Just imagine, you can cope with all literature - technical, professional or fiction - three times faster.

And now the good news, unlike most skills that need to be mastered gradually, speed reading is available to you after just 20 minutes of training.

After all the exercises described in the article, I was able to more than double my reading speed.

Background on "Project PX":

Back in 1998 in Princeton University a seminar “Project PX” was held, dedicated to high speed reading. This post is an excerpt of information from that seminar, gleaned from this article, and personal experience speed up reading.

So, "Project PX" is a three-hour cognitive experiment that can increase your reading speed by 386%. The experiment was carried out on people speaking five languages, and even those suffering from dyslexia were trained to read up to 3,000 words of technical text per minute, 10 pages of text. Page in 6 seconds.

By comparison, the average reading speed in the United States is between 200 and 300 words per minute. We, due to the peculiarities of the language, have from 120 to 180 words per minute. And you can easily increase your numbers to 700-900 words per minute.

All you need is to understand the principles by which human vision works, where time is wasted during the reading process, and how to stop wasting it. When we look at the mistakes and practice not making them, you will read several times faster, not mindlessly skimming, but perceiving and remembering all the information you read.
Are you ready to start the experiment? Then let's begin.

You will need:

Book of at least 200 pages;

Pen or pencil;

Timer.

The book should lie in front of you without closing (press down the pages if it tries to close without support).

Find a book that you don't have to hold so it doesn't close.

You will need at least 20 minutes for one exercise session. Make sure that no one distracts you during this time.

And before we jump straight into the exercises, here are a few short advice how to increase your reading speed.

Make as few stops as possible when reading a line of text.

When we read, our eyes move across the text not smoothly, but in jumps. Each such jump ends with fixation of attention on part of the text or stopping the gaze on an area of ​​​​about a quarter of the page, as if you were taking a photograph of this part of the sheet.

Each eye stop on the text lasts from 14 to 12 seconds.

To feel this, close one eye and lightly press the eyelid with your fingertip, and with the other eye try to slowly glide along a line of text. The jumps become even more obvious if you slide not along the letters, but simply along a straight horizontal line

Well, you feel the jumps.

Try to go back through the text as little as possible.

A person who reads at an average pace often goes back to reread a missed point. This can happen consciously or unconsciously. IN the latter case the subconscious itself returns the eyes to the place in the text where concentration was lost.

On average, up to 30% of the time is spent consciously and unconsciously going back through the text.

Train your concentration to increase the coverage of words read in one stop.
People with average speed reading uses central focus rather than horizontal peripheral vision. Due to this, they perceive half less words in one leap of vision.

Train skills individually.

The exercises are different from each other and you don't need to try to combine them into one. For example, if you are training your reading speed, don't worry about understanding the text. You will progress through the three stages of learning a technique, using a technique to increase speed, and reading with understanding.

The main rule is to train your technique at a speed three times higher than your desired reading speed. For example, if your reading speed is currently around 150 words per minute, and you want to read 300 words per minute, you need to train to read 900 words per minute.

Step one definition initial speed reading.

First, we count how many words fit in five lines of text, divide this number by five and round. I counted 40 words in five lines 40 5 = 8 - an average of eight words per line.

Next, we count the number of lines on five pages of the book and divide the resulting number by five. I got 194 lines, I rounded up to 39 lines on page 195 5 = 39.
And lastly, we count how many words fit on the page. To do this, multiply the average number of lines by the average number of words per line 39 ⋅ 8 = 312.

Now is the time to find out your reading speed. Set the timer for 1 minute and read the text, calmly and slowly, as you usually do.

How much did I get? I have a little more than a page - 328 words.

Step two reference point and speed.

As I wrote above, returning through the text and stopping the gaze takes a lot of time. But you can very well reduce them by using a tool to track your focus.
A pen, pencil, or even your finger will serve as such a tool. After all, when counting words and lines, you probably used a pencil or finger, which helped you not to lose count. We will use it for training.

1. Technique (2 minutes).
Practice using a pen or pencil to maintain focus. Smoothly move your pencil under the line you are reading. at the moment, and concentrate on the place where the tip of the pencil is now.

We follow the lines with the tip of a pencil.
Set the pace with the tip of a pencil and follow it with your eyes, keeping up with stops and returns through the text. And don't worry about understanding the text, because this is an exercise to develop speed, not comprehension.

Try to complete each line in 1 second and increase your speed with each page.

Do not stay on one line for more than 1 second under any circumstances, even if you do not understand what the text is about.

