Brain coach Jim Kwik shows how a visual pacer—your finger, a pen, anything moving across the line—can boost reading speed by 25 to 50 percent in 60 seconds. The trick stops you from rereading words and taps into your eye's sensitivity to motion. Cutting reading time in half frees up two hours a day, or 365 hours a year.
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You're getting a private session with one of the world's leading brain coaches. And I want you to get ready because in Jim's book Limitless, he gives a ton of tips on reading faster, many of which I'd never heard before. So Jim, what are they?
We all have books on our shelf we haven't read yet, right? And the goal is when you pick up the book, if you use a visual pacer when you read, you'll read it faster. And now what's a visual pacer? It could be your finger, it could be a pen, it could be a highlighter, it could be a mouse on a computer. And what you're doing is you're not touching the page or the screen, you're just going right above it and just underlining what you're reading. Now, I want you to not just believe everything I'm saying, you could test it out also. Pick up a book that you're reading, put a mark in the margin where you left off, and what I want you to do is set your phone, your timer, to go off in 60 seconds. So we're going to read for 60 seconds, and I want you to read how you would normally read, not using your finger, but just how you would normally read for comprehension. And then at the end of 60 seconds, I want you to put a mark in the margin where you left off and then count the number of lines that you just read. And that's the lines per minute. Now set the timer again for another 60 seconds and then pick up where you left off, but this time just underline the words. And you're just underlining the words as you would read. And then at the end of 60 seconds, put a mark in the margin and then count the number of lines you just read. For the majority of the listeners, they'll find that second number will be 25% to almost 50% greater. And you don't have to work any harder. So it's not about working harder. It's about working more intelligently, right? And so the reason why it works Is number one, one of the challenges we have when we read is we backskip.
Backskip? What is backskip? What does that even mean, Jim?
We reread words.
Oh.
And this keeps you from doing that. Some people reread whole lines, right? On the other side of it, your eyes are attracted to motion. So if something ran across your room, you wouldn't look at me, you would look at what moves. Because as a hunter-gatherer, your eyes are trained to look at movement. Because if you're in a bush and you're hunting lunch, let's say it's a rabbit or a carrot, depending on your diet. If the bush next to you moves, you have to look because number one, it could be lunch, or number two, you could be lunch. So when your finger is going across the page, it draws your attention through as opposed to your attention being outside of you. And then the final reason, use your finger while you read. It's kind of interesting. Kids use their finger while they read naturally until you— Or organically until we tell them not to. And you do also, because when I ask people to count the number of lines, maybe they didn't use their finger when they initially read. But if I ask you to count the number of lines, what do you do? Use your finger as a visual aid to help you to focus. But the final reason is your certain senses work very closely together. For example, have you ever like had a great tasting fruit right from the farmer's market? But you're not actually tasting a peach, you're smelling the peach, but your sense of smell and taste are so closely linked, your mind can't tell the difference. It can tell the difference when you're sick, when you can't breathe out of your nose. What does food taste like? It tastes more bland, right? And so just as your sense of smell and taste are closely linked, so is your sense of sight and your sense of touch. That when you use your finger while you read, people will say they literally feel more in touch with their reading.
Seriously? This one tool? Just using a visual cue or pacer or whatever you called it can increase your reading speed by 50%. Is that really true?
Absolutely. 25 to 50%. Some of the listeners doing this exercise will actually double their reading speed. And think about it, the value of that. The average person spends about 4 hours a day processing information. You think about social media and emails and books and reports and research, whatever you have to go through, the newspaper. If you could just cut that in half, you double your reading speed. So you save 2 hours a day. What's 2 hours a day over the course of a year? In fact, what's just 1 hour a day saved over the course of a year? 365 hours. How many 40-hour work weeks is that? Over 9. Over 9 weeks of productivity you gain back. You reclaim 2 months of productivity is back of yours, saving into something ubiquitous.
You know what I really love about this, Jim, is that you don't have to try harder. What you just taught us is a skill that will help us read 50% faster just by using the tip of a pen and leveraging the super wiring of how our eyes are wired to track to movement. That's incredible.
