
Is speed reading really possible?  - saurabh
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4229
======
critium
At around 7 or 8 years old, my reading level was several grades ahead of
schedule. I was consuming large (for my age) novels with no sweat.

My parents noticed this and gave me a speed reading book. I incorporated each
an every item on that book including the removal of subvocalization. It
certainly gave returns right away, allowing me to consume books at a faster
rate, but a huge cost.

Years later, I entered college as an engineering student. I noticed that when
reading highly technical textbooks, and classes that required deep
comprehension of text, I was much much slower that my classmates, or my
comprehension level was much lower. Turns out, it was taking almost double the
time for me to get through a section.

Really wished I didnt read the speed reading book now. I dont blame my parents
at all, it was unfortunate that at nearly 40, i'm still trying to unlearn what
that speed reading book taught me. I'm trying to re-learn subvocalication but
its very very hard to 'slow' myself down. I've actually installed screen
readers to replace subvocalization with some positive effect.

~~~
lusr
I just tried reading a number of articles on the front page using
www.spreeder.com that another commenter here mentioned. I got up to 800wpm
with chunk size of 3 before my suspicion was confirmed: while I had no problem
following the story, it felt like I had a mental buffer that was constantly
filling up and skipping over interesting questions or thoughts based on what I
was reading.

Fundamentally, speed reading through something is at odds with processing that
information in a useful way. And therein lies the rub: I don't read something
merely for the sake of reading it.

When I read novels, I enjoy losing myself daydreaming in another world, and
savouring the emotions of the characters while thinking about how I would
react in their shoes. When I read technical documentation I'm attemping to
create or update mental models of technical concepts. When I read a friend's
Facebook post I think about what, if any, response I will offer or how I would
deal with their situation. When I read a message from my girlfriend I have to
take time to understand and plan for whatever she's discussing or asking.

I'm honestly struggling to see the value in speed reading. I cannot think of
why I would be reading something simply for the sake of reading it without
further processing. More valuable would be learning ways to _process_
information more efficiently, i.e. accurately and quickly.

~~~
drostie
I think speed reading, as skimming, would be good in cases where you are
trying to skip through data rather than process it. I do something very
similar with lectures on topics which I'm already familiar with -- I speed
them up to 2x or 3x speed in VLC, then slow them down when I reach a topic
which requires extra thinking and comprehension.

There is also a tremendous value to watching an important lecture twice: the
first time on fast-forward so that you understand the structure of the talk
and the gist of the subject, and the second time on normal speed so that you
can really get into the details. A lot of writing tries to give you an
"overview" or "table of contents" to accomplish the same task, but when it's
not there, skimming can be extremely useful.

------
bambax
> _You can't read without subvocalization._

While this article seems well researched, I find this claim very hard to
believe. I can read while singing (not a song with words, but a tune that I
know well, without words).

I really don't think I "talk to [myself] so quietly, it cannot be heard" and
while my "tongue and vocal chords" may "receive speech signals from [my]
brain", I'm pretty sure they're not executed and neither my tongue or my vocal
chords move in any way.

(While reading in English there are some words I don't even know how to
pronounce, so how could I "subvocalize" them...?)

\- - -

The other point I have issues with is the fact that one should retain
everything they read while speed reading. While I'm unfamiliar with speed
reading classes' claims, I would argue that it's useful to be able to skim a
big wall of text to

1- get a rough idea of what it's about

2- determine if it's worth a further, more thorough examination

That may not be called "speed reading", but it's certainly a helpful skill.

~~~
unavoidable
Proof that you can read without subvocalization are ideographic languages such
as Chinese (especially the traditional variety), where the written text and
the 'vocalization' are not directly related - it is possible to understand a
passage of text based on the relation of the characters to each other and the
appearance of characters themselves (e.g. the radicals used and the parts
within) without actually knowing how each character is pronounced.

~~~
ryusage
My personal experience studying Japanese for a few years makes me skeptical of
this claim. Granted, the radicals, etc in the symbols can give you a hint of
their meaning, but ultimately a writing system is created to communicate
vocalized words.

In fact, many of the "hints" in the written symbols are based on words that
sound similar to other words when pronounced (their actual meaning being
unrelated), which is fully lost if you cut out the vocalization. As another
point, most words are written with multiple symbols, and the meaning of the
overall word may be rather different than the words you would get if you read
the symbols individually. At that point, I don't see any difference from a
word written with an alphabet like English.

~~~
unavoidable
You and the poster below mention Japanese as an example. I counter by saying
that Japanese use of Kanji is very different than the Chinese use. I am a
native Chinese speaker and have taken Japanese classes, and their vocalization
in the language are very different. Japanese places a heavy emphasis on how
the characters are pronounced because their language is not purely
ideographic; rather they use a hybrid phonetic and ideographic system which
forces the reader to vocalize sentences including the Kanji characters.

I posit that if you were a native Chinese speaker, you could skim (or speed
read as claimed in the article) without any subvocalization and still
understand the given passage.

