Monday, October 17, 2016

This Is How Speed Reading Really Works

By Christopher Phillips


Information is growing every minute. This implies that huge amounts of material need to be read. Not to mention the number of email, documents and other material that need to be mentally processed daily. It would be very useful to learn how to read at a 1000 wpm without compromising the understanding of the material.

A normal person reads with a voice saying words out loud inside the head. There are some who even mouth the them, a process more commonly called subvocalization. The concept of speed reading is to eliminate all these unnecessary processes. There are a lot of factors that come into play to achieve a faster speed.

Fixation on a word is a minor detail that barely anyone notices. On average a person fixates on a single string of letters at an average of . 25 seconds. To minimize this amount of time on focusing on one word, speed readers avoid processing words in a straight horizontal direction. The preferred method is to take snapshots of the area where the eyes are focused instead of following the direction of the string of text.

The brain is trained to recognize the shape of words and thus should follow comprehension. Another very popular studying method is skimming. In hindsight, it really is just learning which parts of the material to skip. Details tend to be forgotten after skimming.

A common bad habit of studying is back skipping. This is the subconscious rereading of what has already been read. Meta guiding, a method of reading quickly, strives to eliminate this weakness by using a pointer to make processing lines and words without going back to what has been read already. This prevents the reader from getting distracted with other visual elements.

Another recommended technique uses peripheral vision. Perceptual expansion, as it is commonly know, is essentially looking at the text at a wider range of visual focus to cover more words at a time. It works with the premise that the brain can absorb visual information and translates it into something that can be understood with little effort. With perceptual expansion, reading is not limited to focusing on one line of text at a time.

Day dreaming is another common bad habit in studying and disrupts focus and understanding. That is why there are times that even when a paragraph is read many times, nothing is still absorbed. Reading fast promotes a different way of learning and adjusting to new methods will take time. Comprehension may be temporarily compromised, but according to experts, practice will eventually fix the issue.

Increasing speed in absorbing text seems like a very useful skill, but there will always be counter arguments to an idea that says it is possible to read a 1000 wmp without comprehension being compromised. It does really seem unlikely, but nonetheless it helps to giving it a shot. Admittedly, it should be very useful for material that is not very important.

Think twice about using this newly acquired skill on things that need to be studied. Speed of absorbing certain information is indirectly proportional to comprehension. The faster one might read, the lesser one might understand. It just makes sense that way. To understand the given information is really the main purpose of reading and nothing else.




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