Schulte Tables - Speed Reading

Train your peripheral vision with Schulte Tables: How to do it?

Imagine your vision as a movie screen. While focusing on what you see directly, many details are happening around the central focus. These details will allow you to know what will happen next and the context of the scene you're watching. This is peripheral vision.

With good peripheral vision, you can have a field of view of almost 180º, increase your reading speed, and improve your memory. However, peripheral vision needs to be trained to reach its maximum potential, and Schulte Tables are the best tool for this purpose.

What are Schulte Tables?

Schulte Tables are matrices of random numbers represented in table form, as their name suggests. They are very popular exercises for training your attention span, memory, and speed reading abilities.

There are many versions of these tables, although the most common ones are those with 5 columns and 5 rows. Within the cells will be random numbers from 1 to 25, and your mission will be to find all numbers in ascending or descending order according to their configuration.

Depending on the difficulty level, you can practice with 6x6 tables or letters instead of numbers.

How to solve a Schulte Table correctly?

Consider two elements for this purpose: your eye speed and doing the exercise correctly. As you train, you can reach the final goal, which is to order all numbers with a single glance, reducing the number of eye movements you'll make.

You must fix your gaze on the central cell of the table you've chosen. From there, expand your visual field and analyze the entire grid. If you don't have experience with these, it might be difficult at first, but with practice, everything is possible. The more you practice, the less time it will take to complete the table.

Another tip is to maintain the correct distance from the table. Your eyes should be at an optimal distance for the exercise. A separation between 40 and 50 centimeters is recommended. Don't repeat an exercise more than 10 times in a single session.

Skills you'll develop using Schulte Tables

Schulte Tables have not only a notable effect but also a quick impact on your brain. From individuals to collectively, their power has been demonstrated, and although it's an exercise with such capacity, it can also be interpreted as a mental skill game.

By solving these tables you can:

Develop your peripheral vision: Good peripheral vision develops your reading ability by anticipating words and characters on text pages. You can increase the number of words you cover in each fixation. Peripheral vision can even help you when driving or practicing sports.

Improve your perception of parallelism: When practicing with one of these tables, you'll learn to evaluate information you receive globally. You'll analyze cells in groups within the exercise, but later this will guide you to receive information non-consecutively in your life in general. Your capacity for analysis and interpretation can improve greatly with it.

Increase your stress resistance: Train in noisy environments with Schulte Tables to increase your concentration power and stress resistance. You can use music or simply go to a place with distracting sounds to train. Over time, your work capacity will increase because you won't be distracted or disturbed by external distractions.

Decrease time to search for information: Schulte Tables will teach you to cover large amounts of text quickly. Looking at a single point, and with the development of your peripheral vision, you'll be able to process information at an excellent speed.