This Clever Trick Can Help You Read up to 900 Words per Minute

According to The British Psychological Society, the average reading rate is 238 words per minute, with some people reading up to 400 words per minute. This number has to do with the way your eyes have to move across the page or screen, making you lose time and sometimes even focus. But how fast would you be able to read if your eyes didn’t have to move?

The secret seems to be in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), a term coined by psychology professor and researcher Mary Potter. This technique consists of each word appearing on the screen for a brief moment, one after the other, instead of next to each other. For the text that you’re reading right now, your eyes have to move to read each word; but in RSVP, they don’t. Many programs make just one letter of each word appear in red to anchor your eyes on a focal point. The red letter is always in the same position, even if it’s a different character. This way your eyes won’t wander, you can better stay focused, and your brain is able to recognize the letter almost instantly.

For this to work, there are few things to consider. The first, is learning to control and “quiet” the voice that reads each word aloud in your head; just let your eyes do the work. The second has to do with the words within the text, as it has to be a complete, well-structured idea so your brain can fill in the blanks of things you may have missed and predict the upcoming words through context clues. And you also have to be focused and free of distractions to really get your brain going.

“The lab has shown that a sentence can be understood and remembered when presented as rapidly as 12 words per second (using RSVP, rapid serial visual presentation),” says Potter. “In contrast, a sequence of unrelated words (even if no longer than four or five words) is much more difficult to process and only two or three are remembered.”

By doing this, you train your brain to see words as visual processing, teaching your brain to see words as pictures—just like your brain can recognize a logo in a matter of milliseconds, without having to read the letters in it.

To give you an example of what RSVP can do for you, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is 127,633 words long, meaning it would take you 8.5 hours at an average pace of 250 words per minute. But if you could speed up to 900 words per minute, it would take you only 2 hours and 22 minutes; almost the length of the 2005 movie adaptation, which is 2 hours and 7 minutes.

You can give RSVP a try by watching the video below. And if you’d like to give it a go on other reading materials, you can use online tools like SwiftRead and Reedy to input your own texts or the .epub file of a book you’d like to read. Just try different speeds until you find one that’s comfortable and allows you to thoroughly comprehend the text.