Howard Berg is the number one speed reader in the world. Or at least, he thinks he is. The world is split on their opinion of this controversial figure in the world of speed reading, Howard Berg has performed a few remarkable feats, and has had his share of controversy as well, making him easily one of the most polarizing figures in the field of education.
As most of you know, speed reading was first developed by Evelyn Wood, an Australian educator in the mid 1960s. Speed reading did not being to become popular, however until the late eighties or early nineties, when Howard Berg first appeared on the scene. In the 1990 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, Berg is listed as the world’s fastest reader, being able to read over eighty pages per minute, which modern publishing has translated to twenty-five thousand words per minute based on the average number of words printed on a page.
Berg’s achievement was not all that well-received, however since the record was brand new at the time, and speed reading was not necessarily well-understood by the masses of people. For all anyone knew, he could be turning pages blindly, because reading comprehension was never being tested. Howard Berg was, in fact, never tested at all for this record because at the time, Guinness hadn’t yet begun sending out representatives to verify records as they do today. They took Berg at his word, and published his name as the number one reader in the world, making a career for him.
Howard Berg has since created and released any number of products and books based on speed reading, and not all of them are good, though I do like his speed reading class called Speed Reading University.
Howard Berg’s Controversy
But that’s also where Howard Berg has run into the majority of his controversy. Speed reading professionals laugh at his claims of being able to read and do any kind of comprehension at the same time.
His ability to perform have been on and off. He appeared on a number of shows and television programs and has done both well, and very poorly. He was able to memorize an autobiography of Dick Cavett in only 90 seconds, and was able to perfectly recall the details, though the size and complexity of that passage are currently unknown. He read an 1,100 page book on a Cleveland television news program before this, and demonstrated excellent recall both right after reading it, and even a whole year later. When it came time for him to speed read the new health care bills created by the US House of Representatives, he was only reading around five thousand words per minute, or twenty percent of his world-record holding claim.
However, when it comes to his own infomercials for his products, he read only seventeen pages in twenty-four seconds, an excellent achievement if it is to be believed, but far short of his claim of eighty pages in a minute. In fact, at that speed, he’s reading less than half of that amount. This, and a few other, less noteworthy, misses, led to the FTC filing a complaint against him for deceptive advertising.
So as you can see, the figure of Howard Stephen Berg is one that is rife with controversy and is not all that well respected in most speed reading circles. Almost all credible experts express the same feelings on his abilities: if his reading comprehension is fifty percent or less, then there’s no real reason to be able to read as quickly as he claims to be able to. Others say that what he’s doing is not really reading, and that calling him the world’s fastest reader ins a misnomer because he’s skimming or scanning, not picking up even the major details of the topic matter he’s reading.
However, for all that, Howard Berg should still be recognized as a pioneer in the world of speed reading, since without him, most of us wouldn’t have ever even have heard about speed reading, much less learned how to do it.