. They are pragmatic, practical and easily implemented. What’s more they are, to some extent, common sense in hindsight. With sustained practise anyone can reach a fourfold increase in speed or even greater without loss of comprehension. This has been demonstrated time and time again so clearly is not a myth.

The reason for some people’s doubt is often due to poor personal experience with trying ineffective techniques in the past. This includes the proliferation of online Speed Reading apps of varying quality. Some are better than others but isolating and flashing up individual words is unlikely to be effective for strong comprehension. I will comment in more detail on apps in a later post.

The Science Skeptics

An article originally published in the New York Times (based on a study in the journal ‘Psychological Science in the Public Interest’), widely reported elsewhere, dismisses Speed Reading as fundamentally impossible. The opinion piece was written by Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Jeffrey M. Zacks and the researcher who conducted the underlying study, Professor Rebecca Treiman, both from Washington University in St. Louis. It cites biological and physiological issues why they believe, “It is unlikely that readers will be able to double or triple their reading speeds (e.g., from around 250 to 500–750 words per minute) while still being able to understand the text as well as if they read at normal speed.”

There is only a small area in the retina (called the fovea) for which our visual acuity is very high. Our eyes are seriously limited in their precision outside of that. This means that we can take in only a word or so at each glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side. In fact, since the 1960s, experiments have repeatedly confirmed that when people “speed read,” they simply do not comprehend the parts of the text that their eyes skip over.”

Far be it from me to dismiss respected scientific research by eminent experts in favour of dogma. I am, after all, a trained scientist with a degree in Physics and Chemistry. However, on this occasion, I feel duty-bound to refute, not the basic research, but the erroneous conclusions made.

The basic assertion of Zacks and Treiman, that it’s only the centre of the retina which gives clear detail, is true. The fovea is the primary area where we recognise words and outside of that our vision is much less sharp. Our techniques address this problem logically. Let’s look at Treiman’s conclusions…

“This means that we can take in only a word or so at each glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side.”

The assumption that, because your central focus is small, you can only take in one word at a time neglects basic optics. The lens of the eye changes shape to focus close, middle-distance, or far away and in each case, detail is registered by the fovea. As things get further away they appear smaller. So, if you hold your book at near arm’s-length, the amount of text in the image falling on the central area of the retina increases. Thus, several words can be seen clearly in a single glance.

What is more, the speed and amount of detail which can be taken in can be increased with specific training. A device called a tachistoscope can flash images on a screen for a fraction of a second. It was originally described by the German physiologist A.W. Volkmann in 1859 and used during World War II in the training of fighter pilots to help them identify aircraft silhouettes as friend or foe. It has since been used by police marksmen as a training tool as well as for reading and sports vision.

“Research has demonstrated that tachistoscopic training can increase the size of the peripheral field of view and reading speed. This ophthalmological study gave evidence that tachistoscopic training has the potential to teach individuals to process increased visual information more rapidly, and at the same time be more aware of a larger volume of visual space during a single glance” [Berens C, Girard L, Fonda G, Sells SB. Effects of tachistoscopic training. American Journal of Ophthalmology 1957;44(3):1-48.]

Treiman continues, “You may be able to understand each word on its own, they won’t mean much as a collective whole”

The statement is true. Lone words don’t mean much. Speed Reading does not aim to comprehend single words in isolation in fact, precisely the opposite. As explained above, the eye can take in groups of words. Meaningful chunks are more readily associated and thus comprehended as a whole. Speed Reading can therefore give better comprehension than slow reading.

Peripheral vision, although lacking in detail, can still play a role in providing information about general page structure, layout and some perception of large headings and diagrams. As your focused vision sweeps across the page you get multiple impressions of the words. As the article says, you can recognise “a little bit about the words on either side” - these ‘little bits’ build up and combine to act as useful previews and reviews.

“Since the 1960s, experiments have repeatedly confirmed that when people “speed read,” they simply do not comprehend the parts of the text that their eyes skip over.”

This is ‘skimming’ mentioned previously. It is not Speed Reading. We don’t advocate skipping over words at all.

I hope you can see that, when done appropriately, speed reading does indeed work and doesn’t contradict the biological research.

Vive la Vocab

The article concludes:

“In the end, the only reliable way to become a faster reader, then, is to expand your vocabulary”

 Whilst not the ‘only reliable way to read faster’, vocabulary building is something we whole heartedly advocate and use memory techniques to achieve. Most technical and unfamiliar words in English are based on Latin and Greek. Once you have memorized a selection of these you can build up many, many words as I explain in my book, Improve Your Speed Reading Skills:

 “At the start of the word is the prefix. For example 'iso' meaning the same or equal. Next comes the root of the word. This is the main unit of meaning. For example 'morph' from Greek meaning shape or form. Finally comes the suffix that generally defines characteristics or which part of speech the word is (ie adjective, adverb, noun, etc). For example 'ic' meaning relating to. Therefore the word 'isomorphic' is an adjective meaning being of the same or corresponding form (such as isomorphic crystals). The prefix 'iso' is also used in 'isobaric' meaning the same pressure, 'isotopic' meaning having the same number or protons (in an chemical element) or 'isometric' meaning having equal dimensions. The root 'morph' is also used in 'polymorphic' meaning having many forms or 'amorphous' meaning without form or shape. The suffix 'ism' means the quality of so 'isomorphism' is a noun meaning the quality of being isomorphic…”

“… I suggest you aim to cover 5 per day. Where possible, make up your own associations and strongly visualise them.”

Championship Challenges

In the World Speed Reading Championship you must read a previously unpublished novel against the clock. This is kept totally secret with only a handful of trusted translators and key organizing personnel seeing the text beforehand. After reading, competitors are asked 20 detailed questions, written by the author, requiring one or two sentences to answer. This proves beyond reasonable doubt that they have comprehended what they read. We award prizes based on effective speed. This is calculated as raw speed (in words per minute) multiplied by percentage comprehension.

Why not join us to experience for yourself that Speed Reading really works?