Speed Reading Lessons from Derren Brown and Tim Ferriss

Have you ever felt like somebody you know, a friend, colleague, or indeed a celebrity is about to walk into your eye line?

You have that instinctive feeling that they are about to appear, and voilà, a split second later there they are.

I had been noticing this a lot recently, especially at work. I’d sense a particular person just before they appear in the crowd in front of me.

Time and time again it would happen, and I would be right every time. However much I picked my brain, I couldn’t work out a solution to this puzzle.

A few weeks ago, through a combination of randomly timed sources I found my answer.

I am a huge fan of Derren Brown. I rave about him to all my friends, and I’m sure I’ll rave about him to you in the near future. In fact I was recently lucky enough to be invited to form apart of an audience to be used in an experiment conducted by Derren for Channel 4. Unfortunately, due to the short notice I was unable to attend.

In an episode of Trick or Treat, Derren teaches a member of the public an extreme form of speed reading.

This is not your average speed reading course, this is unconscious speed reading.

The participant quickly goes down each page in a few seconds, following the line of his finger. This way he can get through an extraordinary volume of books in a very short space of time.

The basic idea here is that your unconscious mind is taking a photograph of the pages, and the words contained on the pages, despite the fact that consciously you have absolutely no idea what you have just ‘read’.

When tested by Derren a few days into the experiment, the participant answered both of Derrens seemingly impossible questions correctly (one being the name of a park in particular part of the country, and another being the number of different species of hummingbird in a chosen rainforest).

To be able to answer these questions correctly, it was noted that you must be completely relaxed.

This is not a game of wits or intelligence. To try to work out the answer would lead to failure.

The answers were buried within the participants deep subconscious, he merely had to relax and let them come through.

Concious speed reading follows a similar pattern.

A few days after watching the aforementioned episode of Trick or Treat, I was browsing the popular posts on Tim Ferriss blog and came across his article Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes.

In a nutshell, Ferriss explained how most people read from left to right, down a page. He described how this is a waste of a huge percentage of our time because each time we are at the start or end of a line part of our vision is staring at a blank space.

Tim then goes on to say that the most fundamental factor to speed reading is to start a few words in from the left and end a few words in from the right on each line.

For example, in the below paragraph, if you start with the second word on each side, you start with the second twinkle and end with like, then on the second line you start with in and end with you.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are, up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky, twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.

What both of these examples attempt to show is the power of your vision, outside of what you immediately see.

Unconscious speed reading works because you see every single word and sentence structure on the page, you just need to retrieve it.

Concious speed reading words because although the words you are consciously reading are directly in the centre of your eye line, your vision reaches far outside of that, so you pick up the words on the outer edges of pages even if you start and end 3, or even 4 words into each line.

This exact same theory explains why I’d sense a particular person just before they appear in the crowd in front of me.

Despite not consciously seeing them yet, they had appeared in my line of vision (possibly within a dense crowd, or from a distance) and my unconscious mind was able to pick up on them. Although unable, like the concious mind, to tell me they were in front of me, my unconscious merely planted the idea of that person, their name and face, into my mind – and a split second later, as if by magic, they appeared.

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