Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words (13 page)

The concept of reading groups of words at a time has been around since 1879, when a French ophthalmologist, Louis Émile Javal, developed a method of photographically recording people’s eye movements while they read. Until then, everyone simply “knew” the eyes had to look at each letter in every word.

The interesting thing is, readers don’t move their eyes in a smooth flow, but in small jerking motions called fixations. Javal’s photographs recorded these fixations and revealed that while poor readers perceived just one word—or perhaps only a part of a word—at a time, excellent readers took in entire groups of words with each eye fixation. After this discovery, instructors began to encourage students to “widen their eye spans” and see as many words as they could at each fixation.

The invention of the tachistoscope—a machine designed to flash a series of images very rapidly, sometimes allowing them to appear on the screen for only 1/100
th
of a second, in order to create subliminal imprinting in the mind—seemed to create an advancement in teaching students to see more words at a time. This technology, invented by psychologist Dr. Samuel Renshaw, was originally used to train World War II naval soldiers to rapidly recognize different aircraft and ships.

In 1946, Dr. Renshaw patented the tachistoscope projector and began directing research at Ohio State University to use the machine to teach speed reading.

With regular training on the machine, most people were able to increase their reading speeds from an average of two hundred words per minute to an average of four hundred per minute—the difference between the junior high school student and the post-graduate. However, most students reported that shortly after their course finished, their reading speeds once again sank to their previous levels.

Only recently have experts realized that the normal range of reading ability is roughly two hundred to four hundred words per minute, and that most people operate at the lower end of this range. The increased reading abilities observed during the tachistoscopic courses actually had little to do with the training; they were mostly due to the students being highly motivated over a period of weeks and thus being able to reach the top of their normal range.

Although it was gradually recognized that the tachistoscopic method did not provide any lasting positive results, this approach was still offered as a part of the basic training kit of most speed reading courses for many years. After all, they had to offer something, and a machine like this made a good first impression on students.

Recent History

Before the 1920s, reading instruction stressed “accurate
oral
reading.” The good reader was one who could “read
aloud
with
expression
and
fluency
.”

But then experimenters at the University of Chicago found that students could read faster silently than they could orally, and they could do it with better comprehension and retention. Research on eye movement during this time also found that a reader could read faster if he made fewer fixations per line of text.

However, further research showed that eye movement could not be consciously controlled. Most authorities concluded that the only way to improve reading would be to improve the reader’s ability to
perceive
and
interpret
the material. Therefore, by the 1950s most teachers and colleges were already skeptical of any courses labeled “speed reading.”

But then in 1959, a woman named Evelyn Nielsen Wood set up a course in Wilmington, Delaware called Reading Dynamics. Wood’s method started with what she called "push-up" drills, wherein students would read for one minute and then re-read, trying to cover more material each time. The course also concentrated on exercises meant to widen the eye span in order to see more words at a time. To eliminate subvocalizing, students were encouraged to push their speeds faster than they could vocalize.

Even though these courses concentrated on pushing your speed, the basic theory behind Wood’s exercises was that students should concentrate on reading thoughts instead of words. She described it like this:
"The reader becomes part of the story. Since the method relies upon the total idea of the thought rather than the individual words, there is no feeling of hurry or fast motion of speeded reading. The words go in fast, but they go in only to make the complete picture."

Evelyn Wood considered her work an important crusade—one that would improve student reading skills across the country. In the fall of 1960, she set out to change the world, opening twenty-five instruction centers around the United States.

Sadly though, Wood was bankrupt by the following September. She had opened all twenty-five centers within one month, and although Wood had a zealous commitment towards her schools, she unfortunately did not have any real business or advertising experience.

She sold her business to George Webster, who promptly fired the original staff and modified the course and the marketing. He ran a simply worded full-page ad in the newspaper, offering a money-back guarantee if a student didn’t at least triple their “reading index.” Suddenly, Reading Dynamics became a huge success, and Wood was hired to make public appearances and open new schools.

The advertised guarantee was a very effective marketing strategy, but unfortunately for students, the guarantee wasn’t really that easy to qualify for.

First, the promise was only to improve the student’s so-called “reading index.” This index was calculated by multiplying the words-per-minute speed by the comprehension score. It was actually difficult
not
to improve this index since the final reading exercise was always so much easier than the first. The final comprehension test was so easy that students could score quite high without even reading the exercise.

Second, students had to complete the entire course before qualifying for the refund, and most unsatisfied customers just dropped out, choosing to lose their money rather than more of their time.

