Will we ever… read at superspeed?

Many speed-reading methods involve making sure that new words are always in just the right place for the fovea to recognise. The people behind a new app called Spritz realised that the easiest way to do that is by flashing the words up, one after another, in the same small box. By focusing on that box, the reader can identify each new word without having to shift their gaze. For no extra effort, reading becomes much faster.

Try Spritz for yourself, and you might agree with the company’s claims. But Sally Andrews, a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Sydney, says that effective speed-reading isn’t quite that simple. In an analysis published after Spritz hit the headlines this year, she said that it’s the time it takes to comprehend words that can slow us down. Unfamiliar and long words, in particular, take more time to recognise and understand.

Spritz is asking us to process the written word at a similar pace to how we do speech, Andrews told BBC Future. But if we fail to catch a word in speech we can use other cues such as intonation or the speaker’s hand gestures to fill in the gap and work out what’s being said. These cues are missing from the written words presented by Spritz, which might make comprehension trickier.

But comprehension is not necessarily impossible, as fans of Spritz might argue. This may be because Spritz readers are subconsciously relying on their prior knowledge or experience to fill in any words they miss. Providing the style of writing is familiar, a Spritz reader’s brain might still have some ability to guess any missing words and work out the meaning of a text. “I would argue that what people are doing is not actually understanding what the author has written but picking up words and phrases,” says Andrews. “The more they know already, the greater the degree of that fragmentary information they’ll pick up.”

In fact, other speed-reading techniques also generally require the reader to fill in the gaps they miss. PhotoReading, for instance, is a trademarked system in which the reader takes multiple ‘passes’ over a book, starting with the chapter headings and adding more and more detail with each pass. Andrews says that people using these speed-reading techniques are only ever processing an incomplete version of the text.

These techniques work for some people, but push them too far and the gaps between the words you catch become so large that the text becomes impossible to understand. Research suggests that comprehension tends to drop drastically when people try to process more than about 500 words per minute. In other words, there are fundamental constraints on the speed at which we can take in new information, says Andrews.

But perhaps reading isn’t the only way to ‘upload’ information to the brain. In 2011 neuroscientists from Japan and the US claimed to have found a way to enhance the digestion of basic knowledge. First, they asked people to identify the differences between three subtly different objects while their brains were scanned. Later on, the scientists asked each person to repeatedly perform a different task that – without their knowledge – recreated the same pattern of brain activity. Afterwards, the volunteers were much faster at discriminating that particular object from the other two than if they had trained only by looking at the shapes. Crucially, the fact that the people were unaware of the learning made it much more efficient, say the researchers.

Of course, it’s a long way from recognising one object more quickly to speeding up our ability to recognise every word in a lexicon. What’s more, Takeo Watanabe, the researcher at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who led the study, says his team have not yet tested their technique on learning that involves comprehension rather than just object identification. But the technique “should theoretically lead to [an] enhancement in learning speed, while not reducing the comprehension level”, he says.

However, would-be speed-readers don’t have to wait for sophisticated brain training techniques to increase their reading rate. They might be able to get a speed boost simply by improving their spelling, says Andrews. “People who are good spellers as well as being good readers usually read information more effectively than people who are good readers but poor spellers,” she says. Spelling might help us recognise and represent words in our heads. “I call it lexical quality.”

So will impeccable spelling, smart technology and new knowledge about the brain eventually allow us all to understand text at rates above 500 words per minute? “That’s the $64m question,” says Andrews. “I don’t have an answer.”

Anthony Dhanendran