Speed Reading

or Smoke on the Water on the Brain

In a recent post from Big Think’s Substack feed, I happened to see this headline — “Neuroscience shows that speed reading is BS” — under which, I read this:

Forty years ago, Donald Homa, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University … was contacted by officials at the American Speed Reading Academy with an extraordinary tale. Two of their pupils had achieved a reading rate in excess of 100,000 words per minute, more than ten times the speed of the Academy’s average student and more than 300 times what a college-educated adult can muster … Would he be willing to assess their prodigious skills in a laboratory setting? Curious, Homa happily obliged. In the lab, he tasked the two men with speed reading an entire college-level textbook and then taking a multiple-choice test to gauge their comprehension. After finishing the text in mere minutes, they took the test and absolutely bombed … “The only noteworthy skill exhibited by the two speed readers was a remarkable dexterity in page-turning,” Homa concluded. While this episode is admittedly anecdotal, it does exemplify what scientists have broadly learned about speed reading: It doesn’t work.

I can’t say I’m shocked by those findings. But I was a little surprised to see no mention of Evelyn Wood, founder of the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading course (also known as Reading Dynamics). I’m old enough to have lived through the speed-reading craze of the 1960s and ‘70s. And I recall old Evelyn’s program faced a few headwinds.

Some academics and journalists called it a scam with exaggerated claims of reading speeds — up to 15,000 words per minute with full comprehension (?!) — using little else other than skimming techniques. Tests, however, revealed sharp drops in comprehension at those rates.

In 1961, George Spache (who knew there was a Reading Hall of Fame?) challenged Wood to test her students’ eye movements and comprehension under controlled conditions. Wood took a pass, saying she relied on customer testimonials as subjective evidence. In 1962, Spache studied Wood graduates (apparently, Evelyn was out of town) and determined their comprehension rarely exceeded 50 percent.

Another test by Columbia professor, Eugene Ehrlich, had Wood-trained readers process nonsense text at high speeds without noticing errors, while untrained participants flagged the issues. On June 9, 1962, Ehrlich published an article “Speed Reading Is the Bunk” in The Saturday Evening Post. Drawing on the experience of his test subjects and on linguistic and cognitive research, he critiqued speed-reading techniques as ineffective, arguing claims of dramatically increasing reading speeds were unsubstantiated.

Wood further tarnished her program and her credibility by claiming to be a high school teacher, but she only appeared in yearbooks as non-faculty counseling staff. She also claimed to have ties to President John F. Kennedy, alleging he invited her to the White House for lessons; although, she never specified what kind of lessons, nor was there any evidence to support allegations of any endorsement from him.

In 2016, a study co-authored by psychologist, Elizabeth Schotter, concluded there’s no evidence for dramatically boosting reading speed without losing comprehension. The study referred to Wood’s methods as crazy, based on eye-tracking and cognitive research. Speed reading at the rates Wood claimed were likened to skimming, in which readers miss details, context, and major alterations in texts (but not lunch).

The bottom really fell out when one of Wood’s program graduates, Rufus Sidewinder, provided a testimonial. He claimed to have read Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, in 12 minutes (not counting a lunch break). When asked what the book was about, Rufus said it was about the pigeons on the shoulders of the bronze statue of Atlas in Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan.

Atlas Shrugged (photo by Simeon87, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Bad Wiring

While I do happen to be a modest master of most things, I’m not a neuroscientist. And I haven’t yet been inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame; although, I’m given to understand I’ve been nominated. Nevertheless, I have a pretty fair idea of what would be required of the human brain to enable it to read 15,000 words a minute with full comprehension and retention.

Human reading speed with full comprehension typically ranges from 200 to 400 words a minute. Skilled readers, especially those in the Reading Hall of Fame, might reach 500-600 words a minute under ideal conditions or if they’re taking conscious-altering substances. Beyond that, comprehension drops sharply due to perceptual, cognitive, and neural bottlenecks.

To put things in perspective, 15,000 words a minute would equate to about 250 words a second, which is roughly 50 times faster than the upper end of normal skilled reading. That would allow someone to read a 300-page novel (around 90,000 words) in six minutes, with no loss of understanding. Given the amount of methamphetamine required to jack a reader’s brain up to that level of activity, the reader would die of an overdose before getting past the title page.

Research shows that even in optimized lab settings like rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP — read your next party invitation very carefully), in which words flash sequentially without eye movements, rates above 1,200 words a minute are fleeting, don’t sustain comprehension, and could cause flicker vertigo because the brain’s conscious processing capacity is limited. While sensory input comes in at more than 1 billion bits per second, we can only process about 10 bits per second for focused thought or sound decision-making. Reading a single word might require 5-10 bits. So, 15,000 words a minute would demand a 1,250- to 2,500-fold increase in that rate, fundamentally rewriting neural architecture.

Without getting too detailed or getting too deep in the neuro-technical weeds, enabling us to read 15,000 words a minute with complete comprehension and retention would require transforming the human brain from a sequential processor into a massively parallel supercomputer for language. Pulling that off might require our evolving beyond Homo sapiens’ present architecture, which would turn us into a dude from an episode of The Outer Limits.

Let’s Play it Safe

Practically speaking, if we turned into the dude from The Outer Limits, we’d have to replace all our hats. While that might be a boon for the millinery industry, the rest of us would go broke, to say nothing of having really big ears.

When I was in elementary school, teachers used to grind the kids whose lips moved when they were reading. All those kids have now been vindicated by reading science. They don’t have to worry about speed reading anymore. They don’t have to worry about having big heads or big ears. And they can keep their existing hat collections.

Since the episode of The Outer Limits that featured the dude with the big head aired on October 14, 1963 — and since Evelyn Wood lived until August 26, 1995 — we can only hope she saw the episode and got a glimpse of the future she wasn’t actually creating.

The rest of us can now breathe easy.

“This is the perfect speed.”