Are You Reading Words Or Thoughts?

Two exercises to increase your reading speed

We were simply swamped by the email responses to last week’s speed reading exercise. And several readers wrote in to share more than their reading speeds.Thank you for giving this column its loyal readership.

Every reader who sent in their reading speed has been replied to individually.

But here is a broad guide for those who didn’t:
•     Below 100 words per minute (wpm) — Slow reader, with many possibilities for improvement.
•    100 to 250 wpm — Oral reader who can rapidly and significantly progress by suppressing ‘articulation’ (as explained last week).
•    250 to 400 wpm — Auditory reader who can easily go beyond the sound barrier of 400 wpm.
•    Above 400 wpm — Visual reader who has achieved nirvana… but who can help others improve their reading speed.

Keep in mind, as some of you observed, reading speed varies with the subject matter eg, fiction, news, medical, legal, financial, economics etc. Most people will read faster when they are familiar with the subject.

Your responses only supported the research that has been done over the last 40 years since Evelyn Wood made the famous discovery that Speed Reading can be learnt and taught. 

The speed of reading for the majority of people who use a traditional method of reading does not exceed 750 characters per minute (cpm), which translates into approximately 120 to 150 words per minute (wpm). Your brain has to simultaneously cope with two complex activities at the same time — word recognition and comprehension. 

At the World Championship Speed Reading Competition, comprehension of subjecr matter is as critical as speed. Top contestants typically read 1,000 to 2,000 words per minute with approximately 50% comprehension. The 10,000 word/min claimants have yet to reach this level.
However, Howard Stephen Berg (who figured in the 1990 Guinness Book of World Records) claims to be the fastest reader in the world with a speed of 25,000 words per minute.

As our eyes move across the page they make a series of jerky movements. Whenever they come to linger on a word, that is called a ‘fixation’. Most people fixate at least on a couple of words across a line of print. Research shows that reading is around 25 per cent slower on a computer screen than on paper because they eyes tend to fixate more on a computer screen than on paper because the eyes tend to fixate more on the computer screen. This difference generally increases with increasing reading speed.

Now for this week’s first exercise. Let’s start with vision training. Look at the accompanying diagram.
You have to simply read very quickly in sequence:

A > B > C > D > E > F
A > D > B > E > C > F
A > D > E > B > C > F
F > E > D > A > B > C
F > C > B > E > D > A

There are many more sequences possible. Go ahead and create your own eye-pathways.
Practise this to activate your peripheral vision (ability to perceive the presence, motion or color of objects outside of the direct line of vision). The yogic technique of rotating the eyes by looking towards the right, then top, left and  bottom helps develop your peripheral vision too.
That will help you read more than one word at a glance and take in phrases or “thought units” of two, three or four words rather than single words.

You can extend this exercise to Sudoku; it will not only help you read faster, it will also develop fresh new neural pathways, which is excellent exercise for your brain. 

Recent Right Brain research has enabled some revolutionary techniques that can work wonders. We will deal with some of them in forthcoming columns.

This week’s second exercise requires you to simply read the following sentence as quickly as possible and count the number of times the alphabet ‘F or f’ appears in it.

The sentence is:

Finished files are the result of years of scientific study
combined with the experience of many years.

How many Fs or fs did you find in your first reading? 

You might discover some more in a second or third reading. Email me your score/s with the subject line ‘F Count and I will explain why you didn’t catch them all.

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Thought for the Week

“Sooner or later you’re going to realise 
just as I did that there’s a difference between
knowing the path and walking the path.”
Morpheus to Neo
(in the movie Matrix 1999)
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First published in Gray Matter - The Hindustan Times