~~~
ryusage
Hm...fair enough. I'm still skeptical, honestly, but I don't know enough about
Chinese specifically to argue with that. I do see your point about Japanese
being a mixture of systems.

------
dimitar
I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It
involves Russia.

-Woody Allen

------
acqq
"I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It
involves Russia." Woody Allen

------
js2
The comments in this thread, specifically the questions about deaf readers
prompted me to Google "deaf readers subvocalization", which lead me to the
book "The Psychology of Reading" by Keith Rayner and Alexander Pollatsek.

I'll excerpt a few paragraphs.

[Page 191 - <http://goo.gl/VLaaM>]

 _Electromyographic Recording (EMG) records have been widely used to study the
role of subvocalization in reading. [...] Generally, EMGs are also recorded
from some other part of the body, such as the forearm, where muscle activity
should have no relevance for reading. In fact, normal skilled readers show
little forearm activity during reading, while EMG activity in the speech tract
increases markedly during reading in comparison to the baseline condition
(where the subject sits quietly). In contrast, deaf readers show a
considerable amount of forearm activity during reading (we shall see the
reason for that later in this chapter)._

[Page 211 - <http://goo.gl/R3NPT>]

 _That profoundly deaf people can read at all is sometimes taken as evidence
that speech recoding in normal readers is optional. However, as we have seen,
they do not read very well, and the best available evidence indicates that
when reading English text deaf readers recode the printed information into
their native language (ASL) for comprehension purposes. Since they have not
experienced speech sounds, recoding into a phonological code is precluded from
deaf readers. Instead, the information is recoded into a manual form to aid
comprehension. The poor reading of deaf people is thus probably due in part to
inner speech being a more efficient system of recoding than overt manual
gestures.

Readers of logographic systems such as Chinese can probably access the meaning
of many printed characters directly from the visual representation. However,
associations between the printed word and the appropriate pronunciation are
activated during reading and appear to be important in comprehending text._

~~~
tokipin
my theory is that subvocalization (or this sub-signlanguaging) is actually a
'memory-query' aid that the brain uses. the subvocalization of a word is a
key, in addition to the printed key, that lets the brain rapidly conjure the
meaning from memory. _not_ doing this makes reading inefficient, so there is a
very strong conditioning for it

------
CKKim
In so far as I have had "success" with speed reading it has been to force
myself to run over the words more quickly and so interpret the commonly seen
structures as single units. This means that if a piece is written in a very
formulaic style then I can get through it fast because most of the stock
sentences read like single words with only the unique modifiers jumping out of
the page.

Think about when you look at code and automatically chunk the bits you have
seen a million times before but are somehow magically able pick out the needle
in the haystack which tells you what is special in this instance. The layout
of code helps enormously for us, but I find the effect is the same with
reading if I go quickly and with specific purpose to reformulate the
information as it is scanned. And the more you do it the better you get
because you have more data to draw from when identifying structures. It gets
to the point where often I _want_ an author to be formulaic rather than
stylish and idiosyncratic because it makes it much quicker to reorganise and
internalise.

~~~
derleth
> It gets to the point where often I want an author to be formulaic rather
> than stylish and idiosyncratic because it makes it much quicker to
> reorganise and internalise.

Hence legalese, and bureaucratese, and any number of other things that get
laughed at and railed against in equal measure.

~~~
JDGM
Excellent point. I rarely think of those as standardised structural
conventions for clearly and efficiently conveying meaning to those acquainted
with the terms and, to my shame, usually write them off as obfuscating
functions to mislead or confuse. Not so!

------
CurtMonash
Obviously, you get your best speeds when you're just accepting the text
uncriticially. If you stop to think about it, you won't hit top speeds.

Beyond that, you can certainly train for optimal eye movement, local or global
optimum as the case may be. After I took speed-reading, I knew not to look
directly at the very ends of lines, and I found it more comfortable to center
my eyes on white space than on actual text.

IIRC, I tested up to 800 WPM, but that was on grade-appropriate material in a
high school I found easy.

(Of course, this was all in the 1970s, when what one read was black text in a
familiar font in neat rows on white paper, all at least somewhat thoughtfully
arranged. Things are different now ...)

My best real-life estimates of my reading speed was in the 400 words a minute
range, with sub-vocalization. E.g., I have a few times read 3 novels the same
day, most memorably 2 days before my PhD qualifying exams. (One day
beforehand, I crammed like mad. :D One hour beforehand, I led my fellow
students in the most awkward game of frisbee ever.)

But it all depends on the material, and the approach to reading it. E.g.,
there are certain chapter subsections of Hormander's book on Analysis of
Several Complex Variables that famously take a week or more each to "read".

And yes -- I subvocalize.

~~~
joe5150
"(Of course, this was all in the 1970s, when what one read was black text in a
familiar font in neat rows on white paper, all at least somewhat thoughtfully
arranged. Things are different now ...)"

Different how?

~~~
Anderkent
Nowadays one mostly reads online. Adds, adds everywhere.

