Mindless Reading—What is it?
Ben Feller, Associated Press

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated the ill effects of mindless reading—a phenomenon in which people take in sentence after sentence without really paying attention.

Ever read the same paragraph three times/ or get to the end of a page and realize you don't know what you just read? That's mindless reading. It is the literary equivalent of driving for miles without remembering how you got there—something so common many people don't even notice it.

In a new study of college students, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of British Columbia established a way to study mindless reading in a lab. Their findings showed that daydreaming has its costs.

The readers who zoned out most tended to do the worst on tests of reading comprehension—a significant, if not surprising result. The study also suggested that zoning out caused the poor test results, as opposed to other possible factors, such as the complexity of the text or the task. The researchers hope their work inspires more research into why zoning out happens, and what can be done to stop it. For now, they want the problem to be taken seriously.

“When you talk about this work at conferences, it does lend itself to a lot of jokes,” acknowledges University of Pittsburgh professor Erik Reichie, co-leader of the study.

“It's so ubiquitous. Everybody does it,” he said. “I think that's one of the main reasons it's overlooked. And there's been a view that it is tough to study experimentally. Hopefully, now, there will be more interest in the topic.”

The federal government is showing some.

Reichle and fellow psychology professor Jonathan Schooler did the study on a $691,000 grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Education Department. It is one of 178 federally backed projects aimed at giving schools a scientific basis for sound policies.

Over three experiments, students used computers to read the first five chapters of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace . (Reichle wanted some boring reading—better for zoning out.) Reichle said the dry text itself did not skew the results toward mindless wondering. After all, the students were on alert, unlike the typical reader. Participants were told to monitor and report instances of zoning out as they read text on a computer. Half of them got computer reminders, too: “Were you zoning out?”

Despite all that, many still reported zoning out at a regular pace.

“That's the amazing thing,” Reichle said. “It shows how often this can happen even under conditions that are designed to keep it from happening.”

The students said as their eyes scanned the words, their minds often were elsewhere.

The RapidRead™course will almost totally eliminate the problem of zoning out by showing how to concentrate on not just the words, but also the complete thoughts of the author. The average student doubles and even triples his/her reading rate, and by so doing increases comprehension by 15-20%.