TEENAGER Eugenia Alexeyenko can read every word in The National Enquirer in about the time it takes most people to read this sentence a mere five seconds!
And the incredible 17-year-old reads so fast that she could breeze through a massive 1,200-page novel like "War and Peace" in just 10 minutes.
"This girl can read infinitely faster than her fingers can flick the pages -and if she didn't have to slow down by doing this, she would read at the rate of 416,250 words a minute," said Dr Mara Usbekov, a senior researcher at the Moscow Academy of Science in the Soviet Union.
Scientists were sure Eugenia had never read the test material before because they got copies of political and literary magazines that appeared on the newsstands - after Eugenia was already isolated in a room at the testing centre.
While Eugenia was kept isolated, the examiners read the test material and took notes on its content. Then they put two pages of the material under her hot little eyes to calculate her speed.
The result: "She read 1,390 words in two-tenths of a second -the time it takes to blink her eyelids, " said Dr Usbekov.
Eugenia is able to read so fast because she has a photographic memory that's extremely well developed, said Dr Usbekov.
Said Eugenia: "I don't know what my secret is. The pages go into my mind and I recall the sense rather than the exact text."
"There's some sort of analysis going on in my brain which I can't
explain. But I feel as if I have a whole library in my head!"
