Is Speed Reading A Tall Story?

According to several studies published in the Journal of Vision in March 2007, the idea of speed reading is bunk. The research proved that the construction of the eyes is such that it only allows them to focus on one small area on the page at a time, thus making speed reading impossible.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota say that although you might have the illusion that you see the whole page, you can actually only see small groups of letters at the point where your eyes are focused. Only eight or 10 letters fit in this tiny window, called the visual span. The rest of the letters are just a blur.

So how does anyone ever finish a book as long as "War and Peace"? Readers make a series of eye movements while scanning the page, said Gordon Legge, a vision researcher at the University of Minnesota.

People typically make four eye movements per second, picking up about four or five words per second and 250 to 300 words per minute. That’s a typical estimate for normal reading speed, Legge said.

Due to the constraints of the visual span, reading more than 300 words per minute is almost impossible.

"Speed reading is misleading," said Legge, whose research is published in the March issue of the Journal of Vision. "There’s no magic there. You’re just planting the little island of vision quickly through the page."

When viewing conditions are less than ideal, the visual window shrinks, Legge said.

For instance, people with macular degeneration-the leading cause of vision loss in Americans aged 65 or older-read more slowly than people with healthy eyes, even if they’re handed a magnifying glass. The disease affects the macula, part of the retina responsible for central, sharp vision, and forces people to rely on their cloudy peripheral vision.

Tests were conducted on how changing different aspects of the visual span, such as character size and contrast, affected the speed at which people read. Legge told LiveScience that reading small print, print with poor contrast, or print with strange spacing also leads to slower reading.

Source: LiveScience.com

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