With this technique, I was able to read 936 words in 2 minutes, which means 460 words per minute. Interestingly, when you follow with a pen or pencil, it seems that your vision is ahead of the pencil, and you read faster. And when you try to remove it, your vision immediately seems to disperse across the page, as if the focus was released and it began to float across the entire sheet.

2. Speed ​​(3 minutes).
Repeat the technique with the tracker, but take no more than half a second to read each line (read two lines of text in the time it takes to say “twenty-two”).

Most likely, you will not understand anything at all from what you read, but that doesn’t matter. Now you are training your perceptual reflexes, and these exercises help you adapt to the system. Do not reduce speed for 3 minutes. Concentrate on the tip of your pen and the technique of increasing speed.

In 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 have been reading all your life in order to understand what you read, and it is not so easy to give up on it.

Thoughts cling to the lines in an effort to return 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 gives up and thoughts fly away, which also affects the speed of the pencil.

Step three is expanding the area of ​​perception.
When you focus your gaze on the center of the monitor, you can still see it extreme areas. So with text, you concentrate on one word, but see several words surrounding it.
So, the more words you learn to see in this way using your peripheral vision, the faster you will be able to read. The expanded viewing area allows you to increase reading speed by 300%.

Beginners with normal reading speed spend their peripheral vision on the margins, that is, they run their eyes over the letters of absolutely all the words of the text, from the first to the last. In this case, peripheral vision is wasted on empty fields, and the reader loses from 25 to 50% of the time.

A pumped up reader will not “read the fields”. He will skim only a few words from a sentence, and see the rest in his peripheral vision. In the illustration below you see an approximate picture of the concentration of vision of an experienced reader: words in the center are read, and vague ones are noted in peripheral vision.

Focus on the central words.

Here's an example. Read this sentence

One day the students were enjoying reading for four hours straight.

1. Technique (1 minute).
Use a pencil to read as quickly as possible, starting with the first word of the line and ending with the last word in the line. That is, there is no expansion of the area of ​​perception yet - just repeat exercise No. 1, but spend no more than 1 second on each line. Under no circumstances should one line take more than 1 second.

2. Technique (1 minute).
Continue to pace your reading with a pen or pencil, but start reading with the second word in the line and end reading the line two words before the end.

3. Speed ​​(3 minutes).
Start reading at the third word on the line and finish three words before the end, while moving your pencil at a rate of one line per half second (two lines in the time it takes to say “twenty-two”).

If you don't understand a single line of what you read, that's okay. Now you are training your perceptual reflexes, and you should not worry about speed. Concentrate on the exercise as hard as you can and don't let your mind wander away from the uninteresting activity.

Step four, test your new speed.
Now it's time to test your new reading speed. Set a timer for 1 minute and read on maximum speed, in which you continue to understand the text. I got 720 words per minute - twice as fast as before starting classes using this method.

These are cool indicators, but they are not surprising, because you yourself begin to notice how the scope of words has expanded. You don’t waste time on fields, you don’t go back through the text, and the speed increases significantly.

The ability to read quickly frees up a lot of free time. Just imagine, you can cope with all literature - technical, professional or fiction - three times faster. And now the good news: unlike most skills that need to be mastered gradually, speed reading is available to you after just 20 minutes of training. After all the exercises described in the article, I was able to more than double my reading speed.

Background: "Project PX"
Back in 1998, Princeton University hosted a seminar called Project PX, dedicated to high reading speed. This post is an excerpt of information from that seminar, gleaned from this article, and personal experience with speeding up reading.

So, “Project PX” is a three-hour cognitive experiment that allows you to increase your reading speed by 386%. The experiment was carried out on people speaking five languages, and even those suffering from dyslexia were trained 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 between 200 and 300 words per minute. We, due to the peculiarities of the language, have from 120 to 180 words per minute. And you can easily increase your numbers to 700-900 words per minute.

All you need is to understand the principles by which human vision works, where time is wasted during the reading process, and how to stop wasting it. When we look at the mistakes and practice not making them, you will read several times faster, not mindlessly skimming, but perceiving and remembering all the information you read.
Are you ready to start the experiment? Then let's begin.

You will need:
book of at least 200 pages;
pen or pencil;
timer.

The book should lie in front of you without closing (press down the pages if it tries to close without support).

Find a book that you don't have to hold so it doesn't close.
You will need at least 20 minutes for one exercise session. Make sure that no one distracts you during this time.

And before we jump straight into the exercises, here are some quick tips on how to increase your reading speed.

