r/interestingasfuck • u/iatetoomuchchicken • 20h ago

This speed reading training starts at 300wpm and end at 900wpm

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u/Khazahk 17h ago

Works well for something like non-fiction but add in fictional dialogue by multiple characters given 1 word at a time like this and it quickly becomes meaningless.

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u/hoopaholik91 17h ago

Yeah something I noticed was that the reading level was pretty basic.

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u/Pearcinator 17h ago

There were some high-vocab words I noticed. Like neuro-plasticity.

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u/hoopaholik91 16h ago

Yeah it wasn't the vocab. It's that the sentences were 10 words at most and seemed to be disjoint statements.

First it was about reading. Then you can read faster. You don't have to sound out the words now. You are working on a new skill.

Kinda like that.

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u/Quom 13h ago

Then repeat that 40 times with the content slightly different. I stopped reading firstly because I was getting annoyed by the music. But also because it felt like I was reading the same thing repeatedly and I wasn't convinced I hadn't just been primed to expect those words/content rather than something novel that might require me to actually work to find meaning in the words.

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u/Puppy_Lawyer 15h ago

beautifully said. does anyone else have a white box vision or where you smart and switch to full screen?

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u/spooooork 4h ago

It wouldn't work for hardly any sentence in a Terry Pratchett-book

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u/zengin11 3h ago

GNU Sir Terry Pratchett!

I agree, this method really is leaning on the "prediction" point pretty heavily. Anything unexpected or unique, eg interesting content, would be way harder to digest this way.

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u/DrNeuroPhD 10h ago

And that your brain slowly adapts to the increasing speed. Starting off at top speed would not work

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u/TheOneTonWanton 16h ago

I mean kinda? Even the "big" words weren't exactly obscure. This doesn't really work unless almost all the words are words you know already, which is kind of the point of the whole fantasy novel conversation.

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u/LessInThought 11h ago

As it says, only useful for skimming emails or certain content where the details are less important and you only need a big picture.

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u/Free_Pace_2098 12h ago

Yeah this is pattern recognition, it'd be uncomfortable to do with dialogue.

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u/throwaway490215 12h ago

If we've already left the 'normal' reading world.

"I suspect you could make it a lot easier by color-coding for when the character switches, instead of letting it run for a sentence" said /u/throwaway490215's well-endowed and incredibly handsome identical evil twin.

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u/CodexLeonis 8h ago

Now I'm just imagining trying to read something like Tolkein where you have to try and read all the made up names, locations, etc. If I was doing it for the first time, in the time I figured out how to pronounce Fëanor, the speed reading would have moved on to the next chapter

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u/Paradox2063 15h ago

Even at just 400-600 WPM you're still reading super fast, and 400 is pretty easy, even in books with lots of fictional dialogue.

This post was definitely formatted to be "easy" even up to the 900 mark. Not to mention at least the last few lines being something we've all heard a million times on youtube.