Speed Reading Game! (coming soon)

There is a lot of material on speed reading, and if you want to become an effective speed reader, you are going to need to practice. Too many people get lost along the path of learning how to read faster, and more give up after only a few practice sessions. Thus, I have decided to design an educational game devoted to increasing your reading speed. I will give you more details soon and ask for help brainstorming ideas to make the game addicting. Think how cool it would be to have access to an enjoyable game that made you read faster!

Recommended Resources

Here's a list of recommended resources, which will be updated frequently:

Hardware:

• Kindle ($260): The best device to read ebooks on, period.
• Timer ($10): A nifty little gadget for timing your reading/break sessions

Software:

• The Reader's Edge ($80 for Basic): The top rated, desktop speed reading software
• Ababasoft: A bunch of unpolished, speed read training applications (and articles)
• Spreeder: One of the best ways to practice speed reading on e-content (ebooks, email, online news, etc.)
• Comapping (Less than $3 a month): Online application for creating and sharing mind maps
• Freemind: Desktop software for making killer mind maps
• Lumosity: A site exploding with addicting brain training games
• Free Reading Test: Evaluate your effective reading speed here
• Quickreader (iPhone): Best iPhone speed reading application thus far

Books:

• Speed-Reading for Professionals by Wechsler and Bell ($3 used): A very practical book filled with techniques and exercises devoted to dramatically increasing your reading speed and retention.
• The Mind Map Book ($7 used): This book will introduce yourself to mind-mapping, a revolutionary way to take notes, brainstorm, and organize your thoughts.

Articles:

• Scott H Young on Speed Reading: Extensive blog post which does a great job of summarizing many speed reading techniques.
• Scott's Follow Up: Scott delves deeper into kicking the subvocalization habit.
• Pianoer on Speed Reading: Good blog post that summarizes speed reading and comprehension techniques.
• Mind Tools on Speed Reading: A great productivity site with a great article on speed reading.

Services:

• Project Gutenberg: Project Gutenberg provides the world with free access to thousands of books, most of which are in the public domain. Go nuts downloading ebooks from this site.

Review It or Lose It

Think about the classes you took in high school, how well do you remember any of the information you learned in them? Most likely you have lost much of the knowledge you temporarily owned, forcing you to take essentially the same class years later in college. Imagine how far ahead you would be if you had kept all of that knowledge securely locked in your brain? Review it, regularly, or lose it.

Hooking

You have been amassing experiences your entire life, transforming them into pieces of knowledge, and then cementing these pieces together to build a knowledge base. When you read, you pick up pieces of knowledge and store them in your short-term memory. In order for these pieces to transition into your long-term knowledge base, you need to build durable connections between these new pieces of knowledge and the knowledge structures you have already built. Think about how the new knowledge relates to your existing knowledge, how they are similar or different. This technique is called "hooking" and is something you should be doing throughout the entire reading process, but most importantly in the review stage.

Transforming Your Knowledge Base Into a Castle

A useful hooking technique is to visualize your memory and knowledge base as a castle, where each object within the castle is a piece of knowledge. When you want to add a piece of knowledge to your knowledge base, just pick a symbolic structure that you will remember and visualize adding it to a spot in your castle.

Schedule Breaks

Your brain is an amazing machine. It holds a gigantic database of the information gathered by your senses, interprets meaning from this information, and then constructs complex neural networks from this meaning. It is the most valuable piece of hardware in our body, but in order for it to fire on all cylinders, it needs to be constantly supplied with large amounts of oxygen and nutrients.

The burden of this crucial refueling task resides upon your circulatory system (your nutrient enriching, blood pumping system). You need this system to stay running at its peek performance level if you want to process information at your optimal rate. Maintaining a high blood flow rate is key to keeping the brain in ample supply of everything it needs. This is the primary reason you should take breaks while reading.

Here's how you are going to break:

1. When the timer beeps on you, finish the thought you were digesting and stand up.
2. Drink water, it is crucial for too many bodily operations to be neglected.
3. Do some sort of exercise to get your blood flowing. You could stretch, walk around, tense your entire body, do push ups, you get the picture.
4. After the alloted break time has expired, remember to clear your mind and to consciously refocus on your purpose.

You should experiment with times, but start with 30 minute reading sessions split by 5 minute breaks.

Another benefit of scheduling breaks is that they provide a powerful cue for your brain to switch between productive mode to recovery mode. When the 30 minute timer starts, your brain will know that it needs to be in 100% productive mode for 30 minutes, then it can switch to 100% recovery mode for 5.

Stay Attentive

You pay attention (hopefully) when your friend tells you a story, while you are on the phone getting directions, and during confrontations with your roommate(s), but you rarely stay this attentive while reading a book. The reason you stay alert in the previously mentioned circumstances is that you have established a personal connection with the party involved. This is why you find it easier to stay attentive while reading books with great characters, because you build up personal connections with these characters and are genuinely interested in what happens to them.

Sadly, most people fail to establish the same level of personal connection with the author of the book they are reading. The author is using the medium of written text to converse with you, to educate you, to entertain you. When you read, imagine the author becoming a real physical presence. Listen to an author's story like you would listen to a friend's. Speak to your book's author, ask him or her questions and jot down the answers. You can even debate the author, although try to stay civil and open-minded, as we would hate to see you slap, punch, or otherwise harm a book.

Change your assumptions about written text. Books are not inanimate objects, they are frozen interactions with the author. Thaw them and drink up the knowledge held within.

Accelerate to Visual Speed

In order for your reading speed to surpass the speed of speech, you will need to be able to transform the visual representation of text into meaning without hearing the sound of each word in your head. The habit of sounding words out in your head as you read is called subvocalization, and is probably the deepest engrained reading habit instilled in people. The habit started at the very beginning of our reading careers, when our first reading teachers had us pronounce written words so we could associate the audio representation with the visual and thus add the words to our speaking vocabulary. These teachers were (and probably still are) oblivious to the fact that they were instilling a very low reading speed limit in each of us by emphasizing the importance of learning the audio equivalents of written words and thus encouraging subvocalization.

When you subvocalize, your reading speed is limited to the rate at which you can hear the sound each word makes. After subvocalizing for years and years, your comprehension becomes dependent on hearing the audible versions of words. The reason long-time subvocalizer's usually backtrack is because they failed to sound out the previous passage in their heads and consequently failed to grasp the meaning of the passage.

Here are a couple strategies to overcome subvocalization:

• Overload your audio facilities -- Try humming a tune or counting, "1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3..." while reading. This will overload your audio facilities, preventing you from sounding out words in your head.
• Let go and speed up -- Temporarily let go of the need to comprehend every passage 100%, and instead focus on increasing the rate at which your eyes move across the page. Practice your pacer techniques at 150% of your normal speed. At first you will be catching only bits and pieces, but after a couple minutes your mind will begin to adapt to this faster pace, picking up more and more of the meaning residing in the text. Speed is the key to breaking the subvocalization habit. You can visually take in thousands of wpm, but only speak rates in the low hundreds (auctioneers speak around 250 wpm according to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute).