9 ms·
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 bot
by btilly 2y ago
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.
- bogdan 2y agoCan you read technical text at that speed and understand it?
- BenjiWiebe 2y agoAnother 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.
- mtalantikite 2y ago> 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.
- Agingcoder 2y agoI’m the same - I slow down dramatically with technical topics unless I’m very comfortable with the material. There’s no pleasure in speed reading through literature. It’s like a gourmet meal - you don’t enjoy the food if you wolf it down in 10 minutes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Xelbair 2y agoi my case yes, but i experience severe slowdowns when reading anything written in verse or legalese.
- btilly 2y agoNot 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.
- emseetech 2y agor/speedreading on reddit is where you'll find people at that level. It's a skill that can be learned, but likely you self-taught and simply don't remember learning it.
- btilly 2y agoNo. 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. I'm simply reading. In full.
- senectus1 2y agomostly, but comprehension speeds are something that is built into the brain and can only be improved but serious effort.
- emseetech 2y agoNot 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.
- btilly 2y agoI generally don't test comprehension directly. And the kinds of questions that I've seen for it on speed reading tests didn't impress me.
- ruthmarx 2y agoExcept for above where you say you 'read' but don't 'digest'. Reading implies digestion, if you're not digesting you're not reading 'in full'.
- mandelbrotwurst 2y agoDo you find that your comprehension is as high at this rate as at a lower rate?
- btilly 2y agoFor everything except looking for debugging errors, yes.
- treetalker 2y agoI'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.
- TrainedMonkey 2y agoAnecdatally, 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.
- RajT88 2y agoI have skim mode as well. I could not put a number to it, but I pick up the gist and leave behind some detail. It is how I got through those middle Wheel of Time books.
- noman-land 2y agoWhat benefits do you gain from skimming a fiction book?
- TrainedMonkey 2y ago
- malux85 2y agoDo 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
- freedomben 2y agoI'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.
- malux85 2y agoHey you're right, moving my head and less my eyes is way faster
- btilly 2y agoNo. My eyes pull in several words at a glance, and I just have a series of glances per line. I've seen advice about continuous eye movement for fast reading. That is BS in my experience.
- teunispeters 2y agoI've been wondering if my own speedreading is a beneficial form of dyslexia.
- xandrius 2y agoThen I can glance at words in succession at 900+ wpm.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoSpeed 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.
- robocat 2y agoI suspect you can lose the skill too. I used to be a fast reader. I tried improving my Spanish by reading Spanish books and I would subvocalize the words. After that I lost my fast reading skill in English.
- freedomben 2y agoHow 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
- lupire 2y agoNot quite faster, but skipping more. Speed reading works well on texts that are highly redundant with internal "error correction". Try reading a YA novel quickly (the content motivates you to go faster :) ) and then try to read a physics paper at the same speed.
- phaedrus 2y agoWhen 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.
- btilly 2y agoThis 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.
- emseetech 2y ago| 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.
- jgalt212 2y agoJFK allegedly read at 1200 wpm.
- m463 2y agoI 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.
- bubaumba 2y ago> My brother and I both read around 900 wpm. 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.
- sandspar 2y agoDo 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.
- btilly 2y agoI do. For example I'm currently following around 50 actively updating stories on Royal Roads.