Personal Productivity

Frequently
Asked Questions 

RapidReader^TM
Features 

Technical
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DEMO
RapidReader^TM
 

ORDER
RapidReader^TM 

ABOUT RapidReader™

The Previous Limits To Human Reading Speed
Eye Movement
"Sounding Out" Words In Our Heads
Text As Movies
The Picture of A Word
 

Have You Watched a Good Book Lately?©
 

RapidReadertm is a breakthrough method of information acceleration that allows the user to sit back and without scrolling, "watch" a book or document at four or five times their average reading speed. The RapidReader method was developed by a team of psychologists, educators and technologists. It is based on research conducted at major universities and at Softology™ Development Group. 

The research has shown that humans are capable of reading and comprehending up to 1600 words per minute! The average reading speed is between 150 and 200 words per minute on a printed page and less on a computer where scrolling and eyestrain take a toll. The question then becomes "If we can read up to 1600 wpm. why don't we?". Why are we limited to less than one tenth our potential reading speed?

There are two main factors that force us to read slower than we are capable of: EYE MOVEMENT and "SOUNDING OUT" in our heads as we read the words. 

RapidReader^TM displays words one at a time in sequence in the middle of the screen at a user adjustable rate of speed. It is similar to watching a movie and in that regard eliminates the principal barriers to high reading speeds as well as providing an unprecedented level of comfort for reading on a computer screen. 

RapidReader^TM...Applying The Way We See The World To The Way We Read 

When we humans look at the world we see it as a complete picture. We focus on what's in front of us and then use our brains to interpret it. When we watch a movie we see the action and comprehend what's going on. Only rarely do we move our eyes across the screen and then only when the screen is bigger than our field of vision (or when we sat a little too close). Movies are actually a close approximation to the way we see the world. For most of us the image that's directly in front of us is what we see most of the time. We spend a very small portion of our time moving our eyes from the front view and when we do it's usually a "glance" and then we turn our heads to bring the new interest directly in front of us. There is only one activity that requires that we move our eyes incessantly...reading text on a page or a computer screen. 

"A Simple Fact..Every Time Your Eye Moves, The Optic Nerve Shuts Down. When Your Eye Stops Moving The Optic Nerve Re-Opens But Like a Camera, You Must Re-adjust The Focus For The New Word And That Takes Time." 

Reading text is the only process where we move our eyes across a flat surface a little at a time in order to learn something. Reading text is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, only a few thousand years old. Historically, reading the way we now do came about because of the types of materials that were available to hold information; clay tablets and animal hides and precious metals, paint on stone and later paper. It was really only with the advent of the computer and electronic storage that methods of information transfer could offer change. RapidReader would not exist without the computer, there simply was no method of display sequential text fast enough. So in an odd way, it took a very sophisticated technology to create a method of seeing text the way that for hundreds of thousands of years, we humans have perceived the rest of the world. So while RapidReader™ may be a "new" way of reading, it is a method of seeing the world that's as ancient as man, and as modern as a movie house. 

Line After Line After Line: The Territory of The Written Page 

Up until now, reading was a linear process of moving from one word to the next. As an example if you wanted to write a message in the sand, you'd take a stick and draw a series of symbols in a sequence or line for someone to read. You would use territory to lay out the message moving down the beach as you wrote. If the message were long enough the reader would have to walk down the beach as he read. He would have to use excess energy to go to each word in order to make sense of the message. The same is true of a page or a piece of papyrus or even the computer screen. We have to move our eyes along the symbols to gather the message using energy to get the message. So writing takes up space and reading means covering the territory with our eyes. 

But what if you substitute time for space? For instance, to go back to the beach for a moment, lets say that while someone is looking over your shoulder you drew the first word of a message in the sand. Then instead of writing your way down the beach, you wiped out the first word and drew the second word where the first had been and then the third and so on, one word right OVER the other to complete your message. You would be displaying the words all in the same place. The reader wouldn't need to move because the sequencing of words is done with TIME each word following the one before.That's the way a movie works, one frame displayed at a time. You don't have to walk down the beach to go to the words because the words, like the frames of a movie are coming to you. 

Sounding Out..The Middle Man In Reading 

When we read in a linear fashion, like the man walking down the beach to see the message, we will typically and automatically "sound out" in our heads, the words we see. This is a throwback to the way we learned to read. And one of the principal reasons why we don't reach our reading potential. 

As children we were shown a symbol on a page that looked like this .."CAT".. then we were told what the letters we saw sounded like and so we knew that "CAT" on the page meant the sound "Kaatt" which meant a small furry animal that meows. The text symbol was translated into a sound symbol which was translated into a picture of a cat in our heads. However as we have more experience with reading we don't really need the "training wheels" of "sounding out" that were important to our early learning. 

The Guinness Record for the fastest speaker in the world is an average of 360 words per minute. 

Yet even as our reading skills develop, and as we develop a "sight vocabulary" we still unnecessarily "sound out" from long habit, and the slow laborious movement of our eyes across a page and that slows us down. At RapidReader speeds of over 400 words the possibility of "sounding out" is eliminated. Some occasional words will be sounded out but the meaning of what you are reading will come from the TEXT SYMBOLS directly. They are complete pictures of concepts in the first place. We Don't need the middle man of sounding out at all! 

Why Rapidreader Works 

If you think about it, we don't look at anything the way we read text. We don't look at a picture of an apple in this way. We don't have to scan across the canvas from left to right (or right to left or up to down) repeatedly to know that it's an apple. The information is there the first time we see it. We absorb it all at once. We also don't have to pronounce the word "apple" to ourselves in order for the picture to make sense. We simply look at the picture of an apple and know what it represents. Well, printed words are pictures. They are symbols just like the painters representation of an apple. We only have to look at the symbol directly before us to know what it means. And we don't have to sound it out in our heads to understand it.