Nearly every speed reading class promises the elimination of subvocalization. Subvocalization is even accompanied by minute movements of the tongue and throat muscles. I do this a lot, and it limits my reading speed to virtually the same as my talking speed. Subvocalization is the imagined pronunciation of every word we read. One of the basic goals is the elimination of subvocalization, claimed to be the thing that slows readers down the most. But let's take a look at the strategies that speed reading courses teach. So before you embark on a speed reading course, understand that knowledgeable professionals have devoted their careers to studying this, and have conclusively found that any gains you're likely to achieve are probably nowhere near the numbers printed in your class's marketing brochure, at least not without massive loss of retention. Very few people can read faster than 400 words per minute, and any gain would likely come with an unacceptable loss of comprehension. Rayner has found that 95% of college level readers test between 200 and 400 words per minute, with the average right around 300. In fact, one of his papers is titled Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research, and he published that in 1993. Keith Rayner is a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and has studied this for a long time too. Carver found that of his superstars, none could read faster than 600 words per minute with more than 75% retention of information.
The groups consisted of champion speed readers, fast college readers, successful professionals whose jobs required a lot of reading, and students who had scored highest on speed reading tests. One notable test he did pitted four groups of the fastest readers he could find against each other. Ronald Carver, author of the 1990 book The Causes of High and Low Reading Achievement, is one researcher who has done extensive testing of readers and reading speed, and thoroughly examined the various speed reading techniques and the actual improvement likely to be gained. To truly measure reading speed, we'd have to draw a line at some minimum acceptable level of comprehension. At 800, there's a massive loss of comprehension. Fast speeds require skimming, and comprehension drops off dramatically. But apparently, 800 would be extremely fast for anyone without Kim Peek's hardware. How fast is 800 words per minute? It doesn't sound all that great compared to some of these other speeds. Still, the fastest of those tested had quadrupled their speed to 800 words per minute. Second, The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against him in 1990 for false and misleading advertising, after a blinded study found that none of his customers gained anywhere near as much as he said they would.
#FAMOUS SPEED READER TV#
First, his TV stunts were incredible, but they never came near approaching 25,000 words a minute. But his claims were not without controversy. Berg is best known for amazing stunts of speed reading and comprehension on television shows, including one with Kevin Trudeau who sold his speed reading course Mega Reading. The Guinness Book of World Records does list a fastest reader, Howard Berg, who claimed 25,000 words a minute, nearly as fast as one can fan the pages of a book. 1,200 words per minute is the number cited for Kennedy, however we'll look a little more closely at this in a few moments. Kennedy, who spoke about it often and is said to have had his staff take Evelyn Wood speed reading classes. The most famous speed reader is probably John F.
He was born without a corpus callosum (the connection between the two brain hemispheres), and it's possible that his two hemispheres were able to process the pages he read in parallel. Peek had a unique hardware arrangement driving this ability, though. Estimates of his speed vary, but 10,000 words a minute is the number I found most often. He read two pages at a time, the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye. His mental abilities were so vast and varied that speed reading was hardly the most remarkable, yet it was still really something. The most often cited speed reader is the late Kim Peek, the famous savant upon whom the Rain Man character was based. Fortunately for slow readers like myself, our demand-driven economy has responded with a product we can buy: Classes and techniques purporting to be able to turbocharge our reading speeds to thousands of words per minute. Who among us wouldn't love the ability to pick up any book, flip through its pages in just a few minutes, and then put it down in record time with nearly 100% retention? When I look at my vast stacks of unread books, the idea is certainly a compelling one. We've all seen films of speed readers going through books nearly as fast as they can physically turn the pages.
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