Mad About Science: Speed reading

By Brenden Bobby
Reader Colunist

I’ve always been a slow reader. I’m the kind of person who has to digest every bit of information I read; and, if my brain goes elsewhere mid-sentence, I have to start back at the beginning of the sentence and reabsorb what I just read in its entirety. This makes reading for pleasure a wonderful and imaginative experience, in which I can live out a richly detailed world built by the author. It also makes reading to learn take far longer than it should.

A number of my friends claimed to plow through the entire Harry Potter series over a weekend multiple times per year. It turns out that there are a number of methods for speed reading, though the notion that anyone can read in upward of 1,000 words per minute with perfect recollection is dubious at best. One of the principles of speed reading is snagging key bits of information and allowing your brain to fill in the rest based on context.

The human brain is immensely good at detecting patterns and making connections to fill gaps in those patterns. It’s exceptionally talented at doing this with language, but only after adequate practice. The more practice someone has at reading, the better they’ll be at speed reading. 

It’s unclear if genetics play any part in the ability to speed read. Reading, like most acquired skills, may have some benefits related to genetics, but those benefits don’t outweigh practice and application. This means someone who actively reads more will better comprehend what they’re reading than someone who may have a genetic predisposition for reading and understanding language, but doesn’t spend much time exercising those skills. 

Similarly, someone who spends an hour a day running will be a better runner than someone who comes from a family of runners, but prefers playing World of Warcraft for 14 hours a day.

The process of skimming and scanning is commonly applied to speed reading dense informational text. Humans need context and syntax to grasp linguistic meaning, but our brains are able to fill in a lot of the gaps. An interesting example of this is presented in the cold open of The Office, Season 8, Episode 2, when Kevin begins to contract his sentences in order to save time, only serving to frustrate and confuse his coworkers. 

Kevin knows exactly what information he needs to know while contracting sentences into nonsensical clusters of words, yet it befuddles everyone else when they’re trying to decode his phrases. Interestingly, scanning dense informational texts causes your brain to mirror much of what Kevin was doing, by cutting out unnecessary syntax in favor of important key information. As the information is written down, you’re more easily able to understand if the text is telling you to see the world or SeaWorld. 

This idea is also applied to chunking, whereby your brain gathers blocks of information and groups them together for later recall. It’s easier for our brains to recollect chunks of information than individual pieces, and this is likely due to our knack for pattern recognition. This is especially helpful for recalling long chains of numbers.

Numbers in a seemingly random configuration can be grouped into a more recognizable form that helps us remember them. If I asked you to memorize the number 1,224,192,603,292,240 and recite it to me in 30 minutes, do you think you could do it? What if you turned it into a date format: 12-24-1926, or December 24th, 1926; and 03-29-2240, or March 29th, 2240? 

This is done through decoding and recoding the information — repackaging it into something we can more easily recall. We use dates all of the time, but we don’t commit long strings of numbers to memory, as that data can become very easily corrupted. This form of data management and encoding takes a lot of practice, just like effective speed reading.

Meta guiding is a common speed reading technique that gives the reader a point of reference to follow. A page of text by itself is a referential desert, and it’s easy for our eyes and brains to get lost and end up on a line we’ve already read. Use your finger as a guide and suddenly it’s much easier to fly through the pages. Though it takes more energy to tell your finger to guide your eyes while simultaneously processing the information, that extra mental juice helps us avoid reprocessing information we’ve already absorbed and ultimately speeds up our rate of reading.

Our brains use three methods for reading: subvocalization, auditory reading and visual reading. Subvocalization is what I described toward the beginning of this article. Your inner voice is reading, just like your parents read to you as a child. It’s the slowest form of reading, but it’s also one of the best ways for us to become totally immersed in whatever writing we’re consuming.

Auditory reading, while similar to subvocalization, is a faster form of reading that allows your brain to connect sound to words. Someone who stops to mentally sound out the word “pulchritudinous” is using subvocalization. Someone who recalls Brenden saying the word “pulchritudinous” in a conversation one time is using auditory reading.

Visual reading is a little more complicated than the other two forms. This is the ability to see a word and recognize its meaning without “reading” it with subvocalization or even recalling it. It’s also keyed in to how your brain can differentiate two words that are spelled the same, such as in the example: “Joey liked to read since his parents read to him as a child.” 

Visual reading has expanded in the age of social media to incorporate images into our ability to read. Contextual clues expand beyond the words on the screen to pair with images that permeate our digital lives. The woman-yelling-at-a-cat meme is immediately recognizable and relatable, yet adding different words to it changes the way you process the information as a whole, which is a form of visual reading.

I bet you didn’t think that memes were connected to a higher form of learning, yet here we are.

Stay curious, 7B.