Without such knowledge, they often don’t remember much of what they’ve read and aren’t able to answer substantive questions about the text. Investigations show that these individuals generally already know a lot about the topic or content of what they have supposedly speed-read. While some may claim prodigious speed reading skills, these claims typically don’t hold up when put to the test. “So-called solutions that emphasize speeding up the input without making the language easier to understand will have limited efficacy,” says Schotter. The biggest obstacle, science shows, isn’t our vision but rather our ability to recognize words and process how they combine to make meaningful sentences.

The problem, Schotter and colleagues find, is that eye movements account for no more than 10% of the overall time we spend reading, and eliminating the ability to go back and reread previous words and sentences tends to make overall comprehension worse, not better. Some speed reading technologies claim to offer an additional boost by eliminating the need to make eye movements by presenting words rapidly in the center of a computer screen or mobile device, with each new word replacing the previous word. Reading is a complex dance among various visual and mental processes, and research shows that skilled readers already read quickly, averaging 200 to 400 words per minute. “The available scientific evidence demonstrates that there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy - as readers spend less time on the material, they necessarily will have a poorer understanding of it,” explains Schotter. The report, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, shows that that there are no magic shortcuts when it comes to reading more quickly while still fully understanding what we’ve read. “We wanted to take a close look at the science behind reading to help people make informed decisions about whether to believe the claims put forth by companies promoting speed reading technologies and training courses.” “Speed reading training courses have been around for decades, and there has been a recent surge in the number of speed reading technologies that have been introduced to the consumer market,” says Elizabeth Schotter, a psychological scientist at the University of California, San Diego and one of the authors of the report. Examining decades’ worth of research on the science of reading, a team of psychological scientists finds little evidence to support speed reading as a shortcut to understanding and remembering large volumes of written content in a short period of time.

Learning to speed read seems like an obvious strategy for making quick work of all the emails, reports, and other pieces of text we encounter every day, but a comprehensive review of the science behind reading shows that the claims put forth by many speed reading programs and tools are probably too good to be true.

7 speed reading vs superlearner