Does PhotoReading Work? The Claims and the Evidence

No independent test has found that PhotoReading works as advertised. The method claims you can take in a page a second in a relaxed state and later recall what you need, at rates quoted as 25,000 words per minute. The only controlled evaluation we could find, a small study funded by NASA, found no benefit on any comprehension measure, and the experienced PhotoReader understood less with the technique than when reading normally. The parts of the method that may help are its ordinary study steps, which you can use without the page-flipping.

What is PhotoReading?

PhotoReading is a commercial course developed by Paul R. Scheele and sold by Learning Strategies Corporation as the PhotoReading Whole Mind System, a registered trademark. It is taught through books, recorded courses and licensed trainers. Its promotional material describes it as a way to process information using more of your mind, quotes a reviewer calling it a method that uses the subconscious, and repeats the figure of 25,000 words per minute.

Descriptions from course providers give it five steps. Only the middle one is unusual; the others resemble techniques taught in many study-skills courses.

Does PhotoReading work? What the NASA study found

The one independent evaluation is a report by the psychologist Danielle McNamara, then at Old Dominion University, written under a NASA Ames Research Center grant and published in 2000. She noted that the method had attracted popular attention but that no one had examined its claims objectively, so she tested it.

1. McNamara attended a PhotoReading workshop and learned the technique herself.
2. She and an experienced PhotoReader each took parallel versions of two standardised reading tests and three tests built for the study.
3. Each reader did one version by reading normally and the other by PhotoReading.

No measure showed an advantage for PhotoReading. The rates claimed for the method did not appear: reading times were broadly similar to normal reading. The experienced PhotoReader generally took longer with the technique than without it, and understood less.

The study has clear limits. It had two participants, one of them the researcher, and it is a preliminary report rather than a peer-reviewed paper. It cannot rule out every version of the claim. But it is the only test we could find, and it points one way. The burden of proof sits with a method that claims a hundredfold gain, and that proof has not been published.

Is there any other evidence?

We found no other controlled study of PhotoReading itself. Tests of other extreme speed readers are relevant, though. In a study described in the 2016 review of speed reading by Rayner and colleagues, two graduates of a speed-reading programme went through a college textbook at 15,000 words per minute or more. Their comprehension on a multiple-choice test was poor, and they showed no unusual ability to perceive letters away from the point they were looking at. The researcher, Homa (1983), concluded that what they had developed was dexterity in turning pages.

The broader pattern from that review is consistent: when people read far above their normal speed, they understand less, and trained speed readers perform much like people told to skim. More on this in does speed reading work?

Why the claims conflict with how reading works

The central claim of PhotoReading is that you can take in text you have not looked at word by word. Three well-established facts about vision and reading stand against it.

• Sharp vision covers a tiny area. Only the centre of your gaze, the fovea, sees enough detail to identify letters. Further out, print becomes too blurred to read, however relaxed or unfocused you are.
• Each glance identifies only a few words. On each stop of the eyes you identify the word you are looking at and sometimes the next one. Readers identify words only about seven letters to the right of where they are looking. A page has hundreds of words; a second allows three or four stops.
• Understanding is the slow part. Word recognition is quick, but fitting words into sentences and sentences into an argument takes time. The review by Rayner and colleagues estimates that eye movements take only about 10% of reading time; the rest is processing. See eye movements in reading.

To understand a word, you have to look at it or very near it. A page turned each second gives your eyes time to stop on only a handful of words, and no study has shown the rest being absorbed some other way.

Why do some people feel PhotoReading helps?

People who use the method sometimes report that it helps them. Several features of the course could explain that without the PhotoRead step doing anything:

• The prepare, preview, postview and activate steps add purpose, structure, questions and a second look at the text. These are genuine study habits.
• Activation includes reading parts of the book. Whatever you learn then, you learned by reading.
• Most people rarely test their comprehension after reading, so a feeling of familiarity can pass for understanding.

McNamara's design controlled for this by comparing the same readers with and without the technique on matched tests. That comparison is the one that counts.

What to do instead: a 30-minute routine for a non-fiction book

You can keep the useful parts of the method and replace the page-flipping with reading you can check. Try this on one chapter.

1. Purpose, 1 minute. Write one sentence on why you are reading this chapter and what you need from it.
2. Preview, 3 minutes. Read the headings, the first and last paragraphs, and any summary or figures. This is skimming on purpose; see skimming vs scanning.
3. Questions, 2 minutes. Write three questions you expect the chapter to answer.
4. Read, about 20 minutes. Read the sections that matter at your normal pace. Slow down on dense passages and skim the parts your preview showed you can skip.
5. Recall, 4 minutes. Close the book and answer your questions from memory, then check them against the text. The gaps tell you what to reread.

For a lasting improvement, read regularly and build vocabulary in the subjects you read most; the gains come over months, not days. Measure your starting point with the free reading speed test, which checks comprehension as well as words per minute, and repeat it monthly. Strategies for the recall step are in how to improve reading comprehension.