
Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes - kqr2
http://derrenbrownart.com/blog/2009/08/scientific-speed-reading-read-300-faster-20-minutes/
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codyrobbins
For a long time I was really into the idea of speed reading, and I worked
through one of the original books on it:

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/073520019X>

After a lot of practice I ultimately came to the conclusion that it doesn't
really work. I could 'read' the pages really fast, but it's not what I'd call
reading. It's skimming. Sure, the speed of fixation and regressions limit your
theoretical maximum reading speed, but — for me at least — the real bottleneck
was how fast I could understand what I was reading. You may be able to look at
10 pages of words per minute, but understanding 10 pages of material per
minute just doesn't really work.

Another thing I learned is that there's no good metric for what constitutes
'retention'. It's usually measured by making a list of how many 'things' you
can remember from what you read. It's arguable whether remembering a list of
words from what you've read relates in any meaningful way to whether you
comprehended what you read. Having the word 'scientific' in the title of the
article is misleading at best.

~~~
discojesus
_After a lot of practice I ultimately came to the conclusion that it doesn't
really work. I could 'read' the pages really fast, but it's not what I'd call
reading. It's skimming._

I believe this was shown in a study where experimenters gave reading
selections to self-proclaimed speed-readers without telling them that the text
was actually two separate texts mixed together (i.e. so that line 1 was from
book A, line 2 was from book B, line 3 from book A, and so on). The idea
being, of course, to see if they could really comprehend what they were
reading, since the fact that this was a jumbled mess would be apparent to any
careful reader within seconds.

Of course, the punchline is that none of the speed-readers even noticed it,
which should give some indication as to the level of comprehension that can be
achieved via speed-reading.

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tokenadult
I was just at my friendly public library, and saw this Woody Allen quotation
about speed-reading:

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

Any claim that a method of speed-reading is scientific should trigger interest
in testing how scientifically the reading speed and comprehension was
measured.

<http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html>

But for this claim here, maybe we can go right to the conclusion of the
expanded blog post

[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/07/30/speed-
readin...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-
accelerated-learning/)

to see that the claim is bogus:

"Final recommendations: If used for study, it is recommended that you not read
3 assignments in the time it would take you to read one, but rather, read the
same assignment 3 times for exposure and recall improvement, depending on
relevancy to testing."

On my part, I'd rather read three different writings about the same subject,
rather than the same writing three times, if I'm studying to thoroughly learn
a new subject. And I do that just fine with my current reading speed, which
allows me time to THINK as I read. (I did a lot of study of speed-reading
techniques when I was an undergraduate student, but ultimately concluded that
they get Woody-Allen-style results, and that other techniques for improved
studying work better.)

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figital
Read slower.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_reading>

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ntoshev
The bottleneck when I read is not the time it takes to recognize the words,
but the time to understand the ideas and relate them to my experience. It can
cost me an hour to read a page of a computer science research paper involving
enough mathematics.

~~~
antiform
In my experience, reading papers with math gets a lot faster as you get used
to the conventions. It used to take me almost a whole day to digest a single
math or CS paper in a field I was familiar with, but now I can get through a
couple in an afternoon, provided that I am not interrupted.

The "chunking" that you develop is like that in chess, or programming for that
matter. This seems to be one of the primary reasons why journals will reject
papers with unconventional notation. Unfortunately, the notation doesn't seem
to stay uniform across disciplines (math <-> physics) or even languages
(english <-> french) even when using the same mathematical structures.

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chaosmachine
The actual article is here:
[http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/07/30/speed-
readin...](http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/07/30/speed-reading-and-
accelerated-learning/)

~~~
furtivefelon
I don't actually think the two are exactly the same. Tim's blog talks about
how to read faster by increasing various parameters of conventional reading.
On the other hand, the article (mainly the video) talks about how to turn off
one particular mechanism (vocal cord) and utilize another (visual perception).
Both seems very nice techniques to try :D

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oscardelben
Ok, I studied speed reading a lot and you'll read 1000 words/minute by using
this method, but how will this method affect your memory? I remember
scientists suggesting to use multi sense while studying, so I wonder if this
method is actually cutting one sense.

Some speed readers are also suggesting to read the stuff one more time with
the time saved, but I don't see how this is smarter than going deep the first
time.

~~~
Retric
Several study's have shown you remember more with speed reading. Up to the
point where you are skipping content. The advantage seems to be pre-filtering
the useless content which let's you focus on the important details. You can
also make connections between larger sections of the text because it's fresher
in your memory.

~~~
Kolya
What are the names of the studies that demonstrate that?

~~~
Retric
Honestly, this is not my areas of research. My mother, who as a PHD in
education was vary clear on the point. Going from 100 WPM vs 400-500 WPM
increased average retention.

Maximum retention for history textbooks where people who skimmed the topic,
speed read the subject text, and then skimmed over it again. Slowing down was
not useful for retention but re reading even if skimming was useful. If you
are interested there was a fair amount of research into this in the 60's and
70's but, it's an outdated topic and I can't find anything on Google.

PS: I only learned this when asking for advice on how to study history
textbooks in collage. It's apparently a large and complex topic, but most of
the research is fairly old.

Edit:2 "Slow reading as a problem for learners has been defined by Brown &
Hirst (1983:140) as a "weakness independent of the purpose of reading",
involving the processing of information at such a slow rate that the reader is
unable to hold enough detail in short-term memory to permit decoding of the
overall message of the text"
<http://www.readingmatrix.com/articles/bell/article.pdf>.

