The PX Project is a sin­gle 3-hour “cog­ni­tive exper­i­ment” designed to increase your read­ing speed. Aver­age increases using the tech­nique are appar­ently in the region of 386%. The tech­nique seems to involve three steps:

  • Min­i­mize the num­ber and dura­tion of fix­a­tions per line.
  • Elim­i­nate regres­sion and back-skipping.
  • Use con­di­tion­ing drills to increase hor­i­zon­tal periph­eral vision span and the num­ber of words reg­is­tered per fixation.

Der­ren Brown has embed­ded a short video dis­cussing the tech­nique (3m 38s) on his site.

When think­ing of speed read­ing my first reac­tion is not dis­sim­i­lar to Felix Salmon’s:

When you read fast and don’t sub­vo­cal­ize, do you start to miss the art of con­struct­ing or even just appre­ci­at­ing beau­ti­ful sen­tences? Would a speed reader, for instance, ever be able to write a book like [Nichol­son Baker’s] U&I?

But this quote from the arti­cle made me realise that even if you can speed read, you don’t have to speed read:

Final rec­om­men­da­tions: If used for study, it is rec­om­mended that you not read 3 assign­ments in the time it would take you to read one, but rather, read the same assign­ment 3 times for expo­sure and recall improve­ment, depend­ing on rel­e­vancy to testing.

I would go one fur­ther and say; If the book is to be read for plea­sure, don’t speed read. For all other instances, the above applies.