Speed Reading* is a very useful skill. Most people read every single word when they read a sentence. Tests have shown that the eye skips backwards and forwards on each line as the brain tries to make sense of the sentence. The eye will even go back over words that have already been read, probably as an error checking mechanism. In short, most people read very inefficiently and haven't advanced any further than when they were first taught to read at school.
It doesn't need to be like this, your eyes can take in information at least as fast as your ears, if not faster, so you should be able to read at the same speed as someone talking to you.
Speed reading* is very easy to learn and improvements can be noticed almost immediately. Tony Buzan* has written a few books on the subject and is probably the most well known speed reader. Spending a few minutes training your eyes to make efficient movements is the first big jump. If you missed a word, it doesn't matter, by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you can probably work out what that word was. Once you have made your eyes work more efficiently, even greater gains can be made by using your peripheral vision to read the words you're not currently looking at. This way, you only need to focus on two or three words per line. It may sound strange but it really works.
By taking this method even further, claims have been made of being able to read one page per second in a standard paperback novel. This will require a lot of practice and maybe you'll never reach this kind of level, but you will definitely see improvements.
The Photoreading* principle is different to speed reading. In photoreading, you are attempting to read subliminally. Claims are made about being able to read about a hundred pages per minute in complete relaxation and being able to understand the whole book without having consciously read the book. The whole concept seems quite dubious to me and I didn't get very far into the course before deciding that it wasn't going anywhere. I haven't decided that it's rubbish, it just seems implausible, and if it was as effective as they claimed, it would probably be better known amongst the self improvement community.
