速读技巧初探

山外青山楼外楼，

房价高到我发愁，

举杯浇愁愁更愁，

至今没车去郊游，

现代美女难追求，

受伤只能空擦油，

明天下乡去放牛，

发条微信报个愁。

速读

如何学会速读

学会速度

如何评价《如何阅读一本书》（How to Read a Book）？ - 周不然的回答

I Was Wrong About Speed Reading: Here are the Facts

Seven years ago, I read some books and articles on speed reading and started practicing some of the methods. I found I was able to increase my reading speed from 450 word per minute to 900 in the drills, so I published an article entitled, Double Your Reading Rate, which has since become one of the most popular on this website.

When I wrote the piece, I based the article purely on my personal experience along with the how-to books I had read. I didn’t have any solid scientific research to back my experiments.

Since that time, I’ve had some lingering doubts about speed reading. In addition to seeing some flickers of research that made me suspicious about speed reading programs, I had mostly stopped using the techniques I originally advocated. My reading diet had switched from lighter self-help, to denser and more academic writing. That meant comprehension, not speed, was the bottleneck I was trying to improve.

Now, nearly a decade later, I decided to do some in-depth research into speed reading to bring you the facts.

Is It Possible to Read 20,000+ Words Per Minute?

Some speed reading claims can be tossed aside immediately. Claims that you can read a book as fast as you can flip through a phone book are completely impossible on anatomical and neurological levels.

First we have anatomical reasons to throw out absurdly high reading rates. In order to read, the eye has to stop at a part of the text, this is called fixation. Next, it must make a quick movement to the next fixation point, this is called a saccade. Finally, after you jump a few points, the brain has to assemble all this information so you can comprehend what you’ve just seen.

Eye-movement expert Keith Rayner, argues that even going beyond 500 words per minute is improbable because the mechanical process of moving your eye, fixing it and processing the visual information can’t go much faster than that.

Speed reading experts claim that they can work around this problem by taking in more visual information in each saccade. Instead of reading a couple words in one fixation, you can process multiple lines at a time.

This is unlikely for two reasons. One, the area of the eye which can correctly resolve details, called the fovea, is quite small—only about an inch in diameter at reading distance. Processing more information per fixation is limited by the fact that our eyes are rather poor lenses. They need to move around in order to get more details. This means that eyes are physically constrained in the amount of information they achieve per fixation.

Second, working memory constraints are at least as important as anatomical ones. The brain can hold around 3-5 “chunks” of information at a time. Parsing multiple lines simultaneously, means that each of these threads of information must remain open until the line is fully read. This just isn’t possible with our limited mental RAM.

What about systems like Spritz? Spritz works by trying to avoid the problem of saccades. If each word appears in the same place on the screen, your eye can stay fixed on that point while words flip through more quickly than you could hunt them down on a page. Indeed, using the application gives a strong impression that you can read very quickly.

Their website claims to have research showing faster reading speeds, but unfortunately I was not able to find any independent, peer-reviewed work substantiating these claims.

Working memory constraints here too, enforce a limit on the upper speed you could use Spritz and still be considered to be “reading” everything. Remember reading was a three step process: fixate, saccade and process. Well that processing step slows down regular reading too. If there are no pauses in the stream of words, there isn’t enough time to process them and they fall out of working memory before they’re comprehended.

Is It Possible to Make Moderate Speed Gains Through Training?

The evidence is clear: anything above 500-600 words per minute is improbable without losing comprehension. Even my own perceived gain of 900 word per minute meant that I was probably losing considerable comprehension. This was masked because the books I was reading had enough redundancy to make following along possible with impaired comprehension.

However, according to Raynor, the average college-educated reader only reads at 200-400 words per minute. If 500-600 words forms an upper bound, that does suggest that doubling your reading rate is possible, albeit as a hard upper limit. Can we still get moderate speed reading gains?

