Just finished reading my sixth book this week!
Man, I just love reading books, 'cause they're so
like, packed full of knowledge, you know?
Luckily for me, I know secret speed reading
techniques passed down from a 22nd degree
black belt kung fu master who reached
enlightenment by eating an entire library.
And if you wanna learn those same secrets
and read 18 books a week, just like me,
take my speed reading course.
Only 14 easy payments, and one hard payment of 19.99!
Tax, title, license fee, shipping, handling,
and itching powder removal fee not included.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to
gaining vast amounts of knowledge.
(hardcore dance music)
Ok, let's be real here.
The idea that you could learn to speed read,
that is, learn to drastically increase your reading speeds
and plow through more books than you ever thought possible
has been around for quite a long time.
If you're in college, you'll probably see a flyer on
campus at some point advertising a speed reading seminar
that can teach you how to read at 900 words per minute,
1,200 words per minute, or even beyond that, and
countless bloggers have talked about the supposed
techniques you can use to learn how to speed read.
And so much of it is BS.
So I wanted to create a little series to set
the record straight on speed reading, and also show
you how you can actually realistically increase your
reading speeds, and what I want to do with this video
in particular is lay out the science of
how reading actually works.
Now, reading is possible through, wait for it, eye movement.
I know, crazy, right? But there are actually several
different types of eye movement.
For instance, there's something called smooth pursuit,
which our eyes do when we're tracking a moving subject.
And you can do it right now, just follow my finger
on screen, and you might be feeling a little bit sleepy,
which, in that case, (coughs) give me all your money.
There's also vergence, which is what happens
when your eyes move closer together to focus on
a subject in the middle of your field of vision,
and also something called vestibular eye movement,
which is what happens when your eyes are fixed upon
a fixed subject, but your head moves, and your eyes
compensate for the head movement.
When reading, though, our eyes move in quick,
jerky movements called saccades.
When we're reading silently to ourselves,
the average saccades length is about two visual degrees,
which equates to about eight letters on a page.
And this takes about 30 milliseconds to do.
Now, when your eye stops and focuses on
the text, that's called a fixation.
To understand fixations, first you need to know
about the three ranges of vision your eyes have.
First, there's the foveal, which spans about
two visual degrees right in the center of the retina,
then the parafoveal, which goes about five degrees
on either side of any given fixation,
and finally, your peripheral vision.
Your peripheral vision is pretty blurry,
you can make out shapes and movement,
but it can't really pick up a whole lot of detail.
The foveal, by contrast, picks up detail really well,
and this is absolutely critical for reading.
Most of what you can understand in any given fixation
needs to be in that foveal range.
Maybe one or two letters can be in
the parafoveal range, but that's it.
And the average fixation when you're reading silently
takes about 225 milliseconds, though this is an average.
The range is typically anywhere from
100 milliseconds to 500 milliseconds.
Furthermore, your reading speed isn't
just determined by fixations and saccades.
There's also the actual cognitive processing time
that you have to go through in order to
understand what you just read.
We'll get more into cognition and how your brain learns
in future videos, but for now, I wanna make a brief note
about your working memory, which is
what you're using when you read.
Research has shown that our working memory can really
only handle about four chunks of
information at any given time,
a chunk being a bundle of information that
is loosely connected through meaning.
Chunks for difficult material or things you're
unfamiliar with will be small, whereas chunks for things
that you are familiar with will be bigger,
but for both, the concept here is the same.
Your brain can only handle so many at a time,
and reading too quickly can result in
a loss of comprehension.
That being said, a good figure to keep in mind
is that pauses for comprehension while you're reading
will generally take between 300 and 500 milliseconds.
So essentially, reading breaks down
into a three-step process, we have the
saccade that moves on to the fixation,
and finally, the cognitive processing pause.
Now, even though we have average duration data
for all three of these things, it's not like we can just
add it up together and get an average reading speed.
A number of other factors come into play,
including the fact that when we read we actually skip
a lot of the words on the page.
Words can be separated into two different types,
there's content words, the words that actually
express the ideas you're reading about,
and function words, words that express
the grammatical relationships between those content words.
Research has shown that readers fixate on
about 85% of the content words in any given text,
while they only focus on about 35% of the function words.
On the other hand, reading also includes a lot of
regression, going back to read over previously read words.
Some regressions are small corrections when
a saccade's distance is too long, whereas longer
regressions will be to go over material that you already
read once, but didn't really understand the first time.
For skilled readers, about 15% of their reading time
will be made up of these regressions.
Now that you have a grasp of the main
factors that go into the process of reading,
let's look at what a realistic reading speed really is.
Some speed reading "experts" will tell you
that you can boost your reading rate
to around 1,200 words per minute,
which is a figure that many people cite
John F. Kennedy reading at, and some even say
you can get higher than that.
But, according to Keith Rayner, who's a psycholinguist
at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,
and who did a huge study on 20 years of research
in both eye movement tracking and reading speed studies,
observations of college level readers show that
most people read between 200 and 400 words per minute.
And lastly, there's the concept of
reading flexibility, a lot of the advice on speed reading
assumes that you should be reading at a constant rate,
but in the real world, this really isn't the case.
When you're reading something where the concepts
are presented more closely, or the material's
more difficult, you're gonna slow your
reading rate down so you can keep
understanding what it is you're reading.
And by contrast, when you're reading something
where the concepts are more spaced out,
or you're already familiar with what it is you're reading,
you can increase that reading rate without
a huge loss of comprehension.
So here's the final conclusion that I want you to
take from this first video in the speed reading series.
If you're reading between 200 and
400 words per minute already, you're in the norm.
You're fine.
My friend Shane, who runs the incredibly smart blog
Farnam Street, is a great example of this.
Shane reads about three to five books a week,
but he's very clear on his site that
he reads at an average pace.
Speed readers who claim that they can do
any more than 400, maybe 500 words per minute tops,
are doing so at a loss of comprehension.
In general, reading at lower comprehension rates
should be considered skimming.
And that's what speed reading is.
It's skimming.
After a certain reasonable point, you get an inverse
relationship between your reading speed
and your level of comprehension.
Which one is more important to you?
So, that is where we're gonna end this video,
if you'd like to dig a little bit deeper into
the research I did for it, I've linked to a lot of sources
in the companion blog post for this video,
so you can click the card right now,
or the link down in the description to read them.
Next week, we're gonna look at some of
the common techniques that speed readers
claim will increase your reading speed,
and see if there's any validity whatsoever to them,
and then after that, we're gonna do a video on
how you can actually increase your reading speeds.
So stay tuned for those videos coming in
the next couple of weeks, if you enjoyed this video,
giving it a like definitely helps this channel,
and I will see you in the next video.
(energetic dance music)
Hey guys, thanks so much for watching
this first video of my speed reading series.
Now, if you want to get new videos every single week
on being a more effective student,
including the further speed reading videos,
you can click that big red subscribe button right there.
Also, if you want to read a book on
how to earn better grades, I wrote one,
it's absolutely free, and I'll send you a copy
if you click a picture of the book right there!
Like I said, if you want to get the sources
that I used for the research in this video,
and there are a lot of them, as well as a summary,
you can go to the companion blog post
by clicking the orange logo right there!
Last week was a little bit more of a
philosophical video on how we should
give more appreciation to people in
all sorts of different jobs, so check that out if
you haven't seen it, and if you want to connect with me,
I'm on Twitter @TomFrankly,
or you can leave a comment below.
Thanks for watchin'!