dave@cylixd.UUCP (Dave Kirby) (10/15/85)
Thanks to all who responded to my query on the Evelyn Wood speed-
reading course (and the like). Following is a summary of the info
I got.
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Save your $$, speed reading courses typically emphasize points
such as:
Learn to skim material
Let your eye/mind/whatever capture the whole page.
and other forms of pseudo-psychological nonsense. One course I've
seen actually claimed to let your fovea (a small area in the retina)
grow! Other courses compared your reading time of a piece of text
before and after the course. Needless to say, a person reading the
same material twice (without the course) would probably do better the
second time around.
What I've heard is that **AT BEST*** these courses will
enable you to read newspapers, magazines, and recreational books
faster than otherwise. It does no good for technical material.
Why do I say these things & what is my evidence?
These were the most common asked questions when I taught
Perception,
Cognitive Psychology
and a Psychology of Reading Seminar
at the Univ of Wyoming. Reading some of the claims made by
these companies requires that you forget all the known physiology of
the visual system as well as all the knowledge gathered by experimental
psychologists since the early 1920's (as well as before).
The best thing to do to increase your reading speed/comprehension is to
simply read. Most of reading is non-visual. It requires that visual
info make contact with stored (non-visual) knowledge. Pick up any
technical paper outside your area and you can feel this effect for
yourself. Reading practice can help your eye/brain discriminate
words and/or phrases by their visual shape rather than by careful
analysis. In the case of familiar material, your eye/brain system
picks up enough info to confirm/deny your on-going hypotheses about
the text. If you know thematerial or writing style, you can read faster
by using word shape & length as a cue to meaning.
Most of this info comes from published tech papers by Keith Rayner
(see Reading Res Quarterly, Journ of Exp. Psych:General, etc in the
early 80`s).
Bon appetit,
Rick Acosta
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I took the Evelyn Wood course a few months ago and was somewhat
disappointed. As you may know, the way that reading speed is
increased is through PRACTICE of the drills that they teach you in
class. Just taking the course without practicing is not likely to
increase your speed. I thought that we spent too much of the class
performing the drills and not enough time learning techniques for
faster reading. I could do the drills outside of class, and I thought
that once a drill was taught, practicing it in class was a waste
of time. Their ads talk about INCREASED comprehension, but the
way they claim to increase comprehension is by teaching you how
to take notes on what you read. Most people thought that while
reading at high speed they were missing some of the material.
Since the practice is the important part, I would think that if
you could take a cheaper course at a university, or learn the drills
from a book, it might be about as good as Evelyn.
David Grooms
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In answer to my question:
"Advertisements and P/R appearances (like on the Tonight Show) by these
speed-reading gurus almost always feature some 9-year-old kid who can
tear through 'War and Peace' in 5 minutes. Is this some special in-born
ability that they are exploiting, or can it be developed through the
proper exercises?"
Rick Acosta wrote:
2. The feat is attributed to program/diet/book/exercise X.
Coincidentally, whatever the guru is hawking turns out to be X.
Inborn abilities vs training, hmmm?
Let's step back a minute and figure this one out.
1. In demos, tonite show type shows etc, an agent brings
out a kid/adult/little old lady/whatever that can perform
some (to the audience) amazing feat.
2. The performance is attributed to X
At this point, it is best to keep the two issues separately.
Re 1. There are several possibilities:
a) actual fakery (e.g., Uri Geller) - J. Carson is a
good magician so i doubt that this may be the case.
b) the person is using some cue (perhaps unknowingly)
that the audience has missed (although not human, the
case of Clever Hans, the horse that could count but was
actually responding to some unconscious cues from the
trainer)
In the case described, prior familiarity with the text
may have done it, but if we're tallking promos, I would
want lots & lots of evidence to rule out (a) above.
c) the person has been sampled from one extreme in the
distribution of skill/aptitude/performance.
Notice that any and all of these are acceptable in scientific
inquiry. Option (c) does not rattle my universe nor is it
unique to reading. Luria's mnemonist had perfect recall.
Stromeyer & Psotka's eidetiker could fuse 2 10K x 10K
matrices of random dots & 'see' the hidden message even though
the matrices were shown with an intervening period of 24
hours!! Most of us could do this at intervals of 1/4 second.
I suppose that anatomical studies of these individuals may
reveal something?
Re 2. That one requires my skeptical hat..
Although it would be unfair to judge a program/exercises etc
from a Tonite Show presentation, you can get a pretty
good idea of its worth by comparing their cause-effect
statements to what is and is not physiologically possible.
About reading, we know a few things:
1. a good portion of reading is non-visual. Scan through
some of the mkore esoteric boards on the net and read an
article. Have you read or have you identified words?