~~~
joe5150
I thought CurtMonash was referring to books nowadays, and I must disagree with
him if he's suggesting that typesetting, book design and the quality of book
production was better in the 1970s than it is today.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Yes, it is possible, I do it, but not as good as I would like. You could read
a book in twenty minutes as if it was a video with better comprehension that
reading it slowly(as most of the brain disconnects with such a low bandwidth).

When you speed read you train your eyes to look over a wide area and you are
able to read several lines at the same time and train the brain to make sense
of it(use the subconscious to store-order the lines automatically).

So the best thing you could do is to control the formatting, so text is always
the same size and always organized the same way, so if you force your brain to
make sense of it, it does after time.

The best structure is newspaper-like text, lots of columns, small lines so
your brain could make sense of entire sentences with just an eye shot.

It does not work with Hacker News, or most of the web by the way as each
format is different and content is scrolled, with wide lines, not paginated.

It works really well when you could control the formatting, aka non DRM text
you could interpret with your own software, but if you try to sell this
software you will have problems when even blind people are not permitted to
modify copyrighted text.

------
tokenadult
Wow. That was well worth a read, at whatever reading speed gives you full
comprehension. The author did a good job of reading the previous scientific
literature on the subject, and relating important issues to one another. He
examined both historical claims (supposed world records of reading speed) and
scientific claims (statements about how people read in general).

I read quite a few books about speed-reading when I was a university student
in the early 1970s, putting the techniques to the test while taking courses in
linguistics, foreign languages, history of technology, and Japanese literature
in English translation. There are a number of good books about how to improve
reading skills, with various levels of credulity about "speed-reading" claims.
After my own research and experience, I have to agree with the paragraphs in
the article submitted here based on more recent research:

"Ronald Carver, author of the 1990 book _The Causes of High and Low Reading
Achievement,_ is one researcher who has 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 Rayner 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."

I figure that my comfortable, steady reading speed in materials on a wide
variety of subjects at an upper-division undergraduate to graduate school
level is about 500 words per minute, with good comprehension. I plainly don't
need "tl;dr" summaries of articles submitted to HN as often as many HN
participants ask for those. (To be sure, many HN participants read English as
a second language, and we should admire people who come here to participate in
a second language, something very few Americans could do in a non-English-
language online community.) I definitely read more slowly and with less
comprehension on the first pass in Chinese or in German, my two strongest
languages for second-language reading, but I have read whole books in both of
those languages for fun or for research. I have diminishing ability to read
other languages that are mentioned in my user profile here.

tl;dr: Don't worry about fancy eye movements too much, and don't worry about
subvocalization too much. Just read steadily and think about what you are
reading while you are reading it for best memory of what you read and best
comprehension of what the author was trying to say. Building up your
vocabulary--by more reading, of course--is the best way to build up your
reading speed.

AFTER EDIT: The claim in another subthread here is specifically WRONG that
Chinese constitutes any kind of proof about subvocalization. I'm not
committing to a position on whether or not subvocalization, as defined by
throat muscle movements, always occurs in reading, but I know from the books
_Visible Speech_ by John DeFrancis (a scholar of Chinese)

[http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-
Comp...](http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-
Comparisons/dp/0824812077)

and _Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention_ by
Stanislas Dehaene (a neuroscientist who does brain imaging studies)

[http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-
Invent...](http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-
Invention/dp/B003H4RAOU/)

and from my own study of four different Sinitic modern languages (Mandarin,
Cantonese, Taiwanese, and Hakka) that all writing systems, properly so called,
are systems for writing out speech. Writing is based on speech everywhere in
the world and the Chinese writing system is full of clues that most written
characters are based on the SOUND of spoken morphemes.

How you might write the conversation

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎？

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話？

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even
to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin"
and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

~~~
nhebb
> Don't worry about fancy eye movements too much, and don't worry about
> subvocalization too much.

I took a speed reading class back in the 80's, and it focused on these
techniques. I gave up. I found that I was concentrating so much on trying to
move my finger fast and not subvocalize that I lost focus on the activity at
hand - reading.

I was an engineering major, and the techniques weren't practical for my
academic reading. When reading fiction and non-academic work, it took the joy
out of reading. What was the point of reading a novel fast if I didn't enjoy
it.

For my academic reading, i did a little self analysis. I found my biggest
hurdle to reading quickly with high comprehension was concentration. After
10-15 minutes my mind tended to wander. It's an endurance exercise, and my
brain is no marathon runner. So instead of trying to block out an hour or two
for reading, I would break it up into shorter stints and try to focus very
hard.

It turns out this works out well for reading programming books. I do not want
to read a full book front to back without going over to the computer and
trying it myself. Otherwise, you end the book thinking you understand
everything but realize that stuff way back in chapter 3 is a bit fuzzy.

~~~
frobozz
> When reading fiction and non-academic work, it took the joy out of reading.
> What was the point of reading a novel fast if I didn't enjoy it.

