Speed reading: does it work or not? Part 1
Can I read the “program for the summer” for the week and study the recommended literature for the exam in one night? We understand the question that has always been relevant to students.
/ Photo by Craig Sunter / CC
Each of us, on average, has time to read 200-400 words per minute, while “skorchetetsy”, according to their confessions, can increase this figure by 3-4 times (up to 1 000 or even 1,700 words per minute, respectively). Perhaps, one of the most famous skorchetets - US President John F. Kennedy. In his own words, he not only owned this skill and (by some estimates) read at a speed of 1,200 words per minute, but also sought to ensure that members of his team also learned speed reading and attended Evelyn Wood courses ( Evelyn Wood in the late 1950s In the 1990s, she developed the basics of speed reading teaching, which became the basis for her textbook and the “dynamic reading” school.
')
However, Kennedy's successes pale against the background of other speed reading stars - Kim Peek, the prototype of Dustin Hoffman’s hero from the film “Rain Man”, could read at a speed of 10,000 words per minute (8-10 seconds to a standard book turn). At the same time, he could “parallelize processes” - read two pages of a book at the same time. This amazing ability, however, was achieved not only (and not so much) by exercise: Peak was born with a congenital defect, which is characterized by the absence of a corpus callosum in the brain (this plexus of nerve fibers provides a link between the hemispheres of the brain) and therefore (according to some assumptions) hemispheres could process information independently of each other.
However, the record of 10,000 words per minute was broken. A 1963 American study reported that the reader was able to read more than 17,000 words per minute. The fastest reader in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records (1990 edition), was Howard Berg, who claimed to read books at a speed of 25,000 words per minute (an average of over 80 standard pages of text in 60 seconds ). Reading a book in this mode just looks like a quick page turning!
The results scored by the scribes are really amazing. Nevertheless, not all of them should be taken at face value - we will tell about this a bit later, but for now it’s worth finding out how fast reading differs from “ordinary reading”, and what researchers think about this.
Despite the fact that reading seems to us a continuous and smooth process, this is not quite the case. When reading, our eyes are fixed on a word or group of words (this takes about a quarter of a second). Then we look to the next group. Such spasmodic movements of gaze on the page are called “ saccades ” and in themselves take about one tenth of a second from us.
After several jumps, we again stop to “digest” the read phrase or sentence. It usually takes another 0.3-0.5 seconds. Therefore, Keith Rayner , a psycholinguist from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, acknowledged that most people who know how to read at a high school or student level and who read “for pleasure” do it at about the same speed — about 300 words per minute. .
Of course, with fast reading, we (most often) just look at the page in the same way, lingering on groups of words or symbols for a while. However, the techniques that are commonly used in speed reading are different from how “usually” the text is read. Some of the most popular speed reading techniques are superficial reading, text tracking, fast sequential visual presentation and some others.
Text tracking is one of the oldest techniques that speeds up the reading process. In its simplest form, this is the use of a pointer (finger, ruler), which must be led along lines (somewhat reminiscent of how children learn to read). More complex variations on the topic of tracking the text also suggest the search for specific keywords, which (according to adherents of this methodology) helps to further speed up the process.
Fast sequential visual presentation (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) is a method that is more often used in modern speed reading programs. It consists in the fact that the text is displayed on the device screen word for word. As learning grows, the speed of changing words on the screen (one of the most well-known examples of projects that teach this speed reading technique is Spritz ) [ about applications, projects and techniques that help you read, if not faster, then more qualitatively, we will describe in detail in the second part of the material ].
Superficial reading is, in fact, “looking through” the text, which helps to find the most important parts of it (keywords, theses) and weed out the excess, “complete” all the text in its part. Perhaps this speed reading technique causes the most debate.
Superficial reading is aimed primarily at "sifting" the text for unnecessary or unimportant information and does not imply reading the text as such. Therefore, according to some authors, it does not apply to speed reading, since it does not affect the speed of reading and does not allow to evaluate all the information presented in the text (according to research , our ability to perceive information when surface reading is noticeably lower than when reading in the normal mode).
Other authors, on the contrary, believe that almost all speed reading techniques are somehow related to superficial reading and sifting out of the “extra”:
The journalist Timothy Noah is not alone in his assumptions - he was also agreed with Keith Rayner, who was already familiar to us. His research, as well as the work of some other scientists, can be summarized as follows:
Reiner's conclusions are not groundless: the scientific work in which they were published, the author called "Eye movements in reading and processing information: results of 20 years of research" ( Eye movements in reading ). In this work, Reiner confirms that the proportion of people reading "at the college student level" (in this case it is meant that the subject has a basic education and can read not "by syllables"), falling in reading speeds in the interval from 200 to 400 words per minute is 95% (the average reading speed, again, is about 300 words per minute).
