Take the book and check the effect on yourself right now.
Backstory: “Project PX”
Back in 1998, a seminar “Project PX” (Project PX) dedicated to a high reading speed was held at Princeton University. This article is an endurance of information from that seminar and personal experience of accelerating reading.
So, “Project PX” is a three -hour cognitive experiment that allows you to increase reading speed by 386%. It was drawn over people talking in five languages, and even suffering from dyslexia learned to read up to 3,000 words of technical text per minute, 10 pages of text. Page in 6 seconds.
For comparison: the average reading speed in the United States is from 200 to 300 words per minute. We have in connection with the features of the language – from 120 to 180. And you can well increase your indicators to 700-900 words per minute.
All that is needed is to understand by what principles a person’s vision works, on which time is spent in the process of reading and how to stop spending it. When we analyze the mistakes and practice not to make them, you will read several times faster and not thoughtlessly running through your eyes, but perceiving and remembering all the information read.
Preparation
For our experiment, you will need:
- a book with a volume of at least 200 pages;
- pen or pencil;
- timer.
The book should lie in front of you without closing (press the pages if it strives to close without support).
Find a book that should not be kept so that it does not close
You will need at least 20 minutes per session of the exercise. Make sure that no one distracts you at this time.
Useful tips
Before moving directly to exercises, these are a few short tips that will help increase the speed of reading.
1. Make as few stops as possible when reading a line of text
When we read, eyes move around the text not smoothly, but with races. Each such leap ends with fixing attention on parts of the text or a stop of a look at the area about a quarter of the page, you seem to take a picture of this part of the sheet.
Each eye stop on the text lasts from ¼ to ½ second.
To feel this, close one eye and lightly press the eyelid with the tip of the finger, and try to slowly slide along the text line with the second eye. The jumps become even more obvious if you glide not by letters, but simply in a straight horizontal line:
Well, you feel?
2. Try to go back as much as possible in the text
A person reading at the average pace quite often returns back to re -read the lost moment. This can happen consciously and unconsciously. In the latter case, the subconscious itself returns his eyes to the place in the text where the concentration was lost.
On average, to conscious and unconscious returns, it takes up to 30% of the time.
3. Improve concentration to increase the coverage of words read at one stop
People with an average reading speed use central focus, rather than horizontal peripheral vision. Due to this, they perceive half less words in one jump in vision.
4. Train skills separately
Exercises differ from each other, and you do not need to try to connect them into 1. For example, if you train reading speed, do not care about understanding the text. You will consistently go through three steps: the study of technology, the use of technology to increase speed and reading with understanding.
The main rule: Train the technique at a speed three times higher than the desired reading speed. For example, if now your reading speed is about 150 words per minute, and you want to read 300, you need to train 900 words per minute.
Exercises
1. Determining the initial reading speed
Now you have to calculate the number of words and lines in the book that you have chosen for training. We will calculate the approximate number of words, since calculating the exact value will be too dreary and for a long time.
First we think how many words are placed in five lines of the text, divide this number by five and round. I counted 40 words in five lines: 40: 5 = 8 – an average of eight words in a line.
Next, we count the number of lines on five pages of the book and divide the resulting number by 5. I got 194 lines, I rounded to 39 lines on the page: 195: 5 = 39.
And the last: we think how many words are placed on the page. To do this, we multiply the average number of lines by the average number of words in the line: 39 × 8 = 312.
Now is the time to find out your reading speed. Put the timer for 1 minute and read the text, calmly and slowly, as you usually do.
How much it happened? I have a little more page – 328 words.
2. Landmark and speed
As I wrote above, return on the text and stopping gaze take a lot of time. But you can well reduce them using a tool to track your trick. As such an instrument, you will serve as a pen, pencil or even your finger.
Technique (2 minutes)
Practice using a pen or pencil to hold the focus. Smoothly lead a pencil under the line that you read at the moment, and focus on the place where the tip of the pencil is now located.
We lead the tip of the pencil on the lines
Set the pace with the tip of the pencil and watch it with your eyes, without lagging behind the stops and returns in the text. And don’t worry about understanding, because this is an exercise on speed development.
Try to go through every line in 1 second and increase speed with each page.
Do not linger on one line for more than 1 second under any circumstances, even if you do not understand at all what is about in the text.
With this technique, I managed to read 936 words in 2 minutes, which means 460 words per minute. What is interesting when you follow with the help of a pen or pencil, it seems that the vision is ahead of the pencil and you read faster. And when you try to remove it, immediately vision as if is dispersed on the page, as if the trick was released and he began to swim around the sheet.
Speed (3 minutes)
Repeat the equipment with a tracker, but select no more than half a second to read each line (read two lines of the text during the time that is required to pronounce “twenty -two”).
Most likely, you will not understand at all nothing of what you read, but this is not important. Now you train your reflexes of perception, and these exercises help you adapt to the system. Do not reduce speed for 3 minutes. Concentrate on the tip of your handle and speed increase technique.
For 3 minutes of such a frantic race, I read five pages and 14 lines, an average of 586 words per minute. The most difficult thing in this exercise is not to slow down the speed of the pencil. This is a real block: you read all your life to understand what you read, and this is not so easy to renounce.
