Reace Cloete was 19 years old and a student taking a gap year when he first attended the Shilin Speed Reading course. He attended the 3 week course twice over the period of a few months in mid- 2019.
Reace demonstrated one of the highest memory and recall abilities I had personally seen from the students I had worked with up until that time. He was able to perceive and read a large volume of text and not only to be able to understand the text with full comprehension, but also to be able to recite and recall the story of the text that he read with full detail and even being able to name the characters in the books he read.
On his first completion of the course Reace increased his reading speed from an initial 200 words per minute to over 4000 words per minute with full comprehension and recall.
He then repeated the course about a month later and increased his reading speed even further. In these videos see him performing his reading test and then providing a comprehension and recall demonstration from the story of the book he read at over 14000 words per minute.
Watching the video you may think he is just glancing at the pages and not actually reading, but in this video watch how he reads, “Americanah” – by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, at over 14000 words per minute and then proceeds to give full a comprehension and recall of the book that he had never read before.
It may sound like he spent many hours reading and studying the book, but Reace spent no longer than 5 minutes with the text. He could recall and recite the plot, characters, relationships, events and even the names of the characters in the book. Truly one of the most inspiring minds we’ve had the honour to work with.