Few can read literally without significant loss of understanding of the meaning of the read. Consequently, speed reading techniques that promise to teach almost any person to read several times faster have one but very significant minus - they do not allow to fully understand the meaning of what is written:
Ronald Carver, author of The Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement (published in 1990) and professor of pedagogy and psychology at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, also actively engaged in the study of the speed of reading. He carefully studied the various techniques of "accelerating" reading and conducted a number of his own research. In particular, for testing he selected a group of 16 “superstars” of speed reading. It included both winners of speed reading contests and professionals, whose work duties included reading a large volume of texts (among them Fred Shapiro , columnist for New Yorker, and editor of a medical journal).
Carver suggested that test participants read excerpts from the Reader's Digest editions. It turned out that none of the subjects was able to read materials at a speed higher than 600 words per minute, while retaining sufficient (75% and higher) understanding of the content of the text. Of course, this is twice as fast as the standard reading speed, but up to tens of thousands of words per minute skorchetetsam was far away.
But maybe Carver gathered too small a group of volunteers? Or they were not sufficiently qualified in reading - after all, not everyone can set a world record. Such objections are quite reasonable, but this study gave reason to doubt the "over-achievements" of the industry, which at the time of testing has existed for several decades.
Unfortunately, the outstanding results of many skorchetets (with the exception of Kim Pick) are due to their ego, rather than real possibilities. All the same Carver notes that Kennedy's achievements in reality could have been more modest - most likely, he could read at a speed of 500-600 words per minute, and skim through the text - at a speed of about 1000 words per minute (although this is still two times faster than “normal” reading.
How then did the figure of 1200 words per minute appear? Biographer Kennedy Richard Reeves (Richard Reeves) believes that she was actually "taken from the ceiling" - so suggested one of the reporters of Time magazine, who worked in the White House. The reporter contacted the Evelyn Wood school, in which Kennedy studied fast reading, but did not receive the results of his final testing — it was not conducted, since Kennedy did not complete the course.
As for the other outstanding results, the 1963 study (the briefing case reading 17,040 words per minute) belongs to the category of unconfirmed data. At that time, specialized tests were not used to record achievements, and the results were based on the subject's self-assessment — which was unlikely to be accurate.
The same applies to the achievements of Howard Berg. According to Mark Pennington, a reading specialist, “The representatives of the Guinness Book of Records at that time were not fond of rechecking the records they published, and this record was not recorded by them personally. They took Berg to the word, and he probably just made up his record. ”
By the way, in 1998, Berg was brought to justice by the US Federal Trade Commission for “incorrect” and “misleading” marketing techniques associated with the sale of his products to improve reading speed. As a result, Berg was forbidden to advertise his product as “a system that allows anyone - a child, an adult, a person with a disability - to learn to read at a speed of 800 words per minute and above.”
We read discretely - we translate a glance from one group of words to another. Such jumps, or saccades, as well as the need to comprehend and talk to yourself about what you read, take up valuable time.
Speed reading is a combination of different mechanics that save time studying textual material (by reducing the number of movements with eyes on a line, the ability to create a mnemonic scheme of the material, and a number of other techniques).
Speed reading is different from normal reading - not only in “work mechanics”, but also because it is impossible to increase reading speed without losing the understanding of the text.
Super scores are usually the result of self-promotion . If you want to learn any speed reading technique, you should count on the fact that you can read at a speed of 500-600 words per minute without a significant loss of understanding of the text. The result of several thousand (or tens of thousands) words per minute is hardly achievable. But even 600 words per minute is twice as fast as the average reading speed of almost everyone who graduated from school or university.
In the second part of the material we will focus on what speed reading methods help save time and which have nothing to do with the physiology and real human capabilities. And also we will tell you what other methods and life hacking help to learn more from books and articles in less time.
PS Other materials from ITMO University:
/ Photo by Craig Sunter / CCFantastic features of "fast reading"
Each of us, on average, has time to read 200-400 words per minute, while “skorchetetsy”, according to their confessions, can increase this figure by 3-4 times (up to 1 000 or even 1,700 words per minute, respectively). Perhaps, one of the most famous skorchetets - US President John F. Kennedy. In his own words, he not only owned this skill and (by some estimates) read at a speed of 1,200 words per minute, but also sought to ensure that members of his team also learned speed reading and attended Evelyn Wood courses ( Evelyn Wood in the late 1950s In the 1990s, she developed the basics of speed reading teaching, which became the basis for her textbook and the “dynamic reading” school.
