Speed reading DOESN’T work

Researchers studying the techniques and apps available say they don’t work.

They looked at decades of research – and concluded speed readers don’t remember what they read.

Reading is a complex ‘dance’ among various visual and mental processes, and research shows that skilled readers already read quickly, averaging 200 to 400 words per minute.

Some speed reading technologies claim to offer an additional boost by eliminating the need to make eye movements by presenting words rapidly in the center of a computer screen or mobile device, with each new word replacing the previous word.

‘Examining decades’ worth of research on the science of reading, a team of psychological scientists finds little evidence to support speed reading as a shortcut to understanding and remembering large volumes of written content in a short period of time,’ they said.

‘Speed reading training courses have been around for decades, and there has been a recent surge in the number of speed reading technologies that have been introduced to the consumer market,’ said Elizabeth Schotter, a psychological scientist and one of the authors of the report.

The report shows that that there are no magic shortcuts when it comes to reading more quickly while still fully understanding what we’ve read.

‘The available scientific evidence demonstrates that there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy — as readers spend less time on the material, they necessarily will have a poorer understanding of it,’ explains Schotter.

The problem, Schotter and colleagues find, is that eye movements account for no more than 10% of the overall time we spend reading,

The biggest obstacle, science shows, isn’t our vision but rather our ability to recognize words and process how they combine to make meaningful sentences.

‘So-called solutions that emphasize speeding up the input without making the language easier to understand will have limited efficacy,’ says Schotter.

While some may claim prodigious speed reading skills, these claims typically don’t hold up when put to the test.

Investigations show that these individuals generally already know a lot about the topic or content of what they have supposedly speed-read.

Without such knowledge, they often don’t remember much of what they’ve read and aren’t able to answer substantive questions about the text.

This doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily stuck reading at the same speed all the time, however.

Research does show that effective skimming – prioritizing more informative parts of a text while glossing over others — can be effective when we’re only interested in getting the gist of what we’re reading, instead of a deeper, more comprehensive understanding.

‘There’s no quick fix,’ says Schotter.

Source: Daily mail

N.H.Khider