Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes | Hacker News Reader

Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

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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.

Exactly. I can naturally read very quickly without subvocalizing words, but it's only useful when I have to quickly read something with a very low content-to-words ratio. Or when I need to awe lesser beings, of course.

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.

Take this test: http://www.readingsoft.com/index.html#results I did 464 wpm with 82% accuracy (comprehension is important with this one!). I do a blend of visual and "normal" reading. Visual gets auto-turned off for large words and numerical facts. I don't think I could breach 500 wpm without totally loosing my comprehension.

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...

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.)

Read slower.

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

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.

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.

The actual article is here: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/07/30/speed-readin...

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

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.

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.

What are the names of the studies that demonstrate that?

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.

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

Several study's have shown you remember more with speed reading.

Citations please?

http://www.readingmatrix.com/articles/bell/article.pdf list's several primary sources. Check out: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=753927 for a longer response.

I think you can take the luxury of skipping content when you already know it, but that's not learning new material, it's recalling. My suggestion if anyone is in doubt, is to test these assumptions directly to see if they works or not. For me, they don't work when the material is new, technical or not technical.

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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).

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

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...

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