I used the coursebook Breakthrough Speedreading successfully in teaching myself the technique a number of years ago. Though all arguments here about nuance and

I used the coursebook Breakthrough Speedreading successfully in teaching myself the technique a number of years ago. Though all arguments here about nuance and critical thinking also were nagging in the back of my mind then, the actual reason that made me drop it was actually reading another book on an unusual technique: Relearning to See on the Bates method. The Bates Method emphasizes that one of the worst offenders to natural vision is staring, or the act of fixing a point and relying on peripheral vision to capture a much bigger area. Relearning to See is in big part about relearning to skip, like animals do, when they constantly move their eyes and heads to scan the environment or an object. And speedreading was at odds with this, because it emphasized you should fix your vision on some center point in the page and allow your peripheral vision to gobble up the surrounding text, and you need not even do it sequentially, you should get to the point where you "understand" the image of the page as a whole. That's the bill, anyway. So I opted for natural vision (and comprehension).