778 WPM with Bionic, 672 without. Bionic appears to have increased my speed by 15% but it's also possible that I was just paying more attention to the articles implementing the technique. It's unfortunate that the comprehension scores aren't given though (unless I'm missing something?)
An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
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Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#42No post body was provided.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#43Linked at the end of the article is the short (15 minutes maybe) self-test: https://speed.readwise.io/ . Curious what results people here got. I got 23% faster with BR but I couldn't tell if I was just trying harder.
I was 15% faster with Bionic reading, but I noticed that my comprehension suffered somewhat. I still got all the review questions right, but I sometimes had to re-read sentences or phrases and didn't have that problem as much with the normal text.
My assumption is that I'm able to scan the words better with BR, but my eye gets pulled along too fast and I'm reading without comprehending.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#44778 WPM with Bionic, 672 without. Bionic appears to have increased my speed by 15% but it's also possible that I was just paying more attention to the articles implementing the technique. It's unfortunate that the comprehension scores aren't given though (unless I'm missing something?)
sorry about that. that was an oversight on our part, but we're collecting the comprehension scores in the dataset and will include in our results hopefully sometime next week.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Personal anecdote. When I try to read fast, I notice fixation points as my eyes skip across the text. But it will be whole chunks of words. And anything that tries to draw my attention to one letter as opposed to another, will slow me down. Note that my natural reading speed is ~950 wpm, so I tend to ignore these fads. I read fast enough already. The main barrier to reading faster is that it gets exhausting having my…
Note that my natural reading speed is ~950 wpm, so I tend to ignore these fads. Were you just born with 4-5x the average reading speed? Or did you employ some other 'fads'? This seems pretty astonishing. Particularly in light of the following sentence on the "Speed Reading" entry on Wikipedia: > Cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene says that claims of reading up to 1,000 words per minute "must be viewed with sk…
I simply read a lot of science fiction/fantasy as a kid, and it happened naturally. I would view claims that a random person could be taught to read at my speed with skepticism. But I've met other people who read as fast as I do.
As a kid I thought I was simply a slightly fast reader until I happened to take a copy of https://www.amazon.com/Clan-Cave-Bear-Jean-Auel/dp/060961097... to a bath. I started, got caught up with the story, finished it, and finished my bath. My mother was so astounded that she quizzed me to verify I had actually read the book, and then estimated how what my reading speed had to be.
The weirdest thing is that my brain really does play catchup. I told my mother to test me by picking random spots and reading a few sentences. I was then able to tell her what was going on, and when handed the book could find the passage. That I was able to do. But the book was still jumbled up in my brain - I couldn't have given a plot summary for a day or so.
I strongly suspect that this kind of "brain pipelining" with large amounts of buffering is critical for really fast reading. Get every slow step out of the loop, only do what's fast. Let the slow bits of your brain catch up.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#46400ish wpm with normal text, 0wpm with "Bionic Reading" wibbly wobbly fonts. It just doesn't look like text.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#47https://speed.readwise.io Your results Typeface Bionic Reading Literata Article 1 591 WPM 352 WPM Article 2 657 WPM 457 WPM Average Speed 624 WPM 405 WPM You read 43% faster with Bionic Reading Guess gotta give this a try for storybooks... maybe some enterprising and bored HN nerd can make a Calibre plugin that converts regular epubs to bionic reading enabled epub files ---- but the truth is, for the aforementioned s…
This technique will work for most text, but can be deliberately hacked in a bad way. I discovered this about 20 years ago from a cleverly written attack post on Perlmonks. Every paragraph started with a positive sentence whose tone slid into negative by the end of the paragraph. And then to positive for the next paragraph.
I was horrified at how an attack piece had so many positive votes, and asked people why they were voting for it. It turns out that a lot (probably most) had just skimmed it, felt good, voted for it, and moved on. They literally hadn't seen the nasty things said about a variety of people.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#48I find it really difficult and annoying -- and thereby slow -- to read with these "fixation" points as that's just not how I feel eyes work... I want my eyes to scan across the text rather than ratcheting from one word to the next word, which is both slow and exhausting. The words and "fixation" is thereby just a massive distraction. Hell: if I really really need to read quickly I try to do this thing where I scan my…
> I want my eyes to scan across the text rather than ratcheting from one word to the next word, which is both slow and exhausting. An interesting experiment is to try reading a word at a time, but without moving the eyes. Here's [1] a command line program that takes text on standard input and displays it one word at a time in a fixed position on the screen, holding each word for N milliseconds (3N milliseconds if the…
I saw that demonstrated on Hacker News some years ago, in a web form.
It. Was. Horrible. For. Me.
My eyes are used to processing much bigger chunks than a single word, and know how to move to the chunk size that they used. Therefore I topped out at a fraction of my usual reading speed.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#49[deleted]
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#50It's not a perfect test, but as a statistician, my preliminary takeaway from this is that bionic reading doesn't work.
results are generally in the ballpark of insignificant, and there seems to be a very weak inverse relationship between reading speed and comprehension.
which is to say, on preliminary it looks like most "speed reading" claims (I.e. quackery).