Is reading >1000 words per minute (or at least 600) possible? Or it's just another clever marketing scheme to separate you from your money? Under reading I imply reading/comprehension/retention.

http://cdsearch.britannica.com/magaz...e=2&pid=dlxc04

See if you can access this page. It is available to those who have subscribed to Encyclopaedia Britannica so I don't know if you will be able to access this.

It should be of help to you.

This website should also be of interest: http://www.readinggenius.com/

I don't know the exact figures, but as long long as the reader has can intake that much through their eyes, and has thin enough myelin sheaths (basically regulates synapse speed) to absorb it all then sure its possible.

It all depends on the person.

It is not a black and white question. There are different ways to read different texts. The way you read a magazine is different than the way you read a fiction book which is still different than how you read an english college textbook.

I learned to read a lot faster when I attended college because I had to read all the time espcially in my first two years before I entered the school of business. But that was pratical application learned through repetition.

I had a friend in my old aikido school in college whom worked construction. He came into the school really tired one day. I asked him what was up and he said that he had been off the work site (construction site) for 8 weeks and was not use to the manual labor. I asked him about it and he said that after a few weeks your body (his body) got use to picking up heavy things and reptitve motion and it was ok again.

Reading in college was like that. Being in an enviroment that was sink or swim and contingent upon reading a lot and with a high comprehension rate increased my reading speed and many classmates reading speeds.

I would be very skeptical of many of these read faster in a few hours or days programs that don't involve large amounts of reading because they circumnavigate the practice and application part of learning.

I would further be very skeptical of speed reading programs that did not differenciate (which the few I have seen do not) between various types of reading or even acknowledge their existance.

Really the best thing I think you could do for yourself if you want to increase your reading speed and comprehension level is to practice by reading more. There is a point you will peak but wouldn't it be a shame if you place value on it to read at a substandard of that peak?

Its definitely possible but Im not sure if it can be learned or simply genetics!

hey !! HEY!! How can you say it is possible and than say you do not know how it is possible?

I would ask why speed read in the first place. I just enjoy settling in a nice comfy hammock with a good book to read and take the time to enjoy what the author is telling me. Speed reading a good book isn't worth it to me but I guess some people like to zip along at a thousand miles per second and not stop to enjoy the little things in life that make it worthwhile.

It is possible that man will one day live on the moon through technology.

And yet we do not know how.

The same way we say that consciousness is possible but we don't know how

Actually it is impossible that we will one day live on the moon until or unless we know how.

when you don't know how...what you don't know is how to articulate it.? ...here let me help you. We know we are conscious because of the navigation of our 5 senses and our ablity to organize our thoughts to match our actions and our ablity to use crude and complex motor skills for planned movement.

Its got nothing to do with senses. Most robots have senses but we couldn't call them conscious now could we?!
How then are we able to match our thoughts to our actions? Ur just rephrasing the question. Believe me, we don't know the answer to this one.

And anyway this is all off the point. There ARE things which we know can be possible yet we do not know why. Why? Because we don't know everything in the universe.

A robot has senses, certainly. Any complex machine has the capacity to perform work, or to gather data. What it is incapable of doing is analysing (sp?) the content of its efforts. At best, whatever analysis it does do is a direct result of preprogramming on the part of a human overseer. This is the fundamental difference between man (or any signifigantly advanced animal) and machine: the capacity to act outside of any pre-established physical boundary. A machine can only do as it was instructed to do. Raw interpretation of collected data in real time is a purely natural trait. Solve this dilemma, and you will have realised Asimov's dream.

Yes but is this what gives us consciousness? My guess is NO. Just because we have had no creator and have formed spontaneously and shaped by the hand of natural selection, does not mean we are inherently different to a being which has its evolution speeded up (by being built one day!). It is my opinion that one day in the distant future, we will find out what consciousness really is and be able to give it to robots.

good point didn't think of it that way.

Speed reading should only be used on light material or to find/look something up...

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I did not think that 600 words per minute was considered speed reading. That seems like the speed of the faster readers when I was in college.

I guess that 1000 words per minute is the limit if you expect to understand and retain most of what you read. I think I used to be able to scan @ at least 1000 words per minute when looking for something I knew was in a book, especially if I remembered its position on a right or left hand page (Then I think I would go through a book much faster than 1000 words per minutes withut comprehending anything).

I use this program myself... it's amazing.

I took a speed reading course once. They taught us instead of reading every word, you guide your eyes to read 3 spots on each line, and supposedly your side vision is supposed to pick up the words in between.

I never could get the hang of it, and my reading comprehension plummeted using that system. I just went back to old regular reading word by word.