Introducing Speed Reading

Have you ever thought about this – why did you never improve your reading speed since you were probably 10th or 12th? You can learn to run faster, you have learnt complex activities like swimming, releasing clutch as you accelerate, even dance salsa if you are interested – but despite spending thousands of hours reading since you were a kid, your reading speed does not improve. Why?

Is it because you have reached the maximum potential of your reading speed? This is the time for some statistics.

The fastest readers can read 1000 words per minute (wpm) or more with a very high level of comprehension, but they represent only 1% of the readers of English language. The majority of readers, however, reach around 200 wpm with a typical comprehension of 60%. Surprisingly, the fastest readers in the world are those who are both deaf and dumb – as the way they read is a little different from how most of us read and they are able to read at least 5 times faster than the average reader without any special training. We shall come back to how this is possible at a later stage in this article.

The good news is, if you are reading at 200-300 wpm like most college students, you can improve it drastically with minimal effort. How would you like if you can read twice or thrice faster? Imagine saving time during the competitive exams by reading way much faster than everyone else. Imagine finishing the reading that takes you 6 hours now in just 2 hours. And multiply the time you save everyday with the number of days you shall live more, and that should give you some idea of what benefits can speed reading bring for you.

Speed reading can be achieved through various practice exercises along with a sound understanding of how we read. While I shall introduce you to the concept and tell you some ways in which you can develop your reading speed, it is upto you to learn it and practice it after that. Knowing the secret of speed reading is only as useful as knowing the gymming regime of Salman Khan – it is really useful knowledge and privileged information to which few have access, but if you do not put it into practice in your own life despite knowing, it is not going to make any difference to you. No working out, no muscles – no practice, no speed reading ability.

Understand Reading

Reading involves two sorts of functions – seeing and processing the information inside your brain. It has been found that while our brain in incredibly fast in processing information, it is our seeing function in most cases that is slow and hinders reading really fast. In other words, the processing in the brain is fast, but the information input coming in is slow, so much so that our information processing capacity remains largely under-utilized. This also means the easiest way to improve your reading speed is to increase the speed at which you see.

Understand how we see when we read

Your eyes perform rapid movements from point to point as you read. Saccades are short rapid movements between each fixation point. Your eyes extract visual information only during a fixation. Each of the saccades ends with fixation, which is like a temporary snapshot of the text within your focus area. Each fixation will last 1/4 to 1/2 seconds if you are not trained in speed reading.

To demonstrate this, close one eye, place a fingertip on top of that eyelid, and then slowly scan a straight horizontal line with your other eye – you will be able to feel distinct and separate movements and periods of fixation.

When we ‘see’ a sentence, we are actually seeing many fixation points one after another – the number depends on how long the sentence is. There are three inefficiencies in the way an average reader sees a sentence: 

1. We do not see the fixation points along a straight line: What is the shortest distance between two points? A straight line between those points represent that distance. Naturally, we can read fastest when we see all the fixation points on a straight line. When our eyes move, however, in a zigzag movement instead of in a straight line from fixation point to fixation point, it takes a lot more time to read as our information input through seeing significantly slows down. 
2. We have low vision span with each fixation: The high speed readers can see more with one fixation point, thereby requiring fewer fixation points per line. This can be achieved through practices aimed at increasing your visual span. 
3. We keep regressing: Most readers trace back to see if they read something right, and whether they missed anything, even if they read everything perfectly OK. Most people identify this as a result of poor attention. The truth is that your brain registers what you are reading and things make sense soon enough if you keep reading instead of regressing. Regression is to be discarded and by doing this alone reading speed can increase upto 30%. Regression is just a bad habit – there are easy ways to overcome it, and we shall discuss those.

Finally – there is something also wrong with how most people process the visual information they receive in their brain. This is why the deaf and dumb can read way much faster. Our cognition of words happen like this: we first see the letters, then We form a sound inside our head. As We pronounce it, our brain recognizes the sound and associates the same with the concept the Word represents (meaning of the word). This is known as subvocalization. You can not read any text without pronouncing it – therefore your maximum speed of reading can be the fastest speed at which you can hear – the fastest speed at which the auditory part of the brain can distinctly recognize words. Therefore you see a Word, then your brain pronounces it, and then your brain understands the meaning. Compare this to seeing the picture of an apple – in that case your brain immediately recognizes the apple. It does not subvocalize to understand the word. Therefore, you can see pictures and understand them faster than you can read – think of watching movies. When you watch a movie, especially the scenes with exceptionally high number of visual stimuli like fight sequences, you get a lot of visual stimuli that you process very quickly.

Therefore, the ultimate goal of learning speed reading is breaking the subvocalization paradigm. this is why deaf and dumb students read way much faster than the average students, they never learn to pronounce Words, and therefore they learn to read visually. The auditory part of the brain does not come to interfere in their cognition of the words they see. On the other hand, as kids we learn to read aloud first, and then we follow the same procedure to read as we grow up – faster, silently in our head but still pronouncing every word we read. It is possible to get rid of subvocalization by exercising, but it is a tough art to master and can take at least a month’s regular practice. The best and the fastest readers in the world are all visual readers, and do not subvocalize – they can read way higher than 1000 words per minute. If you have read about how Swami Vivekananda used to read an entire page with a glance, perhaps now you’d understand how that is possible.

While you can set a goal of overcoming subvocalization over time, the easiest thing to do immediately is to improve how you see words, which can increase your reading speed upto 3 times of the current reading speed with an hours practice.

So do you have an hour of uninterrupted time to spare? then sit down with the following things to do an exercise that can increase your reading speed immediately: 

1. A book of enough number of pages to last for a while (at least 200) that can lay flat when open, and which has only one column of text in every page. It will be best if the page size is A4/fullscape or something bigger.
2. You need a pen.
3. And a timer (stopwatch with alarm or kitchen timer is ideal).

