Speed Reading Debunked: Evelyn Wood, JFK's 1,200 Words and a NASA Test

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Speed reading as a modern idea traces to Evelyn Wood, a schoolteacher who coined the term. In 1958, frustrated with her own slow progress, she threw a book, and while brushing dirt off its pages she noticed her eyes tracking the sweep of her hand. That became meta guiding, using a finger as a pacer, and in 1959 she launched Evelyn Wood's Reading Dynamics in Washington, D.C. The idea reached the White House: John F. Kennedy claimed to read 1,200 words per minute and urged his staff to take lessons, and Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter hosted a speed reading course for their team. The episode explains skimming and scanning, saccades, fixations and regressions, and the industry's war on subvocalization.

The science cuts the other way. Normal reading for comprehension runs about 200 to 230 words per minute, and a single fixation captures only about three words in sharp foveal vision. A 2016 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest found no magic bullet, with RSVP apps degrading comprehension, and cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg says comprehension falls off a cliff past 400 to 500 words per minute. Guinness World Records eventually stopped listing speed readers, and by 2015 Memoriad had set strict standards. Still, a 2009 study by Duggan and Payne found skimming a whole text beat reading half of it under time pressure, and Marshall McLuhan concluded speed reading was mainly useful for junk mail.

• In a NASA-funded study, Danielle McNamara tested a photo reading expert who took 73 minutes for three physiology chapters, about 361 words per minute.
• The expert scored zero percent on conceptual questions and 35 percent on multiple choice, after rating her own understanding 4.5 out of 5.
• Six-time world champion Anne Jones was recorded at 4,200 words per minute with 67 percent comprehension, but had prior exposure to the material.
• Howard Stephen Berg claimed 25,000 words per minute, and Maria Teresa Calderon of the Philippines claimed 80,000 with 100 percent comprehension.
• Education researcher Ronald Carver concluded JFK was a gifted strategic skimmer, since the fastest college graduates cap out near 600 words per minute.