Hi all.
I am Nodas, a minds sports competitor, from Greece.
Since I actually competed in the Speedreading contest of the International Memoriad in Las Vegas, USA in 2016, I can provide you with some factual information.
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All we the competitors had about 40 pages to read, in printed material. It was not an extremely technical text, but something about environmental science with occasional difficult vocabulary. I think we were around 20 competitors, not sure about that. You can check all the scores in memoriad.com under the "Competitions/Memoriad 2016 sections’
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All these pages contained about 6000 words, so the winner had to read all those in around 5 minutes, just to get over the 1K words per minute mark. The time limit to read the whole text, was 15 minutes, if I am not mistaken (mind you, this happened 4 years ago)
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IMPORTANT: To estimate our comprehension rate in reading and eventually rank the competitors, we were given 20 multiple choice questions after our read. Each question had 4 choices, A, B, C, or D. There was a time limit on those questions also, probably around 10 minutes for all of them, therefore around 30 seconds for each answer. We had to digitally input them in a special program, a variation of the Memoriad software.
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As it was correctly mentioned, every competitor should answer at least 60% of the questions correctly, in order to register a proper score. That was just to weed out people who just skimmed and didn’t make the effort to comprehend better.
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Therefore, the 1st goal was to read as fast as possible. The 2nd goal was to get at least 12 out of 20 questions. (since 12/20 = 60%). And if both these conditions were met, then one could register a score.
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There were prizes of 2250 dollars for the winners just for this speedreading task alone. In particular 1500 dollars for the 1st place (Gold), then $750 for the 2nd place (Silver) and $500 for the 3rd place ( Bronze) respectively.
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But in order to get these one should register a score (60%+) and have true reading speed of at least of around 450 WPM. The winner in 2016 in Vegas, was a Turkish 17yo high school student who was about to start Medicine school next year. He told me afterwards, that he had already competed and also won the speedreading contest in the national Turkish Memoriad of 2015. His language preference was Turkish, and mine was English. But I did not find the text to be badly translated. The word flow was smooth, and probably taken from some decent journal.
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Note on the competition rules, according to the Memoriad website.
The formula is :
‘Real reading speed’ = ‘Comprehension rate’ x ΄True raw reading speed’. -
Example:
For a Τrue raw reading speed of 1000 WPM, with a Comprehension rate of 60% ,
yields : Real reading speed = 1000 x 60% = 600 WPM -
For the record, my own performance was over 1000 WPM raw speed but unfortunately my rate was just 50% (I answered 10 out 20 questions correctly apparently ) and since it is below 60% so I could not register a score. Everyone below 60% ( i.e. 55% and less) gets a score 0 zero. I did not really skim the text, but I guess that’s the rules and we all competed under these rules.
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English is not my native tongue, and all the papers could be either be read in English or Turkish. But this is not the reason, why I did not get a decent comprehension score. Since it was my first speed-reading competition I probably went off a bit too fast, for own good. Retrospectively, if I went for 800 WPM (True raw speed) , I am positive that I could probably acquire at least 60% Comprehension rate, therefore get 800 x 60% = 480 WPM final real reading speed.
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For the record , the 3rd place (Bronze) went to a guy whom most of you in the memory community know about. His name is Nelson Dellis, an ex-US memory champion. His score was 288 WPM. Because he read raw 461 WPM with 65% therefore he got 461 x 65% = around 290 WPM. And he got 500 dollars for this.
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My own real reading rate was double of this, but unfortunately, I got 50% instead of his 65% (just 3 multiple choice questions more), so I really believe I had a chance , because the overall scores were not extremely impressive.
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If you think this score is low, that is what happens when you enter the pressure of the competition and leave the pressure of your own leisure reading way in your home/hub/crib. People can debate all they want, but these were the actual results.
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Overall, it was a nice experience. But certainly I would say there is a luck element as well, because these multiple choices had only 4 answers to choose from. So in example , for that winning guy who got 1246 WPM with 65%, (=13 questions out of 20), then I could argue, than a couple of those answers could be correct guesstimations, after having to choose only from 2 possible answers, while eliminated in your head the other 2. These numbers like 60% or 75% are not certain, it just happened to answer the right questions.
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The same happens in the English language exam text which I have taken back in the day ( when I passed the B2 level in 1998 and the C2 level in 2003, just after finishing my high school). In the reading section of these English language exams, there are such multiple choice questions as well, but even so, it’s not 100% certain that you understand everything correctly, even if you get them all right. I hope you get what I mean.
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Maybe you can find analogies with S.A.T. or other tests based on such multiple-choice questions, who examine the comprehension level of student or a competitor. And even if one scores perfectly on S.A.T. or in other multiple-choice tests, that does not mean that he knows everything verbatim. Usually, perfect scores are 95-99% pure skill and knowledge, but the rest 1-5% can also entail a luck factor (such as getting asked your favorite topics / favorite questions etc.)
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Finally, about these claims, of 2K+ WPM, I CERTAINLY believe they are a marketing scam, and no human can read so fast under peer-reviewing circumstances. such as these which happen in competitions.
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Like I wrote (and you can double check), even the ex-US memory champ read less than 500 WPM in an actual speedreading competition and even that was considered a decent Top-3 performance. You can ask Nelson in his social media, to confirm what I wrote. That for a 3rd place, 500 WPM was just enough.
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But of course, everyone has to make a living and they can claim all absurdities want, (I don’t wanna put names, but you probably know who claims the ability to read these thousands words per minutes.) Probably similar to folks who claim that photographic memory exists, without even ever stepping foot in the World Memory Championships.
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I just had to note down my 0.02 $, with a standpoint of my competition experience, whilst placing emphasis on the facts. I am sure many people were interested to read about this, because our time is limited and everyone wants to be able to read faster with all this information.
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Hopefully, you probably took less then 1 minute to read all these words of mine.
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And hopefully you had a valuable insight on what is humanly possible (and what is not) regarding reading, which probably the most quintessential human skill in the Anthropocene era.
Nodas