What about people who don't just read, but have absurd speed?
My brother and I both read around 900 wpm. My children only read at a normal adult speed, but both love to read. If I had a way to have passed on my reading speed, I would have. But I have no idea how to do so. And no idea how my reading speed is possible.
I've met only one person outside of my family with similar reading speed to my own.
I'm skeptical of claims like this. How do the claimants define reading? If we mean extracting a subset of information from a particular, arbitrarily defined block of text, well then I can read tens or hundreds of thousands of words per minute: I know how to pick up a typical business paperback, flip to the last chapter (or even just the conclusion), and skim for the 1–3 big ideas.
But try to read a text like a complex SCOTUS majority opinion, or one of the Great Books, at anything close to that speed — good luck! Even trained and very experienced appellate attorneys can study such texts for hours, days, weeks, and still find important intricacies that require not just perception, but ingestion and digestion.
As an exercise, one might grab any text and have one's computer read it aloud at 900 WPM. If one were to glean a single sentence, let alone the important bits, let alone all of it, I'd be shocked.
To me it isn't just about comprehension either. When I read I think about what I'm reading. I'll often stop mid-page or even mid-sentence to think about related subjects or past experiences that have some connection to what I've just read. It takes me longer than other people I know to read something, but I'm far from the slowest at it, and to me, reading is (or at least can be) a deeper experience than just an info dump into my brain.
I'm sure some of it is ADHD or something but to me, reading is about ideas and I can't wait until the end of a book or even the end of a long article without playing around with them. Especially if it's a topic I'm interested in.
Even if speed readers can fully comprehend and retain what they've sped over, I can't help but feel that they're probably missing something.
Here's what's weird. I can read a book faster than I can "digest" it.
I first learned my reading speed by accident after I read Clan of the Cave Bear in a single sitting. Immediately afterwards I could not summarize it, though I could recognize any passage in the book. The next day, I could summarize it.
I describe it as feeling like I have a pipeline. I'm able to fill my brain. Digestion is indeed slower.
Man! I didn't remember it until reading your comment, but I had the same experience in elementary school — obligatory time in the school, with access to books, but only while I was there, after finishing whatever trivial tasks were assigned.
Alas, the selection was quite lacking. So although I voraciously consumed dozens of "Hardy Boys" novels, the subsequent days were filled with irritating thoughts about how stupid they were.... perhaps the inverse of your experience.
Nevertheless, while I was trapped there, it seemed much better than nothing!
I still read books, and to me it seems obvious that most of the "experience" of reading plays out in the background in the days and weeks that follow (unfortunately, even if the book has little to offer — although as an adult I'm free to recogize that and move on to another book).
P.S.
Halfway through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future and it's a good one! Much better than reading about Chet Morton's old jalopy breaking down again just as the villains are escaping on bicycles... ;-P
Well I think your analogy would be better if they could also chew and swallow rapidly, but then their digestive tract took inordinate time to process the meal... (^_^);
That wouldn't be a better analog at all since it wouldn't be making the point I wanted to make, it would just be rephrasing what they stated using the same metaphor.
Anecdatally, I have two reading modes - full comprehension and skimming. In full comprehension I read and subvocalize each word, often slowing down, pausing, or even re-reading to make sure the meaning sinks in. In skim mode I look at phrases, sometimes whole sentences or even simple paragraphs, and move to the next chunk before consciously comprehending the previous one. Skimming effectiveness highly depends on my alertness level and works best with fiction or other media with low information density. For fiction books I can generally recount the plot and events pretty well.
Mostly find out what happens next faster. But on some level something about it is meditative. A constant progress across the book understanding what you can and letting everything else go. From pragmatic angle it is acquiring new information at a comfortable rate without stressful backtracking.
Reading speed might follow a normal distribution near the middle ranges, but I'd expect non-trivial deviations in the tails due to dyslexia, ADHD on the one side and trained speed readers on the other. Perhaps this individual just falls on the far tail of that distribution?
During my graduate coursework I sometimes read 100-200 pages of technical material in a day while cramming for an exam, and was able to retain it for a day or two. I'd believe it if some people exist who could comprehend and retain all of that long-term. Alas, 'tis not I.
If 25% of people have it then, practically, Dyslexia means you are in the bottom 25% of readers, as much as the Dyslexia industrial complex wants to see it as taxonic and not dimensional. (Sure they say it has two subtypes and sure, maybe there are two reasons that make most bad readers bad readers, there are probably more reasons that are more obscure and too hard to pin down)
Personally I think there are a lot of white collar people who are devastated to have a child who is a poor reader who won't follow in their footsteps (college professors, journalists, people in ethic groups where people will think you're a loser if you're a cop or pro football player, etc.) Labeling it as a disease makes it easier for people in that situation to live with it.
