An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster

Your results Readwise logo Typeface Bionic Reading Literata Article 1 479 WPM 574 WPM Article 2 463 WPM 507 WPM Average Speed 471 WPM 541 WPM

You read 14% faster with Literata

Many of the comprehension questions could have been answered without reading the article. But some were quizzing irrelevant parts of the text. It's a hard balance to strike

But does it help you retain what you read? Speed workout comprehension is pointless.

I got this feeling as well and I did 50% better with the plain Literata. I wonder the bolding might speed up slower readers and slow down faster readers by encouraging a word-by-word pace. It would be interesting to see a scatter plot of Bionic vs Literata speed.

Tangential personal anecdote.

I am autistic and I have two unusual informational input traits.

I would consider myself a good reader. A sizeable chunk of my life has been dedicated to reading (and absorbing other forms of media). I can't read at a 950 wpm (that figure is immediately raising suspicions for me) but I'm still fairly fast.

The first weird thing:

I taught myself how to read and I've been reading since I was 3 years old. Apparently this freaked out my aunt when I was in her car reading street signs aloud. I still have memories of being far ahead of my peers in early childhood. School was unable to challenge me and this led to me having a lax study attitude and I became lazy. As an adult I'm still lazy, but I've been able to turn this into a strength as a programmer. (See Bill Gate's quote on "a lazy person").

For anyone else who has or knows someone who is experiencing this: HealthyGamerGG's video: "Why Gifted Kids Are Actually Special Needs" can give some great information to help understand this.

The second weird thing:

I regularly watch informational/tutorial/conference/etc... videos on youtube between 2-4 times their standard speed. I do this in the browser's console with the following command:

$('video').playbackRate = x;

Where x is a number. (e.g. 1, 3, 2.75, etc...)

After you've already typed it once, a simple press of the Up key will bring it back as if you had just typed it.

I've been told there are extensions that do this while avoiding the terminal, but this is already ingrained in my muscle memory. (F12 -> Up -> Delete -> type number -> Enter -> F12.)

Understanding sped-up talking is a skill I've built up over time. To other people around me who have tried to follow along it sounds like gibberish. I've heard of deaf developers who commonly develop this skill so that they're listening 600-800%+ standard speed but I don't think the upper range is possible on videos with different voices and accents using a wider vocabulary.