Talk:Vision span

Could someone site sources for this five letter reading span that "reading research shows"? I happen to be one of those people who teaches others to read at rates of around 1000 words a minute. In order to do that, the human eye has to be able to see several words together, usually up to five. cf Speed reading. My own experience at speed reading 10,000+WPM tells me that the human eye can take in enormous volumes of words at a glance. The amount of information the human eye can take in is dependant upon: Before I boldly go in and rewrite this whole article, I would like to know why I shouldn't...? -- Jim Whitaker Metaphorman 08:57, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) the eyeglass prescription
 * 2) the distance the text is held from the face
 * 3) the size of the typefont
 * 4) the experience of the reader
 * 5) how tired your eyes are
 * 6) what you had for breakfast and how long since you have eaten anything
 * 7) etc etc ad nauseum...

I have added some relevant references as requested. The research stands firm to date. I believe the explanation for your experience of 10,000+wpm is due to innacurate assessment of comprehension. Any study conducted on reading rate must have a measure for non-comprehension. Reading and comprehension are inextricably linked. Otherwize I would be able to claim to read at 1 trillion+wpm just by sprinting through a library in a minute. "I comprehend that it was a library with lots of words in it and it only took one minute!" Regards. Doug
 * Some people can speed read for real. Most cannot. The inner mental processes of those who can read and retain at high speeds are different than those people who learn to gloss their eyes over text at outrageously high speeds.  Most such "natural" speed readers don't subject themselves to reading comprehension tests.  -- Jim Whitaker Metaphorman 00:09, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

Ur, Jim! I believe if you have spent your time telling people you can read a normal text at 10000wpm plus with high comprehension, then you either have the wrong measure for comprehension, or you are trying to make money by deception. I would like to believe you are a typical speed reader (that you have trained yourself to ignore comprehension) and that you have deceived yourself. I believe people want to behave ethically. Of course it is possible to comprehend pulp at that rate. But any joker can do that. Its called scanning. Regs 144.214.54.211 09:11, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC) JosephJ!
 * I used to use "speed reading" techniques to ace midterms and final exams. We are talking classes like Organic Chemistry and Physics.  They sent me to college full time when I was 13 years old in part because of that.  Most people apparently cannot do that....  Just because YOU can't do that and people who can do it for real are rare doesn't mean that there is something wrong with me (or you).  It took years of training myself to find ways to put information I was reading into active use in order to get information to "stick".  Those techniques are not taught in most speed reading courses which basically tell you to "read faster" and "keep reading faster".  The kind of schooling that teaches "reading for ever greater speed" is ridiculous.  It is really too bad that you haven't stumbled on a system that actually works.  They don't sell well because they are hard to teach.  Courses in speed reading cannot teach inner mental processes, they can only teach the surface appearance of speed reading.  Any idiot can learn to gloss their eyes over text.  Throughout history there have been people who read extremely rapidly (sometimes called natural speed readers such as John Stuart Mill).  Trying to teach others to do it without the problems latent in speed reading courses is somewhat problematical.  If you take a look at the wikibook article Speed Reading you can get some semblance of an appreciation for inner mental processes that work and are moderately teachable.  If a reader focuses on putting information to use rather than trying to keep his eyes moving at a constant high steady speed over the text, speed eventually comes naturally.  -- Jim Whitaker Metaphorman 00:09, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

I removed the excess line about speed readers because it seems a little irrelevant to speed reading. Not sure why people want to talk about speed reading all the time on a page about vision span. JuneD 22:33, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * Vision span is a term used in speed reading courses. I haven't seen it used outside of that context.  Hence this article was created to explain it in more detail without burdening the text of the article with details about vision span.  -- Jim Whitaker Metaphorman 00:09, 29 May 2005 (UTC)

In my opinion this is a candidate for speedy deletion. There is no such thing as "Vision Span" in serious research. The average number of eye-stops needed to identify a word decreases with practice and increasing visual vocabulary, see reading. --Hans-Werner34 (talk) 20:52, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

Blind spot
I have removed the following sentence: "There is also the problem of the blind spot, an area near the center of vision in which the human eye has no cone cells or rod cells at all, and sees nothing." Firstly, even in context of the entire paragraph, it is not clear to what "problem" this statement refers. The peripheral vision may not be used in speed-reading, but the existence of a physiological blind spot is generally not a problem because one eye covers for the other. Secondly, it's not clear as to whether this usage of "blind spot" is referring to the physiological blind spot or anatomical blind spot. It certain confuses the meaning of the sentence in that there are areas of the eye that have or do not have photoreceptors, but there are no areas of vision that have or do not have photoreceptors. -AED 04:16, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

This is another article showing how dangerous confidence in wikipedia will be in most of all cases. There human brain can only process fixed symbols, moving symbols are impossible to be processed. Though, a speed reader fixes great parts of text with the soft focus of his eye. He looks at a page like one would look at a car or a table, concentrating not only at one centimetre of the object but at the whole ! Doing this, by practice the speed reader is used to process the information without fixing one word with his eyes as do children in the first or second grade. This method works. I wonder how some people still keep doubting about that. There a far too much people reading at +1000 wpm with excellent comprehension and ... without signs of autism. It took me two years to read at rates +1000 wpm, thousands of pages of practice and now I'm reading cases, judgements and statutes in one third the time I did before. Speed reading methods are the most useful and gratifying skill a lawyer ore other people dealing with great amounts of textual information could learn. The so called scientifical founding of arguments denying that one could read faster than usual are mostly based upon experiences with normal readers who where never taught to read at + 800 wpm with a method that they really understand and that fits for them.~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.58.29.176 (talk) 15:44, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

'Rauding'
There is a mysterious reference, on this page, to 'rauding'. The link merely redirects to 'Reading (Process)'. Could somebody, perhaps, explain this term?

Dreadnought1906 (talk) 01:22, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

What is this author actually saying?
The whole section on applications to speed reading seems like a barely veiled attempt at discrediting speed reading entirely, yet without ever going so far as to directly state that it doesn't exist (although it does leave open the door for the possibility that some mentally imbalanced people can move their eyes rapidly enough to read thousands of words per minute, seemingly to wave a hand to the acknowledgement that speed reading has been demonstrated to exist).

The section may be a collection of facts of some sort, though I really feel at a loss as to the overall coherence of it, and I feel that it's because the author is just trying to prove some ideology without saying it and it's not clear exactly what that is, but maybe it's just me.

Also, he mentions in two places that claims have been "found to be false" without citation. Even if he mentions a lack of cone cells in the first place, I would think a citation for that fact is in order. (Exactly how many cone cells *are* missing? How do we deduce ability to tell words from that?  How do we know no other type of cell is involved?  How many people agree with this data?  Etc.)  I won't put citation needed tags because I don't feel an expert enough on Wikipedia practices, so I'll leave that to someone else. Inhahe (talk) 12:38, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

Conditions causing reduced vision span when reading
Can a section or list of links please be added regarding causes of reduced vision span. I have only 2 characters in focus with corrective lenses despite having normal results for peripheral light tests. What that is called is a mystery to me and many others. There must be several conditions affecting others where a reduction in vision span is significant. Not just dyslexia and tunnel vision. --tygrus (talk) 15:50, 27 December 2019 (UTC)