The mkore familiar the material, the faster our reading
speed (we also take fewer 'glances' at the text)
2. Our eye/brain system caputres data at .25 sec intervals.
If 2 different images are flashed <.25 sec apart you
report a mishmash (fusion) of the 2. This is called
masking.
3. During a short eye movement (6-10 char spaces at normal
reading distance) the eye is effectively blind.
4. The fovea is a very small part of the retina but its
6 million receptors handle what we call day vision
(high acuity stuff). They do this because they have
pretty much 10 to 1 type connections to cells in the
optic nerve. Other cells in the retina (126 million
or so cover the rest of the retina. They are great for night vision
(detecting light), but can't distinguish an X from an O at
5 paces. This is because they are on the 1000 to 1 or more
(i.e., a party line) to the optic nerve.
Foveal vision is essetnial to reading. High oxygen
concentrarion in premature baby's incubator can lead to
deterioration of the fovea. Oh yeah, the fovea also codes
color information. These receptors are nerve cells, ie, they
die & they're gone. No replacements available for neural tissue.
Maybe in 50 years or so.
Now the good news..
1. Reading is a skill like any other. Practice at it (i.e.,
reading for enjoyment, etc) will increase your vocabulary
(the nonvisual part of reading).
2. Like any other skill it needs its reinforcement. Curiosity
is a powerful drive and reading (and at times re-reading)
material brings new insights. Of course, I choose what I read.
I will not re-read William James 'Principles of Psychology'
at gunpoint.
3. Like any other skill, parents can shape it. Studies at
Cornell (see Eleanor Gibson's & ?????? Psych of Reading (?))
showed that variables such as easy availability of reading
& writing materials (magazines, books, blank large pads,
crayons, markers for the hearty minded) had a strong influence
on kids' reading performasnce in grade school. Words
spoke, and amount of reading activity performed by the
parent figures were also im.portant.
As you can see, no magic, but also no easy road either.
For highly technical materials, there seems to be no escape:
If you were an expert, you could speed-read it, but then you
probably wouldn't need to. If you were not an expert, then
you can't speed-read it, if you want to become an expert:-).
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I have actually taken the course. It does work and you can read
much faster. There is a drawback that it requires practice. You
have to use their techniques to keep up the skills. If you don't
do alot of reading it isn't worth it. Also when you read for pleasure
the books are quickly read. I was satisfied with the course but
I found I did not read enough to keep the skills up. However they
give you a card that lets you re-take the course for free whenever
they are in town. I have done this. I doubt if there is something
better but you really have to need to cover a lot of material to
make it worth the money.
Doug Frazier
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I have a friend who took the EWSR course. He reports that the huge
increases in reading speed are due to the way they measure "speed,"
i.e., Words Per Minute X Comprehension. The trick is in computing
comprehension, which is the percentage you get right on a test on
the material just read. Since you are encouraged to skim the material,
your WPM is very high, and since the test is very easy (you can guess
right without having read the material), your reading "speed" improves
dramatically. In fact, since the test is four-choice multiple guess,
you can expect to score 25% by chance. If you can skim four times
faster than you read, you can't help but "improve."
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>(3) Are there alternate courses that are cheaper or better (or both)?
Yes, there's an alternate course of action that's both. Most studies
on speed reading and the like conclude that you can't increase your speed
much before you start losing comprehension. Common sense tells you that
much of the material you've read in the past was not worth reading. So
work on cutting bogus reading material out of your life and you'll
increase your effective reading speed without sacrificing comprehension.
You might start with netnews!! (-: (-: (-: . . . (-:?
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I took such a course in college in 1958 and it was a real winner. At that
time they used a combination of a camera shutter and a slide projector
called a tachistoscope to increase the number of syllables one could fix
on at one time and the retention of such information. Most people at
least doubled or tripled speed and increased retention. I have a feeling
that a very good speed reading course could be written on a computer.
It would be a lot more convenient and probably at least as good if you
don't need the psychological coaching.
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I took the Evelyn Wood course when I was in High School and found that it
sort-of worked but there were three problems:
1. When I read technical material I have to think about what I've read
as I'm reading it to follow the train of thought. I can't do this
at the speeds that speed reading runs at, so I couldn't use the
techniques for technical reading (i.e. reading anything requiring thought
in real time).
2. When you speed read you take in information more quickly than with normal
reading. I found that when I tried to speed read a novel I would have to
concentrate to get what was coming in, and I found that tiring, so I
don't use speed reading for pleasure reading.
3. Speed reading is a skill which must be maintained by use or practice.
Since I haven't been using it I couldn't just sit down and start speed
reading now, though I could rebuild my speed with some time and effort.
All in all, I wouldn't recommend it, but I wouldn't consider it a fraud either.
Dave Rabinowitz