A typical person can read between two hundred and four hundred words per minute. You may think that 400 is really a lot but nothing could be further from the truth. You can practice your speed reading skill with tachistoscopy training.

The tachistoscope was used by the RAF (Royal Air Forces) to display images of aircraft and gradually reduce the exposure time and check how quickly the human eye can recognize the side of the aircraft (enemy or friendly). The same experiment was later carried out to examine word recognition. The results were amazing. The current adaptation of the tachistoscope is flash cards and the so-called fixed screen course, but you have to be careful!

To figure out how fast we can read at first and how much we can improve, we need to do some math. The eye is capable of identifying images or words within 1/500 of a second and was proven by Royal Air Force research decades ago. Going further with this rule, we should be able to get around 23,000 words in just one minute. Just to clear things up, recognizing an enemy’s word or blueprint (images used in early experiments) in such a short time was achieved after longer tachistoscope training.

What we don’t necessarily realize is that most steno speed reading courses are not well prepared. After many experiments, people reported that their reading speed dropped shortly. At the same time, most of these courses aim to go from 200 to 400 words per minute, but this is a normal range, nothing outstanding. From that we can conclude that most of the courses aiming for around 500 words per minute are pretty useless. What you need to understand is that this method will not make you read extremely fast in a short period of time.

Many scientists say that improving reading speed while tachistoscope training is just a matter of increased level of motivation at the time of the course and this would explain a slowdown a few weeks after the typical course ends. It is also said that speed reading tachistoscopic methods do not improve general comprehension and therefore should be used only as a support to speed reading techniques and not as main practice.

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