![]() ![]() The Guinness Book of World Records does list a fastest reader, Howard Berg, who claimed 25,000 words a minute, nearly as fast as one can fan the pages of a book. 1,200 words per minute is the number cited for Kennedy, however we'll look a little more closely at this in a few moments. ![]() Kennedy, who spoke about it often and is said to have had his staff take Evelyn Wood speed reading classes. The most famous speed reader is probably John F. He was born without a corpus callosum (the connection between the two brain hemispheres), and it's possible that his two hemispheres were able to process the pages he read in parallel. Peek had a unique hardware arrangement driving this ability, though. Estimates of his speed vary, but 10,000 words a minute is the number I found most often. He read two pages at a time, the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye. His mental abilities were so vast and varied that speed reading was hardly the most remarkable, yet it was still really something. The most often cited speed reader is the late Kim Peek, the famous savant upon whom the Rain Man character was based. Fortunately for slow readers like myself, our demand-driven economy has responded with a product we can buy: Classes and techniques purporting to be able to turbocharge our reading speeds to thousands of words per minute. Who among us wouldn't love the ability to pick up any book, flip through its pages in just a few minutes, and then put it down in record time with nearly 100% retention? When I look at my vast stacks of unread books, the idea is certainly a compelling one. We've all seen films of speed readers going through books nearly as fast as they can physically turn the pages. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |