Reading Speed

Unfortunately, as with most such questions, my answer has to be that if there were something as simple as a protocol for speed reading, everyone would do it.

There are lots of types of reading.

Reading for pleasure can be done with speed-reading, because you aren’t expecting to remember much about what you read–but if the writer is any good, speed-reading through a piece is like putting a really good meal through a blender and pouring it down. Yes, you got all the food into you, but none of the experience.

Reading something like a newspaper or magazine article, an email or parts of many websites can be done using a scanning technique, because all you are probably looking for is a general overview and to identify something of greater interest or complexity to go back and read more carefully.

The denser or more complex a piece of reading is, the less likely you are to be able to zoom through it, especially if you hope to understand or remember any of the material. Maybe JFK could scan over a page of a newspaper very quickly, but I doubt he read complex position papers at the same speed.

One of the issues with reading speed is our tendency to pronounce each word mentally as we see it (called sub-vocalization). Most techniques try to teach us to skip this, but there is evidence that for most of us it is directly connected with comprehension and recall. The idea of photographic memory–the ability to take pictures of a page and then read through it in our minds–is something I’ve never experienced myself, nor have I ever seen anyone do it in person. It sounds very cool, but I have always wondered how one actually knows which book and page to find–how does the search engine work? I have worked with people who had “photographic” memories, but all were very young, and they didn’t use their capacity for reading. Most had very slow brains, often with a lot of delta, and when they trained to improve their ability to pay attention, they lost the capacity to photograph.

I’ve taken speed-reading courses and even looked into the courses that say you can page through a book backwards and upside down as fast as you can turn the pages, just “photographing” each page for an instant and have high levels of recall. Essentially they all seem to teach an open-focus alpha state. The idea is that you don’t try to read or even see the words. In my speed-reading course, we were taught to scan down the middle of each page with eyes de-focused or scan back and forth across the page in perhaps two or three sweeps. But I’ve also worked with a number of people who couldn’t switch out of alpha when reading, and their comprehension was terrible.

Working memory appears to occur in the left prefrontal and right parietal areas, but working memory is very limited in terms of how much it can recall and for how long. When you hear a phone number and recall it until you can get to a phone to dial it, that’s working memory. When you start a sentence with an idea where you want to go with it at the end, that’s working memory. Neither are very valuable for reading except to be able to process a long sentence.

I don’t know that any of this is very helpful for you. But many of the things we hear about (especially from people who are selling them) don’t turn out to be in real life what it sounded like they might be. You can certainly learn to read a lot of material faster than you probably do now with practice, but I wouldn’t hold out much hope to someone who wanted to be able to zoom through volumes of information without attending to it and then be able to recall and use it.