Agreed. Personally, I think that if you don't subvocalize at least the
dialogue in a novel, you're missing out.

------
sesqu
I checked the link to The Straight Dope about the reading comprehension tests
they had conducted; turns out they hadn't conducted one at all. So I guess the
author didn't read slow enough before writing.

------
logn
I've discovered a few things about reading speed in my experience.

1) When I read fiction by good authors, I take great delight in reading their
sentences, so I slow down drastically to take every word and piece of
punctuation in.

2) Reading speed improves with practice.

3) Read smarter: if you don't need 100% comprehension then read topic
sentences of paragraphs carefully then skim the rest of the paragraph for
details you think are useful. And in news stories, they follow the "inverted
pyramid" for paragraphs meaning that they're ordered such that the first
paragraph is the most important, second one is second most important, etc. So
you can stop reading at any time.

4) Choose a column width that suits you. A lot of time is spent on line
transitions. Smaller columns makes this easier which you can control via your
window size.

------
camelite
I read this at 800 wpm (adjust this down @ 10-20% if a test I did a while back
still stands) fairly comfortably using <http://www.spreeder.com/app.php>. I
find it very much easier to stay "in the zone" using it.

~~~
hackerpolicy
This is called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentation)).
After a few hours (or minutes) you start to identify the drawbacks presented
in the wiki.

~~~
camelite
Yeah I should probably add, I've only used it intermittently. For whatever
reason I don't find it comfortable enough to replace regular reading. It works
best for articles and the like where I want to actively extract information or
quickly ascertain quality.

------
brass9
Speaking of speed reading, the current layout of HN is not optimal for
reading. Main content width is way too long which makes of long sentences.
Font size is too small - so you're forced to zoom in.

Perhaps PG could think about improving readability of the site.

------
daven11
I did a speed reading course when I started uni and yes it does work. A lot of
stuff is bad habits - some others have mentioned, sub vocalisation, keeping
your eye in the middle of the page and read with your peripheral vision,
obvious stuff - don't slide your finger along the page, don't use a ruler
(some do) and so on. I improved my reading and comprehension quite a lot, but
find I turn it off when reading for pleasure versus reading to extract facts.
It's well worth doing - even if it only increases your reading speed 10 or
20%. [edit: How to skim read was another useful tool]

~~~
No1
"don't slide your finger along the page"

Interesting, most speed reading techniques teach the opposite and condition
you to move your fingers along the page.

------
aaron695
I did a speed reading course in high school and often wondered if it was a
scam.

Not a scam, scam more a motivational speaker/Eat less exercise more style
scam. If you followed it through it would work but almost no one follows
through hence the course/advice becomes bunk.

For instance one thing we were taught was to first skim the book/chapter
really quick then read it 'properly'

Makes sense to me, but I never do it.

People do have different reading speed levels and I don't think it's all
innate so I don't think it a crap idea.

I would agree that maybe the teaching is currently more based around customers
and less about pedagogy though.

------
Claudus
When I was younger I took a reading test and scored just over 1,000 words per
minute with 100% retention.

I remember reading an article that there were 3 types of readers.

Readers who sub-vocalize the words

Readers who "hear" the words

Readers who "see" words

Not sure if that's an accurate assessment, but I definitely don't sub-
vocalize. If I sub-vocalized, I think would at least some general idea how to
pronounce unusual character names from fantasy novels. I couldn't have even
tried to pronounce most of the character names in Lord of the Rings,
immediately after reading it but I could recognize the name patterns if I saw
them.

~~~
diminoten
I am very much a sub-vocalizer, and I have _no_ idea how to pronounce a lot of
fantasy words. What I find I do is I just don't sub-vocalize that word. I
don't even think about it, I just don't have a way of pronouncing the word, so
I "skip" it. Subsequently, I honestly couldn't tell you, were we to have a
conversation about that story, what that word was. My comprehension of names I
can't sub-vocalize is dismal compared to my comprehension of a) names I can
and b) larger story concepts and whatnot that I can largely sub-vocalize.

When reading Crime and Punishment in school, I remember specifically saying,
"I have no idea how to pronounce a whole bunch of stuff in here and I'm going
to need to talk about it, so I'm going to specifically come up with a
pronunciation." Without that conscious effort, I simply wouldn't have tried to
vocalize the names whatsoever, despite that being my standard method of
reading.

And to be clear, I _can_ not sub-vocalize, but it's just... uncomfortable.

------
Inufu
I think speed reading is most useful when you are reading some text where only
parts are relevant or new to you. By quickly reading those, you can focus on
the important pieces and spend more time to think about them.

Interestingly, the faster I read, the less I'm able to "filter" the
information I read about, it seems almost as if my brain absorbs it directly.
That means that I'd never speed read content that might contain bad memes or
false information: political propaganda, religious texts, etc.

Does anyone know a good test for reading speed (including comprehension)?

~~~
simonbarker87
This book did in fact double my reading speed in 1 hour and there are 2 nice
tests in the back which can help calculate you reading speed and also
comprehension

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Speed-Reading-Double-Triple-
ebook/dp...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Speed-Reading-Double-Triple-
ebook/dp/B008J2MMWU)

~~~
xenonite
how ironic.