Thoughts are clinging to the lines in an effort to return in order to understand what it is about, and the pencil also begins to slow down. It is also difficult to maintain concentration on such useless reading, the brain surrenders, and thoughts fly away to hell, which is also reflected at the speed of the pencil.
3. Expansion of the area of perception
When you concentrate a look in the center of the monitor, you still see its extreme areas. So with the text: concentrate on one word, and see a few words surrounding it.
So, the more words you learn to see in this way with the help of peripheral vision, the faster you can read. The expanded area of perception allows you to increase the reading speed by 300%.
Beginners with the usual speed of reading spend their peripheral vision on the fields, that is, they run through the eyes of absolutely all the words of the text, from the first to the last. At the same time, peripheral vision is spent on empty fields, and a person loses from 25 to 50% of the time.
The pumped reader will not “read the fields”. He will run through his eyes only by a few words from the sentence, and the rest will see with peripheral vision. In the illustration below, you see an approximate picture of the concentration of the vision of an experienced reader: the words are read in the center, and the foggy are noted by peripheral vision.
Focus for central words
Here is an example. Read this proposal:
Once students enjoyed reading four hours in a row.
If you begin to read from the word “students” and end with “reading”, then save time reading as many as five words out of eight! And this reduces the time to read this offer more than double.
Technique (1 minute)
Use a pencil to read as quickly as possible: start with the first word of the line and end the last. That is, while there is no expansion of the perception of the perception – just repeat the exercise No. 1, but spend on each line no more than 1 second. Under no circumstances for one line should go more than 1 second.
Technique (1 minute)
Continue to set the reading pace with a pen or pencil, but start reading from the second word in the line and finish reading the line two words until the end.
Speed (3 minutes)
Start reading from the third word in the line and end three words to the end, while moving your pencil at a speed of one line in half a second (two lines for the time that is required to say “twenty -two”).
If you do not understand anything read, this is normal. Now you are training your reflexes of perception, and you should not take care of understanding. Concentrate on the exercise with all your might and do not let your mind float away from an uninteresting lesson.
4. Checking new speed
Now it’s time to check your new reading speed. Put the timer for 1 minute and read at the maximum speed at which you continue to understand the text. I got 720 words per minute – twice as fast as before the start of classes according to this methodology.
These are cool indicators, but they do not surprise, because you yourself begin to notice how the area of coverage of words has expanded. You do not waste time on the fields, do not go back in the text, and the speed increases significantly.
If you have tried this technique right now, share success in the comments. How many words per minute turned out before and after?
Backstory: “Project PX”
Back in 1998, a seminar “Project PX” (Project PX) dedicated to a high reading speed was held at Princeton University. This article is an endurance of information from that seminar and personal experience of accelerating reading.
So, “Project PX” is a three -hour cognitive experiment that allows you to increase reading speed by 386%. It was drawn over people talking in five languages, and even suffering from dyslexia learned to read up to 3,000 words of technical text per minute, 10 pages of text. Page in 6 seconds.
For comparison: the average reading speed in the United States is from 200 to 300 words per minute. We have in connection with the features of the language – from 120 to 180. And you can well increase your indicators to 700-900 words per minute.
All that is needed is to understand by what principles a person’s vision works, on which time is spent in the process of reading and how to stop spending it. When we analyze the mistakes and practice not to make them, you will read several times faster and not thoughtlessly running through your eyes, but perceiving and remembering all the information read.
Preparation
For our experiment, you will need:
- a book with a volume of at least 200 pages;
- pen or pencil;
- timer.
The book should lie in front of you without closing (press the pages if it strives to close without support).
Find a book that should not be kept so that it does not close
You will need at least 20 minutes per session of the exercise. Make sure that no one distracts you at this time.
Useful tips
Before moving directly to exercises, these are a few short tips that will help increase the speed of reading.
1. Make as few stops as possible when reading a line of text
When we read, eyes move around the text not smoothly, but with races. Each such leap ends with fixing attention on parts of the text or a stop of a look at the area about a quarter of the page, you seem to take a picture of this part of the sheet.
Each eye stop on the text lasts from ¼ to ½ second.
To feel this, close one eye and lightly press the eyelid with the tip of the finger, and try to slowly slide along the text line with the second eye. The jumps become even more obvious if you glide not by letters, but simply in a straight horizontal line:
Well, you feel?
2. Try to go back as much as possible in the text
A person reading at the average pace quite often returns back to re -read the lost moment. This can happen consciously and unconsciously. In the latter case, the subconscious itself returns his eyes to the place in the text where the concentration was lost.
On average, to conscious and unconscious returns, it takes up to 30% of the time.
3. Improve concentration to increase the coverage of words read at one stop
People with an average reading speed use central focus, rather than horizontal peripheral vision. Due to this, they perceive half less words in one jump in vision.
4. Train skills separately
Exercises differ from each other, and you do not need to try to connect them into 1. For example, if you train reading speed, do not care about understanding the text. You will consistently go through three steps: the study of technology, the use of technology to increase speed and reading with understanding.
