Lighting-Fast Readers Exceed the Speed Limits of a Brain

The paper "A Review of the Savant Syndrome and its Possible Relationship to Epilepsy" by neurologist John R. Hughes has some astonishing accounts of extraordinary mental abilities. We read of "the hyperlexics, who (in one case) can read a page in 8 seconds and recall the text later at a 99% level."  We read of "one savant who could recite without error the value of Pi to 22,514 places," a reference to Daniel Tammet.  Later more specifically we are told that "on American TV many viewers witnessed Daniel at 26 years of age in front of Oxford University dons reciting (without a single mistake) the value of Pi to 22,514 decimal places over a 5-hour period."

We read this:

"Thioux et al.. [5] described Donny, a young autistic savant, 'who is possibly the fastest and most accurate calendar prodigy ever described'. The title of this report likely justifies the latter statement : 'The day of the week when you were born in 700 msec.' " 

This seems to be reference to an ability to name the day of the week in which anyone was born, while taking less than a second to perform such a calculation.  We read of a case of hyperlexia:

"The life of one of the most famous savants, Kim Peek, was dramatized in the popular movie, 'Rain Man', played by actor Dustin Hoffman. Kim reads the left side of a page with his left eye and simultaneously the right side of the page with his right eye (without a corpus callosum). The time taken for these two pages for Kim is usually 8 seconds and upon testing for retention he was 99% correct of the material just read [2]. These values are in contrast to 45 seconds for reading and 45% correct on testing seen in a group of normal individuals."

The corpus callosum is the bundle of fibers connecting the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere of the brain. We might expect under "brains make minds" assumptions that not having a corpus callosum would produce terrible cognitive problems everywhere. But Kim Peek (born without a corpus callosum) had enormous memory abilities and way-better-than-normal reading abilities, as the quote above suggests. It is widely reported that Kim Peek remembered almost everything in thousands of books he had read, a claim that Hughes makes on page 7 of his paper.  

On the same page Hughes refers to acquired savant syndrome, which he describes as when "after some brain injury or brain disease, savant skills unexpectedly emerge, sometimes at a prodigious level, when no such skills were present before injury or illness.” He states this:

"Many examples were given by Treffert, including a 10-year-old boy knocked unconscious by a baseball, then later could do quick

calendar calculations, an 8-year-old boy with the similar talent after a left hemispherectomy [removal of half of the brain] and a 3-year-old child after meningitis was later considered a  musical genius. Also included was a 9-year-old boy who was shot with a bullet to the left brain, leaving him with a right-sided hemiparesis, later developing special mechanical abilities. Finally, two painters were mentioned who had significant qualitative improvements after strokes involving the left occipital lobe and thalamus." 

An old newspaper article describes a very fast reader:

As impressive as the case above is, the article below reports a speed-reading ability ten times faster: a rate of 8000 words per minute. We read that the subject had a 100% comprehension of the material read at this blazing-fast speed, based on test questions he answered about the material. 

You can read the article here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn93065779/1954-07-29/ed-1/seq-8/

The paper here documents an extraordinary "page at a glance" reading ability in two "super reader" subjects, an ability that may be related to photographic memory. We read this:

"In the test situation, the 15-year-old girl read a 6,000 word essay from Brown's 'Efficient Reading' at a rate of 80,000 words per minute with 100 percent comprehension. The 12-year-old girl attained a rate of 54,825 words per minute with 90 percent comprehension on a more difficult essay."

In the paper here we read this: "Gifted rapid readers (who can maintain 70 per cent or above comprehension at rates above 20,000 w.p.m. [words per minute] on Browns workbook Efficient Reading ) appear in her classes at a rate of 1 out of 100 or 1 per cent of the trained population."  Later we read this conclusion after tests were done: "The three subjects in this study did achieve at least the above rates of 20,000 w.p.m. with 70 per cent or better comprehension on an article from Brown’s Efficient Reading before impartial reading experts."