Make as few stops as possible when reading a line of text.
When we read, our eyes move across the text not smoothly, but in jumps. Each such jump ends with fixation of attention on part of the text or stopping the gaze on an area of ​​​​about a quarter of the page, as if you were taking a photograph of this part of the sheet.

Each eye stop on the text lasts from 1/4 to 1/2 second.

To feel this, close one eye and lightly press the eyelid with your fingertip, and with the other eye try to slowly glide along a line of text. The jumps become even more obvious if you slide not along the letters, but simply along a straight horizontal line:

Well, do you feel the jumps?
Try to go back through the text as little as possible
A person who reads at an average pace often goes back to reread a missed point. This can happen consciously or unconsciously. In the latter case, the subconscious itself returns the eyes to the place in the text where concentration was lost.

On average, up to 30% of the time is spent consciously and unconsciously going back through the text.

Train your concentration to increase the coverage of words read in one stop.
People with average reading speed use central focus rather than horizontal peripheral vision. Due to this, they perceive half as many words in one visual leap.

Train skills individually.
The exercises are different from each other and you don't need to try to combine them into one. For example, if you are training your reading speed, don't worry about understanding the text. You will progress through three stages: learning the technique, applying the technique to increase speed, and reading with understanding.

The main rule is to practice your technique at three times your desired reading speed. For example, if your reading speed is currently around 150 words per minute, and you want to read 300 words per minute, you need to train to read 900 words per minute.

Step One: Determining Initial Reading Speed
Now you have to count the number of words and lines in the book you chose for training. We will calculate approximate quantity words, because count exact value It will be too boring and long.

First, we count how many words fit in five lines of text, divide this number by five and round. I counted 40 words in five lines: 40: 5 = 8 - an average of eight words per line.

Next, we count the number of lines on five pages of the book and divide the resulting number by five. I got 194 lines, I rounded up to 39 lines per page: 195: 5 = 39.
And lastly: we count how many words fit on the page. To do this, multiply the average number of lines by the average number of words per line: 39? 8 = 312.

Now is the time to find out your reading speed. Set the timer for 1 minute and read the text, calmly and slowly, as you usually do.

How much did you get? I have a little more than a page - 328 words.

Step two: landmark and speed
As I wrote above, returning through the text and stopping the gaze takes a lot of time. But you can very well reduce them by using a tool to track your focus.
A pen, pencil, or even your finger will serve as such a tool. After all, when counting words and lines, you probably used a pencil or finger, which helped you not to lose count? We will use it for training.

1. Technique (2 minutes)
Practice using a pen or pencil to maintain focus. Smoothly move the pencil under the line you are currently reading and concentrate on the place where the tip of the pencil is now.

Using the tip of a pencil, follow the lines
Set the pace with the tip of a pencil and follow it with your eyes, keeping up with stops and returns through the text. And don't worry about understanding the text, because this is an exercise to develop speed, not comprehension.

Try to complete each line in 1 second and increase your speed with each page.

Do not stay on one line for more than 1 second under any circumstances, even if you do not understand what the text is about.

With this technique, I was able to read 936 words in 2 minutes, which means 460 words per minute. Interestingly, when you follow with a pen or pencil, it seems that your vision is ahead of the pencil, and you read faster. And when you try to remove it, your vision immediately seems to disperse across the page, as if the focus was released and it began to float across the entire sheet.

2. Speed ​​(3 minutes)
Repeat the technique with the tracker, but take no more than half a second to read each line (read two lines of text in the time it takes to say “twenty-two”).

Most likely, you will not understand anything at all from what you read, but that doesn’t matter. Now you are training your perceptual reflexes, and these exercises help you adapt to the system. Do not reduce speed for 3 minutes. Concentrate on the tip of your pen and the technique of increasing speed.

In 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 have been reading all your life to understand what you read, and it is not so easy to give up on it.

Thoughts cling to the lines in an effort to return 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 gives up and thoughts fly away, which also affects the speed of the pencil.

Step three: expanding the area of ​​perception
When you concentrate your gaze on the center of the monitor, you still see its extreme areas. It’s the same with text: you concentrate on one word, but see several words surrounding it.
So, the more words you learn to see in this way using your peripheral vision, the faster you will be able to read. The expanded viewing area allows you to increase reading speed by 300%.

Beginners with normal reading speed spend their peripheral vision on the margins, that is, they run their eyes over the letters of absolutely all the words of the text, from the first to the last. In this case, peripheral vision is wasted on empty fields, and the reader loses from 25 to 50% of the time.

