Sverdlov’s blog

Sounds like a competition…
In fact, this is an ability which most people don’t even suspect they have. Most people read with 900-1000 characters per minute. It’s just they learned this way and nobody told them, that there is something beyond just reading - sometimes it’s a boring and tiring process, which takes a lot of time and it’s results are not always present.

Speed Reading is the ability of one to perceive text (and any other) information faster than usual. This ability is not innate, it’s developed. What would you think, if you see somebody thumbing a book, holding his look on the pages for not more than two seconds? Probably, that he’s interested in the headings or just looks for the pictures. If this man (or woman) has mastered speed reading, he is just reading all the text in depth, imagining every single situation or memorizing difficult terms with his trained, fast working brain.

The information on this page is probably equal to 2-5 kilobytes (please excuse this computer term, bytes and kilobytes are the most widely accepted information measuring term).

The information contained in a picture as big as a regular A4 or Letter page, is equal to a few megabytes. Now, just look around you, or just stare out the window - how much information do you think your eyes are transferring to your brain per second? It’s hard to imagine.

Actually, things are much more complex in the proportions of the perceived information and they are not entirely equal to these which our computer would interpret from the same area (our brain, in fact, interprets a LOT more information than any other computer would interpret), but the purpose of this article is not to involve you in computer science or the functions of our brain - but to show you it’s potential in full, and not the way you have imagined all your life.

I will allow myself just a little comparison, to show you how would your brain compare to a computer: imagine the highest skyscraper in New York City - that would be the size of the computer, if it had to have the same abilities as your brain. Having that in mind, why when we’re reading, we are limiting ourselves to the few kilobites per minute?

One of the possible answers would be, that this is the maximum speed at which one could read. Or with other words, our brain could not achieve higher speed or efficiency of accepting and storing of information. If we accept this as true, we would have to deny sports, science and every single extraordinary achievement - all people would have equal abilities in maths, sport, language study… no training would be required as we would accept that our mind and body are limited up to the “regular” level.
The facts show us the opposite - with enough training you could run faster, lift more weight, learn languages, and, of course, learn to read and memorize faster and better.

All people in the modern world learn to read at the age of 6-7. We study first the alphabet, next begin to understand the way different letters sound, to connect words into sentences (the ones we speak as well as the ones we read). While reading, kids are speaking aloud, and with experience and age one begins to lower his voice while reading, until it is completely hidden inside (this is called subvocalization). It is still present, though - we all (well, almost all of us) read audibly inside our mind, ‘hearing’ every word. This is the way 99% of us read and never develop further - at the level of a 9-10 year old!
We develop ourselves in each and every other area almost till the end of our days, keeping reading at the very beginning, thus limiting our lives.

I will try to explain briefly how our brains processes visual information (text) in a form, which ready for storage and perception.

As a kid, one starts reading by connecting the different letters into words with their audible equivalents, which have been heard before. With time we build some kind of “audio dictionary”, and can reproduce as sound almost every read word. So far so good, the reading speed is “acceptable”, but is that the limit of our abilities? Is the speed at which we speak, equal to the speed at which we could read and perceive information?

The information which we receive through our brain, or better, the brain area which is responsible for sound interpretation, is minimal compared to the volume we receive with our eyes. So, if we learn to receive and interpret information mostly with our eyes, we will increase the speed multiple times, without decreasing the quality (after certain amount of training).

Your brain currently first receives the information through the eyes, then the area of our brain which is responsible for sound interpretation, “reads” the text and just after that it is ready for storage and interpretation. Would you agree if I tell you that passing the information directly from the visual interpreter without involving the audio interpreter, is much more efficient?

It has been proved, that during speed reading, using only the visual interpreter the text is perceived and remembered 70% better, than during regular reading. Of course, these results are achieved after a lot of training, because a habit must be broken first and a new one must be established in order for you to start reading faster and more efficiently. It’s like quiting smoking and becoming a sport star - hard, but Oh my God, it feels just Great!

My personal experience proves it - for just a few hours of training I doubled my reading speed and it’s quality, but further improvement requires much, much more training and patience. Actually, it’s not just the speed - don’t look at speed reading as if it was just a quicker way to read. It is all about teaching your brain to accept and interpret textual information completely differently - meaning… you will have to learn reading again! From the beginning. This time, you will not speak as you read, your eyes will do the work instead of the quiet voice inside your head.

Speed reading has many advantages over regular reading. It’s not just faster, the information gets absorbed much better. Yes, it sounds strange but it’s true. The reason is, that your brain is designed to work much faster - and it actually enjoys it!
Another advantage is the ease with which you begin to read. You know how hard it is sometimes to read constantly - well, with speed reading, you can forget this feeling. When you read fast, your eyes don’t get tired much, as they move less (yes, this is true - your angle of sight gets a lot wider after the training). Your brain starts to produce adrenalin, just as if you were on a sport competition. You feel like you’re running inside, you feel excited, and the more you read, the bigger your reading hunger becomes. Weariness disappears, hunger for knowledge replaces it. I still remember the night after the first self-training in speed reading. I could not sleep - my brain was awaken after years of slow work, and it wanted more, more, more! Can you guess what I did the next day? I read. All day. Then my brains got “overheated” - and I needed some rest, finally.
Now has come the time for a warning - during speed reading, if you feel sleepy - sleep. For 5-10 minutes, that’s enough. Buy some kind of timer, or use your mobile phone’s one. Keep yourself from overheating, just as if you were in a gym.

Wish you great success in SPEED READING!

This article has been published by Bulgaria’s most read psychology magazine - “Insight”

Copyright - Alexander Sverdlov

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 14th, 2007 at 3:14 am and is filed under Mind and intellect. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.