Photoreading advertisements claim that 25,000 words per minute can be read. Is this fact or fiction?

The photoreading method is quite simple:

• Choose a book you want to photoread
• Read the cover to verify that the book is relevant to you
• If it is information that is likely to be out of date, check the copyright date
• Preview chapter titles
• Entering the correct “state” for photoreading
• Flip through pages at a rate of approximately one page per second

Of course, you will have to practice. Getting in the right state was probably the hardest part I encountered. But after some testing, and once I got over worrying about getting it right the first time, that wasn’t too hard.

Testing if photoreading works is not so easy. For all intents and purposes, they are all unique. So you can’t have a “control” version of yourself to compare with your normal version. Nor is it possible to do a double-blind scientific test: either you have read the book or you have not.

So deciding whether photoreading works or not is a state of belief. At the end of the day, you either think it works or it doesn’t. When I first read photos, I chose a dictionary and my test method was crossword puzzles. The kind where they give you a one word clue. Subjectively, I thought my crossword completion speed increased. So my opinion is that photoreading works.

You can learn to read photos from a book, but my preferred method is to use an audio course as I can follow the course instead of getting partly distracted by having to refer to another part of the book.