Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck. Jerry's hanging out here being a weirdo creeper,
Speaker 1: but she's standing in for Dave, who just doesn't show
Speaker 1: up ever, which is sad, but it's all right. M
Speaker 1: This is about speed reading. And you made a very
Speaker 1: good point because you put this together for us that
Speaker 1: if we did the same job today without the Internet,
Speaker 1: you would get a podcast episode about once every two weeks. Yeah, tops,
Speaker 1: because that's how long it would take for us to
Speaker 1: go to the library and do all the analog research
Speaker 1: that would take to get one of these episodes in
Speaker 1: the can. But now we have the Internet and that
Speaker 1: research is much more streamlined as it is for everyone else.
Speaker 1: It's it's crazy, like when you think about it that way,
Speaker 1: just the revolution and information that the Internet provides just
Speaker 1: so easy to take it for granted today, but when
Speaker 1: you stop and think about what people had to do
Speaker 1: just thirty years ago, basically, um, it's it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: The problem is is up to this point, up to
Speaker 1: the point, um where the Internet became like uh widely
Speaker 1: available to people through search engines, Um, we had decades
Speaker 1: and centuries of people who did have to go to
Speaker 1: the library to do all sorts of research, and they
Speaker 1: still had to do jobs, They still had to find
Speaker 1: out the answers to things, and there was a lot
Speaker 1: of information, but all of it was trapped inside books,
Speaker 1: and to get it out of there, you had to
Speaker 1: basically guess what book had the information that you were
Speaker 1: looking for, and then go find the book using the
Speaker 1: card catalog, and then skim that book until you found
Speaker 1: the fact or the information you needed. And that was
Speaker 1: really slow and really hard to deal with. So it
Speaker 1: kind of in that context, Chuck, it makes a lot
Speaker 1: of sense that Evelyn would, the woman who founded a
Speaker 1: company called Reading Dynamics which taught people for a hundred
Speaker 1: fifty bucks about and fifty dollars today um, starting in
Speaker 1: nineteen nine, would become an international sensation with this technique
Speaker 1: of speed reading. Not a few hundred words, which is
Speaker 1: around the where most people topped out, but thousands of
Speaker 1: words per minute. That's right. I think the fastest readers
Speaker 1: can read about four words per minute, and that's absorbing
Speaker 1: what you're reading. It's a big, big point, it is,
Speaker 1: and I have gotten into debates with friends of mine
Speaker 1: who claimed to be um super fast readers, and I
Speaker 1: would do what they do. I would read that try
Speaker 1: and read that fast as a test independently, and it
Speaker 1: just seems very dubious. I'm like, man, I can I
Speaker 1: can barely even move my eyeballs as quick as you
Speaker 1: say you're reading, Like, I don't think you're retaining as
Speaker 1: much as you think, because it might be because I'm
Speaker 1: a little defensive, but I've always been a very deliberate reader.
Speaker 1: I just read very slowly, and I read it as
Speaker 1: if I'm reading out loud to another person. That's how
Speaker 1: I read to myself. And then when you factor in,
Speaker 1: like your mind wandering, and you're like, oh wait, I
Speaker 1: have to get back to reread this paragraph. It takes
Speaker 1: me a very long time too, But I like to
Speaker 1: feel like I got what I was reading afterwards. It
Speaker 1: was worth a certain time, you know, not like these
Speaker 1: skimmers come on right. So Evelyn Wood was very adamant, like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not teaching you skimming, because everybody would be like, yes, skimming,
Speaker 1: we all do that in the catalog or the library,
Speaker 1: standing up by the card catalog. We skim. Just think No,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about reading really really fast. And what she
Speaker 1: said she had was a technique UM that she said
Speaker 1: was quote the greatest inventions since the printing press UM
Speaker 1: and it was it used what she called finger pacing um,
Speaker 1: which was, in her view, a way of show pointing
Speaker 1: out to your eyes huge chunks of text, if you
Speaker 1: were really good, an entire page of text that your
Speaker 1: eye would just absorb, like a different kind of reading.
Speaker 1: That's what Evelyn Wood said that she was teaching people.
Speaker 1: And like I said, it was a smash hit. It
Speaker 1: was very popular in the in the mid cent mid
Speaker 1: twentieth century. Yeah. Their motto was we're not skimming, we're scamming, basically,
Speaker 1: And I think that's a good point for our commercial break.
