Neuroscience shows that speed reading is nonsense
Neuroscience shows that speed reading is nonsense
By Ross Pomeroy | Published: 2025-09-16 14:30:00 | Source: Smart Skills – Big Think
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This article was first published on Big Think in July 2023. It was updated in September 2025.
Forty years ago, Donald HomaHe was a psychology professor at Arizona State University who specialized in memory and visual perception of linguistic stimuli. He has been contacted By officials at the American Academy of Speed Reading with an unusual story. Two of their students achieved a reading rate of more than 100,000 words per minute, more than ten times the speed of the average student at the academy and more than 300 times what a university-educated adult can comprehend (between 200 and 400 words per minute). Would he be willing to evaluate their amazing skills in a laboratory setting?
Strangely, Huma happily obliged. In the lab, he assigned the two men to quickly read an entire college-level textbook and then take a multiple-choice test to measure their understanding. After completing the script in just a few minutes, they took the test and completely failed. They didn’t learn much of anything.
“The only noteworthy skill displayed by the two speed readers was a remarkable page-turning dexterity,” Homa concluded.
Although this episode is anecdotal, it exemplifies what scholars have widely learned about speed reading: it doesn’t work.
There are two reasons why speed reading may not work
For more than half a century, speed-reading courses have promised to dramatically accelerate an individual’s reading ability without compromising comprehension. Proponents claim that people can become fast readers by learning to comprehend more words with less eye movement, and by silencing the inner monologue that accompanies reading.
Summarizing decades of research condition Published in 2016, a team of scientists and linguists specializing in reading ability and visual perception debunked these two principles.
First, how human vision works, including the structure of the eye, does not allow us to see words on the periphery of our visual field clearly enough to fully comprehend their meaning. The idea that entire groups of words can be understood at a single glance is nonsensical. Moreover, experiments have repeatedly shown that a speed reader’s peripheral vision is no better than that of an average reader. It is something that cannot be scaled up.
Second, silencing the inner reading voice can allow a person to receive the text more quickly; However, it comes at the cost of understanding. Sounds are key to language, so translating visual information into audio (sound) form, even just in a person’s head, is essential to fully understanding written words.
Reading is fast and slow
However, proponents of speed-reading programs point to data showing that students’ reading speed improves while comprehension is maintained. Students are given a pre- and post-test and appear to see significant improvement; However, the authors of the 2016 report countered that these findings are generally spurious.
“Sometimes the pretest is more difficult than the posttest, and other times trainees are tested repeatedly on the same material,” they write. “In both cases, it is inevitable that they will perform better on the subsequent test only because of the relative difficulty of the tests or because of repeated exposure.”
When scientists have carefully scrutinized speed-reading courses, they have repeatedly found that students do indeed boost their reading rate, measured in words per minute, but that this acceleration comes at the expense of comprehension. The faster people read, the less they remember what they read.
Nowadays, some applications aim to facilitate speed reading. Most present words of text one after another in the same place, allowing the user to adjust the display speed. This method, called “rapid sequential visualization,” allows the reader’s gaze to remain fixed—eliminating the supposed need for wasteful word-to-word scanning. Unfortunately these Apps don’t work either. The faster users view text, the lower their understanding.
Take a look, it’s in a book
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