The newspaper article here notes that a 1990 version of the Guinness Book of World Records recorded that Howard Berg could read at 25,000 words per minute. 

In the paper here, we read this:

 "Some hyperlexic children can read anything placed before them, even though they may never have heard or seen those words before,

nor do they understand them. They rarely mispronounce even the most difficult words."

An old newspaper article refers to the phenomenal reading ability of William Gladstone: 

"Perhaps the fastest reader the world ever knew was Gladstone. He could read and digest a novel of 50,000 words, a scientific work as large or larger, a political treatise or a history by merely glancing at the leaves as he turned them over. His eye and mind seemed to photograph with the rapidity of an instantaneous camera."

A 1972 newspaper article tells us this:

"Glen Pesely may be the world's fastest reader. The 18-year-old California boy can read 27,000 words per minute with nearly 100 per cent comprehension."

The 1972 newspaper article below gives us more details on this Glen Peseley, saying he could read up to 27,000 words per minute:

You can read the story here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SCS19721001.1.1&srpos=27&e=-------en--20--21--txt-txIN-%22fastest+reader%22-------

A 1969 newspaper article tells us this: "Jeanne Crandell, age 11, sixth grade, probably is the fastest reader in the world, reading as many as 70,000 words a minute." 

Reading some papers on Google Scholar, after searching for "hyperlexia," it seems that there exists a small number of super swift readers, often autistic, who have a stunning ability to read with astonishing speed, one that does not seem to the result of practice using speed reading techniques. 

The ability of humans to read at any fast rate is something beyond any explanation of neuroscientists or evolutionary biologists, who are also unable to explain the origin of language. We can imagine no "survival of the fittest" scenario that would explain the origin of language. All fast reading involves symbol recognition occurring at a blazing speed. Neuroscientists have no credible tale to tell of how any type of recognition could occur by means of the brain. Humans manufacture things such as books and computers that allow a fast recall of information. From such activity, we know the type of things that make possible fast recall: things such as addressing, indexing and sorting. The human brain has no such things. The brain has no addresses and nothing corresponding to indexes; nothing in a brain is sorted; and the brain has no indexes. The brain has many severe slowing factors which should make impossible very fast reading if such reading were to happen purely by brain activity. Such factors are discussed in my post here.  

The severe slowing factors include relatively slow dendrites, and synapses which each require a synaptic delay to transmit a signal. Because there are very many synapses for every neuron (as many as 1000), the cumulative delay caused by synaptic delays should utterly rule out phenomena such as very fast reading, if such phenomena occur by brain activity. Then there's the fact that only about half of the axons in the cortex of the brain are the faster myelinated type of axon (as discussed in the scientific paper here). The other half of the axons are very much slower unmyelinated axons, which have a transmission speed 10 to 100 times slower than myelinated axons. The diagram below schematically depicts the "speed bumps" in the brain.  Such "speed bumps" vastly outnumber the fastest parts (myelinated axons).  The result is that brains must be too slow to explain phenomena such as very fast reading with good understanding of what is read. 

An ability to read fast is something we should never expect to occur in any naturally arising organism.  An ability to read fast is something we should expect to arise in a species only if some higher power or higher agency wanted for a species to develop a civilization like humans have, one with things like cities, architecture, literature and art. 

In the diagram below we see four colored areas. At the center is the simplest phenomenon of consciousness, merely being awake and aware of something. The yellow area represents some of the commonly known mental phenomena that are more than mere consciousness. The orange area represents little-known powers of the human mind (or types of human experiences) that are not disputed by professors. The green area represents paranormal abilities of the human mind or types of paranormal human experiences that are disputed by professors, even though the evidence for such abilities and experiences is very good. The professors who dispute the reality of such abilities and experiences are typically those who have never bothered to seriously study the evidence for such abilities and experiences.  Almost none of the items mentioned in the diagram can be credibly explained as being caused by the brain. You might call the phenomena mentioned in the green part of the diagram "icing on the cake" for the person arguing that the brain cannot explain the human mind. The phenomena mentioned in the green part of the diagram strengthen the case against thinking that your brain is the source of your mind and the storage place of memories. But that case can be adequately made without even appealing to such disputed phenomena. 

