Forced Speed Reading Training with Spreeder.com

August 24th, 2006

I’ve always been interested in speed-reading (though I’m now afraid that training myself for speed reading has in fact lowered my reading comprehension) and saw a link to a cool utility called Spreeder on Lifehacker today.  The basic premise of this tool is that you paste in some text and it flashes word-by-word to you at a very fast pace so you don’ t have time to do things that slow down your reading.

Several factors affect our reading speed, like subvocalization (the little voice inside our heads that reads along with us and slows us down), backtracing (rereading parts over and over again), etc. The purpose behind apps like these is to train our minds to get rid of all the other crap. So, by having a steady input of text, we erase our dependency on backtracing. By increasing the reading speed, subvocalization can’t keep up and eventually goes away… we don’t need to subvocalize to process information, as much as we may think we do.

I tried it using the text from “The Power of Now” by Steve Pavlina.  I like his posts but I find them a little verbose when I’m in my blog-reading attention span mode.  So I put the 2000 word post into spreeder and cranked up the text to about 900 words per minute.  I was surprised that I was able to actually get a lot of the meaning out of thetext (probably about 90% understanding) in about 2 minutes (whereas previously something like that might take me 6-8 minutes at about 250 wpm.  I think I might try it again with some text that is totally unfamiliar with me and see what level of comprehension I can get.

Update: Article on speed-reading techniques

Update: also tried Zapreader.com and it works a little better in my opinion cause you can use word chunks instead of just thousands of single words flying at you.

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