A pumped up reader will not “read the fields”. He will skim only a few words from a sentence, and see the rest in his peripheral vision. In the illustration below you see an approximate picture of the concentration of vision of an experienced reader: words in the center are read, and vague ones are marked by peripheral vision.

Focus on central words
Here's an example. Read this sentence:

One day the students were enjoying reading for four hours straight.

1. Technique (1 minute)
Use a pencil to read as quickly as possible, starting with the first word of the line and ending with the last word in the line. That is, there is no expansion of the area of ​​perception yet - just repeat exercise No. 1, but spend no more than 1 second on each line. Under no circumstances should one line take more than 1 second.

2. Technique (1 minute)
Continue to pace your reading with a pen or pencil, but start reading with the second word in the line and end reading the line two words before the end.

3. Speed ​​(3 minutes)
Start reading at the third word on the line and finish three words before the end, while moving your pencil at a rate of one line per half second (two lines in the time it takes to say “twenty-two”).

If you don't understand a single line of what you read, that's okay. Now you are training your perceptual reflexes, and you should not worry about speed. Concentrate on the exercise as hard as you can and don't let your mind wander away from the uninteresting activity.

Step Four: Test Your New Speed
Now it's time to test your new reading speed. Set a 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 starting classes using this method.

These are cool indicators, but they are not surprising, because you yourself begin to notice how the scope of words has expanded. You don’t waste time on fields, you don’t go back through the text, and the speed increases significantly.

Back in 1998, Princeton University hosted a seminar called Project PX, dedicated to high reading speed. This post is an excerpt of information from that seminar, gleaned from this article, and personal experience in speeding up reading.

So, “Project PX” is a three-hour cognitive experiment that allows you to increase your reading speed by 386%. The experiment was carried out on people speaking five languages, and even those suffering from dyslexia were trained 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 between 200 and 300 words per minute. We, due to the peculiarities of the language, have from 120 to 180 words per minute. And you can easily increase your numbers to 700-900 words per minute.

All you need is to understand the principles by which human vision works, where time is wasted during the reading process, and how to stop wasting it. When we look at the mistakes and practice not making them, you will read several times faster, not mindlessly skimming, but perceiving and remembering all the information you read.

Are you ready to start the experiment? Then let's begin.

You will need:

• book of at least 200 pages;
• pen or pencil;
• timer.

The book should lie in front of you without closing (press down the pages if it tries to close without support).

You will need at least 20 minutes for one exercise session. Make sure that no one distracts you during this time.

And before we jump straight into the exercises, here are some quick tips on how to increase your reading speed.

Make as few stops as possible when reading a line of text.

When we read, our eyes move across the text not smoothly, but in jumps. Each such jump ends with fixation of attention on part of the text or stopping the gaze on an area of ​​​​about a quarter of the page, as if you were taking a photograph of this part of the sheet.

Each eye stop on the text lasts from 1/4 to 1/2 second.

To feel this, close one eye and lightly press the eyelid with your fingertip, and with the other eye try to slowly glide along a line of text. The jumps become even more obvious if you slide not along the letters, but simply along a straight horizontal line:

Well, do you feel the jumps?

Try to go back through the text as little as possible

A person who reads at an average pace often goes back to reread a missed point. This can happen consciously or unconsciously. In the latter case, the subconscious itself returns the eyes to the place in the text where concentration was lost.

On average, up to 30% of the time is spent consciously and unconsciously going back through the text.

Train your concentration to increase the coverage of words read in one stop

People with average reading speed use central focus rather than horizontal peripheral vision. Due to this, they perceive half as many words in one visual leap.

Train skills individually

The exercises are different from each other and you don't need to try to combine them into one. For example, if you are training your reading speed, don't worry about understanding the text. You will progress through three stages: learning the technique, applying the technique to increase speed, and reading with understanding.

The main rule is to practice your technique at three times your desired reading speed. For example, if your reading speed is currently around 150 words per minute, and you want to read 300 words per minute, you need to train to read 900 words per minute.

Step One: Determining Initial Reading Speed

First, we count how many words fit in five lines of text, divide this number by five and round. I counted 40 words in five lines: 40: 5 = 8 - an average of eight words per line.

And lastly: we count how many words fit on the page. To do this, multiply the average number of lines by the average number of words per line: 39 ⋅ 8 = 312.

Now is the time to find out your reading speed. Set the timer for 1 minute and read the text, calmly and slowly, as you usually do.