------
sp4rki
I've been a bookworm from early age and even though I slow down when the
material is highly technical and requires better comprehension I don't find
the words being repeated in my head. As a matter of fact, while reading I find
that while I do talk in my head, I might summarize or ask myself questions
about a paragraph (stuff like: "Don't believe. Rem. check refs", like I did a
few times in this article), as opposed to repeating the words I'm reading. The
only moment I find I'm repeating words mentally or sub-vocalizing is when I'm
writing, and I believe I do so to get the underlying tone of what I'm writing.

When I read a novel, I tend to want to spend more time immersing in the world
and the events in it. While I slow myself down in this case, I tend to make
images in my head while reading and I've found that it becomes inherently
harder to do if I'm subvocalizing... it removes focus from the imagination
side of things for me. I don't really believe that it's impossible to read
without subvocalization.

In any case, one of the tricks I use to speed read at a moderate speed (as
opposed to skimming) is to black out mentally everything but the current line
and process it as a whole. It works like imagining a rectangle enclosing the
current line. Works wonders for me taking into account I'm the fastest reading
person in my social circles.

------
Granitas
there are plenty of books around this topic. In short there are a at least 4
ways speed reading that you use for different materials. As the other comment
pointed out the 1st thing you have to do is stop vocalizing what you read,
then you need to learn vocabulary so you would know all of the words without
putting much thought to it.

speed reading can really be a game changer, I used to get bored of books
myself, but when I can read faster the experience seem to be way more
enjoyable!

~~~
jibbirish
But do you experience the same limits as stated on Skeptoid? Are your reading
at 500-600 words per minute, with full comprehension, or even faster?

~~~
StavrosK
I can read pretty quickly (I've never really measured, but it takes me about a
minute to read a page, which I guess is around 500 words). Depending on the
text, though, there's a lot of slowing down or re-reading. I read Harry Potter
pretty quickly, but "Thinking: Fast and Slow" is nowhere near at the same
pace.

~~~
realsuperman
Yes, a lot of times speeds keep on varying. It depends a lot on the type of
book that you're reading. For the rest, it's inherent abilities that assist.

------
btipling
I worry more about the quality of my comprehension than the speed at which I
read. I"d rather take ages and get a good understanding than speed up the pace
at which I read. Depth over breadth any time. In product features, in overall
understanding, in capability, in testing, art, in all things life. This is
akin to a get rich quick scheme, do things on the cheap, doing more with less.
You can only do less with less.

------
tjbiddle
I'd argue with a few points made in this article. Subvocalization can most
definitely be minimized - Not removed completely, but minimized. The article
brought out a study from NASA stating that there were minute muscle movements,
which I would believe - but if you can minimize it to a dull effect, can
drastically improve your speed of reading.

As with "fancy eye movements" as some have claimed it - Whether they have much
of a help, I'm not sure. Personally I generally read with my right eye, and my
left eye tails a fraction of a second behind which generally helps pick up a
few details I may have missed - But I notice I have trouble with this if a
page's width is too large (HN has a fairly large width and I will read much
faster if I make the window smaller). Anything more than that seems as if it
would be fairly difficult - But I haven't read into the various techniques.

Can you learn to read at the crazy speeds mentioned in the article? Probably
not. Speeding your reading up though seems definitely plausible - At least it
_seems_ to work for me, but I can't draw a very good conclusion from just
myself in the sample.

------
goldfeld
I used the coursebook Breakthrough Speedreading successfully in teaching
myself the technique a number of years ago. Though all arguments here about
nuance and critical thinking also were nagging in the back of my mind then,
the actual reason that made me drop it was actually reading another book on an
unusual technique: Relearning to See on the Bates method.

The Bates Method emphasizes that one of the worst offenders to natural vision
is staring, or the act of fixing a point and relying on peripheral vision to
capture a much bigger area. Relearning to See is in big part about relearning
to skip, like animals do, when they constantly move their eyes and heads to
scan the environment or an object. And speedreading was at odds with this,
because it emphasized you should fix your vision on some center point in the
page and allow your peripheral vision to gobble up the surrounding text, and
you need not even do it sequentially, you should get to the point where you
"understand" the image of the page as a whole. That's the bill, anyway. So I
opted for natural vision (and comprehension).

------
msutherl
As I was reading this article, I used the SpeakIt! Chrome Extension[1] with
the native voice setting to gauge how fast the quoted speeds actually are.

For me, 800 wpm was about the limit of how fast I could read while still
understanding most of it. That's the '4x' setting. The '2x' setting is 400
wpm, which based on the article and my experience is a good target reading
speed.

It's not entirely perfect because the rhythm imposed by the text-to-speech
engine is not optimal for fast reading – it pauses when you don't need a pause
and powers through complex sections, but I found it an interesting exercise
nonetheless.

Lately I do most of my reading by listening to audiobooks. The last two books
I read, I experimented with the 2x speed setting on the iPhone. It took a few
minutes to get used to, but now I can't recommend it highly enough. Now I can
get through audiobooks in half the time and I've totally adjusted to the
butchered sound quality.

[1]:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speakit/pgeolalili...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/speakit/pgeolalilifpodheeocdmbhehgnkkbak?hl=en)

------
KennethMyers
Anecdotal personal stuff: I learned to stop subvocalizing in grad school. I
had no idea it was a canonical speed reading strategy. I can read really fast
now, with unimpeded comprehension.

Common sense stuff: The author says that scientists say that reading without
subvocalization is impossible. The fact that deaf people can read is extremely
inconvenient for this theory. Seriously, man?

------
npsimons
It's funny this comes up here and now, as I am working through "How to Read a
Book", which was in one of the recommended reading threads on HN recently. In
HtRaB, they talk a little about speed reading, but dismiss it as mainly
something that can help bring someone up to speed, ie, it is mainly helpful in
a remedial sense. I think the commentary with comprehension is quite cogent
(it's precisely why I'm reading HtRaB), and so therefore the discussion should
turn to what to read, since time is limited. Again, I am grateful to previous
threads on HN for pointing out good reads, and feel that a more considered
approach to how time is spent (both in what is chosen to be done and how well
it is done), rather than in how quickly something is done is most beneficial.

------
gnosis
There's another Ronald Carver book called _"Reading rate : a review of
research and theory"_ , which comes to the conclusion that speed reading
doesn't work.

People can skim at faster rates than they can when reading with full
comprehension, but then their comprehension will suffer. You can learn to
skim, to take notes, to get quick overviews of whatever you're reading by
noting things like chapter and section headings and by reading for the main
ideas of sections and paragraphs.

These are all useful skills. But they are a far cry from being to read every
single word in the text with full comprehension, and doing that at a
significantly faster rate than normal. This latter achievement is something
there is little or no evidence of.

