The short version
Speed reading does not improve your memory. No evidence supports it, and the definitive 2016 review of reading research does not claim it. If you want to remember what you read, use spaced repetition, mnemonics, visualisation and self testing. Reading a page at 500 words per minute instead of 250 does none of that work for you.
The honest answer, first
We sell speed reading software. This page tells you to buy nothing, and we are publishing it anyway.
There is no good reason to believe that training yourself to read faster makes you remember more. Speed reading is a technique for getting through text. Memory is a separate system with its own rules, and those rules do not care how fast the words arrived.
The best evidence on reading is a thirty page review published in 2016 in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Five authors. Peer reviewed. The lead was Keith Rayner, who spent forty years building the science of eye movements in reading, and who co-invented the moving window paradigm, the instrument that measures how much text a reader takes in per fixation. He had no course to sell and no app to defend.
The paper asks what speed reading can do. It does not say a word about improving memory. Nobody has shown it, and the courses that promise it are promising something no one has ever measured.
The mechanisms of reading are real, as we set out in is speed reading real. The memory claim bolted onto them is not. Our speed reading guide is honest about what the training gives you. Memory is not on the list.
Why people expect speed reading to help memory
The belief is not stupid. It comes from two arguments, and both are half right.
The volume argument
Read twice as fast, cover twice as many books, know twice as much. It sounds like arithmetic.
It is not. Having read something and knowing it are different states. Most of what you read leaves almost no trace within a week, and reading it faster changes nothing about that. Double the input to a leaky bucket and you get a faster leak.
Get the numbers straight before you multiply them. The average reading speed for an adult is about 250 words per minute. Normal reading with full comprehension caps near 300. The fastest competent adults land near 550. That is the range, and the memory story is usually told with numbers that do not exist.
Volume does help in one narrow way. The more you read in a field, the more prior knowledge you carry, and prior knowledge is the strongest predictor of what sticks. That is reading a lot, over years. It is not speed reading.
The attention argument
This one has more in it.
Slow reading leaves room for your mind to wander. You reach the foot of a page and realise you took in nothing. Push the pace and there is less room to drift. Attention improves, and attention is a genuine memory input.
A faster reader who is engaged will remember more than a slow reader who was daydreaming. That is true. Look at what did the work. The attention did it, not the speed. You get the same benefit reading at 250 words per minute with your mind in the room.
What reading faster actually does
To see why memory is untouched, look at what changes when you speed up. Almost nothing that memory needs.
It speeds up getting through text. That is all it claims.
Your reading rate is set by how fast your brain pulls meaning out of a word. Not by how fast your eyes reach it. A fixation lasts about 250 milliseconds. A saccade, the flick to the next fixation, lasts 25 to 30. The eye movements are a tenth of your reading time. The thinking is the other nine tenths.
Every technique on sale works on the tenth. Even if a technique worked perfectly, it would deliver you to the end of the page sooner. Arriving sooner is not remembering.
The encoding problem
Things stick when you do something with them. You connect them to what you already know. You argue with them. You picture them. You explain them to somebody else.
All of that takes time, and speed reading is a technique for spending less time on the page.
This is the awkward centre of the question. The pauses where you stop and think are the pauses where memory gets built. The faster you read, the fewer of them you have. Speed reading does not attack your memory. It removes the conditions memory needs.
The rehearsal problem
Memory needs return visits. One pass over a text, at any speed, leaves you with a fraction of it.
Speed does buy the option of more passes in the same time, and that is the one honest lever on this page. Two fast reads of a chapter beat one slow read for retention, because the second pass is where the material starts connecting to itself.
That only works if you spend the saved time on a second pass. Almost nobody does. They spend it on the next book.
Where speed reading does earn its place
Two cases, and both are narrower than the sales copy.
Previewing
Skim a chapter before you read it properly. Headings, first lines, the shape of the thing.
Now your brain has a frame to hang the detail on. When the detail arrives it has somewhere to go, and material that lands in a structure holds far better than material that lands in a pile.
That is a genuine memory gain and it comes out of the speed reading toolkit. It costs three minutes.
Skimming is a legitimate skill, and Rayner said so plainly. He called it a reasonable way to cope with the overwhelming amount of text we have to read. Use it here, where it earns its keep.
Second and third passes
Read fast enough to go round twice.
Pass one for the shape. Pass two for the argument. Pass three, if it matters, for the detail you need to hold. Three quick passes beat one careful crawl on almost any text you intend to remember.
Do the arithmetic on your own numbers. If you know your words per minute, you know what a chapter costs you in minutes.
Notice what is doing the work in both cases. Not the speed. The structure the speed lets you build.
What actually improves memory
If retention is your goal, these are the tools. None of them are speed reading. All of them beat it.
Spaced repetition
Meet the material again tomorrow. Then in three days. Then in a week. Then in a month.
Forgetting is not a leak you can plug. It is the default. The only reliable defence is meeting the thing again just before it goes. Spacing beats cramming, and it is not close.
This is dull, it takes weeks, and it works. It is the same shape as the honest truth about speed reading itself.
Mnemonics
Give the fact a hook. A rhyme, an acronym, an image, a place in a room you know.
Raw information slides off the mind. Information tied to something vivid stays. Memory competitors do not read faster. They build palaces, and none of them are speed readers.
