What's up, guys?
Welcome to the second video
in my little series on speed reading.
Now if you missed the first video,
you can watch it right there.
But that one went over the science
of how the reading process actually works.
Both how our eyes move and fixate on text
and how our brain constantly pauses
to process that incoming information.
Now for this video, I want to take a look
at three commonly touted speed reading techniques
that all claim they can circumvent
or augment some part of this process
in order to increase your reading speeds.
And these three techniques include,
number one, enlarging the area of your fixations.
Essentially allowing yourself to read text
in your peripheral vision.
Number two, eliminating sub-vocalizations.
Suppressing that voice inside your head
that speaks when you're reading.
And number three,
what's called Rapid Serial Visual Processing.
Showing each word in succession in the same exact spot.
The question is, do any of these techniques actually work?
Let's start with the claim that some speed readers
can fixate on larger areas of the page.
There's actually some speed readers
who've even claim they can take a single mental snapshot
of a page and process the entire page's text
inside their head all at once.
Similarly, a 1962 study cited somebody
who could read at 10,000 words per minute
by making only six fixations per page.
And the weird part here is this person
claimed they made fixations
in a counterclockwise motion
going around the edges of the page.
They didn't follow the lines of the text at all.
However, the problem with that study
is there was no formal measure of comprehension.
So it wasn't really clear what this person
was remembering from their reading at all.
Additionally, further studies have shown
that good reading comprehension
can only be had when people follow the lines.
Go figure.
And here's the kicker, you can't read text
and understand it if it's in your peripheral vision.
It has to be within that foveal range or just outside of it.
In fact, a 1987 research paper on speed reading
reported only one correct answer
out of 30 test cases where a reader was tested
on information that was three letter spaces or more
from an area they had fixated on.
Add these findings to what we already know
about the eye's foveal range and the results are clear.
Fixations are very small and we can't comprehend text
that doesn't fall within or very, very near them.
But what about eliminating sub-vocalization?
Some speed reading courses agree that you do
need to fixate on text in order to comprehend it,
but they also claim that sub-vocalization,
essentially your brain speaking the things
you're reading aloud inside of your head,
is slowing you down.
If you could jettison that sub-vocalization,
or suppress it in some way,
could you increase your reading speeds?
Again research shows that this
is a tactic that's unlikely to work.
According to Elizabeth Schotter,
who is the author of some
of the most recent research on speed reading,
"There's a lot of evidence that
when people recognize words visually,
they access the sounds of those words to understand them."
Even if you're not reading aloud,
your brain sends signals to your vocal cords as you read.
NASA scientists even developed a computer program
to detect these signals and measure them.
Scientists have done such studies where they try
to have readers suppress sub-vocalization.
In some by playing a tone whenever these signals
are detected by the computer program,
and in others by having readers
try to hum aloud while they read.
In each case, comprehension went way down.
It seems that reading is inextricably tied
to our auditory language processing capabilities,
and trying to separate the two does more harm than good.
So let's move on to our third method,
and this is the one that you guys requested
I talk about the most.
It's the technique utilized by apps like Spritz,
Spreeder, ReadQuick on the iPad, and others.
And the name for it is Rapid Serial Visual Processing.
These apps work by showing each word
in a reading by itself in rapid succession.
The words are fixed in place
which eliminates the need for saccades
because your eyes can remain fixed
in the same spot as the words change.
That's what the words you see
on the screen right now are doing,
though since they're following the pace
of my voice they're going very, very slowly.
As a demonstration, here's the next segment
of the script going at five third words per minute.
(Light piano music)
Now in case you didn't catch any of that,
let me go ahead and restate it.
The RSVP technique finds its origins
in a device called a Tachistoscope
which uses a slide projector to flash images
in rapid succession which is supposed to help
people improve their recognition speeds.
Tachistoscopes were used during World War II
to train fighter pilots to recognize other aircraft
as friend or foe more quickly
and then in the 1960s,
some schools started using them to try to increase
the reading speeds of their students.
Many modern RSVP apps have their own unique features.
For example, Spreeder lets you set multiple words
to be flashed instead of just one at a time.
And Spritz tries to move the position of each word
in order to help your eye more quickly
reach its optimal recognition point.
For all these cool features though
research shows that RSVP systems,
in general, don't really work that well.
One of the main problems with RSVP systems
is that they present every single word in a reading
requiring your brain to try to process them all.
As we learned in the first video in the series,
people don't fixate on every single word in a reading.
They tend to skip a lot of the content
and they do it in an intelligent way.
They tend to fixate more on content words
and less on the function words.
In fact, that 1987 speed reading study
revealed something pretty interesting.
For normal readers it's not just the length
of the words that explains why content words
are fixated upon more often.
Even in reading tests where all the content words
were only three letters long,
for normal readers they were able to fixate
more often on those content words.
For skimmers and speed readers; however,
the proportion of content words fixated upon
to function words was about even.
This reveals that at least at normal reading speeds
our brains are able to intelligently fixate upon
the most important words in the text.
But with RSVP we don't get this ability
because every single word is presented one after another.
This makes your working memory the bottleneck.
It strains to keep up while all the text
is flooding in at one constant rate.
My own informal tests using these apps confirms this.
I find it really exhausting to read this way
and after about 30 seconds of doing so
I find that it's really hard
to remember the details of what I just read.
An additional strike against RSVP apps
is that they don't allow for regressions,
going back to reread over sections
that you've already read before.
Elizabeth Schotter conducted another study
that looked at RSVP systems in detail back in 2014,
and the conclusion of this study was
that this is a big problem.
As it turns out, the ability to make regressions is integral
to having high comprehension levels when you read.
And the problem with this software is
it can't accurately predict at what points
your brain needs to go back and read something again.
So in my eyes at least for the case of reading
for learning and comprehension,
all three of these systems have been thoroughly debunked.
Does that mean they're entirely useless?
Well, maybe not.
Some of them can be useful
for scanning over text quickly,
maybe reading a text message or email,
or if I'm trying to find the gist of something.
But if you're doing an in-depth reading of a textbook,
or you're trying to read a book to learn something,
I don't think they're really that useful to be using.
Now there are definitely other speed reading techniques
out there that I didn't mention in this video.
One in particular that I'm currently interested in
is called BeeLine.
There's not a whole lot of research on it
so if you know something, please tell me.
And I'm sure people will let me know
about other techniques down in the comments.
Also in the interest of time,
I had to leave a lot of the nuance and detail
about these techniques in particular out of the video
but I did link to all the studies and articles
that I used to research this video
in the companion blog post.
So you can click the card right now
or the link down in the description to read them.
So that's it for this video.
In the next one we'll wrap up
this little mini-series on speed reading
with a discussion on how you can
actually increase your reading speeds.
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