> Personally I think there are a lot of white collar people who are devastated to have a child who is a poor reader who won't follow in their footsteps (college professors, journalists, people in ethic groups where people will think you're a loser if you're a cop or pro football player, etc.) Labeling it as a disease makes it easier for people in that situation to live with it.
Isn't this just how all diseases and indeed all things work? We're the ones who come up with these simple categorizations and labels to describe reality which is vastly more complex. The terms are necessarily underspecified and the boundaries between categories are necessarily fuzzy. This is true even within some medical community that attempts to have more precise definitions of "disease"/"disorder"/"disability"/etc. and it's all the more true for colloquial usage of these terms. But yes, these terms do end up just meaning "any condition that is not normal that causes problems for the person experiencing it."
Comprehension: 100% of questions answered correctly
How your reading speed compares
Slow 150 WPM
Average 250 WPM
Fast 400 WPM
Speed reader 600 WPM
You can read pretty fast! Remember that reading fast is only valuable if you're able to maintain good enough comprehension for your goals.
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I took my time and paid attention in order to be able to give dates and things.
I can go considerably faster. I read about 1000wpm or so for work, a bit slower if I am taking time for pleasure, and when I was a teenager, about 2-3 times faster than that when under pressure.
For instance, I read Joseph Conrad's _Victory_ -- 432 dense pages -- in 2 hours for homework, then wrote an essay on it and went to bed. I got a B+. :-)
Shorter lighter SF novels I read in half an hour, back then.
Comprehension: 100% of questions answered correctly
Most of my few seconds spent "reading" was actually spent deciding if I even had to read it at all. I correctly concluded that the test was garbage, and then skipped to the questions, and answered the 4(!) questions using only basic common sense.
I can answer comprehension questions and get a good score. For example I got a perfect score on the verbal section of the GRE when I took it in the early 1990s, and this is the speed that I did the reading comprehension tests. I can read whole books, and come away able to find any passage after reading just a few paragraphs. For all intents and purposes, it's read.
I can't debug code at this speed though. Doesn't matter how fast I can read, I can't think for myself at the same speed.
It gave me a bit of a headache but I can still tear through large amounts of text, retain the info, summarise it, and then if I don't want or need it let it go.
I've been doing some anti-ADHD training on my own by reading a difficult book -- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin -- slowly.
Sure I could bro down those words in a straight beginning-to-end readthrough and get a sense of what's going on. But I find that going back over the past few paragraphs is rewarding, as subtle turns of phrase reveal details I hadn't noticed.
You could probably be trained to comprehend text electronically read to you at 900 wpm. Blind people using screenreaders, for instance, train themselves to understand text read aloud very fast.
She goes to great lengths to show how non-sexist the society is according to then feminist theory. Then, just accidentally, slips in gender divides that should not exist in her society.
Given that I had just read some of that feminist literature, I found it quite jarring.
Guess I'm not far along to have reached the bit with the gender divides, yet. What I have read seemed to reflect a rather 2020s-feminist view of gender, in a time when feminism was still in its bra-burning arc. So that was interesting.
You might find amusing the RA Lafferty short-story "The Primary Education of the Camiroi" (1966).
Summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXNLUFeplI
"A PTA delegation from Earth visit another planet to investigate their educational methods in order to figure out how to improve the school system back home on Earth. But the lessons learned, and the conclusions drawn, are rather… odd and disturbing."
“How rapidly do you read?” Miss Hanks asked a young girl.
“One hundred and twenty words a minute,” the girl said.
“On Earth some of the girl students your age have learned to read at the rate of five hundred words a minute,” Miss Hanks said proudly.
“When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at the rate of four thousands words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.”
“I don’t understand,” said Miss Hanks.
...
“What is this business about slow reading?” Miss Hanks asked. “I don’t understand it at all.”
“Only the other day there was a child in the third grade who persisted in rapid reading.” Philoxenus said. “He was given an object lesson. He was given a book of medium difficulty, and he read it rapidly. Then he had to put the book away and repeat what he had read. Do you know that in the first thirty pages he missed four words? Midway in the book there was a whole statement which he had understood wrongly, and there were hundreds of pages that he got word-perfect only with difficulty. If he was so unsure on material that he had just read, think how imperfectly he would have recalled it forty years later.”
“You mean that the Camiroi children learn to recall everything that they read?”
