digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Read with your hand as a pacer, sweeping it across each line as fast as you can still comprehend, to speed up reading by roughly 20% within minutes and up to about 100% after a few hours of training. Howard Berg, billed as the world's fastest reader, argues that most people read slowly because they "hear" each word in their head, and that speed readers instead visualize the material like a movie. The segment also mentions a Tampa speed-reading course (Supersonic Speed Reading) offered to boost reading speed and retention.
Key Points
- Berg says he holds a Guinness Book of Records entry for speed reading at 80 pages per minute, backed by 10 documented TV and article appearances.
- Typical reading is about 200 words per minute, and according to Berg, people often forget the title and author the next day.
- Berg says speed readers "see" the material as a movie rather than hearing each word internally, comparing it to taking in the road while driving.
- He claims he skimmed half of a 600-page fraud textbook in about five minutes (though he also says he read '300 pages in 5 minutes'), summarizing its lessons on internal controls and supervision.
- He cites examples from his training, including 19-year-olds passing the California bar, and says he completed a four-year college program in a year and a graduate course in educational psychology in 50 minutes, getting a B+.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Take a book at home and time yourself for one minute while reading normally; mark with a pencil where you stop.
- Go back to the first page of a chapter.
- Move your left hand from the left margin to the right margin, across one line at a time, as fast as you can still understand, with your eyes following your hand.
- If you understand what you read, speed up until comprehension breaks; then slow slightly to find your comfortable ceiling.
- Practice this for about 10 minutes, then return to your original spot and read with the hand technique at your comprehension speed. Berg says this alone can raise speed 10 to 20% in one session.
- To go further, Berg says reading speed can rise about 100% in roughly two and a half hours of training.
- Berg's speed claims and credentials come from his own statements in the interview and were not independently verified in the transcript.
Bottom Line
Speed reading is presented as a trainable skill rather than a fixed trait, and the hand-guided technique is a quick, low-cost way to test whether you can read faster without losing understanding.