There seems to be some mild evidence here in favor of speed reading. One study of a course had some students quadruple their speed. Another study showed some speed reading experts reading around the 600 word per minute level, roughly twice as fast as a normal reader.

However there’s a trap here. Speed reading may possibly make you a faster reader, but it’s not clear the speed reading techniques are the cause. Second, speed reading trainees tended to read faster, with less comprehension, than non-speed readers. Since measuring comprehension is more difficult than speed, I believe many new speed readers can fall into the trap I did: believing they’re making an unqualified doubling of their reading rate, when in reality, they are doing so at a significant tradeoff of comprehension.

Do Speed Reading Techniques Work?

If the evidence suggests that reading faster may be possible, albeit more modestly, it casts a much harsher light on certain speed reading dogma. The most dangerous is the idea that subvocalization should be avoided to read faster.

Subvocalization is the little inner voice you have when reading that speaks the words aloud. When you started reading you probably spoke out loud with that voice, but you learned to silence it as you got older. If you turn your attention to it, however, you can still hear yourself making the sounds of the words in your head.

Speed reading experts claim that subvocalization is the bottleneck that slows down your reading. If you can learn to just recognize words visually without saying them in your inner voice, you can read much faster.

Here the evidence is clear: subvocalization is necessary to read well. Even expert speed readers do it, they just do it a bit faster than untrained people do. We can check this because that inner voice sends faint communication signals to the vocal cords, as a residue of your internal monolog, and those signals can be measured objectively.

It’s simply not possible to comprehend what you’re reading and avoid using that inner voice. So reading faster means being able to use this inner voice faster, not eliminating it. To further that, expert speed readers who were studied also subvocalized, they just did it faster.

The other main recommendation I made in my speed reading article was using a pointer. This means moving your finger or a pen to underline the text as you read it. This technique is supposed to help you make eye fixations and reduce the random wandering of the eye which can waste time. One study suggests that this apparent function isn’t realized, and that the pointer functions as a pacing device, while actual eye fixations are uncorrelated with pointer or hand movements.

If You Shouldn’t Speed Read, How Should You Read Better and Faster?

In my research for this article, I did find a couple factors that were associated with better reading speed, without sacrificing comprehension. None of these are magic fixes for your reading woes, but a mild treatment that works is better than a fantastic one which doesn’t.

Reading Tip #1: Skim Before You Read

Many speed reading courses are actually teaching skimming techniques, even if they package it as “reading” faster. Skimming is covering the text too fast to read everything fully. Instead, you’re selectively picking up parts of the information.

Skimming, isn’t actually a bad method, provided it’s used wisely. One study found that skimming a text before going on to reading it, improved comprehension in the majority of cases.

Reading Tip #2: Improve Your Fluency to Improve Your Speed

Fluent recognition of words was one of the major slowing points for readers. Subvocalization, that mythical nemesis of speed readers, is slower on unfamiliar words. If you want to speed up reading, learning to recognize words faster seems to improve your reading speed.

Fluency isn’t just an issue for reading in your non-native language. It also matters for technical documents or prose which uses unfamiliar vocabulary. If I’m reading a text that uses jargon like mRNA, or obscure words like synecdoche, I’m going to pause longer. That will slow my reading speed down.

The best way to improve fluency is to read more. If you read more of a certain type of text, you’ll learn those words faster and read better. If you’re a non-native or fluency significantly impacts your reading speed, then even a tool like Anki may be useful for learning hard words.

Reading Tip #3: Know What You Want, Before You Read It

Part of the reason skimming first might appear to help is that it allows you to map out a document. Knowing how an article or book is structured, then, allows you to pay more attention to the things you think are important.

Another tip offered in a lot of speed reading courses, which is likely good advice, is to know what you’re trying to get out of a text before you read it. Thinking about this before you start reading allows you to prime yourself to pay attention when you see words and sentences that are related. Even if you’re reading at a speed which has some comprehension loss, you’ll be more likely to slow down at the right moments.