In the end, few students actually made the incredible progress that was promised. Over the next twenty years the public became more and more skeptical, and the “speed reading” industry was unable to refute this skepticism with enough student success stories.

This skepticism is unfortunate because there are always ways to improve any skill. But because of the outlandish promises made by many of these courses, people felt cheated and then ridiculed all speed reading courses to avoid looking foolish enough to fall for such ridiculous promises. As comedian Woody Allen described it, “I took a speed reading course and read
War and Peace
in twenty minutes… It involves Russia.”

Progress

Although the past century was littered with many courses using all kinds of incredible exercises and making even more incredible claims, at least the past hundred years saw a huge increase in the number of people who actually
could
read.

In the century before that, a lot fewer people could read—and most who did, only read aloud, and only for entertainment. But even as a form of entertainment, reading was probably as fascinating to the people of that time as any of our entertainment is to us today. It’s interesting when you realize that before there was radio or TV, most people never even heard what people in other places sounded like. In fact, this is why many books of the 1800s—
Tom Sawyer
is a good example—are so full of colloquialisms and strangely spelled words. These books were written this way to reproduce the way people
sounded
.

Throughout the twentieth century, reading instruction became much more widely available than in previous eras; however, it was still primarily aimed at reading sounds, not ideas.

Future Reading

Reading has made great progress over the centuries, but that doesn’t mean the progress has to stop now. With the recent erosion in reading skills, there is now even greater room for improvement. Today half the people read below two hundred words per minute, the vast majority of high school graduates aren’t ready for college, and SAT reading scores have plummeted to their lowest level in four decades. The best path out of this this problem is through improved reading skills. The good news is that this is something people can do on their own.

Due to the massive and rapidly growing amount of information available since the advent of computers, the internet, and e-books, reading skills are becoming ever more important. Information is no longer expensive or difficult to access, and this means that regardless of the issues we may have with our current educational systems, we seem to be entering a new era of do-it-yourself education—and the only entrance exam or tuition required is the ability to read.

In order to read more, reading needs to evolve beyond text as sound to text as meaning. This is the same goal Evelyn Wood suggested when she said we needed to "
rely more upon the total idea of thought rather than the individual words.
"

But now there is an important difference: the order. Comprehension must come first,
before
speed. Wood’s method was basically an improvement on the old tachistoscopes—it still focused on pushing speed and merely hoped for improved comprehension as a result. The reverse, however, is the better way to read faster. Faster reading won’t lead to faster comprehension, but faster comprehension will naturally lead to faster reading.

There have been many disagreements over methods to teach reading, but when people think of controversies in reading education, they usually only consider disagreements about word recognition training—such as the long-standing argument between phonics and sight learning. Both of these methods only teach how to match text with words, but regardless of which method is used to recognize words, word recognition is really only the first step of reading.

To be an effective reader, you need to be able to rapidly and accurately process the thoughts behind the words. The thoughts are what the author wanted to communicate; the words were used only as a vehicle to communicate them.

The history of writing has gone from simple record-keeping, to sound recording, and then to idea recording. Reading now has to catch up and advance from sound playback to
idea
playback. To handle the more extensive and sophisticated information today, we’ll need to trade in listening to that old-time radio and switch over to watching a new HD flat screen.

In other words, this is not your parents’ reading. If reading and writing has changed so much in the past, it would be incredibly vain of us to think that we, today, were the intended final receivers of this skill. Likewise, it would be shameful to think we were the first who could not improve it.

Practice Exercise #7

Remember, if you find yourself slipping into old reading habits as you practice, just stop a moment and then continue by concentrating more on meaning. As you continue, go as slowly as you need to until you can really get a grasp on the information. Take your time; you’re creating something new. This whole human ability to read may still be on the ground floor, and you are experimenting with using other parts of your brain to discover a better way of extracting meaning from text.

And if it seems sometimes like you’re not quite sure how to conceptualize the ideas you are reading, and you feel like you’re not quite getting it, imagine how earlier readers felt when they first tried reading in their heads. That probably felt pretty strange too, and I’m sure they often felt impelled to start reading aloud again as they were used to doing. No reading advancements would have occurred if people weren’t willing to try something new, so read with an open mind, so you too can be part of this advancement.

Just as with your previous six exercises, see each word-group in a single glance, imagine the meaning of each thought-unit, concentrate on pushing your comprehension instead of your speed, and be patient and focus on the ideas.

When you’re ready, begin reading the first thousand words of

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer