Speed reading is one of the many gimmicks of this hustle culture, where the internet is flooded with speed reading courses and everyone out there wants to consume the maximum amount of information and read every bestseller in the shortest possible time frame.



Most of them don’t care about how much they’ll be able to retain or understand by reading 1000 words per minute. Speed reading courses propose that one can read anything whether it is psychology or a sports magazine at a lightning speed, which doesn't make any sense.

Reading isn’t about skimming or flipping pages, it’s about understanding, comprehending the ideas, and absorbing rich perspectives. At the cost of speed, we are trading our accuracy, comprehension & understanding. 

Why We Are Not Built For Speed Reading?

When reading, the eye has to stop at a certain point in the text to make sense of it, this is called fixation. Next, it must make a quick move to the next fixation point, which is called a saccade. Saccades are the hopping movements we make with our eyes between fixations.

The eye’s design allows us to see only a tiny portion of our visual field with enough precision to recognize the letters in 10 to 12-point fonts. Speed reading advocates that we can grasp whole sentences using our peripheral vision in one go. This is biologically Impossible.

Also, the working memory constraints are as significant as well. Many psychology experiments have shown that our short-term memory can hold only a limited number of separate items. Processing multiple lines simultaneously just aren’t possible with our limited mental RAM.

Reading is about comprehending and understanding. When we read we usually go back to something we didn’t understand. It might be a word, a line, or a complete paragraph so that we can read it again for better understanding. Speed reading apps/courses consider this a bad habit.

One of the methods used by the speed reading apps is RSVP - Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, in this technique the words are presented separately faster than the natural reading rate. This method prevents the reader from going back to the sentences they first didn't understand.

Speed reading considers backtracking a waste of time. So basically one is reading random words at a faster speed without comprehending anything at all. At the cost of speed, we are trading our accuracy, comprehension and understanding.



Reading Fast is Not Thinking.

If you’re reading fast you’re not thinking and challenging what you’re reading. You’re not being critical. You’re not making connections with existing knowledge. You’re just taking away the surface level knowledge and not absorbing anything at all.