This isn’t always possible. I read a lot of books unsure about what I want to discover in them. Fiction and reading for pleasure can’t be reduced to a mission objective. However a lot of bland, necessary reading in our lives fits this type. Speeding it up might be worthwhile if it leaves us more time for reading with curiosity.

Reading Tip #4: Deeper Processing Tasks to Improve Retention

Sometimes you don’t want speed at all—you want near full comprehension. When I was in school, I needed to read most textbooks in a way that I could retain nearly every fact and idea I encountered later. It’s not just full comprehension you want, but long-term memory of the information.

Here cognitive science offers some suggestions. A principle of memory is that we remember what we think about. So if you want to remember the ideas of a book, highlighting bolded passages isn’t the best idea. Highlighting causes you to think about bolded words, not what they means.

Some alternatives are taking paraphrased, sparse notes or rewriting factual information you want to remember as questions to self-quiz later.

Conclusion

I was wrong. Subvocalization shouldn’t be avoided. Doubling your reading rate may be possible from a lower range (250 to 500 words per minute, for example), but it’s probably impossible to go beyond 500-600 words and still get full retention. Speed reading may have some redemption as an alternative to skimming text, but even here the benefits come from how speed readers conceptually organize the text, and not on the mechanics of eye movements.

In terms of accuracy, my original article hasn’t aged too well. In my more recent courses, I still teach speed-reading, but I had already shifted mostly to the speed-reading-as-intelligent-skimming paradigm which is a bit more defensible. Still, I’ll be sure to include this research in any new courses I develop.

I apologize to any readers who may have gotten outsized hopes about what speed reading could accomplish. My goal, as always, isn’t to present a fixed dogma of what it takes to learn better, but to research and experiment with new ideas. Unfortunately, sometimes that’s a path that dead-ends or winds back on itself. In any case, I’ll always do my best to share whatever I find with you.

作者：间与间
链接：https://www.zhihu.com/question/19669390/answer/278270431
来源：知乎
著作权归作者所有。商业转载请联系作者获得授权，非商业转载请注明出处。

