Is it possible to learn how to accelerate when reading a book?

It seems that people never have enough time to read. That's why so many courses, manuals and promotional apps that can help you read faster. But scientists say that increasing the reading speed by three times while still being able to understand is unfounded.

"Reading at high speed is really impossible," said Elizabeth Schotter, a cognitive scientist at the University of South Florida .

She explained that reading is a complex task, requiring coordination between many nervous systems. You must first look at each word, understand its meaning and any other information related to it, its grammatical role in the sentence; relate this word to the rest of the sentence and its wider context; and then find a place to look next.

The human eye and brain must work a lot when reading.

Sometimes a problem during the reading process makes you have to go back and read it again. A skilled reader can read about 200 to 300 words per minute. Speeding up the process while maintaining accuracy is almost impossible, she said.

Ms. Schotter wrote a recent review on the topic: "The scientific community is quite consistent in skepticism about reading speed. Those who claim to help people increase their reading speed are often for money. from those statements. "

In 1959, Evelyn Wood introduced a program to speed reading Reading Dynamics in the US. It became so popular that Presidents Kennedy, Nixon and Carter sent administrative staff to the course. Mrs. Wood's technique trains people to read an entire paragraph at once. Many other books and courses also develop similar approaches, such as scanning text in a zigzag pattern. These methods suggest that our eyes create wasteful movements when we glance back and forth at the text, and by streamlining our vision can help us accelerate reading.

But studies have found that vision is focused on a relatively small area of ​​observation, making people unable to fully perceive and read large lines of text at once. The limit for reading comprehension is the ability to recognize words, so adjusting eye movement probably won't help you read faster. We also need to read the words in order, so a zigzag pattern would probably reduce readability rather than increase. When our eyes darted back and forth across the lines of text, it did not actually move in a waste; It really helps us fully understand the text.

Listening to the voice while reading is necessary

Other speed reading techniques also teach the reader to suppress the internal voice while reading, based on the assumption that this voice slows the reader down. But research shows the opposite: eliminating this voice makes it difficult to understand what you are reading.

In recent years, many apps have stated that they can speed up reading without taking you through any training. These applications display text only one word at a time, word for word at a certain ratio. That way, your eyes are forced to focus on the word in front of you. But again, sometimes the eyes have to turn and reread the words to fully grasp the text. And although the eyes can only focus on a small area of ​​their sight, research has found that your eyes receive important information in addition to being focused. Therefore, it is simply not possible if you only read one word at a time.

Ms. Schotter said that the speed of reading varies greatly for each person. Due to various factors, some people happen to read faster. They may have better working memory or faster information processing. But the claim that people can triple their reading speed or more (for example, reading more than 15,000 words per minute, the equivalent of reading college textbooks in less than 6 minutes) is unrealistic. Studies have found that people who read this speed do not fully grasp the material."Most people who claim to be reading fast are actually skimming," Ms. Schotter said.

When skimming, you are hunting for certain words, paragraphs and sentences. A good reader can grasp the gist of a text fairly quickly - especially if they are familiar with the subject - but they will also miss out on details and nuances.

So is there a way to become a reader faster? You may not significantly increase your speed, but research shows you can be a little faster by improving your vocabulary and reading more.The best thing is to spend a lot of time reading .

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