The Speed Reading Book

Author: Tony Buzan

Tachistoscope instructors typically measured student progress with a graduated chart in groups of 100 to 400 words per minute (Figure 1.1). With regular training, most people were able to exceed a rate of 200 words per minute to a rate of 400 words per minute, similar to the difference between an elementary school student and a graduate student. Successful students who underwent the tachistoscope test expressed dissatisfaction with their results after several weeks of reaching the "graduate student" reading stage, and most reported that, shortly after their course ended, their reading speed dropped back to its previous level. Again, this is similar to returning to the average adult reader's rate. On average, with this method, an individual's speed increases from 200 words to 400 words per minute. This seems great at first: doubling reading speed, but if you look at it mathematically, something is very wrong. If the eye can distinguish images (e.g., a plane or a word) in five hundredths of a second, then the expected reading speed per minute is 60 seconds x 500 words per second = 30,000 words (or a short book) per minute! Where did the other 29,600 words go? Or to put it another way, if the normal range for reading ability is approximately 200 to 400 words per minute and most people achieve the lower end of this range, then an average 250-page book, with about 500 words per page, would take approximately ten and a half hours to read; therefore, the increased reading ability observed during tachistoscope courses had nothing to do with training in reality. This ability was more attributed to highly motivated students over several weeks, who were thus able to reach the peak of their natural rate. The tachistoscope has become useful as part of a set of basic exercises, although it does not represent a comprehensive speed reading method, and the average speed for a good, fast reader began to break the next major barrier - 1000 words per minute. Effective reading schools have flourished and offered many learning methods motivated by stories of the benefits of speed reading by public figures such as US President John F. Kennedy. As a result of the interest shown by President Jimmy Carter, photo-reading was one such method, which simply focused on the eye's ability to "photograph" larger areas of printed words than usual.