“The Camiroi children and adults will recall for life every detail they have ever seen, read or heard. We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth. We cannot afford to waste time in forgetting or reviewing, or in pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”
Amazing story. I enjoyed reading this so much. The sad fact that this was written in 1966 - like the gentleman advocated for gutting the public school system 6 decades ago, and only now we are getting around to the business of defunding the dept of education. The story has foretold everything - the culture wars, the sacred cow/buffalo, utterly divergent visions of the left and right when it comes to what education means…Rafferty seems to be a futuristic mind reader. Amazing.
I'm another "speed reader" skeptic. After significant repeated investigations I came to a stunning conclusion: I'm among some of the fastest actual human readers. My general reading speed 300 to 600 wpm depending on context and medium. For context I was your usual bookworm growing up: reading ahead of level, constantly reading everywhere, always reading while walking, always getting in trouble for reading with other people present like at the breakfast/dinner table, just churning through books non stop. And yes I now read random scientific articles and things for fun.
Anything above that reading speed I've started just allocating to bullshitters, or generally techniques which come back to "not reading" rather than "reading".
That is to say people who choose techniques to try to speed themselves up through strategies like "skimming" (that is to say, not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or "extracting key points" (that is to say not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or their comprehension drops beyond 100% (that is to say not reading to try to game metrics).
And that's assuming you're not just dealing with the actual frauds trying to talk themselves up in a penis-measuring contest or sell something.
So yeah, I'm in the anything above 400-600 wpm is in the bullshitters club. And technical or difficult text is of course lower and can't be sped up.
No inherent offence intended to "speed readers"... Ok, maybe a little...
So you have decided anyone who can read faster than you is a fraud? Meaning you think you are in possession of the fastest non-fraudulent human reading abilities possible?
Do you have any evidence of this beyond the fact that if you sped up your own reading you would lose comprehension? The person reading at 150wpm could make the same case against you.
After wasting the better part of a decade on speed reading as a teen and using speed reading tools I can only find myself to agree with them. Remove multiple-choice questions and ask questions about the material and speed readers comprehension crumbles apart to such a degree it is difficult to call what they do to be "reading".
There are quite a number of studies on this, but I'll reference a blog that does all the referencing for me [0] since their experience and thirst for knowledge that led them to later be an advocate against - rather than an advocate for - speed reading is basically a 1:1 match of my own.
500-600 WPM is the upper limits, 99.99% of people claiming otherwise are bullshitting, I always leave that 0.01% because some people are literally just built different and are truly one-of-a-kind (or one-of-maybe-a-dozen people on Earth). Anyone claiming such speeds is going to be under a lot of scrutiny the same way I'd be skeptical of anyone else claiming to be in the top 0.01% of anything. If someone tells me they're a Top 10 Challenger ranked League of Legends player I'm not just going to take their word for it without some solid evidence.
All that I have to say about it, is that in a place like Hacker News, you do encounter the top 0.01% on a fairly regular basis. Particularly among those who were here early on. Being too skeptical of it when you see it doesn't sound like that good an idea.
I mean seriously. Why would I lie? And why would I risk the fake reputation on this account on a lie about something stupid, when I have friends who know me here?
It's not that I've decided based on no evidence, it's that I've never met someone in the flesh able to do it where observations are consistent with claims.
Ignoring five minute Reddit or hacker News messages where people say "oh I'm so fast at reading" once you actually have to put them to the test: i.e. oh cool you're a fast reader: so here's a thing we've both not seen but are required to read and we'll discuss and analyse them in the morning. And you can judge how fast they are based on their understanding of the text and how far they've gotten compared to you.
Eventually you start to realise that there's a mysterious absence of observations to the right of what appears imo to be an almost biological barrier.
Then you start to look into their history: well I presume you've read a lot? And you try to talk to them about things... And they're generally not that well-read.
Then you correlate it with other high-performers: PhDs, professors, learned people, people who read all the time and have a history of reading. And you see that these best readers who read a lot also tend to read at a maximum speed of about 300-600 wpm with any comprehension.
So you come to balance these two hypothesese: there's speed readers out there, but they're generally not well read people and don't have a history of reading and they can't discuss much and they don't tend to turn up to discuss things when there's actual reading involved... But they can read really fast I swear!
And you compare them to the people who professionally read, read all the time, are verifiable strong readers... And you clock them between 300-600 wpm.
Beyond the whole "proving a negative" what's a rational person supposed to conclude?
