Some speed-reading advocates claim that with proper training (outlined in many popular books and YouTube videos) or the use of special apps, it’s possible to increase your reading rate to 1,000 words per minute or more.

Such books, videos and apps generally assume our reading speed is constrained because we are inefficient at extracting information from the printed page. But is this the case?

To assess these claims, let’s first see what the science says about our reading capacities.

A 2019 meta-analysis of 190 published studies found that when silently reading English non-fiction, adults read at a rate of 175–300 words per minute. Interestingly, this rate increased to 200–320 words per minute for fiction. This difference may reflect the fact that fiction tends to be more engaging or may be easier to understand.

Advocates of speed-reading, however, claim these estimates are conservative and reflect “bad reading habits”. But this contradicts what actually happens when we read.

During reading, our eyes don’t move smoothly across a printed page but instead make rapid movements called saccades, separated by brief pauses called fixations.

Although language processing continues during saccades, visual processing is suppressed. Information on the printed page is only extracted during fixations.

These fixations are typically 200–300 milliseconds but vary in duration. For example, fixations tend to be longer when reading less common words because they require more time to identify.

Experiments show we perceive letters and words in a small region of our field of vision.........

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