Blurred images of mental photography
By Andrew Derrington
I've just received details of a course in a revolutionary new technique for reading incredibly fast. The leaflet promises that PhotoReading [correct], which is based on a sort of mental photography, will enable me to "blast through books at up to 25,000 words a minute".
About a hundred times faster than most people read, and five or ten times ahead of the claims of most "old fashioned" speed-reading techniques, this has to be worth a measly pounds 200. Just think. I would be able to zap through this page in ten seconds. The whole newspaper would only take me a few minutes instead of several hours. And 25,000 words a minute is not the limit. According to the newsletter "Book Blaster" one PhotoReader read a book at a staggering 690,000 words per minute.
Surprisingly, the world of cognitive science is not buzzing with talk about PhotoReading. In fact the scientists I contacted weren't particularly interested. According to Keith Rayner of the University of Massachussets, even the more modest claims of speed-reading don't stand up to close scrutiny. "I tend to believe that rates of about 500 words per minute are possible... but when readers are going at around 1000 words per minute they are skimming. Portions of the text are being skipped over" he says.
Skimming causes information to be missed. When speed readers are tested after reading a passage at 1000 words per minute they are just as good as ordinary readers at easy tasks, like saying what the passage is about, or choosing a suitable title, Rayner says, but they perform much worse on questions about details. If ordinary readers are instructed just to skim the text they can go as fast as speed readers but they also fail to take in the details.
One of the barriers that limits reading speed is the human eye. You can experiment on yourself to confirm this. Fix your eye on the middle of a line halfway down a column. If you can read the first and last words in the column your vision is above average. If you can read anything on the line two above or two below the one you are looking at it is exceptional.
If you can't do either of these things don't worry - neither can I. But the experiment suggests that in a mental photograph of a page of text, most of the words will be unreadable. You have to look almost directly at a word in order to read it. {And according to John Findlay of the University of Durham it's almost impossible to move your eyes onto a new word more than about 5 times a second.}[opt cut]
This limitation of the eye is a boon to psychologists. They can study how the brain processes information during reading by analysing where the eye is looking. According to Geoff Underwood, of the University of Nottingham, the latest generation of eye-trackers tell where the eye is pointing to within one tenth of the width of a letter. Underwood is using an eye-tracker to study how we decide where to look next, while reading.
When psychologists began to use eye-trackers they discovered another limitation to reading speed. The brain can only take in a limited amount of information - referred to as the perceptual span - at one time. With George McConkie, now at the University of Illinois, Rayner measured the perceptual span of readers by replacing most of the words on a video screen with nonsense strings of letters. Wherever the eye was pointing, a small patch of screen would have the correct letters, but everywhere else they would be jumbled.
Rayner compares the technique to making people read through a moving window. Inside the window the text is correct, outside it is nonsense. "The rationale is that when the window is as large as the perceptual span there will be no difference [in readingperformance] from when there is no window." Rayner says. He and McConkie found that in English the perceptual span extends about 15 letters to the right and about four letters to the left of the letter you are looking at. Others have have shown that in Hebrew, where each character contains more information, the span is smaller, and in Chinese and Japanese it is smaller still.
Psychologists are now using eye-tracking to test theories of how we process language. Eye movements slow down when we process difficult words or complex sentence structures. They are using eye movement records to distinguish between theories that predict different sources of difficulty within a single sentence like "The man hit the woman with the green hat".
But for my part, I think I'll save my pounds200 and give PhotoReading a miss. At 25,000 words per minute I might skip too much small print.
The author is professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham
Published in The Financial Times, November 2nd 1996