- I guess I read a couple of hundred books a year, something like that.
Dan Holloway is one of the fastest readers on the planet.
In the time it takes an average person to go through one novel,
he can read four or more.
- There is a lot of literary snobbery,
and the idea that you should read slowly in order to savor it,
whereas I actually find that I enjoy a book more if I read it slightly more quickly
because I get immersed in it more.
Speed reading first took off in the 1950s,
when an American school teacher created a system
purporting to help people read many times faster.
- Mrs. Wood, would you stand up and take a bow please, just so we can see you?
It has spawned a multi-million dollar industry of books, classes, podcasts, videos, and apps.
For decades, researchers have downgraded speed reading as bogus,
full of courses that merely teach you how to skim
without retaining what you've read.
But now, some scientists say it's entirely possible.
Most of us are just doing it wrong.
I'm meeting people whose minds stretch the limits of human potential,
and the researchers who are studying them,
to understand how we can all be healthier and more productive.
This week: reading.
I'm Michael Tabb. This is Exceptional Humans.
This is the Mind Sports Olympiad in London.
It's an odd cluster of competitions that test the limits of the human brain.
There are board games and tournaments, like underwater chess,
where your turns last as long as you can hold your breath.
And then there's speed reading.
It's not a big event,
which is how I ended up entering the contest last minute and losing.
Holloway won for the third year in a row,
clocking in at about a thousand words per minute.
- There are lots of misconceptions about speed reading,
that it's almost like some superhuman super power
that means that you can look at a page of text and instantly take it in.
And that just isn't how the mechanics of it work.
There's very little we actually understand about speed reading.
Competitions like this happen around the world,
where some participants have clocked 500 words per minute,
others 4,000.
But according to most of scientific community,
and virtually all published research on the topic,
speed reading isn't legitimate, or even possible.
Then, there's Ralph Radach.
- Speed reading, it is very controversial,
but we have to sort this out.
Radach is based in Wuppertal, Germany,
and he's known around the world for his work on eye movement and word recognition.
So I was surprised when Radach said he thinks speed reading is entirely possible,
and that he's found preliminary evidence that proves it.
- We have identified at least one individual
who can read at 1,000 words per minute with good comprehension.
So, it is possible to do this, but you have to train this for decades.
When we read, our eyes pause every few characters,
long enough to process what we see,
before moving quickly to the next point, and then pausing again.
Because we first learn to read aloud,
we essentially make enough fixations to pronounce each word in our head.
That process is called subvocalization.
Radach's lab has used eye-tracking equipment
to test a small number of speed readers similar to Holloway,
and found they made far fewer fixations as they read,
so few they couldn't possibly be subvocalizing as they read.
- When they speed read, they encode much more information within the same amount of time
because they are much more efficient.
Markus Hofmann works with Radach at Wuppertal University.
He thinks speed readers train themselves to recognize whole "chunks" of text,
not just individual syllables or words.
And that may physically change how their brains process information.
It's a theory. And they need to study more super-fast readers, people like Holloway, to prove it.
We actually connected them while reporting this story,
and they do plan on testing him at some point.
But for now, they first want to show that speed reading is actually possible.
So they started an experiment to see if they can get ordinary people to read just a bit faster.
They're basing on many of their techniques on decades of speed reading books,
going all the way back to the work of American schoolteacher Evelyn Wood.
- Many of you will double, even triple your speeds just going through this program!
These videos have been around for decades,
claiming to help people read up to thousands of words per minute
using a few basic techniques.
Here's one woman demonstrating it on the popular game show, "I've Got a Secret," in 1961.
- Very... It's very accurate indeed.
And it took me a month to write what she read in one minute!
Over the years, Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics grew into an international business.
Lots of people, including scientists, dismissed the courses as a scam.
But Radach took a similar course in the 80s and found it very effective.
He's made some tweaks,
but basically distills the process into five strategies.
Step one: Organize your reading.
Only read things you actually need to.
Step two: Speed up gradually.
Don't try to double your pace right away.
Step three: Focus on units of meaning.
You don't have to read one word at a time.
If you're reading "The Old Man and the Sea,"
you can read "the old man" all at once.
Step 4: Keep moving forward.
Don't reread entire passages because you doubt yourself.
Step 5: Stop talking to yourself.
This is particularly controversial,
because there's also research showing that pronouncing words in your head
bolsters short-term memory.
But subvocalization does limit how fast you can read.
In short, Radach says a lot of this is about breaking bad habits,
as opposed to learning new ones.
Laura Schwalm, one of Radach's students,
has made speed reading her dissertation project.
In six weeks or less, she uses these methods to help participants read faster,
while checking that they don't lose comprehension.
- Our results are not ready yet.
But what I can tell, is that all of our participants got faster,
and some of them could double their pace.
Schwalm will spend the next few years continuing the experiment and analyzing the data.
But if the preliminary results hold up,
it could lead to one of the first scientific approaches to reading faster.
That doesn't mean we could all train ourselves to read as fast as Holloway.
Even he admits a thousand words a minute isn't ideal for processing things.
- No, I don't always read a book in half an hour.
There's a danger of taking what is essentially a sport
and turning it into some kind of universal paradigm of what's a good way to learn.
We still need more research to prove speed reading is a legitimate pursuit.
Maybe you won't read thousands of words a minute,
but that doesn't mean you can't become a better reader.
Thanks for watching this Quartz member exclusive.
This video is part of our series, Exceptional Humans.
Keep watching for more stories on people whose minds stretch the limits of human potential,
in everything from sleep, to memory, to meditation.