Background Studies on that link has an overview.

~~~
lsc
does 400wpm really count as speed reading? christ. much slower than that and
you are moving your lips.

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discojesus
_It was tested with speakers of five languages, and even dyslexics were
conditioned to read technical material at more than 3,000 words-per-minute
(wpm), or 10 pages per minute. One page every 6 seconds_

Do we even need to officially call "bullshit" when Tim Ferriss posts
something, or is it just assumed now?

If you read 10 pages of technical material per minute, you will not have
anywhere _near_ as good an understanding of it as someone who read it slowly
and carefully. Reading dense technical material at this rate is almost
completely worthless (perhaps even worse than worthless, because there is a
non-zero probability of the reader fooling himself into thinking he actually
does understand it)

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KhuramMalik
I speed read the Tribes book by Seth Godin. That was my first ever speed-
reading attempt, and i have to say, it was rather exhausting, even though i
got through the book in just a few hours.

On the other hand, when ive used techniques from "How to read a book", the
process has been much slower but i've felt ive gotten a lot more from the book
on first read without having to go back a number of times. Its a pretty
difficult artform though.

~~~
agbell
Great suggestion. I just added "How to read a book" to my books to read list.

~~~
mtoledo
It is a great book, with a very disciplined method of reading. It makes
reading take too long though, and you'll get frustrated with how little books
you've read and start skipping steps and adapt your own reading method.

Well, that's what I did.

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jasonkester
But really, is it a _good_ thing that you can read "For Whom The Bell Tolls"
in 25 minutes? Do you really get the same benefit and enjoyment out of the
book from reading it that fast that I do when I soak it in over the span of a
week?

I read for pleasure, not for speed. I'll sometimes re-read a section of good
literature several times just to appreciate the turn of phrase. Scanning the
entire page in 5 seconds would completely remove that experience. It'd be like
swallowing a bar of 70% cocoa Spanish artisan chocolate in three bites. Why
would you do that?

So yeah, while I can appreciate that there are cases where you'd just want to
skim through something as quickly as possible to suck in some information, I
think I'll pass. Increasing my reading speed would actually lessen the
enjoyment I get from reading.

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teeja
Generally,the more worthwhile something is, the less we gain from skimming it.

Not that I thought that thermodynamics text was worthwhile.

On the other hand, skimming will sometimes get you to the good stuff. In the
case of Anathem, about 150 pages of skimming.

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JshWright
This is a fascinating visual example of a conversation I had with my wife the
other day. She referred to an "inner narrator", when reading, and was very
confused when I didn't understand what she meant. Apparently I've always done
this and never realized others didn't.

Note: I don't consider myself to be a "speed reader" by any stretch. I seem to
read about 50% faster than my wife if we're scrolling through text on a page
(judging by how often she complains I need to slow down ;), but I have no idea
how either of us compares to "average"

~~~
sophacles
I also do this naturally. I call it "reading a movie" and it works best for:
fiction, computer stuff, and to a lesser extend where I already have some
knowledge. It also works when I'm not tired. When I start 'reading words'
(your wife's inner narrator), I have to give up and stop for a while. When
reading new and difficult stuff I'll usually read each chunk[1] twice, once
for the words and once for the picture. This seems to be the best. I do notice
that I have an above average reading retention in my peer group, but at a
conceptual level. I am absolutely terrible at quoting, since the ideas are
transferred, not words.

Does the your experience match mine?

[1] The groupings can be a couple sentences or a couple of paragraphs per
chunk, depending on how unfamiliar I am with the topic.

~~~
salvadors
I also don't subvocalise when reading (repeating aeiou or 1234 to myself when
reading didn't slow me down at all), but I also don't form movies, or even
static images, when reading. I actually have no ability to visualise at all,
despite the claims in many medical textbooks that such ability is essential.
The first source I ever found that took this seriously was an Oliver Sachs
article in the New Yorker a few years back on on visual imagery in the blind,
where he revealed that he also has no "inner eye":
http:://www.truncheon.net/newyorker/20030728_sacks.html - scroll to "visual
imagery in the sighted"

I've also found that my retention is entirely conceptual — I soak up ideas,
but rarely remember the details. I never remember quotes, and with fiction I
often can't even remember the names of the main characters. I don't really
read much fiction, though. I particularly dislike books that go into huge
depth of description: like Tolkien who couldn't even mention walking past a
tree without taking 3 pages to describe it.

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tetha
Hm. I found it far more efficient to trim what you read instead of trying to
read faster.

At first, filtering at a paragraph level is something I found myself to do.
Usually, I just read the first few words of the sentences in the paragraph
(most of the time even just some sentences in the paragraph) until I mostly
see what the purpose of the paragraph is about ("Ah, he is telling me about
injective", for example). Once I know this, I either skip the entire paragraph
or read it slower and deeper.

Second, it is sometimes a good idea to rather start in the middle of something
and read to the end, just backpatching from the first chapters whatever you
still need. This works well if you are reading papers about things you are
familiar with. You usually just don't need those 12 definitions again, and
again, and again. I think, this is also what Knuth referred to as 'batch
reading' of papers (and it being much more efficient).

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capnshmapn
Since when does my larynx do a goddamn thing when I read silently?

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321abc
According to "Reading rate: a review of research and theory" by Ronald P.
Carver, speed reading (not to be confused with mere skimming) doesn't work.

See: [http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Rate-Review-Research-
Theory/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Rate-Review-Research-
Theory/dp/012162420X)

