Transcripts
1. Introduction: Here are five
comfortable, simple, no-nonsense tips to
help you read faster.
2. Lesson 2 - Prepare: Number one, do some
mental stretches. Think of reading as a race. And depending on your goal, you're going to set different
paces for yourself. For example, there's
an enormous difference between you're just going for a walk to enjoy
the nice weather, and trying to run a
four-minute mile, obviously, before you try to run
that fast and that far, you'd need to go through a
whole I warm-up process. Need to stretch and
get your muscles activated and ready to be used. And speed reading
is no different. Our brains need time to
kinda get up to speed. So here's how you do that. First of all, try to relax. If you're stressed out, you're gonna have
a really hard time reading really fast because
it takes concentration. So take a couple
of deep breaths, try to forget the
day is stresses. Focus on the present moment. Then you want to
kind of flip through the book and get a feel for
what the chapter is like. Define how far you want to read and maybe look at the headings
and the chapter titles. Kinda, it just kinda familiarize yourself with the topic of
what you're trying to read. And this won't take long,
maybe a minute or so to kinda familiarize yourself with what you're planning on
reading, think about it. If you're like most people
are like five minutes ago, your brain was being pulled up all different kinds of
directions by people, by notifications, by tasks and things
you had to do tonight. You're trying to
take all of that and that you're all
that fragmentation, trying to pull it all
together to focus in on one single task of reading about one topic with what
the book is about. And it takes a little
bit of time to do that. It doesn't just
happen like that. It takes a little bit of time, a little bit of preparation
to be able to do that.
3. Lesson 3 - Don't get too comfortable: Tip number two, don't
get too comfortable. So when you go for a walk, you have time to chat, Daydream, send a text message, smell the roses, eat some pasta. There's all kinds of stuff you can do when you're on a walk. All those extra actions
split up your attention. We just fine because walking doesn't really take
much concentration. Running, however, requires that you remove all distractions. So when you're speed reading, you're constantly pushing
yourself to go faster, which increases focus and
build more confidence, allowing you more comprehension. This means that you're
reading environment needs to be a chamber
of concentration. It's like my favorite term ever. This is a place devoid of all distractions from anything that's going to pull
your attention away. And it's going to prevent you from being fully
focused on that. One task of reading, sitting outside is awesome. But if you're at a place
where the wind is blowing the pages and you're
trying to balance your highlighters on
your knee and stuff. It's not a great combo
for concentration.
4. Lesson 4 - Remove subvocalization: Tip number three,
don't read yourself. This is called a
sub vocalization, and it's when we
unintentionally speak the words that we're reading to ourselves inside of our mind. This is one of the main
hindrances to reading fast and also for
comprehension and retention. It has two main problems. The first one is that you'll
never be able to read faster than you can pronounce the words
inside of your mind. This is big problem when you're trying to
read faster because that means you'll cap out at about 200 to 250
words per minute, which is how fast the
average adult speaks. The other problem you will run
into a sub vocalization is that your brain can comprehend about 800
words per minute. And so vocalization
will keep you at about two hundred and two hundred and fifty
words per minute. That means that your
brain is only using about 1 fourth of its
concentration abilities. This is why your mind
wanders when you read and why the other 34. So your brain decides to go off and try to solve quantum
mechanics or something. This is also why it's so
hard to listen to someone else in a conversation because
while they're talking, you're filling in all the words of what you could be saying in response or like your mind is running faster
than they can talk. That's why it's really
hard to concentrate. When it's almost when
someone's talking to you and when you're listening
to a speaker and stuff, your mind will just wonder, because it's getting,
it's getting bored. Contrary to popular belief, you don't actually have to
hear the word inside of your mind to know what it means. This is how you can see an
exit sign or a stop sign. And you just know what it means without actually
saying the word, this is how we have to
train ourselves to read because that barrier
will really it. You'll cap out at it. You
won't be able to go above it. So breaking through that is actually not
terribly difficult. It just takes a little
bit more concentration. And some things you can
try is you can try. Some people say chewing gum will help or humming to yourself. The rhythm of these actions
will help push your reading. And it will, it will prevent you from saying every word and
for me it into a sound. But for me I just found
that if I just focus on like concentrating on not saying the word
inside of my head. It took a little bit of
getting used to it took me a couple of pages
to kinda get it down. But then after that it was just kinda natural like you're, you're reading and
the words are just like going straight into
your comprehension. And those will definitely take
some getting used to you. Like, I know for myself, I first heard this and I was
like, That's impossible. There's no way you
can actually do that. But after I practiced
it for a while, the results were actually much more than I was even expecting.
