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What do John F Kennedy and Jimmy Carter have in common (OK, apart from both being US presidents!)?

Correct. They were both trained speed readers.

I have so much stuff to read sometimes it drives me nuts. Emails, psychology journals, student reports, client information, cutting edge psychology books (not to mention all the other kinds of books I love to read). Yet like most people I was never taught to speed read at school. I decided to do something about it myself. I have been using hypnosis for fourteen years, helping hundreds of people, teaching its clinical use to practitioners, and using it self-hypnotically. So it made perfect sense to see how I could use hypnosis to develop speed reading ability in myself.

Just how fast is speed reading?

The average person (yeah, I know, there is no such thing as the ‘average person’ - the average reader then… sheesh, give me a break already!) reads around 200 words a minute. Claims of 1,000 to 2,000 words a minute and way more are rife, but careful research conducted by Allyn and Bacon in 1987 and Harris and Sipay in 1990 indicate that recall and comprehension rates drop dramatically if reading speed goes much above 1000 words a minute.

I don’t rule out any possibility, but I have managed to get my own rates up to around 1,000 words a minute with about 80% comprehension. What’s more, revision of the material significantly improves comprehension. Not bad when you consider that the average 200-250 word reader only has about 65% average comprehension on the first reading.

Speed reading and hypnosis

When we perceive over all patterns (rather than using sequencing) we use the right hemisphere of the brain. To speed read, we need to see the words in groups and not ‘voice’ them in our minds. When you see someone silently mouthing the words they are reading, you can be sure they are not speed reading, because they are clearly vocalizing each word. If you ‘hear’ the words you are reading in your mind, you are ‘sub-vocalizing’. This is the province of the left side of your brain. When we ‘see’ the words without vocalizing or sub-vocalizing, we can instantly speed up. And because we are able to see peripherally we can scan many words at a time. This is sometimes called ‘photo reading’ and requires a wide awake trance like focus whilst you are actually speed reading.

Hypnosis is concerned with activating the right side of the brain while quieting down the mental and emotional ‘chatter.’

With this in mind, I have recently produced ‘Speed reading’, a new hypnotic download for hypnosisdownlaods.com. It should enable many ‘time pressured individuals’ to ramp up the rate at which they read in a major way.

Right, I’m off to tackle ‘War and Peace’ (the world record for which is 15 minutes, by the way, according to 25,000 words a minute ‘fastest speed reader in the world’ Howard Stephen Berg. Mmmmm.)

Mark