You can start by determining your current reading speed though that is not really the most important thing. If you want to track your progress, you’d know by the end of this exercise that you are reading faster anyway. If you are interested in measuring it, then first calculate your current reading speed now. You’d then also measure the speed again after the exercise is over. You can find the procedure to easily measure reading speed in the box. Otherwise, if you are like me and have interest only in the progress and not in exact calculation of how much you progressed, save time and effort and just proceed to the reading exercise straight away.

The Exercise

Regression, alignment of fixation points, and the duration of fixations can be minimized by using a tracker and pacer. Have you ever used a pen or a finger while reading, moving it under the lines as you read – to help yourself concentrate better? That is exactly what a tracker and pacer is! It is used for the purpose of tracking – using a visual aid to guide fixation efficiency and accuracy and you already know this from experience! While trying to improve reading speed, a tracker and pacer is extremely important. You can improve reading speed at least by 30-50% just by using a tracker and pacer. For all purposes of various reading speed practices, using a tracker is always a must. It helps you keep up a uniform speed as whenever you see your hand slacking, you know that you are slowing down. You can not also intuitively go back and regress as your eyes always must follow the tracker and the tracker and pacer must not trace back. For the purposes of this article, we will use a pen. Holding the pen in your dominant hand, you will underline each line (with the cap on, or even with the cap off – just don’t make marks on the page as you move the tip of the pen under the sentence), keeping your eye fixation above the tip of the pen. This will not only serve as a tracker, but it will also serve as a pacer for maintaining consistent speed and decreasing fixation duration. You may hold it as you would when you write, but it is recommended by some speed reading masters that you hold it under your hand, flat against the page.

1) Learn the technique

Practice reading for the next 10 minutes using the pen as a tracker and pacer. Underline each line, focusing above the tip of the pen. We are not trying to improve your brain’s processing speed, so comprehension is irrelevant right now. The purpose of the exercise is to increase your ‘seeing speed’. We want to train your eye to see faster and more efficiently so that you can increase the amount of visual input to your brain. Comprehension will come at a later stage. At this point of time, DO NOT CONCERN YOURSELF WITH COMPREHENSION. Right now, you just want to see the words faster and faster without understanding what you are seeing. As you read, look at each line to a maximum of 1 second, and increase the speed with each subsequent page. You can tell the speed by noticing how fast your hand along with the tracker is moving. Read, but under no circumstances should you take longer than 1 second per line, otherwise the purpose of the exercise is lost. 

You have to understand this exercise first and be conversant with the process before you start doing the exercise really effectively, just like doing a physical activity well, like swimming, or a particular gymming exercise. 

How do you know what is a second? Say in your mind: Bhagalpur – that takes exactly one second.

2) Practice for maximum speed

Repeat the technique, keeping each line to no more than 1/2 second (2 lines for a single Bha-gal-pur”). Some will comprehend nothing, which is to be expected. Maintain speed and technique-you are conditioning your perceptual reflexes, and this is a speed exercise designed to facilitate adaptations in your system. Do not decrease speed. V2 second per line for 3 minutes; focus above the pen and concentrate on seeing everything within the limited time. You may fail to do so initially. Still, keep trying. Move your tracker fast enough – and then try to follow up with your eye. As you keep trying, you shall eventually be able to do it. In most of the workshops I take, 70% of the students can start doing this exercise properly only after 10 minutes of trying. 

The most common mistake while doing this exercise is to slow down the speed of your tracker. Please do not do that, move it very fast, at the speed required, otherwise there is no hope of learning speed reading. In a class, I can see students are doing this and alert them. For your practice, you can ask someone to keep a check to see whether you are slowing down while practicing. It is possible to be vigilant yourself as you practice, which is how I learnt this exercise myself. 

After practicing this 2nd step at least for 20 minutes, you can try reading for comprehension. You shall read significantly faster than your original speed with full comprehension. Do not get satisfied here and stop, otherwise you shall lose this improvement very soon. please practice the same for the rest of the hour at least. This will train you eyes to see faster than ever. Also, keep practicing for 15 minutes everyday for the next one week, so that the habit of speed reading becomes second nature to you. This effort will be hugely rewarded all through your life as you save thousand of hours in reading time – which you can spend elsewhere doing other things you enjoy!

A few other techniques worth trying in order to reduce subvocalization:

While the above technique may help you to see faster, it does not deal with subvocalization. By adding some other tricks to the basic exercise above, one can start overcoming subvocalization.

As you do the above exercise, keep humming a tune or a song you like inside your head, all the time as you read. Next, you can count 1 to hundred and backwards as you read. The purpose of these exercises is to keep the auditory part of your brain busy as you read, so that it is forced to read using your visual part. As usual, it takes a while of trying before you can do this exercise effectively. Keep trying to read and sing/speak simultaneously. Initially you shall fail and will be sometimes reading and sometimes singing/speaking – but after concentrating for 10 minutes you should start to get it right – you shall notice the difference when that happens. 

There are various other exercises that can make a difference to your reading speed, but the ones described above are the easiest ones that give maximum benefit with the least effort. Almost everyone I taught could read at double their usual speed after two hours of practice – but it is important to get the exercise right. You would need some willpower to do it – as this is a lot about unlearning how you have been reading for years now apart from reading faster. Ramanuj Mukherjee is a lawyer by profession, and naturally he has to read a lot everyday. To save time and do more, he mastered speed reading. Since then, he has taught speed reading to hundreds of students in various workshops and classes. You can refer to spritzinc.com for more practices and speed reading lessons.