没必要学习速读，速读技巧是存在的，也是自然而然的，你只是省去了阅读你认为无用信息的部分。下面就部分因素做一个讨论：

1. 读者。对读者而言，面对同一本书，随着年龄的增长其知识（广义的）是逐渐增加的。因此题主如果尝试下与一个小学生比赛读语文课本，那么肯定是题主读的快的。但是这种知识的增加有局限性，就算题主与高一的韦东奕比赛读数学课本，韦东奕甚至都不需要翻开课本，因为书上的知识都是韦东奕已有的。那么问题就转化成了“如何增加自己的知识？”，此问题太大，稍后再讨论。
2. 作者。对一个读者而言，一个作者在不同时期写出的不同作品有不同的内涵，我们可以称之为“思想的转变”、“观念的进步”。(:з」∠) 对不起我虽然写了小标题但是我忘记刚才想写什么了，随便举个例子应和一下吧。并不是所有的作者都是好的，即便是好的作者，其结论也往往囿于自身经历而不具有一般性，比如费马数： 在n=0,1,2,3,4时都是素数，但是n=5之后就不是了，至少目前还没发现新的费马数是质数。这个式子是如此优美，以至于如果你这一辈子只见过n=0,1,2,3,4的话，没办法控制自己不去想这是真的。当然如果你懂群论，15分钟就可以找到n=5时费马数的因子，还能得意洋洋地把17世纪的数学家们批判一番，但是费马提出规律的当时是做不到的，因为群论的出现需要这类问题的处理经验来奠定基础。
3. 遣词方式与文法。词的构造顺序是在不断变化的，虽然文字的书写方向是单一的，但是其解读方式却多种多样，如藏头诗、字谜、自指命题（例：这句话是错的）等等。而且我们也不敢打包票，顺序阅读就是最吼的且无法被优化的，比如“马克思列宁主义，毛泽东思想，邓小平理论，三个代表重要思想，科学发展观”，虽然这句话有30个字，但是你最多看到第二个词就知道后面是什么了，视野直接往后跳就可以了，如果跳过了头就回跳。你错过了什么信息吗？并没有，你完全知道写这些东西的人在说什么，你完美把握了作者想表达的涵义。因此文字数对速读来说并不是一个良好的指标。大多数人也没有形成对多重否定的句子含义的直觉，一定得回跳去数否定词的个数，当然如果你不是很在乎，二选一猜一个意思也行，后面还能根据上下文修正。
4. 背诵与理解意义是完全不一样的。你能背诵《春江花月夜》和你能背诵《jewel》的歌词是没有太大的区别的，但是如果你能从《春江花月夜》中学到某些写作的手法并利用，自然就有了价值。写到这里我打了一个激灵，因为我知道《春江花月夜》不可能凭空产生价值，那么我们学习其“精巧的构思”的时候，必然有许许多多“不那么精巧的构思”与之反衬，这些知识从何而来呢？同样的，如果你能速读完《哈利·波特》系列并就其中的世界观、经济体系、哲学、人物刻画作出深刻见解的时候，你一定掌握了许多可以与之参照的知识。有了这些知识，你快读慢读精读粗读都是可以得出见解的，速读与得出见解不存在因果联系。
5. 当我们谈论“速读”的时候我们更直接的期望是什么？如果是学习到新的知识，我的看法是知识需要一步一个脚印，没有捷径可走。比如前面的1-4点，每一个我都举了例子。如果不明白举这些例子的用意，就需要搜索，通过阅读这些例子产生的过程来理解，让概念之间产生关系，最后获得了知识。如果是你想多读几本书装逼emmmmm……科学之所以是科学是因为其研究问题的方法，而不是结论，不能与其他概念产生联系的知识，与 的小数点后100位有什么区别？人类的记忆能比得上硬盘的可靠性高读取速率快吗？
6. 人类从视觉中获取信息的速度是有限的。人类依靠分辨边缘来识别词组，但是中央凹的面积太小了，人类一次能分辨的词组有限。或者更一般地，就让你分辨稀疏的黑点吧。看下面的图，随着点的数目的增加，你计数的时间越来越长。一方面是训练少，没有形成自动优化的方法，只能一个一个数或者高级点三四个一组编组来数；另一方面是随着点的数目增加，其相对位置关系变得复杂化，人脑不会浪费大量的资源对其进行编码的，更何况声称一目十行的速度法？速读真的能突破生理极限让你在一次阅读注视中分辨5个以上的词并确定其位置关系与逻辑关系吗？不妨众筹一个眼动仪，让那些声称自己掌握速读的人来测试一下，看看是不是一目十行，看看他能否长时间维持这样一种认知资源高消耗的状态直到读完一整本书，真以为自己是输出功率稳定的发动机了不成？

结论：我不会给出题主是否应该怎么做的建议，这是题主自己的事。我不否认学习速读技巧就像学习英语学习技巧一样可以缓解你的焦虑，但是当你反复读一句话仍不理解其意思的时候，很可能是因为与之关联的知识的缺失，不妨把关键词拿到being上Google一下。阅读技巧在不同的阶段有不同的需要，题主就按部就班的来，逐渐会意识到哪些知识对自己是有用的，哪些是没用的，也就自然而然掌握了速读，日刷paper（摘要）100篇不在话下。

反思：第3点与第5点另有与短时记忆相关的部分和语言的非经典处理模型可以展开，仔细想了想是自己赖以吃饭的本事，忍了不讲。第2点是真的忘了要写什么了，看着我写的提纲好茫然。第3点末尾的部分对普通的阅读也适用……不会有人看到吧（逃

彩蛋：你以为你看到的就是你真的看到的吗？两个经典例子：怎样让大排不硬？ 如何跟白如冰和曾博约炮