Speed-Reading with Spreeder

Most people naturally read at or near their regular speech speed, but your brain is actually capable of absorbing textual information at much higher rates of speed. When you read, you normally fall into what's called "subvocalization," which simply means you sound out and pronounce each word mentally. Your brain seems to go through the process of preparing to verbalize every word of every sentence, but just doesn't send the signals to your vocal cords to actually pronounce the words.

Speed reading is simply disciplining yourself not to subvocalize each word while you read. Your brain is actually very capable of this once you get used to it. The problem is that on a written page, you have a second problem that you have to train your eyes to actually "scan" a word and then move to the next one, and (depending on the layout of the page, font size, etc.) that is also a challenge.

Type or paste some text into Spreeder and run it. The initial default speed of 300wpm isn't really all that fast (which is probably why some people try it and "don't get it" since they can actually subvocalize that fast) so they aren't getting any real benefit yet. The magic is in gradually bumping up the speed until you get to the point where the subvocalization process starts falling behind. When you push it just a little faster, your brain will "give up" trying to subvocalize, but you should continue to have a very high comprehension of what you read. In fact, as you push it higher over time, you will likely find you have very high comprehension at speeds that would have sounded absurd.

Basically, you are training your brain to directly connect visualized words to their known meaning without having to go through the "detour" of your brain's speech center.

Copy and paste this entire narrative into Spreeder and see how fun learning to speed read can be!

If you think you might use Spreeder a lot, check out the Spreeder Bookmarklet.