Speed Reading

I've learned that one of my character traits (flaws/weaknesses/quirks), that I attribute to my addictive personality, is that I'll fixate on an interest for a few weeks (or months) and learn all there is to know (or all I'm interested in knowing) on the subject before I lose interest and move on. I don't know, maybe it's just mild ADD, but it's something I'm trying to level out in my life.

Any way, my latest fixation has been speed reading. I feel like I'm an OK reader, but I've always thought of myself as slow when it comes to reading. I also feel overwhelmed by the amount of books on my to-read list. Moreover there's a lot of things I want to learn, but I don't have the time to read all the materials necessary. If I could just double or triple my reading speed the problem would be solved amiright?

I spent quite a lot of time and energy studying and practicing speed reading. I downloaded programs and even wrote one of my own (which I may publish for free some day if I ever find the motivation to polish it up). But through all my efforts I've found more validation than results. It turns out that I was at the top of the average for speed and comprehension already (courtesy of this test). And I've learned, for a few other reasons, that I will rarely use speed reading.

I started out by scouring youtube.com for tutorial videos. After wading through all the I-want-to-sell-you-a-$500-course-even-though-you-can-find-it-for-free-elsewhere videos, I found about a dozen or so actually relevant tutorials. All the videos I watched had the same elements:

There are three main inhibitors to reading speed.

1. Fixation is the processes of focusing your eyes directly on each word. This can strain the eyes and it slows you down because your eyes can only move so fast. Instead you should move your eyes in a smooth linear fashion and take in groups of words using your peripheral vision as opposed to one word at a time.
2. Regression Regression is going back and re-reading a section of text that you feel compelled to for whatever reason.
3. Subvocalization or silent speech, is defined as the internal speech made when reading a word, thus allowing the reader to imagine the sound of the word as it is read (Carver 1990). This was the focus of all the speed reading materiel I've studied. There's varying degrees of this, from physically mouthing (or even whispering) the words, to simply hearing an inner voice narrate the words. The reason this is so important is that by subvocalizing each word you can only read as fast as you can speak. For most of us that's between 150 to 250 words per minute.

The methods used to fix these problems (I'll address why they're not really problems later) were all pretty much the same. For fixation and regression you simply move your finger from left to right under the line of text you're reading and follow it with your eye. This is to help pace your reading and stop you from moving your focus backwards. The drills include reading a passage of text as fast as you can with 100% comprehension while moving your finger under the text, and then re-reading the passage faster and faster and faster until you're comprehending about 30%. The theory is that you're training your eyes to move smoothly without fixating on any one word. It also helps suppress subvocalizing because you're looking at the words faster than you can say them in your head.

Other drills included counting to 10 repeatedly in your head while reading; or humming or biting your finger. All of these types of drills are to silence the internal voice or subvocalization. The best tutorials I've seen also include replacing subvocalization with subimaging which is visualizing scenes or words as images instead of words. The theory being that we process images much faster than the sounds of words. The common example is when you see a stop sign you don't say "stop" in your head, you just process the image for what it is.

So after reading and watching dozens of tutorials, and practicing the drills for a few weeks. I did start to see improvements but very minimal ones -- I went from 250~ words per minute to about 350~ wpm. Honestly that's not a bad improvement but the reading felt different. It felt more like skimming. It wasn't skimming though. I was actually reading and comprehending 100%~ of the materiel, but something felt off. (As a quick side note I did read an article that made the distinction between reading comprehension and recollection i.e. you can have 100% comprehension of what you're reading -- you understand it completely -- but when it comes to recalling that information you may fall short.) In an attempt to find what I was doing wrong I moved on to forums to see what other's experiences were. Which is where my journey has peacefully come to an end.

I was ultimately lead to this article which explains the history behind speed reading, and debunks many of the myths associated with it.

To be blunt, speed reading is probably not going to work for you and the training will be a waste of time.

LOL. When I read things like this, it just comes across as arrogant, and I usually view these negative statements as a challenge. So initially I was reading this article with a huge grain of salt. However the article as a whole articulated many thoughts and feelings that I was already having but hadn't yet formalized. For example, when it came to speed reading a novel (I practiced with a sci-fi book) I felt like I could comprehend all the events but the experience of the book was somehow different. It made the book feel dry, and I was almost convinced that it was just a bad book. Here's what the article says:

"Speed reading" fiction at high speeds does not work very well. This is because fiction focuses upon the emotional experiences. The human brain is simply not fast enough processing emotions to push the envelope. At best, a speed reader of fiction remembers an account of events, but does not have the experience that the author had in mind for the reader. Novels are best read in 'real time' to experience the moment.

For me this is exactly true. Speed reading a novel, at best takes the joy out of it, and at worst removes the emotion from the scenes in the book. If you think about it a book is in fact a narration, it's not a series of images -- that's called a movie! And attempting to speed through the narration really sucks the scenes dry. You simply don't have time to imagine the emotion behind the words, and experience the events from the characters points of view.

When it came to expensive software, I was less than impressed with the results. But to be honest at first I was excited. There's something exhilarating about being able to read words that are flashing in your face at a ridiculous speed. The problem was that while using the program I could read extremely fast but when it came to reading actual material outside of the program, I could at most read at half the speed as with the software. In essence I would have to plug every article I read into the program to make it effective. And again the wiki article explained this perfectly:

There are two different camps when it comes to speed reading software. One camp says it is the scourge of the earth and forces the student into "inorganic" reading methods that do not work (this author is in that camp). Real world reading material requires the reader to dynamically adapt to the material he or she is reading, and speed reading software forces a rigid pace on the reader. People who learn to speed read with software usually become dependent upon the software and have to unlearn everything they learned from the software and re-learn how to speed read all over again.

Real reading is an organic process that defies some machine trying to control your brain.

I got goose bumps when I read that, it's exactly what I was experiencing

The other main issue I've had is with reading groups of words together. Every time I attempt to do this my comprehension plummets. I abandoned those drills early on in the process.

Research indicates that only the words that were in focus and in the vision span that the eyes actually looked at could be components of answers in comprehension tests. Readers who attempted to take in too many words at a glance, or who tried to read so fast using finger pacing techniques that they tried to take in words using peripheral vision ultimately could not answer questions about the resulting garbled sentences involving the words not in direct line of sight.

Again I got goosebumps

I haven't totally written speed reading off as a whole yet. But I'm definitely approaching it from a new perspective. I feel like I've learned all there is to know about the theory of speed reading at this point (or all I care to know about it). And I have a more realistic expectation of it. I think at the end of the day what I gained from this whole experience was validation over results. What I mean by that is that I was already a proficient reader, I just didn't know it. I bought into the sales pitch, and the temptation to improve was too much to resist. That being said I think that with continued practice I could eventually reach 800+ wpm but I don't know how often I'll want to read that fast. I enjoy the emotional experience of becoming totally immersed in a good novel, which for me requires subvocalizing. And I knew from the start that I wasn't going to be reading technical materiel at break-neck speeds simply because of their complexity. So from the three types of materials I most often read: novels, technical blogs, and news articles; I will most likely only speed read through the news. Which honestly may not be worth the effort to develop the skill for.