Short Stuff: Speed Reading

Back in the 60s and 70s, a speed reading craze broke out. Tough luck that speed reading is bunk.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck. Jerry's hanging out here being a weirdo creeper,
but she's standing in for Dave, who just doesn't show
up ever, which is sad, but it's all right. M
This is about speed reading. And you made a very
good point because you put this together for us that
if we did the same job today without the Internet,

(00:24):
you would get a podcast episode about once every two weeks. Yeah, tops,
because that's how long it would take for us to
go to the library and do all the analog research
that would take to get one of these episodes in
the can. But now we have the Internet and that
research is much more streamlined as it is for everyone else.
It's it's crazy, like when you think about it that way,

(00:47):
just the revolution and information that the Internet provides just
so easy to take it for granted today, but when
you stop and think about what people had to do
just thirty years ago, basically, um, it's it's pretty amazing.
The problem is is up to this point, up to
the point, um where the Internet became like uh widely

(01:08):
available to people through search engines, Um, we had decades
and centuries of people who did have to go to
the library to do all sorts of research, and they
still had to do jobs, They still had to find
out the answers to things, and there was a lot
of information, but all of it was trapped inside books,
and to get it out of there, you had to
basically guess what book had the information that you were

(01:31):
looking for, and then go find the book using the
card catalog, and then skim that book until you found
the fact or the information you needed. And that was
really slow and really hard to deal with. So it
kind of in that context, Chuck, it makes a lot
of sense that Evelyn would, the woman who founded a

(01:51):
company called Reading Dynamics which taught people for a hundred
fifty bucks about and fifty dollars today um, starting in
nineteen nine, would become an international sensation with this technique
of speed reading. Not a few hundred words, which is
around the where most people topped out, but thousands of

(02:13):
words per minute. That's right. I think the fastest readers
can read about four words per minute, and that's absorbing
what you're reading. It's a big, big point, it is,
and I have gotten into debates with friends of mine
who claimed to be um super fast readers, and I
would do what they do. I would read that try

(02:34):
and read that fast as a test independently, and it
just seems very dubious. I'm like, man, I can I
can barely even move my eyeballs as quick as you
say you're reading, Like, I don't think you're retaining as
much as you think, because it might be because I'm
a little defensive, but I've always been a very deliberate reader.
I just read very slowly, and I read it as

(02:55):
if I'm reading out loud to another person. That's how
I read to myself. And then when you factor in,
like your mind wandering, and you're like, oh wait, I
have to get back to reread this paragraph. It takes
me a very long time too, But I like to
feel like I got what I was reading afterwards. It
was worth a certain time, you know, not like these
skimmers come on right. So Evelyn Wood was very adamant, like, no,

(03:18):
I'm not teaching you skimming, because everybody would be like, yes, skimming,
we all do that in the catalog or the library,
standing up by the card catalog. We skim. Just think No,
I'm talking about reading really really fast. And what she
said she had was a technique UM that she said
was quote the greatest inventions since the printing press UM

(03:41):
and it was it used what she called finger pacing um,
which was, in her view, a way of show pointing
out to your eyes huge chunks of text, if you
were really good, an entire page of text that your
eye would just absorb, like a different kind of reading.
That's what Evelyn Wood said that she was teaching people.
And like I said, it was a smash hit. It

(04:03):
was very popular in the in the mid cent mid
twentieth century. Yeah. Their motto was we're not skimming, we're scamming, basically,
And I think that's a good point for our commercial break.
So we'll be right back after this to talk about
the scam that is speed reading. That's why SKA a
little bit that you should know. Y SKA should know.

(04:30):
But Josh Clark, alright, so it is a scam. Uh.
Their website or they didn't have a website. Their workshop,

(04:52):
I knew it started with a w Their workshop boasted
that you could read five to seven thousand words per
minute and you could get through Warrant in Peace in
eighteen minutes. Immediately upon hearing that I'm surprised anyone said, well,
this sounds revolutionary, Sign me up. I figured percent of
the people in the world would have said, there's no
way that's impossible. This has got to be a scam.

(05:15):
But everyone from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon to
Charlton Heston were early adherents of uh Wood's speed reading program. Yeah,
and I mean it makes sense because in the mid
twentieth century in America there was like a real trendy
nous about like intellect and you know, the engineering mindset,

(05:36):
lots of efficiency. Everything is very buttoned down and compartmentalized.
So the idea that you could wade through this enormous
amount of information trapped in books really quickly was it
was a way to show off that you were an
intellectual number one, but also was like I'm going to
leave the rest of you idiots behind. I'm gonna go
learn to speed read and you'll never catch up with me. Um.