Speaker 1: So we'll be right back after this to talk about
Speaker 1: the scam that is speed reading. That's why SKA a
Speaker 1: little bit that you should know. Y SKA should know.
Speaker 1: But Josh Clark, alright, so it is a scam. Uh.
Speaker 1: Their website or they didn't have a website. Their workshop,
Speaker 1: I knew it started with a w Their workshop boasted
Speaker 1: that you could read five to seven thousand words per
Speaker 1: minute and you could get through Warrant in Peace in
Speaker 1: eighteen minutes. Immediately upon hearing that I'm surprised anyone said, well,
Speaker 1: this sounds revolutionary, Sign me up. I figured percent of
Speaker 1: the people in the world would have said, there's no
Speaker 1: way that's impossible. This has got to be a scam.
Speaker 1: But everyone from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon to
Speaker 1: Charlton Heston were early adherents of uh Wood's speed reading program. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean it makes sense because in the mid
Speaker 1: twentieth century in America there was like a real trendy
Speaker 1: nous about like intellect and you know, the engineering mindset,
Speaker 1: lots of efficiency. Everything is very buttoned down and compartmentalized.
Speaker 1: So the idea that you could wade through this enormous
Speaker 1: amount of information trapped in books really quickly was it
Speaker 1: was a way to show off that you were an
Speaker 1: intellectual number one, but also was like I'm going to
Speaker 1: leave the rest of you idiots behind. I'm gonna go
Speaker 1: learn to speed read and you'll never catch up with me. Um.
Speaker 1: So there was a lot of adherence to it. The
Speaker 1: thing is there was also very simultaneously from a very
Speaker 1: early um period. I think her first workshop was offered
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty nine, and by nineteen sixty two the
Speaker 1: Saturday Evening Post had Um a story titled speed Reading
Speaker 1: His Bunk. So there was criticism of it and skepticism
Speaker 1: of it um from the outset, but she managed to
Speaker 1: hang in there and actually reading dynamics is around today still,
Speaker 1: it is. Uh, there have been I think the Washington
Speaker 1: Post wrote a big criticism in nineteen eighty. Uh, there
Speaker 1: were some other There's a woman named Marcia Biederman who
Speaker 1: wrote scan artist colon how Evelyn would convince the world
Speaker 1: that speed reading worked. And one of her criticisms was
Speaker 1: this whole finger pacing thing, like even if that was
Speaker 1: a thing, like you could do that yourself. You could
Speaker 1: run your hand down a page and learn how to
Speaker 1: do that stuff without paying what amounts to these these
Speaker 1: day dollars, like over hundred bucks for someone to teach
Speaker 1: you this bunk. And uh, the whole idea was I
Speaker 1: think the Washington Post said said it was a new
Speaker 1: way to teach readers to take in whole ideas rather
Speaker 1: than words. So you know, I think if you looked
Speaker 1: at a page of a book and went and went
Speaker 1: down it, you might pick out, you know, let's say,
Speaker 1: fifteen keywords where maybe you could say, I think the
Speaker 1: character went to the hospital and they got better. But
Speaker 1: like that's not the same as reading something right. Um.
Speaker 1: So there was also like this kind of veneer of
Speaker 1: religiousness that was assigned to reading dynamical, very culti kind
Speaker 1: of scientologist eye a little bit um there. There was
Speaker 1: you were supposed to have faith number one in your
Speaker 1: ability to speed read. You also had faith you had
Speaker 1: to have faith in the process, the procedure um, and
Speaker 1: people who weren't any good at it didn't have enough confidence.
Speaker 1: They didn't have enough faith. Uh. And that was born
Speaker 1: out of Evelyn Wood's background is a Mormon. I believe
Speaker 1: she was a very religious person. So that that definitely
Speaker 1: kind of um was something that that Reading Dynamics was
Speaker 1: draped in as well. But it also kind of has
Speaker 1: a like you say, a culti view of culti um
Speaker 1: technique of blaming the student rather than the actual workshop,
Speaker 1: which is pretty terrible because it really was the workshop
Speaker 1: that was the problem. And one of the things they did,
Speaker 1: Chuck was like you can't have you can't be around
Speaker 1: for decades and you know, do millions of people, Like
Speaker 1: millions of people took this course. This is like dollars
Speaker 1: for for the workshop. Millions of people took this course, Um,
Speaker 1: you can't just dupe them without some sort of rigging.
Speaker 1: And so what they did was they rigged what's called
Speaker 1: the reading index. And the reading index was basically the
Speaker 1: measure of how fast you could speed read by timing
Speaker 1: how fast you read and then scoring it against your comprehension, right,
Speaker 1: so you would get a comprehension test at end. And
Speaker 1: what the Harvard Crimson in nineteen seven UH sort of
Speaker 1: uncovered and pointed out was they very simply made those
Speaker 1: first comprehension tests way harder than the final comprehension tests.
Speaker 1: So the idea is as you progress each test, you're
Speaker 1: going to get better and better scores for your comprehension.
Speaker 1: And the first ones are very complicated and the last
Speaker 1: ones are maybe like multiple choice UH and just kind
Speaker 1: of super easy, to the point where the University of
Speaker 1: Missouri did some experiments on the reading dynamics UH testing
Speaker 1: and they found that you could score about a sixty
Speaker 1: percent read and I assume this is for the later tests,
Speaker 1: but you could score about a sixty percent reading comprehension
Speaker 1: without even looking at the material. Yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: was the final test that that that's how easy yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and I mean they also Reading Dynamics was also known
Speaker 1: for threatening or actually filing lawsuits against its vocal critics too,
Speaker 1: to sign them scientology. So, um, the thing is is
Speaker 1: like there's still this desire to speed read. I was
Speaker 1: reading this article I'm Wired, and it said speed reading
Speaker 1: is or sorry, speed reading is a scam um, And
Speaker 1: there's still today. There's different iterations of it. And I
Speaker 1: think part of it, probably especially when you're looking at
Speaker 1: the original founder of like a speed reading technique or
Speaker 1: something like that, before it becomes like a business, that
Speaker 1: person probably really does think this works, and they really
Speaker 1: do want to learn to speed read, and that desire
Speaker 1: is still around. But I came across this um this
Speaker 1: article by a guy, an author named Mark Seidenberg who's
Speaker 1: researched this, and it's basically he points out that the
Speaker 1: brain is just not equipped to absorb information that fast,
Speaker 1: and that when you're reading words on a page, you're
Speaker 1: each little bit you absorb and then you move on
Speaker 1: to the next bit. Each of those is called a fixation,
Speaker 1: and we can take between a roughly seven and eight
Speaker 1: letters per fixation, right. Each fixation lasts between a quarter
Speaker 1: to a fifth of a second, and that um, really
Speaker 1: what you're taking in. If you calculate something like seven
Speaker 1: letters per fixation, you could do six eighty letters per minute,
Speaker 1: which divided by five letter words plus a space is
Speaker 1: two eighty words per minute. Two eighty words per minute
Speaker 1: is what the average person can read at So the
Speaker 1: idea that somebody could read seven thousand words per minute
Speaker 1: and have any idea what they just read is it's
Speaker 1: just it's bunk. As the Saturday Evening Post put it,
Speaker 1: it's total bunk. And the one thing that is also
Speaker 1: very much Scientology like, as they count on pride and
Speaker 1: shame to kind of keep former adherence to the program quiet. Um,
Speaker 1: maybe you're shameful that you paid thirty dollars for Scientology
Speaker 1: programs and nothing out of it and you don't want
Speaker 1: to say anything about it. Or maybe you paid that
Speaker 1: equivalent in the nineteen fifties and you didn't learn how
Speaker 1: to speed read and you didn't want to go around
Speaker 1: telling people you dropped that much money. And they kind
Speaker 1: of count these organizations, and it is funny how much
Speaker 1: it's kind of close to Scientology, but they count on
Speaker 1: people kind of keeping their failures quiet because of that
Speaker 1: pride and that shame and it it worked. It's funny.
Speaker 1: If you read some of these, um, these contemporary articles,
Speaker 1: you'll see interviews with people who are like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: really used to have it, but you know, my my
Speaker 1: comprehension score has gone down because I haven't kept up
Speaker 1: with it. That's what they say. I am kept up
Speaker 1: with it. I let it go, I'll let it slip. Uh.
Speaker 1: So it's pretty yeah, so, um speed reading is not
Speaker 1: a thing, and it's actually a pretty interesting little world
Speaker 1: two trapes into. So if this caught your attention, go
Speaker 1: check out more of it. And I think, chuck that
Speaker 1: short stuff is out, don't you. It's out as out
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