In it he describes among other things our mastery of text and how the brain manages. There is a great book, author of Godel-Escher-Bach escapes me, called The Mind’s I (I think). The posts on these studies did not tell us whether eyes were tested to see if they moved the same for a variety of texts. I don’t know but I’ll bet the number of hops per line would vary depending on the readers experience with the text. Knowing how far to hop to the next picture is what we learn to do when we learn to read. Though the eye will jerk to each spot on the line of text it will see lets say eight to fifteen letters before moving on. The limitations of peripheral vision is quite important but I think overstated. If they are still on this board a link might be inserted. They are shorter than most of these posts. I think I have written out here the EW exercises I used back then and would be happy to do it again if asked. We hardly ever read beyond a walking pace. Adults know what they want to bother reading and what not to. How much does anyone past grade school practice their reading to improve speed? I’m sure that if each of us pushed we could read faster but all would give up a unanimous “So what?”. This is not the best way to read every book, not even every fiction book. I enjoyed speed reading fiction because it made the description pop up into a whole picture at once, quite amazing. I say enjoyed since when I pushed beyond this to 1,100 wpm the effects fell off rapidly. I got faster each day month after month until I was enjoying 600 to 700 wpm. And the more you follow your finger the more used to seeing the text you will get. The more you type the better you get, the more you follow the finger the better your eye will get at keeping up. This reiterates the fact that practicing will improve performance. To start I must go back to the EW course and remind people that the basics involved following the finger tip as is moved along the line. The most recent has been the anatomy of the eye and its capacity to jump as it reads as well as the limitations of what could possibly be seen by peripheral vision. There have been a number of new topics and I will try to touch each one. Most of what I’ve learned long ago in the technical world has long been eclipsed by such modern miracles as VHS. I’m delighted that this thread is still going. In my opinion there are many many ways to the same end yet at the same time for now there isn’t a satisfactory speed reading method out there. For me it is still a wonder why I can listen to songs which say the words 5x faster than I can possible subvocalize them and yet I can recall the song off the top of my head. If all else fails the subvocalization speed should just be increased. It would be interesting if we were to run tests of different training methods to overcome any limitation, there are certainly things that can be done that haven’t been done before, who knows maybe actual speed reading will come into existence. It certainly is one of the main obstacles but it is sort of an unknown factor till the others are solved. e.g if you visualize a pile of oranges you can’t count them easily in packs of 14 even in your mind, but you don’t really have a visual perception issue. If you try to visualize the words in your mind, you have difficulty seeing them all at once and reading the words even if you make them up, so I would say there is more to it then that. You can make out a lot more words in a line and you can read them within your peripheral vision but you can’t exactly recall them as easily, you could port your eyes between every 3 words or so if that was the critical issue. That issue is one that is not a limiting factor yet. Please correct me if I got something wrong. This would lead to the situation that only few people with a special anatomy are able to learn highspeed reading. Or their ganglion cells are more evenly distributed instead concentrated at the fovea. Maybe they have more ganglion cells than usual so they can indeed read text in the peripheral vision field. Let’s assume it isn’t, but there are people with a special retina. Is it possible to train the retina to recognize text in a bigger area with one fixation? I have no idea. Look at a word near the center of a paragraph and try to recognize words at the edge of the paragraph without glimpsing.Ī fixation needs some time, which further decreases the limit for reading speed. Please take a look at this picture on Wikipedia: Usually the resulting resolution in the peripheral vision field is too low to recognize words. But there are only around one million ganglion cells that transfer informations to the brain, so there are cells in between that do some kind of processing and compression. According to Wikipedia, the entire retina contains about 7 million cones and 75 to 150 million rods.
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