How you can read twice as fast and faster. And how you can learn it easily.
How to hack your brain to read a book a day
Why most people never learn to read faster has two simple reasons:
- They think it is a esoteric skill only a few chosen one can master.
- They are not willing to invest the time. [But I ask myself why??]
Do I need talent?
Many people think they need some form of increased ability or talent to learn reading at higher speeds but the answer to wether you need any talent to flip through pages of a book is a simple NO.
Facing point one I want to tell you from my experience that speedreading is actually very painless to learn and absolutely everyone who can read can surely master this skill.
No special talent is needed and in fact, it is more like learning to drive a car. Basically, everyone can do it. In the beginning you dont know how,but bit by bit, lesson by lesson, you will get there until you can steer all by yourself.
What you know is, you will learn to drive because its in your range of perceived ability and the same should apply for speed reading . And trust me it is and it is also as effortless to learn.[But way less dangerous]
As you are probably currently not reading above the speed of a regular reader, since you didn’t do any spceific speedreading excersises yet, you will most likely read at an average reading speed of about 200–250 words per minute. If you invest a little time you easily can read at high speeds of 1000 words per minute and even more is possible. And it is also something that you will do completely subconsciously too. This may sound incredible now but like i said there is no magic involved.
All you need to do is just study a bit of theory and a few easily done effective exercises. Your only investment needed is motivation and a little bit of time. And I will now give you a good reason why you should invest the time.
Your time will be well invested
If you read twice as fast just imagine how much time can you save yourself. If you read only 5 hours per week, which is a fairly small amount of time for an average reader, that would be 260 more free hours per year. 260 whooping hours.
Just imagine what great things could you do with 260h free hours more per year? Or differently said 18.4 free days.
Plan a vacation on a tropical island and relax on the beach? Read the books you always wanted to read? Spend time with your loved ones? Learn a new skill?
Reading is also a crucial part of being a super learner: https://medium.com/personal-growth/6-habits-of-super-learners-63d466a254fd
The awesome thing is it is totally up to you and what you want to do with this free time.
Now you might ask: but how?
There are several exercises you can do that will help you get there and I will go through them one by one and show you several variations you can do.
Let’s get into how it is possible and what techniques we are using to achieve faster reading speeds.
Chance is that if you read with an average reading speed of a regular reader you are probably reading a text word by word.
Just like how you learned to read the first letter by letter, then syllable by syllable you are now reading word by word. But actually, we could even absorb more than just single words at once.
It is possible to take in whole sentences at once. How? You might ask. Simply by using our peripheral vision.
To proof this outrageous concept we can do a simple test. Focus on any word in this text and then check if you can still see the adjacent word. Or the even 3 words at once if you are daring enough. You can test this out right now.
You can see more than one word at a time? Good.
If not just try again until you can. You’ll get there
The next steps
The next thing we are learning is why and how it works that we can see more than one word . Basically, the human eye can focus on things in a fashion like this:
So, our eyes best focal area is actually rather oval then linear. We will soon be teaching ourselves how to use this knowledge in our favor soon.
Movement
Another concept we have to keep in mind is that our brain/eyes are naturally trying to follow movement.
Try it with your friend or spouse: quickly move a finger in across their vision and their eyes will naturally follow your finger.
Or just remember how you walk through a crowded place and your eyes always try to follow the movement.
Finally our first exercise
This one is simple. Use your finger to help you with reading. Just use it line by line. This might need some unlearning.
In school, we are usually told not to use our fingers when reading and it will feel completely unnatural at first. It might even decrease your reading speed for the first 10 minutes. So the first exercise is to simply get used to using your finger while reading and relax.
The point of this exercise was to give our brain a little help when reading. Our brains are actually not made for reading but to follow the movement and now we have a little help and it sets us up for our first reading exercise.
Small improvements
Our next little exercise is when use our finger to read, start putting in the finger at the first word, but at the second. And also stop at the second to last word before we change to the next line.You will automatically get the beginning and end.
Try this now. In the beginning, this will feel a bit uncomfortable but soon you will get used to it and your reading speed will already be increased.
To the next part
This was the first part of “How to read twice as fast”. In the following part, you will learn what are the main exercises that will help you to achieve double your reading speed.
To be continued…
[Link to be added soon]
About the author: He is a programmer by career-choice that loves to read and share knowledge with his peers. He also loves self-improvement,productivity and cooking. His wide variety of interests is reflected in his work where he refreshingly has a go at wide arry of scores of topics.
