To tell about the difference in reading speed, I made a pyramid-like diagram.
Fig: The vertical axis is reading speed. The faster you read, you go upwards. The width of each layer of the pyramid is the time used for each reading method. The faster you read, the less time you spend. So the whole picture goes pyramid-like. In this chapter, I explain from the top to the bottom of this pyramid. The term “speed-reading techniques” tends to make misunderstanding that reading faster and climbing the pyramid is worthwhile. However, we need to know at what height yourself is and to think whether you should climb or descend.
The speed of reading aloud is a good standard. It corresponds to F in the figure. The reading speed is said to be about 300 characters in one minute in Japanese. It is the speed that trained announcers speak as easy to hear. If you read quickly without worrying about the ease of listening, it is a little faster. It is the performance limit of the human throat. If you read 300 characters in one minute, assuming that a book has 900 characters per page, you need 3 minutes to read one page. If the book has 300 pages, you need 15 hours to read it.
Another good standard is the performance limit of the human eye. It corresponds to C in the figure of Pyramid of reading speed. Human eyes have an afterimage effect. They cannot perceive the blinking faster than 50 ~ 100 milliseconds. Even if a lamp is blinking, you feel it as lit continuously. This speed is the performance limit of the human eye. If you read one page at 100 msec, you read 10 pages per second, 30 seconds per book. (*7)
When reading a physical paper book, the movement of the hand turning the page is also a bottleneck. If you turn the paper book twice per second, the two-page spread is 0.5 seconds, so it is 4 pages per second and 75 seconds per book.
I was interested in what happens if I solve the bottleneck of the hand movement. I scanned books, digitized them, and made my own software to show pages at high speed. The software can control the speed such as 1 page per second, 2 pages per second, … and 16 pages per second. In my experience, I cannot read the ordinary sentences on 16 pages per second. By focusing on the first 10 characters of the first line, a word jumps into my eyes once in a few pages. On the other hand, headlines and diagrams are easy to jump into my eyes.
When you are reading an easy book, the speed falls between from 15 hours per book, which is the limit speed of the throat, and 30 seconds per book, which is the limit speed of the eyes.
- Footnote *7: On the other hand, in an experiment that shows only one word for 25 milliseconds, we can read it in the probability about 30% to 60%. The reason we cannot read so fast is not the display time is too short. We cannot distinguish many visual images when they come in too short period.