The main rule: Train the technique at a speed three times higher than the desired reading speed. For example, if now your reading speed is about 150 words per minute, and you want to read 300, you need to train 900 words per minute.
Exercises
1. Determining the initial reading speed
Now you have to calculate the number of words and lines in the book that you have chosen for training. We will calculate the approximate number of words, since calculating the exact value will be too dreary and for a long time.
First we think how many words are placed in five lines of the text, divide this number by five and round. I counted 40 words in five lines: 40: 5 = 8 – an average of eight words in a line.
Next, we count the number of lines on five pages of the book and divide the resulting number by 5. I got 194 lines, I rounded to 39 lines on the page: 195: 5 = 39.
And the last: we think how many words are placed on the page. To do this, we multiply the average number of lines by the average number of words in the line: 39 × 8 = 312.
Now is the time to find out your reading speed. Put the timer for 1 minute and read the text, calmly and slowly, as you usually do.
How much it happened? I have a little more page – 328 words.
2. Landmark and speed
As I wrote above, return on the text and stopping gaze take a lot of time. But you can well reduce them using a tool to track your trick. As such an instrument, you will serve as a pen, pencil or even your finger.
Technique (2 minutes)
Practice using a pen or pencil to hold the focus. Smoothly lead a pencil under the line that you read at the moment, and focus on the place where the tip of the pencil is now located.
We lead the tip of the pencil on the lines
Set the pace with the tip of the pencil and watch it with your eyes, without lagging behind the stops and returns in the text. And don’t worry about understanding, because this is an exercise on speed development.
Try to go through every line in 1 second and increase speed with each page.
Do not linger on one line for more than 1 second under any circumstances, even if you do not understand at all what is about in the text.
With this technique, I managed to read 936 words in 2 minutes, which means 460 words per minute. What is interesting when you follow with the help of a pen or pencil, it seems that the vision is ahead of the pencil and you read faster. And when you try to remove it, immediately vision as if is dispersed on the page, as if the trick was released and he began to swim around the sheet.
Speed (3 minutes)
Repeat the equipment with a tracker, but select no more than half a second to read each line (read two lines of the text during the time that is required to pronounce “twenty -two”).
Most likely, you will not understand at all nothing of what you read, but this is not important. Now you train your reflexes of perception, and these exercises help you adapt to the system. Do not reduce speed for 3 minutes. Concentrate on the tip of your handle and speed increase technique.
For 3 minutes of such a frantic race, I read five pages and 14 lines, an average of 586 words per minute. The most difficult thing in this exercise is not to slow down the speed of the pencil. This is a real block: you read all your life to understand what you read, and this is not so easy to renounce.
Thoughts are clinging to the lines in an effort to return in order to understand what it is about, and the pencil also begins to slow down. It is also difficult to maintain concentration on such useless reading, the brain surrenders, and thoughts fly away to hell, which is also reflected at the speed of the pencil.
3. Expansion of the area of perception
When you concentrate a look in the center of the monitor, you still see its extreme areas. So with the text: concentrate on one word, and see a few words surrounding it.
So, the more words you learn to see in this way with the help of peripheral vision, the faster you can read. The expanded area of perception allows you to increase the reading speed by 300%.
Beginners with the usual speed of reading spend their peripheral vision on the fields, that is, they run through the eyes of absolutely all the words of the text, from the first to the last. At the same time, peripheral vision is spent on empty fields, and a person loses from 25 to 50% of the time.
The pumped reader will not “read the fields”. He will run through his eyes only by a few words from the sentence, and the rest will see with peripheral vision. In the illustration below, you see an approximate picture of the concentration of the vision of an experienced reader: the words are read in the center, and the foggy are noted by peripheral vision.
Focus for central words
Here is an example. Read this proposal:
Once students enjoyed reading four hours in a row.
If you begin to read from the word “students” and end with “reading”, then save time reading as many as five words out of eight! And this reduces the time to read this offer more than double.
Technique (1 minute)
Use a pencil to read as quickly as possible: start with the first word of the line and end the last. That is, while there is no expansion of the perception of the perception – just repeat the exercise No. 1, but spend on each line no more than 1 second. Under no circumstances for one line should go more than 1 second.
Technique (1 minute)
Continue to set the reading pace with a pen or pencil, but start reading from the second word in the line and finish reading the line two words until the end.
Speed (3 minutes)
Start reading from the third word in the line and end three words to the end, while moving your pencil at a speed of one line in half a second (two lines for the time that is required to say “twenty -two”).
If you do not understand anything read, this is normal. Now you are training your reflexes of perception, and you should not take care of understanding. Concentrate on the exercise with all your might and do not let your mind float away from an uninteresting lesson.
4. Checking new speed
Now it’s time to check your new reading speed. Put the timer for 1 minute and read at the maximum speed at which you continue to understand the text. I got 720 words per minute – twice as fast as before the start of classes according to this methodology.
These are cool indicators, but they do not surprise, because you yourself begin to notice how the area of coverage of words has expanded. You do not waste time on the fields, do not go back in the text, and the speed increases significantly.
If you have tried this technique right now, share success in the comments. How many words per minute turned out before and after?