Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Speed Reading

Episode Date: May 19, 2021

Back in the 60s and 70s, a speed reading craze broke out. Tough luck that speed reading is bunk. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck Jerry's hanging out here,

being a weirdo creeper. But she's standing in for Dave, who just doesn't show up ever, which is sad, but it's all right. This is about speed reading. And you made a very good point because you put this together for us that if we did the same job today without the internet, you would get a podcast episode about once every two weeks. Yeah, tops. Because that's how long it would take for us to go to the library and do all the analog research that it would take to get one of these episodes in the can. But now we have the internet, and that research is much more streamlined as it is for everyone else.

It's, it's crazy. Like when you think about it that way, just the revolution and information that the internet provides. It's just so easy to take it for granted today. But when you stop and think about what people had to do just 30 years ago, basically, it's pretty amazing. The problem is, is up to this point, up to the point where the internet became like widely available to people through search engines. We had decades and centuries of people who did have to go to the library to do all sorts of research, and they still had to do jobs. They still had to find out the answers to things. And there was a lot of information, but all of it was trapped inside books. And to get it out of there, you had to basically

guess what book had the information that you were looking for, and then go find the book using the card catalog, and then skim that book until you found the fact or the information you needed. And that was really slow and really hard to deal with. So it kind of, in that context, Chuck, it makes a lot of sense that Evelyn Wood, the woman who founded a company called Reading Dynamics, which taught people for $150, about $1,350 today, starting in 1959, would become an international sensation with this technique of speed reading. Not a few hundred words, which is around where most people tops out, but thousands of words per minute. That's right. I think the fastest readers can read about 400 words per minute,

and that's absorbing what you're reading. Yes, that's a big, big point. It is. And I have gotten into debates with friends of mine who claim to be super fast readers, and I would do what they do. I would try and read that fast as a test independently. And it just seems very dubious. I'm like, man, I can barely even move my eyeballs as quick as you say you're reading. I don't think you're retaining as much as you think, because it might be because I'm a little defensive, but I've always been a very deliberate reader. I just read very slowly, and I read it as if I'm reading out loud to another person. That's how I read to myself. Yeah. And then when you factor in your mind wandering,

and you're like, wait, I have to go back and reread this paragraph, it takes me a very long time too, but I like to feel like I got what I was reading afterwards, so it was worth a different time. Yeah, not like those skimmers, come on. Right. So Evelyn Wood was very adamant, like, no, I'm not teaching you skimming, because everybody would be like, yeah, skimming, we all do that in the catalog or the library standing up by the card catalog. We skim. She's like, no, I'm talking about reading really, really fast. And what she said she had was a technique that she said was, quote, the greatest invention since the printing press. And it used what she called finger pacing, which was, in her view, a way of

pointing out to your eyes huge chunks of text. If you were really good, an entire page of text, that your eye would just absorb like a different kind of reading. That's what Evelyn Wood said that she was teaching people. And like I said, it was a smash hit. It was very popular in the mid 20th century. Yeah, the motto was, we're not skimming, we're scamming. Basically. And I think that's a good point for our commercial break. So we'll be right back after this to talk about the scam that is speed reading. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. So it is a scam. Their website, or they didn't have a website. Their workshop, I knew it started with a W, their workshop boasted that you could read five to 7,000 words per minute and you could get through war and peace in 18 minutes. Immediately upon hearing that, I'm surprised anyone said, well, this sounds revolutionary. Sign me up. I figured 100% of the people in the world would have said, there's no way that's impossible. This has got to be a scam. But everyone from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon to Charlton Heston were early adherents of Wood's speed reading program.

Yeah. And I mean, it makes sense because in the mid 20th century in America, there was a real trendiness about intellect and the engineering mindset, lots of efficiency. Everything's very buttoned down and compartmentalized. So the idea that you could wade through this enormous amount of information trapped in books really quickly was a way to show off that you were an intellectual number one, but also was like, I'm going to leave the rest of you idiots behind. I'm going to go learn to speed read and you'll never catch up with me. So there was a lot of adherence to it. The thing is there was also very simultaneously from a very early period. I think her first workshop was offered in 1959. And by 1962, the Saturday evening post had a story titled Speed

Reading as Bunk. So there was criticism of it and skepticism of it from the outset, but she managed to hang in there and actually reading dynamics is around today still. It is. There have been, I think the Washington Post wrote a big criticism in 1980. There were some other, there's a woman named Marsha Biederman who wrote scan artist, Colin, how Evelyn Wood convinced the world that speed reading worked. And one of her criticisms was this whole finger pacing thing, like even if that was a thing, like you could do that, yourself, you could run your hand down a page and learn how to do that stuff without paying what amounts to these, these day dollars, like over 1300 bucks for someone to teach you this bunk.

