Most adults read somewhere around 200 to 250 words per minute (WPM). But in a report recently receiving a great deal of social media attention, a company called Spritz has announced a supposed breakthrough in reading technology that they claim will make everyone the equivalent of an Olympian speed reader, polishing off Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone in 77 minutes.

Normally when we read, our eyes hop from word to word through the text, with quick movements (called saccades) shifting gaze from one word to the next. We look directly at (fixate) most words, though we skip some words (especially those that are shorter and more predictable), and we fixate other words more than once (especially those that are longer and less predictable). The amount of time our eyes linger on each word and the distance they hop changes from moment to moment as comprehension difficulty changes.

According to Spritz, their breakthrough technology gets rid of the need to move our eyes, and is the result of three years of “stealth mode” research and fine-tuning. What exactly is the technology? It’s based on rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), a method with a long history in Psychology in which each word is flashed for a brief period of time (for example, 1/10 of a second) at a single location. Because all of the words are flashed in one place, there is no need for eye movements, and so (the claim goes), we are released from the bottleneck created by eye movements and breathtaking new reading speeds can be achieved.

RSVP reading has been around a long time. In fact, quite a bit of research was conducted on it during the 1970s. What makes this version different? According to Spritz, the key to their breakthrough is that each word is presented using what they call the “Optimal Recognition Point” (ORP). The idea is to present words so that the eyes are fixated at the best location for recognizing them. Spritz takes this optimal recognition point to be slightly to the left of the center of each word. Reading researchers will recognize this idea as a version of two phenomena observed in scientific studies of reading: the optimal viewing position effect (word recognition is fastest when a word is centered around the fixation point), and the preferred viewing location effect (during normal reading the fixation point tends to be slightly to the left of the optimal viewing position).

So Spritz sounds great, and even somewhat scientific. But can you really read a novel in 90 minutes with full comprehension? Well, like most things that seem too good to be true, the answer unfortunately is no. The research in the 1970s showed convincingly that although people can read using RSVP at normal reading rates, comprehension and memory for text falls as RSVP speeds increase, and the problem gets worse for paragraphs compared to single sentences. One of the biggest problems is that there just isn’t enough time to put the meaning together and store it in memory (what psychologists call “consolidation”). The purported breakthrough use of the “ORP” doesn’t really help with this, and isn’t even novel. In the typical RSVP method, words are presented centered at fixation. The “slightly left of fixation” ORP used by Spritz is a minor tweak at best.

Two other points are worth noting. One is that reading at fast RSVP rates is tiring. It requires unwavering attention and vigilance. You can’t let your mind wander, ponder the nuances of what you’re reading, make a mental note to check on a related idea, or do any other mental activity that would normally be associated with reading for comprehension. If you try, you’ll miss some of the text that is relentlessly flying at you. The second point is that the difficulty of comprehension during reading changes over the course of a sentence, paragraph, and page. Our eyes engage in a choreographed dance through text that reflects this variation in the service of comprehension. RSVP makes every step in the dance the same. Or, to stretch an analogy, imagine hiking along a forest trail. Each step you take determines your overall hiking speed. Some steps require a longer pause to gain footing on loose stones, and others require a longer stride to step over a protruding root. Would it be effective to run on the trail? Worse, would it be a good idea to tie a piece of rope between your ankles so that each step was constrained to be exactly the same length? Surely this would lead to some stumbling, if not to a twisted ankle or catastrophic fall!

A lot more could be said about problems with fast RSVP reading (and if there’s interest I may address these in a later Blog post), but for now hopefully you can see the nature of the problems with the claims that are making the rounds in social media.