~~~
r0s
> read every single word in the text with full comprehension

Some would say this is impossible and unnecessary.

------
loopdoend
The whole eye-moving thing is a complete waste of time and effort. The real
trick to speed reading is RSVP[1], rapid serial visual presentation.

In RSVP the words or small groups of words are flashed in extremely fast
succession without the need for the reader to move their eyes at all.

I use iRSVP on my iPhone to read books from my Calibre library and my reading
speed has never been higher. It's not for everyone and requires a high degree
of concentration, but it enables me to read and understand books much faster
that I would have been able to otherwise.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentation)

~~~
abentspoon
If you've had good luck with RSVP on your phone, I built a RSVP
bookmarklette[1] a while back for reading articles on the web. I never had
much luck reading with it, but it might be useful if RSVP works for you.

[1] <http://qwerjk.com/force-feed>

------
Tichy
Wondering about subvocalization, what about reading in a language I never
learned to speak?

~~~
batgaijin
unless it used an alphabet you don't know how to pronounce that's impossible.

~~~
StavrosK
What's impossible? Reading without subvocalization? I do it all the time.

------
hexagonc
I agree with the conclusion that improving reading comprehension is the best
way to improve reading speed, at least for me. There are two things I learned
from my stuttered attempts at speed reading: (1) The best way to increase
reading speed for me is to simply stop re-reading sentences that I already
read. I do this unconsciously usually because I didn't fully understand the
sentence the first time. Better reading comprehension reduces this. (2)
Attempting to speed read is probably a waste of time for me because most of
the material I read is technical, so comprehension is usually the bottleneck
to getting through the material, anyway.

------
Mz
Different people have different minds/brains. My ex read so fast that trying
speed reading techniques slowed him down. I read ridiculously slowly for
someone who was in a lot of gifted classes. I tried speed reading techniques.
I was able to read faster. I hated it and went back to my snails pace
voluntarily. I read with good comprehension, but, yes, I "say" everything
mentally.

My oldest son also reads shockingly fast. When I began watching him play
videogames, he flipped through dialogue so fast I could not read it. I thought
he was just skipping familiar parts. Nope. He just reads that fast. He has to
slow down if he wants to include me.

------
Tycho
I have 3 thoughts on speed reading

1\. Speed reading fiction is about as sensible as watching movies in fast
forward.

2\. Speed reading non-fiction will not lead to much formation of conceptual
knowledge in your brain, and definitely not the sort of rich inter-connected
learning that we probably read for in the first place.

3\. Speed reading where you develop a sixth sense for which parts of, say, an
academic paper you should slow down and read carefully could probably be a
good thing.

In general, while I used to think there was some sort of prestige attached to
how much / how fast you could read, I don't think that anymore. It's how
'deeply' you read that counts.

------
lius0035
I once heard a talk by an top government official who says she has to read a
briefing book of hundreds of pages every single day from 10p.m. to maybe 1a.m.
Of course, They skim a lot and they probably know a lot about the issues
already but still they must read at a much higher speed than a college kid to
finish that kind of reading assignment every day, right?

I know some people who read a book a day and I can't do it a week, and none of
them need to advocate their reading speed. They must read a few times faster I
do, I think.

Does anybody here read new texts, with no skimming and a decent comprehension
at 1000wpm?

------
fauigerzigerk
How do deaf (since birth) people subvocalize?