Some of the items mentioned in the green part of the diagram are discussed in my posts and free online books here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here (some of which may require pressing Older Posts at the bottom right of the page to fully explore the relevant evidence). 

The diagram helps show the stupidity of the approach taken by many of today's thinkers, an approach in which the thinker tries to make his explanation task a million times easier by the silly trick of describing a mere "problem of consciousness" that needs to be solved.   The human mind and its capabilities and experiences is a reality a million times more than mere "consciousness."  It is an absurd problem misstatement to describe the problem of explaining human minds as a mere problem of explaining consciousness.  The person who makes that mistake is committing a blunder as bad as the person who tries to reduce the problem of explaining the arising of human bodies to a mere "problem of solidity origination." 

Postscript: In the paper here we read of some more interesting cases of acquired savant syndrome:

"In his book Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks (2009), records the case of Tony Cicoria, a surgeon who was struck by lightning in 1994. He had no prior interest in classical music, bur rapidly became an obsessive and skilled pianist following his recovery. A comparable striking case of acquired mathematical ability is the case of Jason Padgett, who became a talented mathematician after being struck on the head with an iron bar in 2002 (Padgett & Seaberg 2014). According to his narrative, following the attack Mr. Padgett first experienced symptoms of OCD and PTSD, and then began to develop visualisation of mathematical theories he was unable to name."

She Has Photographic Memory and Severe Unmanageable Epilepsy

The normal facts of human memory performance are sufficient to discredit claims that memory formation and memory recall are brain activities. There is not a neuroscientist who can credibly explain how a brain can store a detailed memory.  Nothing known to neuroscientists can explain how learned information or experiences could be translated into brain states or synapse states. Neuroscientists claim that memories are stored in synapses, but we know that the proteins in synapses have average lifetimes of only a few weeks, 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans can remember things (more than 50 years).  We know the kind of things  (in products that humans manufacture) that make possible an instant retrieval of stored information: things such as sorting, addressing, indexing, and read/write heads.  The human brain has no such things.  Humans such as actors playing the role of Hamlet can recall large bodies of text with 100% accuracy, but such recall should be impossible using a brain in which each chemical synapses only transmits a signal with 50% accuracy or less.  Brains are too slow, too noisy and too unstable to be the source of human memory recall which can occur at blazing fast speeds with 100% accuracy. 

I discuss many cases of exceptional human memory in my posts here and here, cases of people with memory far beyond that of the average person. Every additional piece of evidence establishing extraordinary human memory abilities is an additional nail in the coffin of the doctrine that brains store memories. Given all the reasons for thinking the brain is too slow, noisy and unstable to account for human memory performance which can be very fast and very accurate, the credibility of the claim that brains store memories is inversely proportional to the highest observed speed, accuracy and depth of human memory performance. 

Therefore we should note well a case reported last year of a young woman with a very sick brain but memory so accurate it can be justly called photographic or near-photographic. The case is reported in the paper "The Possibility of Eidetic Memory in a Patient Report of Epileptogenic Zone in Right Temporo-Parietal-Occipital Cortex," authored by Brent M. Berry, Laura R. Miller, Meaghan Berns and  Michal Kucewicz.  Neuroscientists seem to like to make it as hard as possible for people to find out about cases of extraordinary human memory; and so they like to use the term "eidetic" (a word few people understand) rather than use easily-understandable terms such as "photographic" or "superhuman-seeming."  I will use the more easily-intelligible term "photographic memory" for this case, which, as we will see, is memory performance so good it is like having a photograph of 300 word pairs in your "mind's eye."