(05:57):
So there was a lot of adherence to it. The
thing is there was also very simultaneously from a very
early um period. I think her first workshop was offered
in nineteen fifty nine, and by nineteen sixty two the
Saturday Evening Post had Um a story titled speed Reading
His Bunk. So there was criticism of it and skepticism

(06:19):
of it um from the outset, but she managed to
hang in there and actually reading dynamics is around today still,
it is. Uh, there have been I think the Washington
Post wrote a big criticism in nineteen eighty. Uh, there
were some other There's a woman named Marcia Biederman who
wrote scan artist colon how Evelyn would convince the world

(06:41):
that speed reading worked. And one of her criticisms was
this whole finger pacing thing, like even if that was
a thing, like you could do that yourself. You could
run your hand down a page and learn how to
do that stuff without paying what amounts to these these
day dollars, like over hundred bucks for someone to teach

(07:02):
you this bunk. And uh, the whole idea was I
think the Washington Post said said it was a new
way to teach readers to take in whole ideas rather
than words. So you know, I think if you looked
at a page of a book and went and went
down it, you might pick out, you know, let's say,
fifteen keywords where maybe you could say, I think the

(07:23):
character went to the hospital and they got better. But
like that's not the same as reading something right. Um.
So there was also like this kind of veneer of
religiousness that was assigned to reading dynamical, very culti kind
of scientologist eye a little bit um there. There was

(07:43):
you were supposed to have faith number one in your
ability to speed read. You also had faith you had
to have faith in the process, the procedure um, and
people who weren't any good at it didn't have enough confidence.
They didn't have enough faith. Uh. And that was born
out of Evelyn Wood's background is a Mormon. I believe
she was a very religious person. So that that definitely

(08:04):
kind of um was something that that Reading Dynamics was
draped in as well. But it also kind of has
a like you say, a culti view of culti um
technique of blaming the student rather than the actual workshop,
which is pretty terrible because it really was the workshop
that was the problem. And one of the things they did,

(08:26):
Chuck was like you can't have you can't be around
for decades and you know, do millions of people, Like
millions of people took this course. This is like dollars
for for the workshop. Millions of people took this course, Um,
you can't just dupe them without some sort of rigging.
And so what they did was they rigged what's called

(08:46):
the reading index. And the reading index was basically the
measure of how fast you could speed read by timing
how fast you read and then scoring it against your comprehension, right,
so you would get a comprehension test at end. And
what the Harvard Crimson in nineteen seven UH sort of
uncovered and pointed out was they very simply made those

(09:10):
first comprehension tests way harder than the final comprehension tests.
So the idea is as you progress each test, you're
going to get better and better scores for your comprehension.
And the first ones are very complicated and the last
ones are maybe like multiple choice UH and just kind

(09:30):
of super easy, to the point where the University of
Missouri did some experiments on the reading dynamics UH testing
and they found that you could score about a sixty
percent read and I assume this is for the later tests,
but you could score about a sixty percent reading comprehension
without even looking at the material. Yeah, I think that
was the final test that that that's how easy yeah, exactly,

(09:53):
and I mean they also Reading Dynamics was also known
for threatening or actually filing lawsuits against its vocal critics too,
to sign them scientology. So, um, the thing is is
like there's still this desire to speed read. I was
reading this article I'm Wired, and it said speed reading
is or sorry, speed reading is a scam um, And

(10:16):
there's still today. There's different iterations of it. And I
think part of it, probably especially when you're looking at
the original founder of like a speed reading technique or
something like that, before it becomes like a business, that
person probably really does think this works, and they really
do want to learn to speed read, and that desire
is still around. But I came across this um this

(10:38):
article by a guy, an author named Mark Seidenberg who's
researched this, and it's basically he points out that the
brain is just not equipped to absorb information that fast,
and that when you're reading words on a page, you're
each little bit you absorb and then you move on
to the next bit. Each of those is called a fixation,

(11:01):
and we can take between a roughly seven and eight
letters per fixation, right. Each fixation lasts between a quarter
to a fifth of a second, and that um, really
what you're taking in. If you calculate something like seven
letters per fixation, you could do six eighty letters per minute,

(11:22):
which divided by five letter words plus a space is
two eighty words per minute. Two eighty words per minute
is what the average person can read at So the
idea that somebody could read seven thousand words per minute
and have any idea what they just read is it's
just it's bunk. As the Saturday Evening Post put it,
it's total bunk. And the one thing that is also

(11:44):
very much Scientology like, as they count on pride and
shame to kind of keep former adherence to the program quiet. Um,
maybe you're shameful that you paid thirty dollars for Scientology
programs and nothing out of it and you don't want
to say anything about it. Or maybe you paid that

(12:05):
equivalent in the nineteen fifties and you didn't learn how
to speed read and you didn't want to go around
telling people you dropped that much money. And they kind
of count these organizations, and it is funny how much
it's kind of close to Scientology, but they count on
people kind of keeping their failures quiet because of that
pride and that shame and it it worked. It's funny.

(12:26):
If you read some of these, um, these contemporary articles,
you'll see interviews with people who are like, yeah, I
really used to have it, but you know, my my
comprehension score has gone down because I haven't kept up
with it. That's what they say. I am kept up
with it. I let it go, I'll let it slip. Uh.
So it's pretty yeah, so, um speed reading is not

(12:46):
a thing, and it's actually a pretty interesting little world
two trapes into. So if this caught your attention, go
check out more of it. And I think, chuck that
short stuff is out, don't you. It's out as out
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(13:06):
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