~~~
blowski
Studies have suggested that some do, some don't. The more deaf you are, the
less likely you are to subvocalise.

Totally not an expert in this area, but I think everybody associates more than
just the sound of the word - movement of lips, memories, and other senses are
also involved. Deaf people can obviously acquire those 'subvocalisations'
instead.

[http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8PhwXf9uj1IC&pg=PA114...](http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8PhwXf9uj1IC&pg=PA114&lpg=PA114&dq=deaf+subvocalization&source=bl&ots=ZzKLbj_KCD&sig=204yVPfW8uNexHCO2M1-fby5kVk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fE8rUeGZLsqR4ASE5IGgAw&ved=0CGwQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=deaf%20subvocalization&f=false)

------
ericb
Around 5th-7th grade, I was in advanced reading and part of a speed reading
training class/experiment. It still all seems a bit odd to me. A woman came in
a couple times a week with a special projector that projected a book on the
screen, but using a rapidly moving light, only showed a few words at a time on
the screen. Each week the light moved faster. This was followed by
comprehension tests.

I read about 30% faster than most people, but I have no idea if this is really
why. Was anyone else a guinea pig? This was in Central NY in the 80's.

------
taeric
So, whenever I think of the subvocalization debate, I immediately see this
video. The basic idea was, do not presume that everyone does the same thing
you do in order to achieve the same goal.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL273BA8C6E484C988&fe...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL273BA8C6E484C988&feature=player_detailpage&v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y#t=148s)

In other words, I find it hard to believe a claim that subvocalization is
required across the board. At least, at an absolute level.

~~~
ax_
Feynman is not talking about subvocalization in that video.

He's talking about seeing and hearing. According to psychology, humans have
two sets of "short-term memorybuffers"; spatio-visual, and auditory. It is
perfectly possible to do two tasks at once, as long as you use different
"buffers". Like juggling and singing.

But to be able to comprehend text, it needs to go through the linguistic
centre. It doesn't matter if it goes through the spatio-visual or auditory
sensors. Subvocalization is created by the linguistic centre.

Simple words or numbers do not need to go through the linguistic centre. So it
is perfectly possible to comprehend text and at the same time count if you
"see"/"hear" text and "hear"/"see" counting. But you cannot comprehend two
advanced texts at once.

~~~
taeric
Hmm... I can obviously not claim you are wrong. But I do find the difference
between internally hearing something and "subvocalization" tough to
distinguish.

And, my entire point was that reading is different to different people. So...
it may well be that many folks can not speed read. Might even be the case that
most speed readers are not as good as they believe. Still, to see the numbers
in this, 600wpm with 75% retention sounds ridiculously fast and not too shabby
on the retention. So... yeah?

------
hmsimha
After reading this very informative article, it occurred to me that developers
of new tools that will be built upon heavily would do well to try to think of
names that can be vocalized in one or two syllables. Reading the name PHP or
the mouthful WYSIWYG should take longer than words such as C or Java or SCRUMM
or perl if we are indeed vocalizing them. Perhaps the convention of adding www
to the beginning of website names has had a substantial impact on the
efficiency of web navigation?

------
emiliobumachar
It's really up to the text. When I read math or comuputer science papers, I
have to read slowly, and a few times over, to get any comprehension, even from
the non-formula prose.

------
e12e
I wonder if NASA has done comparative studies on native vs foreign language
wrt sub-vocalization and reading/speed reading ?

It is rather well known that native language and (all) foreign languages are
"stored" in separate parts of the brain (with some limited controversy over
whether there exists "bilingual" people in a biological sense).

I wonder if that has an effect on how we read written text (other than that
most people presumably read faster and with better comprehension in their
native tongue).

------
daralthus
Good speed reading courses and books not only teach you how to skim faster and
not to subvocalize but how to comprehend and learn better. For example in Paul
R. Scheele's book he teaches you how to start on a book:

read the table of contents,

then read the headlines through the book,

then speed read the book and then try to probe your comprehension, ask
questions etc.

The table of contents and the probing is the most important. Teaches you
recursive learning, when you first build a foundation then you fill out the
details.

------
Raz0rblade
I also use spead reading once in a while. I can read realy fast going through
large documents To be able to find something quickly I once got a huge
document on my desk 3400 pages, and i had to decide if we would do that
project, please try to read it. To their surprice i fineshed reading and
pointed them on the hard parts of it, they never thought anyone would be able
to read the entire doc in just a few hours for the deadline.

