Is it real? Can you learn how to do it? If so, is there a free way to learn how to do it? If not, how much money is gullibility worth?

Theoretically possible by seeing groups of words, not individual ones. I've got a book on the subject which didn't help me to learn to do it, but then I'm an odd case. Someone with normal cognition might well learn to do it.

As Woody Allen once quipped, "I took a speed reading class, and afterwards read "War and Peace" in three hours. It was about Russia."

There are some physiological limits on fast you could possibly read if you actually read every word. Your eyes don't glide smoothly over the page, they saccade from position to position. You can't see anything during the saccade because your eye is moving and because your visual threshold is suppressed. This lasts for about 0.25 secs. After fixation you need a certain amount of time acquire the image; I don't have the numbers at hand but it's on the order of 0.1 secs. In addition, the only part of your eye in which you have high enough resolution to read text is the central one or two degrees. Depending on the distance to the text and the font size, that's one or two words to the right or left of the fixation point, and one or two lines above and below. On my monitor right now, if I fixate on a single word and don't saccade ( a difficult thing to do, actually) I can resolve the words to the immediate right or left and the words directly above and below.

Crunching the numbers, our visual system maxes out at about 3 saccades per second, and we can resolve about 3 words in the current line during each saccade. If you were to actually read every word, then the maximum reading speed would be about (3 saccades/sec x 60 sec/minute x 3 words/saccade) or 540 words/minute. This is in line with observed reading speeds for competent adult readers.

Human variation being what it is, there are no doubt exceptional individuals who can resolve more words or make faster saccades and be capable of faster speeds. But for average people 500-600 words per minute is the limit if, as I stipulated, you intend to actually read every word.

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You can't see anything during the saccade ... This lasts for about 0.25 secs.

Are you sure of that number? A quarter-second seems extremely long to me.

(That's my primary question. Secondarily: since the eye views "the fixation point, and one or two lines above and below," should the number-crunching be based only on the "3 words in the current line"?)

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Originally posted by shufitz:
Are you sure of that number? A quarter-second seems extremely long to me.

It's a lower bound, and I'm oversimplifying. There are other processing delays before the image of the page is available to your consciousness. Yes, it's a long time. The temporal continuity of vision is a powerful illusion.

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Secondarily: since the eye views "the fixation point, and one or two lines above and below," should the number-crunching be based only on the "3 words in the current line"?)

I wanted to find physiological limit for normal reading, which is line-by-line. If you can learn to read three lines simultaneously and keep them straight then the limit increases, but that seems like a pretty difficult cognitive task to me.

Hey neveu, just to pick a nit. The vision out of the corners of your eye is much sharper than the vision in the center. The retina is made up of little cones and rods that pick up light. The rods are packed closer together and give finer reselution, but the cones can detect color. peripheral vision is black and white, but very sharp. I seem to recall early star gazers would look with the corner of their eyes to see fine items. Have you ever traveled down the road in your car and glanced over at a passing truck and seen the lug nuts on its wheels? That is a very fast image to capture, yet the eye can do it. I know, you can't track the lug nuts, but you can catch the snap shot. While on eyes, did you know that you have a blind spot in the middle of each eye? Close your right eye, focus on a point on the wall, then hold a coin out at arms length. Slowly move it from in front of your nose to the right. About 10 inches over it will disapear. Pretty neat. This is the point that the optic nerve comes off the back of the eyeball and there are no cones nor rods there. It is in the middle of the eye so that both eyes cover the others blind spot. The mind (not the eye) will hide the spot. When you look at a blue object it will cover the blind spot with blue, but when you put a small item in the spot, it can't see it. Yeah, no bearing on the reading topic, just kind of interesting.

P.S. it it's a good book why would you want to read it fast? if it's a bad book why would you want to read it at all?

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The vision out of the corners of your eye is much sharper than the vision in the center.[...]The rods are packed closer together and give finer reselution.

You're a little confused here. The highest visual resolution is at the fovea. This is where almost all your cones are, and very few of your rods. Here is a plot of rod and cone density as a function of angle from the fovea:

Rod density peaks at about 20 deg., but that's only half the story. Rods and cones aren't pixels, they are wired together in the retina to create larger receptive fields. These fields are larger for rods than cones, and get larger the farther you move from the fovea. That's why your resolution at 20 deg. is much lower than the resolution at the fovea.

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I seem to recall early star gazers would look with the corner of their eyes to see fine items.

Not exactly. Early (and modern) stargazers will notice that they can see very dim stars slightly to the right or left of their fixation point, but that these stars would disappear when they looked directly at them. This is a question of sensitivity, not resolution. The cones are less sensitive than rods.

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Have you ever traveled down the road in your car and glanced over at a passing truck and seen the lug nuts on its wheels?

This is a different phenomenon entirely. What's happening when you see the lugnuts is that you are making a saccadic eye movement, which is very fast. That's why you can't track it: you aren't doing a tracking eye movement, you are doing a jumping eye movement. During a saccade, the image is smeared across your retina, so your visual system suppresses it. However, there is a moment during the saccade when the angular velocity of your eye matches the angular velocity of the truck across your field of view, and the image is stable. Your visual system captures this frozen image.

ouch! so much for bits of info I pick up along the way. If you arn't ready to learn somthing new, you probably arn't reading this site. Thanks Neveu

One thing I've learned, lop, is not to fool with neveu.