/This is making some minor possible exceptions for people like Kim peek, but aside from having never met him, of such people exist, my understanding is there's also genuine philosophical questions as to whether what those people are doing can neurologically be considered the same act of reading as what the average human being is doing in terms of whether they can then discuss the themes, contents and implications of what they read.
Edit: and this is in context of people like me LOVE reading, so of course we've looked into methods and communities that propose they can increase reading speed, make people read faster, and are filled with fast readers
I don’t have a good cross-reference for wpm on this, but I can read uncomplicated stuff at about 100-120 pages per hour. Most people don’t believe me until they see it.
My wife reads at roughly double that speed. She’s the only person I have ever met who reads significantly faster than I do. Met a few who are 10% or maybe 20% faster than I am. But she’s in an entirely separate category, and yes, that is with 100% comprehension, not skimming.
When we were dating, and I first saw her do it, I just said oh, you read really fast. She said, so you don’t think I’m faking it? No, I said, you’re just the first person I’ve ever met who is noticeably faster than I am, but it’s obviously real.
Then I asked the question: what color is the number 5? She stared at me for a second before giving her reply (I don’t remember). “How did you know?” Because I’d read about synesthesia and a qualitatively different form of pattern recognition seemed the most obvious conclusion. Someone might be a little faster than me with basic reading skills, but I’ve been around enough fast readers to know that I’m pretty damned fast, and that those who are faster are usually just a bit faster. Not double.
I have no particular interest in subjecting myself to whatever testing you think is needed. Reading it something that I do for pleasure.
The other person I met with the same speed I discovered by sending her an article, rereading it because I was bored while waiting for her to read, then finding that I was done around when she began commenting on it - having finished at about the same time.
You don't have to believe me. As far as I'm concerned, it's a party trick. But a trick that means that I prefer the written word over other forms of entertainment.
I had long since come to the conclusion that "speed reading" is a hoax and just another name for "skimming". They are not fooling anybody but their own ego.
The technique of Reading varies widely based on content and our own interest in it.
For example, i have spent hours upon hours reading/re-reading the Sherlock Holmes canon dozens of times because i find the language phrasing/stories/deductions highly appealing and hence want to savour/understand every word of it. On the other hand even though i love Charles Dickens' novels i don't spend as much time on it and skim through large parts which are not appealing to me. The result is that i can literally write essays in my sleep on Sherlock Holmes but can't do it for Oliver Twist/Great Expectations/etc. Thus the meaning of the word "read" is not the same for both.
I have a huge personal library consisting of a large number of "hard copies" and an even larger one in "soft copies" and love skimming/reading them. Skimming to note the larger main points and coming back to Read them if and when i feel like it.
When I was still in school I scored over 900 on a reading speed test. For those skeptical how this is possible, I don't read linearly my eyes make saccades and groups of words come piling into my brain like someone dumped a bucket of Scrabble tiles. There seems to be a long "pipeline" wherein the words from different lines and different order in the sentences get reassembled into meaning. After reading something very quickly if I look away the information is sort of still "digesting" for some time.
(I seem to have a good size memory buffer for this which no doubt has to do with enabling the speed reading. I remember in typing class classmates were amazed that the way I transcribed assigned text was to read a half a page or more and type it all out verbatim before going back for another chunk. Until they pointed it out I didn't think that was anything special.)
I will admit that at 900 WPM I wasn't getting 100% of the material (albeit enough to get 90% on the comprehension test - which is less than 90% of the source material, just enough source material to reconstruct 90% of the gist). I was really trying to see how fast I could go, since it was computer graded and I could gamify it. (I did get a different text to read and questions to answer about it each time; I wasn't re-reading the same text.) Through this same exercise I learned my comfortable reading speed was 200 - 300 WPM and speed reading without loss of comprehension (just requiring effortful concentration and/or impatience) was around 500.
As an adult I'm certain my reading speed is NOT that fast anymore, and I often find myself re-reading text I just read.
| my eyes make saccades and groups of words come piling into my brain
That's similar to a tactic speed readers: looking at spaces between words instead of the words themselves, which allows your brain to pull in multiple words at once. There's a pile of approaches and not all are useful, but that one is. Another I've found is quieting my inner voice.
Without doing any practice or any other speed reading methods, just doing those two things boosted my wpm to 500+ at 100% comprehension when I was younger. I was a good reader to begin with but not a particularly fast one. I stuck with those methods because they're effortless and I didn't want to lose comprehension by pushing faster.
And importantly most of what I read is fiction, and a faster speed feels as though it would ruin the feeling of stories that are more ponderous. I prefer the speed of the thoughts on the page to feel like they're real time with the characters thinking them.