------
emhart
Around the point in the article describing the eye movements required for
reading, I experienced a weird anxiety as I attempted to both perceive my own
eye movements and consume more of the text. After a few sentences it actually
became uncomfortable. Gave me the impression that implementing speed reading
strategies would be dubious for me, personally.

~~~
mistercow
I have this sort of problem all the time, and I wonder if it is due to a
Problem. For example, if I become aware of my blinking (like if someone does
the "manual blinking" trick on me ... ... damn it), then I become anxious and
uncomfortable until I can be sufficiently distracted from thinking about it.

Another one is eye contact; I generally don't have a problem making eye
contact during conversation, but if I start _thinking_ about it, I become
aware that I can only look at one eye at a time and, I get a similar feeling
of anxiety and discomfort. I can't decide whether to focus on one eye, switch
between them (and at what rate?), or stare past the person, "magic eye" style
so they look like a triclops.

~~~
emhart
Hah, the triclops comment made me chuckle. And don't read too much into this,
as I doubt it is at all an appropriate indicator, but I should disclose that I
actually have an anxiety disorder. Particularly in conversation I will sort
through conversational trees and actively analyze the dialog I am having, as
it is happening.

It can be both maddening and very useful. But more than anything it makes you
realize how comfortable you are with those closest to you, because all that
overlaid mapping and planning fades away into actual casual conversation.

Veering far off topic now though!

~~~
mistercow
Interesting. I also have an anxiety disorder, so maybe there is some
relationship there. We just need someone neurotypical to chime in and tell us
whether it happens to them too.

------
gordaco
I'm surprised about the bit about the subvocalization; I always thought that
brain speed was the number one limiting factor.

~~~
jibbirish
I have had a few workshops on speed reading at my university, and what those
guys said about subvocalization was something along the lines of: We learn to
read when we are about 6 years old, how do we learn this? By sitting in a
classroom and reading out aloud a simple text, with the entire class at once.
In this stage we start to connect reading with subvocalization, when we learn
to read better the teacher tells us to 'read in our heads'. Meaning that you
are still sub vocalizing. This is a limiting factor as one can (presumably)
only speak around a maximum of 500-600 words per minute. Coincidentally, this
is the maximum speed for which we can read with a high comprehension according
to skeptoid.

I personally never thought much of the guys giving the speedreading workshops,
they seemed to be acting and came across like secondhand car dealers. Their
claims of comprehension with over 1500 words / minute just sound insane. The
techniques however are not all nonsense, and I do believe that I have learned
to increase my reading speed from +/- 300 to around 500 words per minute.

The most important lesson they thought was 'guiding your eyes'. Our eyes are
not that good in following a straight line by themselves, just try to stare
straightforward, and make a perfect circle with your eyes: it will more likely
be a pentagon or something. When we let our eyes follow our finger drawing a
circle however, it is a lot easier. Applying this to reading, simply means
using your finger or pen to follow each sentence on the paper. I find it a lot
faster to read that way, but I still let myself subvocalize the sentences, for
comprehension. Doing this on a 500-600 words/minute rate is a lot more
exhausting though, and I only use it for academic articles or textbooks.

------
X4
1) Silence the inner voice.

2) Don't fallback with your eyes, just re-read the entire sentence.

I can combine two lines I've read into a sentence while reading the next two
lines. It helps when I'm in an exam, or when looking for something in a
Website.

I heard of people who scan pages diagonally, which makes my envious :)

------
donniezazen
Besides sub-vocalization I tend to read loudly making full use of my oral
musculature. It helps me stay active, improves comprehension and retention. I
am not sure if it's a bad habit or just the way my brain works. Any of you
guys have same experience.

------
appleflaxen
Just a shout out for forcefeed - a javascript bookmarklet that lets you read
any web page without moving your eyes. I think it's incredibly helpful, even
if my comprehension isn't 100%.

~~~
davidje
link? thanks

------
coldtea
Yes, if you don't value what you read and just want to get a quick idea of it.

It's not possible for actually _reading_ stuff.

Which reminds me of the Woody Allen quote:

― "I speed-read "War and Peace". It's about Russia, right?".

------
appleflaxen
Just a shout out for forcefeed - a javascript bookmarklet that lets you read
any web page without moving your eyes. I think it's incredibly helpful.

------
rahulroy
Is there any good speed reading online course?

~~~
mistercow
You are still looking for one after reading that article?

------
Executor
For a user of a speed reading CD (eye-Q), thank you for this info!

------
cafard
Not for me.

------
humanspecies
The text says it's been proven by NASA and several others that you can't
remove subvocalization, yet most speed reader comments here go on to say "yes
it works i removed subvocalization". It's obvious all these "speed readers"
didn't read a single line of this article.

~~~
daven11
depends what you mean by sub vocalisation - some people move their lips when
they read - this slows things down. You still read the words in your head - so
you could call that sub vocalisation - but don't move anything physical
(throat, mouth, tongue) - that slows you down.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
From the article:

Even skimmers subvocalize 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 subvocal system thinks of
phrases and talks to himself so quietly, it cannot be heard, but the tongue
and vocal chords do receive speech signals from the brain."