We read in the paper about a young woman once plagued by seizures:

"The patient did have a history of a fall from a bicycle at age 11 with a head injury without loss of consciousness but had about ten minutes of amnesia. The patient also had a history of depression, anxiety (for which patient was treated with citalopram and sertraline due to minimal interaction with anti-seizure medications), and bulimia, as well as osteoporosis. The patient began having events at age 6. These involved staring and inability to respond for 15 to 20 s, although she thought that she did not entirely lose awareness. These occurred about five to six times per day. She had an MRI head scan which was reportedly normal, but an EEG was reportedly abnormal. Based on an abnormal EEG and the description of her events, she was started on carbamazepine, and she stopped having these events which were diagnosed by a primary care physician to be focal seizures with impaired awareness."

We read that the seizure medicine had some limited success, although eventually the seizures returned.  We read, "At age 15, the patient had recurrent seizures with staring, sometimes with inability to respond and other times with preserved responsiveness."  Over the next eight years doctors switched her seizure medicine a few times, but the woman "continued to have events,"  We read that "At age 23, her seizures of the same type (staring with or without loss of awareness and with or without epigastric sensation lasting 10–60 s) started occurring much more frequently (up to every day or multiple per day)."  Seizures are like electrical storms in the brain. We read that around this age the young woman "continued to have seizures from a few times per week up to a few times per day."

As part of being thoroughly evaluated at age 24, the young woman had a variety of cognitive tests. The paper tells us that at age 19 the woman had her verbal IQ measured as 162, which is way, way higher than the average of 100.  We are told that the patient achieved superhuman-seeming performance on a memory test:

" This research protocol instead of using short word lists used 300 paired associates. Interestingly, the patient’s recall was at 99% (298 out of 300). The task itself involved being asked to study a list of word pairs and then were later cued with one word from each pair, selected at random. The patient was then instructed to vocalize the partner of each cue word."

You may realize how impressive this is by considering the result below involving 28 subjects doing a similar test:

"Twenty-eight participants with intracranial electrodes for seizure monitoring participated in a verbal paired-associates task (Fig.1A,B). Participants studied 216... word pairs and successfully recalled 34.8...words with a mean response time of 1908...ms."

Recalling 298 out of 300 words (99%) in a word-pair recall test is obviously memory performance very radically higher than recalling a mere 34 words out of 216 (which is merely 16%). 

We read this discussion of the most extraordinary memory performance by this female subject under a variety of tests:

"What was more interesting was that the patient was able to recite the paired words without the cue prompts (this was true for the vast majority of word pairs which the patient was able to recall with prompt). This was not a temporary or short-term memory phenomenon, as the patient was tested with similar length lists across the next 3 days and 7 days, obtaining results no less than 97% (Table 1, Scheme 2). The lists were randomly generated for each session using words from the same pool as the previous lists so that the memorization of default lists was not an issue. Extended testing beyond any of her neuropsychological clinical testing included PAL testing sessions four times (each made up of 12 word pairs encoded and then given a chance for retrieval repeated 25 times in what amounts to approximately a 45 min session). So, in total, the patient had four assessments of 300 word pairs each for 1200 word pairs on a single day. Researchers, after noticing remarkable performance, went off protocol and went beyond immediate short-term assessment to two more sessions of longer-term memory, asking the patient to simply write out the word pairs that she could remember from the immediate PAL session #1 (the first 300 word pairs). The patient was tested in this fashion 24 h later and then 168 h later. She was able to write out greater than 95% of the words in each session (see Table 1, Scheme 2). Given that this occurred inside the context of acute stress (surgery planning), the patient was also re-tested in a very similar fashion several months later after equilibration to her neurostimulator and had similar results (achieving greater than 97% on immediate assessment of massive word pair sets and greater than 95% on longer-term assessments involving writing out 300 words from one of the sessions on day 0)."

The paper gives us this chart of near-perfect performance in several types of memory tests:

The patient had her brain scanned during some of these tasks. Contrary to the neuroscience dogma that the left brain is more actively involved in language use, the brain scan showed that "No appreciable left cerebral language-related activation was seen with three of the four tasks."

