How many words per minute can you read? Find out now

Put down Wordle. New brain-exercise-for-the-day just dropped. 

“Can you read 900 words per minute?” a viral post that has been doing the rounds on X, challenges. “Try it.”

If you made it to 600 words per minute, that’s more than twice the speed of the average reader. If you made it to 900, congratulations—according to some back-of-the-napkin math, that makes you 278% faster than the national average (which is 238 words per minute). 

By that same logic, it could take you around 40 seconds to read this 600ish word article. But should it?

As one X user pointed out, “this is like brainrot for reading.” Or as Jane Ollis, medical biochemist and founder at AI-powered neurotech company Sona, told Fast Company, “It’s the cognitive equivalent of watching Netflix on fast-forward.”

The challenge uses a technique called rapid sequential visual presentation, or RSVP. The effect is bizarre, almost meditative, as your eyes passively absorb huge quantities of words at a rapid-fire pace. “Eye movements shorten, the inner voice gets kicked out of the room, and the brain starts guessing what comes next,” explains Ollis. 

There’s another factor to consider when we read really fast. “It’s neural autocomplete,” says Ollis. “Very efficient. Not always accurate.”

Research backs this up. Getting rid of sub-vocalizations—or “hearing” words in your mind—may increase “reading” speed, but has been shown to reduce comprehension of what is being read. And doing away with those extra eye movements, by placing words one on top of another rather than along a sentence (like in the X post), has also been found to have a similar effect on comprehension. 

“You know roughly what happened, but you wouldn’t bet your reputation on the details. And neuroscience tells us that the good stuff—insight, memory, and learning—happens when the brain slows down enough to actually chew the information,” explains Ollis. “When people try to read at extreme speed, the brain doesn’t suddenly get smarter. It gets lazier in a clever way.”

For the deluge of text we consume on a daily basis (more than at any other time in history) this skill isn’t unhelpful. From checking emails to scanning work documents to perusing social feeds, these are all effective use-cases for this kind of speed reading approach. (It’s also a pretty fun challenge, to be honest.)

But the best way to read faster, without reducing comprehension, is simply to read more. 

“In a world obsessed with speed,” Ollis says, “attention might be the most rebellious skill we have.”