Speed reading
Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
When I came across the concept “speed reading” for the first time a couple of years ago, it kind of blew my mind. I have been reading books wrong my whole life. I have always read the book as if a voice in my head spoke the words to me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does take a lot of time to read a book. Especially technical literature. I don’t know why it came as a surprise to me, but it turns our that it is no problem at all to simply read faster. A lot faster.
If you have ever listened to audiobooks or podcasts you might have experimented with the playback speed. Some speakers and narrators speak frustratingly slow and an increased play speed might even make it sound more natural. But why stop there? Next time you listen to a podcast, try to increase the playback speed as fast as possible until it becomes uncomfortable. Chances are that you might be able to listen at 200% speed, or perhaps more. Now, if you can listen at that speed – You will be able to read at the same speed or faster. The eyes are faster than the ears because they can capture and interpret whole sentences and patterns, unlike the ears which have to work sequentially. I am convinced that we can read at least as fast as we can listen. And of course, practice makes perfect. Speed reading is a skill. Next time you read a book or an article, try this simple exercise. Just read the text as fast as humanly possible. Forget about that “narrator voice” inside your head and just give it all you got. You might be as surprised as I was when I discovered something that really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Now, reading can feel like sitting in the driver’s seat in an F1 car at full speed.
To have a thorough knowledge in the topic that you are speed reading probably helps a lot. If you are familiar with the terminology, language and key concepts you should be able to read the text as chunks and patterns instead of interpreting each sentence. And if you have read let’s say five books on a given topic, you should be well prepared to take on the sixth book at full speed. On the contrary, if you are just starting out in a new knowledge domain, speed reading is probably more difficult. If you aren’t familiar with the vocabulary, you might need to stop and integrate new words as you go. Consequently, speed reading might not be the best option if you are learning something new. But is it really so?
Thinking about this raises an interesting question in me. It is obvious that a beginner will find it more difficult to speed read than someone with great skill in a given domain. But what if the beginner burns through five books “sloppy” in the same time as it would have taken to read just one under normal conditions? When I think about it that way, it is not so obvious to me anymore that it is a worse option. Yes, you will lose a lot of information on the way while speed reading. But you will also pass 5x the amount of information through your mind. And some of it will stick. I don’t know if it works, but I think I have to try it out next time I decide to learn a new domain. Just crunch through five books as fast as humanly possible. And when your mind starts to lose focus and slow down, just force yourself to increase the reading speed back to full speed again.
Another interesting advice I got from a friend was to spend some extra time on the content section of the books, should you decide to speed read. That will prime your mind to the task at hand and help you to understand the structure of the text.
I highly recommend that you try out speed reading, both with regular books and with audio books. The other day I went through a whole book on academic writing in less than three hours. It made me feel like Neo in the matrix when he said “I know Kung Fu”.
What are your thoughts on speed reading?