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Short Stuff: Speed Reading · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: there's Chuck. Jerry's hanging out here being a weirdo creeper,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: but she's standing in for Dave, who just doesn't show
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: up ever, which is sad, but it's all right. M
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: This is about speed reading. And you made a very
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: good point because you put this together for us that
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: if we did the same job today without the Internet,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: you would get a podcast episode about once every two weeks. Yeah, tops,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: because that's how long it would take for us to
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: go to the library and do all the analog research
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: that would take to get one of these episodes in
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: the can. But now we have the Internet and that
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: research is much more streamlined as it is for everyone else.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: It's it's crazy, like when you think about it that way,
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: just the revolution and information that the Internet provides just
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: so easy to take it for granted today, but when
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: you stop and think about what people had to do
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: just thirty years ago, basically, um, it's it's pretty amazing.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: The problem is is up to this point, up to
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: the point, um where the Internet became like uh widely
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: available to people through search engines, Um, we had decades
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: and centuries of people who did have to go to
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: the library to do all sorts of research, and they
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: still had to do jobs, They still had to find
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: out the answers to things, and there was a lot
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: of information, but all of it was trapped inside books,
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: and to get it out of there, you had to
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: basically guess what book had the information that you were
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: looking for, and then go find the book using the
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: card catalog, and then skim that book until you found
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: the fact or the information you needed. And that was
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: really slow and really hard to deal with. So it
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: kind of in that context, Chuck, it makes a lot
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: of sense that Evelyn would, the woman who founded a
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: company called Reading Dynamics which taught people for a hundred
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: fifty bucks about and fifty dollars today um, starting in
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: nineteen nine, would become an international sensation with this technique
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: of speed reading. Not a few hundred words, which is
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: around the where most people topped out, but thousands of
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: words per minute. That's right. I think the fastest readers
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: can read about four words per minute, and that's absorbing
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: what you're reading. It's a big, big point, it is,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: and I have gotten into debates with friends of mine
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: who claimed to be um super fast readers, and I
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: would do what they do. I would read that try
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: and read that fast as a test independently, and it
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: just seems very dubious. I'm like, man, I can I
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: can barely even move my eyeballs as quick as you
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: say you're reading, Like, I don't think you're retaining as
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: much as you think, because it might be because I'm
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: a little defensive, but I've always been a very deliberate reader.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: I just read very slowly, and I read it as
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: if I'm reading out loud to another person. That's how
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: I read to myself. And then when you factor in,
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: like your mind wandering, and you're like, oh wait, I
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: have to get back to reread this paragraph. It takes
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: me a very long time too, But I like to
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: feel like I got what I was reading afterwards. It
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: was worth a certain time, you know, not like these
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: skimmers come on right. So Evelyn Wood was very adamant, like, no,
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: I'm not teaching you skimming, because everybody would be like, yes, skimming,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: we all do that in the catalog or the library,
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: standing up by the card catalog. We skim. Just think No,
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: I'm talking about reading really really fast. And what she
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: said she had was a technique UM that she said
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: was quote the greatest inventions since the printing press UM
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: and it was it used what she called finger pacing um,
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: which was, in her view, a way of show pointing
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: out to your eyes huge chunks of text, if you
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: were really good, an entire page of text that your
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: eye would just absorb, like a different kind of reading.
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: That's what Evelyn Wood said that she was teaching people.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: And like I said, it was a smash hit. It
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: was very popular in the in the mid cent mid
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: twentieth century. Yeah. Their motto was we're not skimming, we're scamming, basically,
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: And I think that's a good point for our commercial break.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: So we'll be right back after this to talk about
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: the scam that is speed reading. That's why SKA a
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: little bit that you should know. Y SKA should know.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: But Josh Clark, alright, so it is a scam. Uh.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: Their website or they didn't have a website. Their workshop,
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: I knew it started with a w Their workshop boasted
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: that you could read five to seven thousand words per
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: minute and you could get through Warrant in Peace in
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: eighteen minutes. Immediately upon hearing that I'm surprised anyone said, well,
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: this sounds revolutionary, Sign me up. I figured percent of
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: the people in the world would have said, there's no
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: way that's impossible. This has got to be a scam.
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: But everyone from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon to
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: Charlton Heston were early adherents of uh Wood's speed reading program. Yeah,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: and I mean it makes sense because in the mid
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: twentieth century in America there was like a real trendy
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: nous about like intellect and you know, the engineering mindset,
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: lots of efficiency. Everything is very buttoned down and compartmentalized.
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: So the idea that you could wade through this enormous
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: amount of information trapped in books really quickly was it
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: was a way to show off that you were an
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: intellectual number one, but also was like I'm going to
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: leave the rest of you idiots behind. I'm gonna go
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: learn to speed read and you'll never catch up with me. Um.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: So there was a lot of adherence to it. The
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: thing is there was also very simultaneously from a very
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: early um period. I think her first workshop was offered
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty nine, and by nineteen sixty two the
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Saturday Evening Post had Um a story titled speed Reading
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: His Bunk. So there was criticism of it and skepticism
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: of it um from the outset, but she managed to
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: hang in there and actually reading dynamics is around today still,
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: it is. Uh, there have been I think the Washington
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: Post wrote a big criticism in nineteen eighty. Uh, there
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: were some other There's a woman named Marcia Biederman who
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: wrote scan artist colon how Evelyn would convince the world
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: that speed reading worked. And one of her criticisms was
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: this whole finger pacing thing, like even if that was
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: a thing, like you could do that yourself. You could
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: run your hand down a page and learn how to
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: do that stuff without paying what amounts to these these
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: day dollars, like over hundred bucks for someone to teach
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: you this bunk. And uh, the whole idea was I
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: think the Washington Post said said it was a new
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: way to teach readers to take in whole ideas rather
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: than words. So you know, I think if you looked
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: at a page of a book and went and went
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: down it, you might pick out, you know, let's say,
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: fifteen keywords where maybe you could say, I think the
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: character went to the hospital and they got better. But
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: like that's not the same as reading something right. Um.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: So there was also like this kind of veneer of
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: religiousness that was assigned to reading dynamical, very culti kind
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: of scientologist eye a little bit um there. There was
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: you were supposed to have faith number one in your
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: ability to speed read. You also had faith you had
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: to have faith in the process, the procedure um, and
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: people who weren't any good at it didn't have enough confidence.
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: They didn't have enough faith. Uh. And that was born
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: out of Evelyn Wood's background is a Mormon. I believe
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: she was a very religious person. So that that definitely
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: kind of um was something that that Reading Dynamics was
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: draped in as well. But it also kind of has
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: a like you say, a culti view of culti um
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: technique of blaming the student rather than the actual workshop,
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: which is pretty terrible because it really was the workshop
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: that was the problem. And one of the things they did,
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: Chuck was like you can't have you can't be around
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: for decades and you know, do millions of people, Like
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: millions of people took this course. This is like dollars
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: for for the workshop. Millions of people took this course, Um,
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: you can't just dupe them without some sort of rigging.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: And so what they did was they rigged what's called
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: the reading index. And the reading index was basically the
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: measure of how fast you could speed read by timing
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: how fast you read and then scoring it against your comprehension, right,
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: so you would get a comprehension test at end. And
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: what the Harvard Crimson in nineteen seven UH sort of
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: uncovered and pointed out was they very simply made those
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: first comprehension tests way harder than the final comprehension tests.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: So the idea is as you progress each test, you're
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: going to get better and better scores for your comprehension.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: And the first ones are very complicated and the last
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: ones are maybe like multiple choice UH and just kind
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: of super easy, to the point where the University of
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: Missouri did some experiments on the reading dynamics UH testing
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: and they found that you could score about a sixty
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: percent read and I assume this is for the later tests,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: but you could score about a sixty percent reading comprehension
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: without even looking at the material. Yeah, I think that
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: was the final test that that that's how easy yeah, exactly,
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: and I mean they also Reading Dynamics was also known
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: for threatening or actually filing lawsuits against its vocal critics too,
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: to sign them scientology. So, um, the thing is is
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: like there's still this desire to speed read. I was
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: reading this article I'm Wired, and it said speed reading
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: is or sorry, speed reading is a scam um, And
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: there's still today. There's different iterations of it. And I
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: think part of it, probably especially when you're looking at
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: the original founder of like a speed reading technique or
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: something like that, before it becomes like a business, that
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: person probably really does think this works, and they really
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: do want to learn to speed read, and that desire
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: is still around. But I came across this um this
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: article by a guy, an author named Mark Seidenberg who's
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: researched this, and it's basically he points out that the
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: brain is just not equipped to absorb information that fast,
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: and that when you're reading words on a page, you're
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: each little bit you absorb and then you move on
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: to the next bit. Each of those is called a fixation,
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: and we can take between a roughly seven and eight
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: letters per fixation, right. Each fixation lasts between a quarter
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: to a fifth of a second, and that um, really
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: what you're taking in. If you calculate something like seven
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: letters per fixation, you could do six eighty letters per minute,
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: which divided by five letter words plus a space is
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: two eighty words per minute. Two eighty words per minute
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: is what the average person can read at So the
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: idea that somebody could read seven thousand words per minute
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: and have any idea what they just read is it's
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: just it's bunk. As the Saturday Evening Post put it,
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: it's total bunk. And the one thing that is also
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: very much Scientology like, as they count on pride and
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: shame to kind of keep former adherence to the program quiet. Um,
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: maybe you're shameful that you paid thirty dollars for Scientology
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: programs and nothing out of it and you don't want
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: to say anything about it. Or maybe you paid that
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: equivalent in the nineteen fifties and you didn't learn how
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: to speed read and you didn't want to go around
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: telling people you dropped that much money. And they kind
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: of count these organizations, and it is funny how much
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: it's kind of close to Scientology, but they count on
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: people kind of keeping their failures quiet because of that
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: pride and that shame and it it worked. It's funny.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: If you read some of these, um, these contemporary articles,
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: you'll see interviews with people who are like, yeah, I
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: really used to have it, but you know, my my
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: comprehension score has gone down because I haven't kept up
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: with it. That's what they say. I am kept up
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: with it. I let it go, I'll let it slip. Uh.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: So it's pretty yeah, so, um speed reading is not
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: a thing, and it's actually a pretty interesting little world
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: two trapes into. So if this caught your attention, go
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: check out more of it. And I think, chuck that
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: short stuff is out, don't you. It's out as out
• 12:57
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