"Forty years ago, Donald Homa, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University specializing in memory and the visual perception of linguistic stimuli, was contacted by officials at the American Speed Reading Academy with an extraordinary tale. Two of their pupils had achieved a reading rate in excess of 100,000 words per minute, more than ten times the speed of the Academy's average student and more than 300 times what a college-educated adult can muster (between 200 and 400 words per minute)."
"Would he be willing to assess their prodigious skills in a laboratory setting? Curious, Homa happily obliged. In the lab, he tasked the two men with speed reading an entire college-level textbook and then taking a multiple-choice test to gauge their comprehension. After finishing the text in mere minutes, they took the test and absolutely bombed. They hadn't learned much of anything."
Two purported speed readers claimed reading rates over 100,000 words per minute but failed a comprehension test after speed-reading a college textbook. Speed reading courses promise drastic acceleration without comprehension loss. Proponents assert that taking in more words with less eye movement and silencing inner speech enable such speeds. A 2016 synthesis of decades of research by cognitive scientists and linguists refuted both tenets. The structure and function of human vision prevent clear perception of peripheral words, limiting the amount of text that can be taken in during a fixation, and attempts to bypass inner speech fail to preserve deep comprehension at extreme speeds.
Read at Big Think
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