5. Lesson 5 - Expand visual abilities: Number four, use your
peripheral vision if you can understand kind of the basic visual principles
that we use when we read, then you'll be able to remove
a lot of inefficiencies and increase your reading time and comprehension and
things like that. So that's what we're
going to look at next. And so a critical part of this
whole process is learning to read phrases, not
individual words. For example, if you read
this sentence here, you'll be able to understand
completely the sentence, even though you're
reading half as many of the words for myself, I found that when I
removed some vocalization, this process happened naturally. And so it's kinda nice because you get a little bit
of a cycle going on. Like these things they
stack on top of each other. And once you learn one, it
helps you move into the next one of improving your
reading and speeding up. And in fact, I'm guessing you actually do this already
even without realizing it. Now you can begin using this to your advantage because your, your eye span is
about an inch and a half as you'll see
in the next final tip, which is the best
one, your eye takes little snapshots of the page. And since your eye
span the width of the capture that it can take
us about an inch and a half. It's pretty awesome
because that means that once you learn how to use this and remove
some vocalization, as I said, you'll be
able to read like seven to nine words at a time, which is pretty awesome. So the best way I've found
to actually improve this and train this is to get a ruler and a pencil and just mark in about an inch to an
inch and a half where you begin reading on the
left side of the page and then mark off the exact same amount
on the right side. And then that is the,
that is the margins of where you start reading
and you stop reading. So basically, you're
allowing your eye only to move in the middle
section of the sentence. And you're requiring
your peripheral vision to pick up what's on the
outside of those lines. And this will take a little
bit of practice as well. So I don't recommend
you try this on your textbooks and like
really important texts. So give yourself a
little bit of time to learn this and get used to it because there's a little bit of a
learning curve. But if you stick with it, you will absolutely be
able to master this.
6. Lesson 6 - Use a pointer: Tip number five, use a pointer. This one might be the most
important out of all of them, even if you don't do
any of the other ones, this will still dramatically
improve your reading speed. This goes along with
our previous point, but when you read, your eye doesn't move just in a straight line across the page. It actually bounces and
takes little snapshots, which as we learned before, is about an inch and
a half at a time. That's how much your
eye can capture in each snapshot that it
takes up the page. If you'd like to actually see
this and feel it happening, the way you can do that
or a demonstration that you can do is to close one of your eyes and place your finger on top
of your eyelid. Generally, don't like
mash it in there. Then what you wanna do is you
want to look all the way to your left and then gradually, slowly move your eye
across and just look at the room and move it across all the way
to your right side. Now what you'll
feel as you'll feel your eye under your eyelid, it'll it'll jerk
across the room. It's hard to see with
your eye that's actually opened because it feels smooth. But it's actually not. Your eyes is jumping across as
taking little snapshots. And that's exactly what's
happening when you're reading. Now, do the exact same thing, but this time hold
your finger out on the left side and track
your finger with your eye. You want to focus on the tip of your finger and do
the exact same thing, move it across the room. And what you'll find is
that it will dramatically, if not completely, remove
all of those skips, all of those jumps
that your eye does. And that's what a pointer does. It smooths the whole process up and it makes it easier
for your eye to follow. And the reason we want
to make this smooth ER for our AI is that it prevents something called back
skipping and regressions. Back skipping and
regressions is when our eye jumps to take the
next snapshot of the page. But instead of going
perfectly sideways, it'll sometimes jump up or
jumped down or jump backwards. If you're really not
paying attention, this will happen over and over and over as you read a page. And that's how you can get
to the end of a paragraph. I've no idea what you read
because you're I was taking snapshots of the sentences above and below what you were
actually trying to read. And this gets very confusing because then you
don't understand it. So then you maybe go back
and try to read it again. And you just had this whole
big compounding problem. In fact, Tim Ferriss says
that back skipping and regressions make up to
35% of your reading time. So meaning that if you
read a whole page, that means that you
re-read about a third of that page,
like That's wild. So even just even if you don't implement any
of these other steps, if you only implement
this last one, I'm using a pointer and
you read just like normal. You'll improve your reading
time by at least 30%, which is pretty
awesome, honestly. And using a pointer actually has a couple of
more benefits as well. It makes it easier for
you to determine where to start reading on the page
and where to end reading. That way you can let
your peripheral catch on either side of where
you start and stop. The other thing it will do
is it'll help you increase your focus because
now you're using more of your brain is
requiring you to actually do a motion and an action,
be conscious with it. So it kinda keeps you out of
that autopilot mode where you just read and you
don't really get anything. And best of all,
it allows you to manually speed up
your reading time. And what this means is that when you use a pointer and you
move it across the page, you want to have the
pointer moving and guiding your eye like slightly faster
than what is comfortable. Because if you only move it at the rate you are
comfortable with, eventually it'll just get
slower and slower and slower and it'd be right
back to where you started. So if you keep the pointer
moving just a little bit out of your comfort
zone just a little bit faster than normal. It'll help you to keep
moving and keep improving. In fact, you should probably
set a goal to do each line at about a 2.5th to a second
and work up to that speed. And so I know at
first I was like There's no way I can do that. That's way too fast. But as you begin to work with this and
get more used to it, you'll begin to
surprise yourself with what you'll be able to do. In fact, a lot of
places will tell you not to even worry about
comprehension at first, and to just move at that speed. To train your eye to begin moving that fast across
the page is simply a practice to get your baseline speed and get your eyes used to moving
that fast over the page.
Austin Schrock, Building a better brain
