How to learn to read 3x faster in 20 minutes

Background: Project PX

Back in 1998, Princeton University hosted a Project PX seminar on high speed reading. This article is an excerpt from that seminar and personal experience with accelerating reading.

So, Project PX is a three-hour cognitive experiment that can increase your reading speed by 386%. It was conducted on people speaking five languages, and even dyslexic people were trained to read up to 3,000 words of technical text per minute, 10 pages of text. Page in 6 seconds.

By comparison, the average reading speed in the United States is between 200 and 300 wpm. Due to the peculiarities of the language, we have from 120 to 180. And you can easily increase your indicators to 700-900 words per minute.

All you need is to understand how human vision works, what time is wasted in the process of reading, and how to stop wasting it. When we sort out the mistakes and practice not making them, you will read several times faster and not mindlessly skimming over your eyes, but perceiving and remembering all the information you read.

Preparation

For our experiment, you will need:

a book of at least 200 pages;
pen or pencil;
timer.

The book should lie in front of you without closing (press down on the pages if it tries to close without support).

Find a book you don’t need to hold so that it doesn’t close

You will need at least 20 minutes for one exercise session. Make sure that no one distracts you during this time.

Useful Tips

Before moving on to the exercises, here are some quick tips to help you increase your reading speed.

1. Make as few stops as possible when reading a line of text

When we read, the eyes do not move smoothly over the text, but in jumps. Each such leap ends with fixing your attention on a part of the text or stopping your gaze at an area of about a quarter of a page, as if you are taking a picture of this part of the sheet.

Each stop of the eyes on the text lasts from ¼ to ½ seconds.

To feel this, close one eye and lightly press the lid with the tip of your finger, while with the other eye try to slowly slide along the line of text. Jumps become even more obvious if you do not slide along the letters, but simply along a straight horizontal line:

How do you feel?

2. Try to go back as little as possible in the text

A person who reads at an average pace quite often comes back to reread a missed moment. This can happen consciously and unconsciously. In the latter case, the subconscious mind itself returns the eyes to the place in the text where concentration was lost.

On average, conscious and unconscious returns take up to 30% of the time.

3. Improve concentration to increase the reach of words read in one stop

People with average reading speed use central focus rather than horizontal peripheral vision. Due to this, they perceive half as many words in one jump of vision.

4. Train the skills separately

The exercises are different from each other, and you do not need to try to combine them into one. For example, if you're training your reading speed, don't worry about understanding the text. You will go through three steps sequentially: learning the technique, applying the technique to increase speed, and reading with comprehension.

Rule of thumb: Train your technique at three times your desired reading speed. For example, if your reading speed is now somewhere around 150 words per minute, and you want to read 300, you need to practice reading 900 words per minute.

Exercises

1. Determination of the initial reading speed

Now you have to count the number of words and lines in the book that you have chosen for training. We will calculate the approximate number of words, since calculating the exact value will be too dreary and time-consuming.

To begin with, we count how many words fit in five lines of text, divide this number by five and round off. I counted 40 words in five lines: 40: 5 = 8 - an average of eight words per line.

Next, we count the number of lines on five pages of the book and divide the resulting number by five. I got 194 lines, rounding to 39 lines per page: 195: 5 = 39.

And the last thing: we count how many words fit on the page. To do this, multiply the average number of lines by the average number of words in a line: 39 × 8 = 312.

Now is the time to find out your reading speed. We set the timer for 1 minute and read the text calmly and slowly, as you usually do.

How much did it turn out? I have a little over a page - 328 words.

2. Landmark and speed

As I wrote above, backtracking and gaze stops take a long time. But you can easily shorten them by using a tool to track your focus. You can use a pen, pencil or even your finger as such a tool.

Technique (2 minutes)

Practice using a pen or pencil to maintain focus. Smoothly move your pencil under the line you are reading at the moment, and concentrate on the place where the tip of the pencil is now.

We follow the tip of the pencil along the lines

Set the pace with the tip of your pencil and follow it with your eyes, keeping up with stops and backtracks through the text. And don't worry about understanding, this is a speed exercise.

Try to go through each line in 1 second and increase the speed with each page.

Do not linger on one line for more than 1 second under any circumstances, even if you do not understand at all what the text is about.

With this technique, I was able to read 936 words in 2 minutes, which means 460 words per minute. Interestingly, when you follow with a pen or pencil, it seems that vision is ahead of the pencil and you read faster. And when you try to remove it, your vision immediately spreads across the page, as if the focus was released and it began to float all over the sheet.

Speed (3 minutes)

Repeat the technique with the tracker, but allot no more than half a second to read each line (read two lines of text in the time it takes to say "twenty-two").

Most likely, you will not understand anything at all from what you read, but that doesn't matter. You are now training your perceptual reflexes, and these exercises help you adapt to the system. Do not slow down for 3 minutes. Concentrate on the tip of your pen and the speed-up technique.

In 3 minutes of such a frantic race, I read five pages and 14 lines, an average of 586 words per minute. The hardest part of this exercise is not to slow down the speed of the pencil movement. This is a real block: you have been reading all your life in order to understand what you are reading, and it is not so easy to give up on it.

Thoughts cling to the lines in an effort to return to understand what it is about, and the pencil also begins to slow down. It is also difficult to maintain concentration on such useless reading, the brain gives up, and thoughts fly away, which is also reflected in the speed of the pencil.

3. Expansion of the field of perception

When you concentrate your gaze in the center of the monitor, you can still see its outer regions. So it is with the text: concentrate on one word, and you see several words surrounding it.

So, the more words you learn to see in this way with the help of peripheral vision, the faster you can read. The extended reading area can increase your reading speed by 300%.

Beginners with a normal reading speed spend their peripheral vision on the fields, that is, they run their eyes over the letters of absolutely all words of the text, from the first to the last. In this case, peripheral vision is spent on empty fields, and a person loses from 25 to 50% of the time.

A pumped-up reader will not “read the fields”. He will scan only a few words from the sentence with his eyes, and see the rest with his peripheral vision. In the illustration below, you can see an approximate picture of the concentration of the eyes of an experienced reader: words in the center are read, and foggy ones are marked by peripheral vision.

Here's an example. Read this sentence:

On one occasion, students enjoyed reading for four hours straight.

If you start reading with the word "students" and end with "reading", then you save time reading as many as five words out of eight! And that cuts the time to read this sentence by more than half.

Technique (1 minute)

Use a pencil to read as quickly as possible: start with the first word of a line and end with the last. That is, while there is no expansion of the area of perception - just repeat exercise number 1, but spend no more than 1 second on each line. Under no circumstances should one line take more than 1 second.

Technique (1 minute)

Continue to set the pace for reading with a pen or pencil, but start reading on the second word in the line and finish reading the line two words before the end.

Speed (3 minutes)

Start reading from the third word in a line and finish three words before the end, while moving your pencil at the speed of one line in half a second (two lines in the time it takes to say "twenty-two").

If you don't understand anything you read, that's okay. You are now training your perceptual reflexes, and you don't have to worry about understanding. Concentrate on the exercise with all your might and do not let your mind drift away from the uninteresting activity.

4. Checking the new speed

Now is the time to test your new reading speed. Set a timer for 1 minute and read at the maximum speed at which you continue to understand the text. I got 720 words per minute - twice as fast as I did before starting this technique.

These are great indicators, but they are not surprising, because you yourself begin to notice how the coverage of words has expanded. You don’t waste time on the fields, you don’t go back through the text, and the speed increases significantly.