Speed reading
Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene says that claims of reading up to 1,000 words per minute "must be viewed with skepticism".
[1] The term "speed reading" is thought to have been coined in the late 1950s by Evelyn Wood, a schoolteacher.
[13] Skimming or skipping over text can also aid in comprehension when layered reading, a process of strategic rereading, is employed.
It is thus suggested by experts that speed-reading is most useful to those who need "to skim a large amount of material or need to improve their study skills" and less useful to those who read "highly technical material that requires careful study of each sentence".
[citation needed] The 2000 National Reading Panel (NRP) report (p. 3-1) seems to support such a mechanism.
To increase speed, some older programs required readers to view the center of the screen while the lines of text around it grew longer.
[16] Advocates claim that speed reading is a great success and that it is a demonstration of good comprehension for many purposes.
Mark Seidenberg considers claims like reading 25,000 words per minute "cannot be true given basic facts about eyes and texts".
He goes on to say that "people are as likely to read thousands of words per minute as they are to run faster than the speed of light".
This strategy may also cause overestimation of one's knowledge, as demonstrated by the following case in McNamara's preliminary analysis, showing evidence of the Dunning-Kruger effect:[19] The final task given to the PhotoReading expert was to read the three chapters from the textbook on Physiology in order to take an exam from a course that used that textbook.
grouping, using RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation), increasing peripheral vision, alternating colors for each line of text.
Marshall McLuhan was initially a convert to speed reading, however later concluded it was only useful for tasks like "scanning junk mail".
[22] U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and his wife Rosalynn, were both avid readers and enrolled in a speed-reading course at the White House,[23] along with several staff members.
Ronald Carver, a professor of education research and psychology, claims that the fastest college graduate readers can read only about 600 words per minute, at most twice as fast as their slowest counterparts, and suggests that Kennedy's claimed reading speed was more a measure of how fast he could skim a piece of text.
The six-time world champion Anne Jones is recorded for 4200 wpm with previous exposure to the material and 67% comprehension.
Howard Stephen Berg from the United States has claimed to be the Guinness World Record holder for fast reading with a speed of 25,000 words per minute,[27] and Maria Teresa Calderon from the Philippines claims to have earned the Guinness World Record for World's Fastest Reader at 80,000 words per minute reading speed and 100% comprehension.