Apparently the doctors were never able to get the young woman's seizures under control, because the abstract refers to her as someone with "medically refractory epilepsy."  That means epilepsy when you have seizures doctors cannot stop. A case such as this helps to discredit the dogma that the brain is the cause of human memory. If this dogma were true, there is only one  thing we should expect to occur in a patient with a very sick brain plagued by the "electrical storms" of seizures, and that is below normal or greatly inferior memory performance, not vastly superior memory performance. 

A story as interesting as this should have been the lead item on one day's Science News.  For many years I have studied the daily "Science News" feeds every day, and I never heard a word about this case, which I only discovered through a Google Scholar search using the phrase "eidetic memory." It seems that when scientists do studies that they claim support their dogmas, we hear all about such stories in our daily Science News feeds and in science magazines such as Quanta. But when scientists produce evidence that defies the prevailing dogmas of scientists, then we are unlikely to hear about such a study.

When neuroscientists want you to remember a case, they give some type of nickname or tag that allows a case name to be conveniently discussed.  So, for example,  if neuroscientists want you to remember a patient with initials of BT, they may refer repeatedly in their paper to "patient BT." But in this paper I have quoted, we have no identification that allows us to conveniently refer to the astonishing subject.  Since the main paper authors are from Minneapolis, Minnesota (in the United States),  we may presume the patient lives in Minnesota.  For lack of a letter phrase to describe this woman, let's call this woman the Minnesota Marvel.  Like the case of Mollie Fancher and the case of the French civil servant with almost no brain and other cases discussed here, the case of this Minnesota Marvel should be studied by  every neuroscientist. 

Wishing to portray the human mind as having powers that are only weak, some materialists deny the reality of photographic memory (also called eidetic memory), despite a wealth of evidence that it exists. 

The paper here documents an extraordinary "page at a glance" reading ability in two "super reader" subjects, an ability that may be related to photographic memory. We read this:

"In the test situation, the 15-year-old girl read a 6,000 word essay from Brown's 'Efficient Reading' at a rate of 80,000 words per minute with 100 percent comprehension. The 12-year-old girl attained a rate of 54,825 words per minute with 90 percent comprehension on a more difficult essay."

In the paper here we read this: "Gifted rapid readers (who can maintain 70 per cent or above comprehension at rates above 20,000 w.p.m. [words per minute] on Browns workbook Efficient Reading ) appear in her classes at a rate of 1 out of 100 or 1 per cent of the trained population."  Later we read this conclusion after tests were done: "The three subjects in this study did achieve at least the above rates of 20,000 w.p.m. with 70 per cent or better comprehension on an article from Brown’s Efficient Reading before impartial reading experts."

Page 158 of the document here quotes a 19th century newspaper report told of a young girl (Ethel Carroll) with such exceptional memory for speech and music that it was like photographic memory : 

"The first time that the child showed her phenomenal gift was at the age of eleven months. At that time she was taken to see one of Hoyt's plays at the Macdonough Theatre. Upon returning to her home she surprised every one by repeating, word for word, one of the popular songs. From that time until now little Ethel has been a regular playgoer. Now, at the age of four, her memory has developed so remarkably that it is a common thing for her after seeing a new play to sing, without a mistake or the least sign of hesitation, song after song that she had never heard before. She can also repeat the lines of the play with wonderful correctness. The child has a retentive memory for names and dates. In spite of the fact that large numbers of people see her daily, drawn by curiosity, she never forgets the name of any one who is introduced to her, and can tell even the exact day when she first met them, though it may be months after. Recently her wonderful memory was put to a severe test at a concert recital in Oakland. After the performance she was asked if she remembered a certain recitation on the programme, remarkable alike for its length and peculiar phrasing. She had never heard it before, but with a confident smile and a certain enchanting carelessness of manner she recited the entire piece without a break."