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Can Speed Reading

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ACCORDING TO THE badge icon on my phone, I have 667 unread articles in my Instapaper account. I also have 12 un-downloaded novels waiting for me on Amazon’s servers, 142 unopened emails, and suffer from what the Japanese call tsundoku (an unwieldy pile of books and magazines annexed my nightstand and desk long ago). Like a lot of people, I’m drowning in words. It’s no wonder then that speed reading—reading at an increased speed with no loss of comprehension—is an increasingly popular recourse for both the GTD crowd and anyone who worships at the altar of productivity. Who wouldn’t want to breeze through their reading list at 2,500+ words per minute and devour Johnny Five levels of input? That’s more or less the promise that Evelyn Wood’s …show more content…

It’s an intricate dance between a number of visual and mental processes, one that’s highly dependent on language. Unlike speech, reading and writing are, to borrow a phrase from evolutionary psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, “cognitively unnatural.” Parents don’t have to teach an infant to speak—it’s simply a human instinct. Writing, on the other hand, doesn’t come naturally. Why does this matter? Rather than being a purely visual process, both reading and writing piggyback on language and speech. This has profound consequences for how humans process and understand writing, consequences that almost all speed-reading techniques ignore or distort. Ignore the Voice in Your Head Take one of the more common bad guys in the world of speed reading: sub-vocalization. This is the inner speech readers hear in their heads as they read silently. “Because we all learn to speak and listen before we learn to read, almost everyone tends to access the sounds of speech when they read,” says

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