How much did you get? I have a little more than a page - 328 words.

Step two: landmark and speed

As I wrote above, returning through the text and stopping the gaze takes a lot of time. But you can very well reduce them by using a tool to track your focus.

A pen, pencil, or even your finger will serve as such a tool. After all, when counting words and lines, you probably used a pencil or finger, which helped you not to lose count? We will use it for training.

1. Technique (2 minutes)

Practice using a pen or pencil to maintain focus. Smoothly move the pencil under the line you are currently reading and concentrate on the place where the tip of the pencil is now.

Set the pace with the tip of a pencil and follow it with your eyes, keeping up with stops and returns through the text. And don't worry about understanding the text, because this is an exercise to develop speed, not comprehension.

Try to complete each line in 1 second and increase your speed with each page.

Do not stay on one line for more than 1 second under any circumstances, even if you do not understand what the text is about.

With this technique, I was able to read 936 words in 2 minutes, which means 460 words per minute. Interestingly, when you follow with a pen or pencil, it seems that your vision is ahead of the pencil, and you read faster. And when you try to remove it, your vision immediately seems to disperse across the page, as if the focus was released and it began to float across the entire sheet.

2. Speed ​​(3 minutes)

Repeat the technique with the tracker, but take no more than half a second to read each line (read two lines of text in the time it takes to say “twenty-two”).

Most likely, you will not understand anything at all from what you read, but that doesn’t matter. Now you are training your perceptual reflexes, and these exercises help you adapt to the system. Do not reduce speed for 3 minutes. Concentrate on the tip of your pen and the technique of increasing speed.

In 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 have been reading all your life to understand what you read, and it is not so easy to give up on it.

Thoughts cling to the lines in an effort to return 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 gives up and thoughts fly away, which also affects the speed of the pencil.

Step three: expanding the area of ​​perception

When you concentrate your gaze on the center of the monitor, you still see its extreme areas. It’s the same with text: you concentrate on one word, but see several words surrounding it.

So, the more words you learn to see in this way using your peripheral vision, the faster you will be able to read. The expanded viewing area allows you to increase reading speed by 300%.

Beginners with normal reading speed spend their peripheral vision on the margins, that is, they run their eyes over the letters of absolutely all the words of the text, from the first to the last. In this case, peripheral vision is wasted on empty fields, and the reader loses from 25 to 50% of the time.

A pumped up reader will not “read the fields”. He will skim only a few words from a sentence, and see the rest in his peripheral vision. In the illustration below you see an approximate picture of the concentration of vision of an experienced reader: words in the center are read, and vague ones are marked by peripheral vision.

Here's an example. Read this sentence:

One day the students were enjoying reading for four hours straight.

1. Technique (1 minute)

Use a pencil to read as quickly as possible, starting with the first word of the line and ending with the last word in the line. That is, there is no expansion of the area of ​​perception yet - just repeat exercise No. 1, but spend no more than 1 second on each line. Under no circumstances should one line take more than 1 second.

2. Technique (1 minute)

Continue to pace your reading with a pen or pencil, but start reading with the second word in the line and finish reading the line two words before the end.

3. Speed ​​(3 minutes)

Start reading at the third word on the line and finish three words before the end, while moving your pencil at a rate of one line per half second (two lines in the time it takes to say “twenty-two”).

If you don't understand a single line of what you read, that's okay. Now you are training your reflexes of perception, and there is no need to worry about understanding. Concentrate on the exercise as hard as you can and don't let your mind wander away from the uninteresting activity.

Step Four: Test Your New Speed

Now it's time to test your new reading speed. Set a 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 starting classes using this method.

These are cool indicators, but they are not surprising, because you yourself begin to notice how the scope of words has expanded. You don’t waste time on fields, you don’t go back through the text, and the speed increases significantly.

If you tried this technique right now, share your success in the comments. How many words per minute did you get before and after?

Learn to read three times faster in 20 minutes - Lifehacker Zorina Iya

3. Speed ​​(3 minutes)

3. Speed ​​(3 minutes)

Start reading at the third word on the line and finish three words before the end, while moving your pencil at a rate of one line per half second (two lines in the time it takes to say “twenty-two”).

If you don't understand a single line of what you read, that's okay. Now you are training your reflexes of perception, and there is no need to worry about understanding. Concentrate on the exercise as hard as you can and don't let your mind wander away from the uninteresting activity.

Chapter Two How to Avoid Instant Death, or General scheme actions in the first minutes