Right. And the whole idea was, I think the Washington Post said, said it was a new way to teach readers to take in whole ideas rather than words. So, you know, I think if you looked at a page of a book and went and went down it, you might pick out, you know, let's say 15 key words where maybe you could say, I think the character went to the hospital and they got better, but like that's not the same as reading something. Right. So, there was also like this kind of veneer of religiousness that was assigned to reading dynamics. Very culty, kind of Scientology-sty a little bit. There was, you were supposed to have faith, number one in your ability to speedread. You also had faith. You had to have faith in the process, the procedure,

and people who weren't any good at it didn't have enough confidence. They didn't have enough faith. And that was born out of Evelyn Wood's background as a Mormon, I believe. She was a very religious person. So, that definitely kind of was something that reading dynamics was draped in as well. But it also kind of has a, like you say, a culty view of, or a culty technique of blaming the student rather than the actual workshop, which is pretty terrible because it really was the workshop that was the problem. And one of the things they did, Chuck, was like you can't be around for decades and, you know, do millions of people. Like millions of people took this course. This is like $1,300 for the workshop. Millions of people took this course. You can't

just dupe them without some sort of rigging. And so, what they did was they rigged what's called the reading index. And the reading index was basically the measure of how fast you could speedread by timing how fast you read and then scoring it against your comprehension. Right. So, you would get a comprehension test at the end. And what the Harvard Crimson in 1967 sort of uncovered and pointed out was they very simply made those first comprehension tests way harder than the final comprehension tests. So, the idea is as you progress each test, you're going to get better and better scores for your comprehension. And the first ones are very complicated. And the last ones are maybe like multiple choice. And just kind of super easy

to the point where the University of Missouri did some experiments on the reading dynamics testing. And they found that you could score about a 60% read. And I assume this is for the later tests. But you could score about a 60% reading comprehension without even looking at the material. Yeah. I think that was the final test that that that's how easy. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, they also reading dynamics was also known for threatening or actually filing lawsuits against its most vocal critics to silence them. Sounds like another. Yeah. Scientology. So, the thing is, is like there is still this desire to speedread. I was reading this article on Wired and it said speedreading is, or sorry, speedreading is a scam. And there's still today, there's different

iterations of it. And I think part of it probably, especially when you're looking at the original founder of like a speedreading technique or something like that before it becomes like a business, that person probably really does think this works. And they really do want to learn to speedread. And that desire is still around. But I came across this, this article by a guy, an author named Mark Seidenberg, who's researched this. And it's basically, he points out that the brain is just not equipped to absorb information that fast. And that when you're reading words on a page, you're, each little bit you absorb, and then you move on to the next bit, each of those is called the fixation. And we can take between roughly seven and eight letters per fixation,

right? Each fixation lasts between a quarter to a fifth of a second. And that really what you're taking in, if you calculate something like seven letters per fixation, you could do 1680 letters per minute, which divided by five letter words plus a space is 280 words per minute. 280 words per minute is what the average person can read at. So the idea that somebody could read 7000 words per minute and have any idea what they just read is, it's just, it's bunk, as the Saturday evening post put it. It's total bunk. And the one thing that is also very much Scientology like is they count on pride and shame to kind of keep former adherents to the program quiet. Maybe you're shameful that you paid $30,000 for Scientology programs and got nothing out of it. And you

don't want to say anything about it. Or maybe you paid that $1,300 equivalent in the 1950s. And you didn't learn how to speed read. And you didn't want to go around telling people you drop that much money. And they kind of count these organizations and it is funny how much it's kind of close to Scientology. But they count on people kind of keeping their failures quiet because of that pride and that shame. And it worked. It's funny if you read some of these contemporary articles, you'll see interviews with people who are like, yeah, I really used to have it. But you know, my comprehension score has gone down because I haven't kept up with it. That's what they say. I haven't kept up with it. I let it go. I let it slip. So it's pretty, yeah. So

speed reading is not a thing. And it's actually a pretty interesting little world to traipse into. So if this caught your attention, go check out more of it. And I think Chuck, that short stuff is out, don't you? It's out as out can be. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.