Visualisation
Turn the words into pictures. Make a scene of what you just read and put yourself in it.
It slows you down. That is the trade, and it is worth making when the material matters. Speed and retention pull in opposite directions here, and pretending they do not is how the courses get you.
Retrieval
Shut the book. Say what it said.
Pulling a memory out is what strengthens it. Reading it again does not, though it feels like it does, which is why so many people re-read and then fail the exam.
There is a link back to speed here. A reader who knows a test is coming reads differently, and both speed and comprehension move. Same eyes, same brain, same page. The only change is that something is at stake. So read expecting to be tested. It costs nothing and it improves both numbers, and no course can sell it to you.
How to read when you need to remember
Put it together and the method is short.
Preview the text fast. Get the shape before the detail.
Set a question you want answered. Reading with a purpose beats reading to have read.
Read at a pace that lets you think, and let hard passages slow you down. A trained reader is not fast at everything. A trained reader knows when to brake. That judgement is the actual skill, and it is covered in how to improve reading comprehension.
Stop at the end and say what it said. Out loud, or on paper. No looking.
Come back tomorrow and do it again.
Speed reading appears once in that list, at the top, as the preview. That is its honest weight in a memory task.
Speed reading, revision and exams
This is where the question bites. Students are the people who need to remember what they read, and they are the people the courses target hardest.
Why it disappoints students
A textbook is the worst possible material for speed reading. It is dense. It is unfamiliar. Every sentence has to be held for later, and you have little prior knowledge to lean on. Every one of those features loads the part of reading that no technique can reach, which is the brain pulling meaning out of the words.
Rate is set by comprehension, and comprehension is exactly what a textbook makes expensive. Ronald Carver measured the gears. Memorising a text runs near 140 words per minute. Learning it runs near 200. Reading it with full understanding runs near 300. A student is working in the bottom two gears, and no course has ever moved them.
So the student who trains for speed and then attacks a textbook feels cheated. They were sold a general skill. What they bought works a little on easy prose and refuses to work on the one text that matters to them.
What a student should do instead
Use speed on the first pass and the last pass. Never on the pass in the middle.
Skim the chapter in five minutes to build the frame. Then read it slowly, arguing with it, taking notes in your own words. Then, days later, read it fast again to refresh what is already there.
Fast, slow, fast. The speed reading exercises that help here are the previewing drills, not the eye drills. The speed builds the scaffolding and does the reviewing. The slow pass does the learning. Nothing in that plan asks reading speed to do a job it cannot do.
Beware the apps that sell memory
Every few years a product arrives promising speed and recall together. The mechanism is always the same and it always fails the same way.
Nearly every app flashes words one at a time in a fixed box. The method is rapid serial visual presentation, and it is honest about one thing. It does speed up word identification, because it removes the cost of moving your eyes, and that cost is real.
Then look at what it takes away. It removes preview, because there is nothing beside the word to preview. It removes your ability to go back, because the words have already gone. Rayner and his co-authors put it flatly. Comprehension invariably suffers, and it suffers more the longer the text runs.
Now the fact the app reviews never print. Mary C. Potter of MIT invented rapid serial visual presentation. Potter and Levy, 1969. She coined the term. She is a co-author of the 2016 paper. The woman who created the technique co-signed the review that buries it.
A word flashed at you and gone is a word you did nothing with. Doing something with it was the whole of memory. Most speed reading apps remove the exact conditions retention needs, then charge you monthly for it.
The inner voice question
People ask whether killing their inner voice would help them remember more. It would not, and you cannot kill it anyway.
Subvocalization is the habit of pronouncing words in your head as you read. You can reduce it. You cannot remove it, and anyone promising otherwise is selling you something that does not exist.
It is not a memory problem in any case. Hearing the words in your head does not stop them sticking. If anything, saying something to yourself is a mild form of rehearsal, and rehearsal is a memory tool.
The claims to walk away from
Any product promising photographic recall from faster reading is lying. There is no mechanism for it and there never was.
Be careful with the older promises too. Evelyn Wood launched Reading Dynamics in 1959 and claimed thousands of words per minute with comprehension intact. Under test, comprehension fell as speed rose. What looked like reading turned out to be skimming topped up with prior knowledge. If comprehension could not survive the test, memory never had a chance.
Judge any memory claim by asking what the reader is doing differently after the page ends. If the answer is nothing, there is no memory gain in it, whatever the wpm number says.
The verdict
Speed reading and memory are two different skills, and only one of them is on sale. The market bundles them because a course that promises faster reading is a smaller product than one that promises faster reading and total recall. The bundle is not honest.
Speed reading will not improve your memory. It will get you through more pages, and that is worth having on its own terms. Read does speed reading work for what the training does deliver.
If you want to remember what you read, the work happens away from the page. Space your reviews. Build hooks. Make pictures. Test yourself.
Then go back and read it again, because the second reading was always the one that counted.
Start by finding out where your reading speed sits today. Take the speed reading test. Then spend your money on nothing, and spend your time on the four tools above.
Sources
Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4–34.
Carver, R. P. (1992). Reading rate: Theory, research, and practical implications. Journal of Reading, 36(2), 84–95.
Potter, M. C., & Levy, E. I. (1969). Recognition memory for a rapid sequence of pictures. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 81(1), 10–15.
