Speed Reading Intelligence: Double Your Reading Speed in 15 Minutes a Day

Donnell Burns is a learning efficiency researcher, corporate training consultant, and the founder of CogniRead, a professional development firm that designs cognitive skills programs for Fortune 500 organizations.

For over fifteen years, Burns has worked at the intersection of cognitive psychology, information design, and adult learning. His approach to speed reading is grounded not in gimmicks or pseudoscience but in the peer-reviewed literature on eye movement, visual perception, and memory consolidation. He has trained more than eight thousand professionals across industries including finance, healthcare, law, and technology—helping executives, analysts, attorneys, and software engineers process written information more efficiently without sacrificing comprehension.

Burns began his career as a high school English teacher, where he first noticed the dramatic variation in reading efficiency among otherwise capable students. This observation led him to pursue graduate study in cognitive science at Columbia University, where his research focused on the relationship between reading rate, working memory capacity, and text comprehension. His master's thesis—*Automaticity and the Fluent Reader: A Training Protocol for Adult Reading Efficiency*—remains one of the most-cited papers in the applied reading literature.

After completing his graduate work, Burns spent six years as a learning and development specialist at McKinsey & Company, where he designed and delivered training programs on information processing, analytical reading, and executive communication. It was during this period that he developed the fifteen-minutes-a-day protocol that forms the backbone of this book—a method refined through thousands of hours of one-on-one coaching with professionals who had no time to waste on ineffective training.

In 2019, Burns founded CogniRead to bring evidence-based reading training to a broader audience. The company's flagship program, the Speed Reading Accelerator, has been adopted by over forty companies and consistently delivers a verified doubling of reading speed among participants who complete the eight-week curriculum. CogniRead maintains ongoing research partnerships with university cognitive science departments to continuously refine its methods based on the latest findings in reading research.

Burns is a sought-after keynote speaker at industry conferences on productivity, learning and development, and information management. His talks combine practical technique with an accessible explanation of the underlying cognitive science, earning him consistent top-speaker ratings at events hosted by the Association for Talent Development, the Society for Human Resource Management, and the International Association of Business Communicators.

He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two children. When not training readers or writing about cognitive performance, Burns can be found hiking the Columbia River Gorge, working through his own reading list at a deliberately relaxed pace, and testing new practice techniques on willing family members before releasing them to the public. He maintains that every book is worth reading at least twice—once for speed, once for soul.