')
However, Kennedy's successes pale against the background of other speed reading stars - Kim Peek, the prototype of Dustin Hoffman’s hero from the film “Rain Man”, could read at a speed of 10,000 words per minute (8-10 seconds to a standard book turn). At the same time, he could “parallelize processes” - read two pages of a book at the same time. This amazing ability, however, was achieved not only (and not so much) by exercise: Peak was born with a congenital defect, which is characterized by the absence of a corpus callosum in the brain (this plexus of nerve fibers provides a link between the hemispheres of the brain) and therefore (according to some assumptions) hemispheres could process information independently of each other.
However, the record of 10,000 words per minute was broken. A 1963 American study reported that the reader was able to read more than 17,000 words per minute. The fastest reader in the world, according to the Guinness Book of Records (1990 edition), was Howard Berg, who claimed to read books at a speed of 25,000 words per minute (an average of over 80 standard pages of text in 60 seconds ). Reading a book in this mode just looks like a quick page turning!
The results scored by the scribes are really amazing. Nevertheless, not all of them should be taken at face value - we will tell about this a bit later, but for now it’s worth finding out how fast reading differs from “ordinary reading”, and what researchers think about this.
Reading and fast reading: what is the difference
Despite the fact that reading seems to us a continuous and smooth process, this is not quite the case. When reading, our eyes are fixed on a word or group of words (this takes about a quarter of a second). Then we look to the next group. Such spasmodic movements of gaze on the page are called “ saccades ” and in themselves take about one tenth of a second from us.
After several jumps, we again stop to “digest” the read phrase or sentence. It usually takes another 0.3-0.5 seconds. Therefore, Keith Rayner , a psycholinguist from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, acknowledged that most people who know how to read at a high school or student level and who read “for pleasure” do it at about the same speed — about 300 words per minute. .
How fast reading looks like
Of course, with fast reading, we (most often) just look at the page in the same way, lingering on groups of words or symbols for a while. However, the techniques that are commonly used in speed reading are different from how “usually” the text is read. Some of the most popular speed reading techniques are superficial reading, text tracking, fast sequential visual presentation and some others.
Text tracking is one of the oldest techniques that speeds up the reading process. In its simplest form, this is the use of a pointer (finger, ruler), which must be led along lines (somewhat reminiscent of how children learn to read). More complex variations on the topic of tracking the text also suggest the search for specific keywords, which (according to adherents of this methodology) helps to further speed up the process.
Fast sequential visual presentation (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) is a method that is more often used in modern speed reading programs. It consists in the fact that the text is displayed on the device screen word for word. As learning grows, the speed of changing words on the screen (one of the most well-known examples of projects that teach this speed reading technique is Spritz ) [ about applications, projects and techniques that help you read, if not faster, then more qualitatively, we will describe in detail in the second part of the material ].
Superficial reading is, in fact, “looking through” the text, which helps to find the most important parts of it (keywords, theses) and weed out the excess, “complete” all the text in its part. Perhaps this speed reading technique causes the most debate.
Superficial reading is aimed primarily at "sifting" the text for unnecessary or unimportant information and does not imply reading the text as such. Therefore, according to some authors, it does not apply to speed reading, since it does not affect the speed of reading and does not allow to evaluate all the information presented in the text (according to research , our ability to perceive information when surface reading is noticeably lower than when reading in the normal mode).
Other authors, on the contrary, believe that almost all speed reading techniques are somehow related to superficial reading and sifting out of the “extra”:
Looking through is not reading. If you have not previously read the text you are viewing, you will miss a lot of information. And fast reading courses teach precisely browsing, not reading, although (most of them) do not recognize it.
- Timothy Noah , writer, editor of Politico, lead author at Slate (2000–2011)
The journalist Timothy Noah is not alone in his assumptions - he was also agreed with Keith Rayner, who was already familiar to us. His research, as well as the work of some other scientists, can be summarized as follows:
Speed reading is not reading [whatever that means]
Reiner's conclusions are not groundless: the scientific work in which they were published, the author called "Eye movements in reading and processing information: results of 20 years of research" ( Eye movements in reading ). In this work, Reiner confirms that the proportion of people reading "at the college student level" (in this case it is meant that the subject has a basic education and can read not "by syllables"), falling in reading speeds in the interval from 200 to 400 words per minute is 95% (the average reading speed, again, is about 300 words per minute).