This all sounds very familiar, except that my coordination is not enough for typing quickly. That's because of an unrelated neurological problem though.
I'm limited to something like 40-45 WPM.
And the 900 wpm minute is simply about what I find comfortable for a story where I want to know what happens next.
I think there are a lot of parts to the fast reading pipeline.
I know someone who had undiagnosed vision problems when young which harmed the ability to read fast/fluently.
I suspect that vision is pretty critical. To read fast you have to be able to visually capture quickly, chunk things together and feed them to further stages of the comprehension pipeline.
I suspect poor vision, poor lighting and contrast, bad fonts, flickering displays, distractions from other senses all slow you down. I also think there might be an age window to learning reading fluency that could be missed.
I read fairly fast (haven't tested it in a while) but I learned reading books, which have good contrast, a large high-resolution font and reflective lighting. I wonder if this makes my visual pipeline attuned to reading different than new readers who have learned on glowy screens, with small pixelated fonts, and competing with other non-reading distractions.
Might be interesting to give your kids physical books or reflective e-ink/e-paper readers to read in a well-lit environment and see if it helps.
Speed reading is a skill you can learn; it just takes practice. I can't imagine doing this with any book I'm trying to enjoy, though—successfully interpreting the semantics correctly isn't the same as letting it "hit you", if that makes sense. For highly dense texts (think e.g. Kant) I can't imagine actually understanding anything at that kind of speed—at best maybe you could memorize it and process it later.
How do you go about practicing? Do you just try to push yourself faster?
I notice that my error rate (reading words that aren't there) goes way up if I push myself to go faster. If I'm reading something that is easy to guess at then it might feel like I'm blazing through it with good retention, but if the words aren't what I expect then it ends up being quite counter-productive
Another faster-than-average reader here, I don't remember what my result was when I calculated reading speed.
Anyways, I do slow down dramatically when it's technical. I'm learning then, and limited by my learning speed.
When I'm reading fiction, I forget that I'm reading, and don't even know what speed I'm reading. I'm completely in the flow and the story is playing out in my head.
> Anyways, I do slow down dramatically when it's technical. I'm learning then, and limited by my learning speed.
Do you also find that this happens with different types of fiction, or are they all basically the same?
Personally, if I'm reading someone like Toni Morrison or Marquez, I find that I like to slow down and savor what's going on. It's like ready poetry. If it's something I can read fast, I tend to find it's not something I'm drawn to spending the time with.
Not on a consistent level. For example when I do a lot of programming, or when I'm studying advanced math, my reading speed will slow down. Just knowing what was intended is not enough - a single letter can really matter.
But if I'm just reading an average programming book, then basically yes. 700+ WPM is comfortable, and I don't try to measure exactly how much + it is.
Speed reading is explicitly trading off speed and comprehension. It takes advantage of the fact that we need to see a lot less of the text to pull out certain ideas than we think we do.
Not exactly. Speed reading has a lot of tactics that don't trade comprehension for speed. You said below that you pull in groups of words at once. Speed readers do that by looking at the spaces, which allows our brain to group words together. I started doing this when I was younger and got an immediate significant boost without practice and with no loss of comprehension.
What does your comprehension test at? It's not uncommon for speed readers to test at high comprehension with your reading rate.
It sounds like you claim to read fast, but then have to take extra time to digest, so if we add your digesting time to your reading time and count that total as reading time period, it's not actually that fast at all.
Do you read a lot? I mean, do you read the book quickly then rest, or do you use your extra time to read three books? There's the old story of how some taxi drivers will drive longer hours during busy rainfall periods to make extra money, whereas other drivers just hit their quota early then stop.
That's a great speed. I'll never reach because I have to read some paragraphs several times before I understand the article. Some times using pen a paper...
Anyway, you can still improve you speed with the same level of understanding by asking chatgpt for summary.
Do you think it could be a mutation that allows your eye muscles to move faster?
My reading speed is limited by how fast I can move my eyes, if I use one of those apps that just flashes the words in the same spot my reading speed at least increases by at least 4x
I'm a normal to slow reader so take this with a grain of salt, but I've noticed that speed readers tend to turn their heads, whereas normal speed readers just move their eyes and not their head. Would be interesting to hear if you try moving your head if it helps your speed.
My brother and I both read around 900 wpm. My children only read at a normal adult speed, but both love to read. If I had a way to have passed on my reading speed, I would have. But I have no idea how to do so. And no idea how my reading speed is possible.
I've met only one person outside of my family with similar reading speed to my own.