CHAPTER 10
10. Learning to Walk on Your Hands
At various points throughout my academic career, I attempted to learn to “speed-read.” I read Evelyn Wood’s famous book on speed-reading. I tried “The PX Method.” And, indeed, when I fatefully met Lev in 2011, I was able to read at an impressive 450 words per minute (wpm).
The problem? My comprehension rate was about 40 percent.
Lev, on the other hand, was able to read nearly twice as fast as I was—with comprehension in the 80- to 90-percent range. In retrospect, this isn’t surprising. Unlike me, Lev had the memory and pre-reading tools that you now have. And soon, you’ll have the speed-reading tools, as well.
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Before we go into the “flashy” and “sexy” skill of pre-reading, I want to manage your expectations. When we talk about speed-reading, we are not talking about “photographing” a page per second. We’re not talking about reading one page with each eye, or reading speeds of 5,000 wpm. While all that sounds nice, the fact is, science has pretty much proven that none of those things are even remotely possible.
Disappointing, I know.
But here’s the interesting and exciting part. The most exhaustive research “disproving” speed-reading does so by demonstrating that comprehension begins to drop off at 600 wpm, and declines steeply at 700 to 800 wpm.11 To put this into perspective, the average college-educated reader reads 200 to 250 wpm in English. When viewed in this light, it seems to me that “speed-reading” is very much possible—but only in the ranges of 600 to 800 wpm.
How, then, do we speed-read?
Well, the basics of it are quite simple. I will explain them to you, you will read my explanation, and then you will begin to practice. But speed-reading is a lot like learning to walk on your hands—which, after a year or two of practice, I learned to do quite comfortably. Knowing what to do and being able to do it effectively are two very different things. And it will always be much more comfortable and natural to walk on your feet when you get out of bed in the morning.
Speed-reading is very much the same. Without a doubt, the memory and pre-reading skills you’ve learned so far are a complete overhaul to the way you think and learn. But over the years, I’ve come to realize that speed-reading is a specific tool useful for specific scenarios. Would I speed-read a nice novel before bed? Probably not. But did I speed-read a bunch of academic research to write this chapter? You bet.
What’s more, after decades of reading the “slow” way, be prepared for speed-reading to feel unnatural and downright exhausting. Another metaphor I like to share with students is that of slouching. Though we all know that we should sit up straight (or better yet, switch to a standing desk), I bet 90 percent of you just corrected yourselves upon reading this sentence. Speed-reading is a lot like this. Oftentimes, when I sit down to read, I must “remind” myself to speed-read. This ties in with the skill we previously learned, proper preparation and mindset. Once I’ve determined why I’m reading a text, I can determine whether or not speed-reading is appropriate.
And now, let’s learn how to actually do it.
Subvocalization
For as long as speed-reading has been around, experts have taught that one of the keys to reading faster is to eliminate subvocalization. In other words, get rid of that pesky “voice” in your head. After all, that voice can really only speak at a pace of about 400 to 450 wpm. Your brain, by contrast, can recognize complex images, symbols, and situations in as little as 0.013 seconds. Subvocalizing what we read is like trying to describe a photo to someone instead of just showing it to them. It takes high-fidelity visual information and degrades it to low-bandwidth auditory information. If we eliminate the voice, we eliminate the bottleneck, right?
The truth is, it’s not quite so simple. Because of the way we process language, research shows us that it’s impossible to eliminate subvocalization entirely. We can, however, dramatically minimize it and learn to subvocalize only a small portion of the words we read. Doing so yields a great improvement to our ability to read quickly, albeit a very difficult one. In our programs, we call this “breaking the sound barrier,” and just like getting up to Mach speeds, it’s something you need to work up to.
Larger Fixations
For a moment, pay special attention to the way you are reading this page. While you may think that your eyes are moving smoothly, in reality, they are not. In fact, they cannot. Our eyes are literally incapable of making smooth, consistent movements unless we’re tracking a moving object. To try this out, look at the beginning of this line, and try to smoothly move your eyes from one end to the other. You might think your eyes are moving in one fluid motion, but in fact, this transition is completed in many tiny, rapid movements. If you’re curious, compare these movements with smooth ones by waving a finger in front of your eyes and following it. See the difference?
When gazing at sets of stationary objects, our eyes focus in fixations. Each time your eyes focus lock focus on something, that’s a fixation. The fast, precise movements from one fixation to another are known as saccades. Here’s the kicker. To keep our vision stable and prevent us from getting disoriented, our brains actually “shut off” our vision while our eyes are in motion. Then, unbeknownst to us, they stitch the pictures back together when we settle on a new fixation. This phenomenon is called saccadic masking or saccadic blindness, and it means that for a significant portion of the time you are looking at this page, your eyes aren’t actually inputting any additional information to your brain.
Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about saccadic blindness. What we can do is reduce the amount of time we spend in it. A normal reader is trained to make one fixation per word, resulting in about eight to ten fixations per line. That’s a lot of time spent in saccadic blindness. But if we can train ourselves only to make, say, one or two fixations per line, we spend much less time in saccadic blindness. In this way, we can absorb more information—faster.
We train to do this using a tool called a Schultz table.
Schultz tables contain a grid of numbers similar to a completed Soduku puzzle. To use one, you simply stare into the middle box and attempt to “see” what is outside of your immediate focus. This trains you to not only recognize what is in the very middle of your focus—the fovea—but also to pick up on the blurry periphery of your vision—the parafovea.
This is admittedly a bit controversial. On the one hand, the research is clear that speed-readers’ claims of being able to “preview” a subsequent line are absolute bunk. On the other hand, numerous studies have demonstrated that hiding the text immediately after the reader’s fovea severely impacts reading speed and comprehension.12 From this, we know that readers clearly use information from more than just the fixated word to read effectively.13 So no, you won’t be able to read two lines at a time, or even one full line at a time. But you can benefit from learning to capture a line in just two or three fixations, with two to four words per fixation.
Optimized Fixations
Once you’ve learned to take in words in larger groups of two to four, you’ll inevitably notice that a lot of your first and last fixations are somewhat wasteful. As my father always liked to joke when I struggled with my reading material, “Make sure you’re reading the black stuff, not the white stuff.” Most readers center their fovea on the first letter of the first word and the last letter of the last word in a line. Doing so means that half of your focal range is wasted on blank, white paper. Of course, there’s very little information in the margins—until you write it in there. For this reason, the most advanced speed-readers center their fixations on the second and second to last words on a line, like so:
And, quite honestly, that’s all there is to it.
It all sounds easy enough, right? It’s not. This skill alone takes students months to learn, and the truth is, if you don’t use it, it gets rusty.
For this reason, we advocate learning with an approach called progressive overload. Originally taken from the world of weight-lifting, progressive overload means training just at the cusp of your capability and adjusting as soon as you are comfortable at a certain level.
In speed-reading, this means reading at a speed where you can just barely comprehend. Many speed-reading courses would tell you to begin reading at a speed of 600 wpm or beyond. But doing so gives your comprehension no opportunity to gradually improve. This is why I encourage you to gradually level up. Think about it: at the gym, you wouldn’t go straight to lifting 450 pounds. You would lift a weight that is challenging to lift only once or twice, right? Then, you’d only increase the weight once you were able to effectively lift it five times. So, too, should you train for speed-reading.
When you’re first starting out, it’s helpful to cover what you’ve read with an index card, using it to set a pace based on the speed you want to go. Initially, this may mean reading just 350 wpm. To do this, figure out how many seconds that is per page. It will likely be around fifty seconds for your average book. Then, give yourself approximately that much time to read the page.
At first, you will feel that you are hardly comprehending anything. This is normal. In fact, when you’re learning, it’s a good idea to stop and “quiz” yourself on what you read. Stop at the end of a section or chapter and list out the details you have absorbed. Then, flip back through the book to see how you did. With time, your comprehension will improve, and you’ll begin to feel that you’re comprehending much more than you were before. This is a good indication that it’s time to take your speed up a notch.
As you juggle all this, don’t forget everything you’ve learned thus far. Before reading, pre-read the chapter ahead, survey its structure, and generate your questions. After speed-reading each paragraph or page, pause, and take a moment to recall, creating visual markers to represent what you learned. Once you’ve finished the chapter, close the book and review those visual markers. And of course, revisit the books you’ve read with some form of spaced repetition. Unless you complete each of these steps—particularly the memory aspects—you will have no more success than I did before discovering this method.
If this seems like a lot, don’t worry. We have put together a “flight checklist” that you can print out and keep with you. It will remind you of all the things you need to do before, during, and after you speed-read. That way, you won’t neglect any of these important steps in the process. You can download that worksheet by visiting http://jle.vi/bonus.
Speed-reading may take a few weeks—even months—of practice to completely master. Don’t despair. Take it slow, gradually increase your speed, and continue training. One day, it will simply “click” for you. You’ll break the sound barrier and realize that you’re absorbing information at speeds of up to 700 wpm.
In that moment, rejoice! But remember, if you don’t use this newfound skill, you will lose it.
11 Keith Rayner et al., “So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help?” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 17, no. 1 (January 14, 2016): 4–34, https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100615623267.
12 Dennis F. Fisher and Wayne L. Shebilske, Eye Movements in Reading (Cambridge, MA: Academic Press, 1983), 153–179, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-583680-7.50014-X; Keith Rayner et al., “Raeding Wrods With Jubmled Lettres: There Is a Cost,” Psychological Science 17, no. 3 (March 1, 2006): 192–193, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01684.x.
13 Rayner et al., “So Much to Read, So Little Time,” 4–34.