Few can read literally without significant loss of understanding of the meaning of the read. Consequently, speed reading techniques that promise to teach almost any person to read several times faster have one but very significant minus - they do not allow to fully understand the meaning of what is written:
I finished the speed reading courses — we were forced to drive along the pages — and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. There is something about Russia
- Woody Allen
Ronald Carver, author of The Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement (published in 1990) and professor of pedagogy and psychology at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, also actively engaged in the study of the speed of reading. He carefully studied the various techniques of "accelerating" reading and conducted a number of his own research. In particular, for testing he selected a group of 16 “superstars” of speed reading. It included both winners of speed reading contests and professionals, whose work duties included reading a large volume of texts (among them Fred Shapiro , columnist for New Yorker, and editor of a medical journal).
Carver suggested that test participants read excerpts from the Reader's Digest editions. It turned out that none of the subjects was able to read materials at a speed higher than 600 words per minute, while retaining sufficient (75% and higher) understanding of the content of the text. Of course, this is twice as fast as the standard reading speed, but up to tens of thousands of words per minute skorchetetsam was far away.
But maybe Carver gathered too small a group of volunteers? Or they were not sufficiently qualified in reading - after all, not everyone can set a world record. Such objections are quite reasonable, but this study gave reason to doubt the "over-achievements" of the industry, which at the time of testing has existed for several decades.
What is behind the impressive results scorchtetsov
Unfortunately, the outstanding results of many skorchetets (with the exception of Kim Pick) are due to their ego, rather than real possibilities. All the same Carver notes that Kennedy's achievements in reality could have been more modest - most likely, he could read at a speed of 500-600 words per minute, and skim through the text - at a speed of about 1000 words per minute (although this is still two times faster than “normal” reading.
How then did the figure of 1200 words per minute appear? Biographer Kennedy Richard Reeves (Richard Reeves) believes that she was actually "taken from the ceiling" - so suggested one of the reporters of Time magazine, who worked in the White House. The reporter contacted the Evelyn Wood school, in which Kennedy studied fast reading, but did not receive the results of his final testing — it was not conducted, since Kennedy did not complete the course.
As for the other outstanding results, the 1963 study (the briefing case reading 17,040 words per minute) belongs to the category of unconfirmed data. At that time, specialized tests were not used to record achievements, and the results were based on the subject's self-assessment — which was unlikely to be accurate.
The same applies to the achievements of Howard Berg. According to Mark Pennington, a reading specialist, “The representatives of the Guinness Book of Records at that time were not fond of rechecking the records they published, and this record was not recorded by them personally. They took Berg to the word, and he probably just made up his record. ”
By the way, in 1998, Berg was brought to justice by the US Federal Trade Commission for “incorrect” and “misleading” marketing techniques associated with the sale of his products to improve reading speed. As a result, Berg was forbidden to advertise his product as “a system that allows anyone - a child, an adult, a person with a disability - to learn to read at a speed of 800 words per minute and above.”
So briefly:
We read discretely - we translate a glance from one group of words to another. Such jumps, or saccades, as well as the need to comprehend and talk to yourself about what you read, take up valuable time.
Speed reading is a combination of different mechanics that save time studying textual material (by reducing the number of movements with eyes on a line, the ability to create a mnemonic scheme of the material, and a number of other techniques).
Speed reading is different from normal reading - not only in “work mechanics”, but also because it is impossible to increase reading speed without losing the understanding of the text.
Super scores are usually the result of self-promotion . If you want to learn any speed reading technique, you should count on the fact that you can read at a speed of 500-600 words per minute without a significant loss of understanding of the text. The result of several thousand (or tens of thousands) words per minute is hardly achievable. But even 600 words per minute is twice as fast as the average reading speed of almost everyone who graduated from school or university.
In the second part of the material we will focus on what speed reading methods help save time and which have nothing to do with the physiology and real human capabilities. And also we will tell you what other methods and life hacking help to learn more from books and articles in less time.
PS Other materials from ITMO University:
- How technological entrepreneurship and science fiction are related
- Postgraduate Studies at ITMO University: the main thing about entering and studying in 2017
- Polymer holograms with “runaway” nanoparticles were developed by university scientists
- EMI life hacking: how to teach in English if you are not a native speaker
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/331270/
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