Bionic reading:
317 WPM
Literata:
317 WPM
You read 0% faster with Bionic Reading
I guess I’m a pretty consistent slow reader.
An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
61–70 of 100 posts
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#62I get the opposite effect. Instead of reading each word, I start reading the parts of the word which is not normally how I read. It's very jarring.
Same. I found it impossible to concentrate. Similar disrupting effect as gifs (visual noise) next to the text or similar.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#63Earlier 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…
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 w…
I'm like you in both respects, but I also read as fast as the parent commenter. My operating theory had been that, since nobody had taught me to read one word at a time and subvocalize them, I just developed a different means of reading than most people, reading several lines at a time rather than individual words.
The jury is out as far as whether I'm also autistic, though. I have a great many traits in common with people who are, but I've also found a surprising amount of success reducing my more frustrating symptoms by a combination of working through early childhood trauma (which has helped my nervous system stop overreacting to stimuli) and extremely strict regulation of my diet (I have only eaten 10 foods, prepared in two ways, in the last year and a half) to reduce gut leakage and brain inflammation. (The diet is not expected to be this severe forever. Foods are reintroduced in stages. And it includes slow-cooked meat on bones and organ meats, so it's not as dire/risky a nutritional thing as it probably sounds.)
Because I had no language delay as a child and Asperger's was not a separate diagnosis until I was well into elementary school (and they certainly weren't looking for it in girls), I was never tested or diagnosed as a child. I also haven't identified enough advantages to pursuing a diagnosis as an adult to choose to pursue it now. But if healing my nervous system and my gut eliminates my symptoms (eventually), I'm inclined to think that would indicate I didn't have autism in the first place, just a cluster of overlapping symptoms.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#64Another sort of physically interesting thing that might unexpectedly help some people:
read with the opendyslexic font.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#65Linked 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.
15% faster with Literata (381 WPM with BR vs 442 WPM with Literata). Not sure if that's accurate since I'm a bit impatient at the BR part.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#66respect author do himself experiment! he even calculated p-value for it, also result did not recommended his method, but he let me trust he in future.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#67Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#68Faster with Bionic by 6%. Less of a difference than I expected although it does feel easier for some reason.
I have thought about using Bionic or Dyslexic fonts but I'm worried that it'd cause a change over time that makes it even harder to read plain format text.
My reading speed overall is slow compared to others. I notice my reading speed is only fast and accurate when I'm extremely interested in a topic.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#69I 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…
The evidence regarding comprehension using RSVP is similar to what TFA mentioned with Bionic, which was that comprehension drops as speed goes up.
The last company that tried to popularize this was Spritz, and I believe they are now owned/operated by their erstwhile VC. It probably didn't help that the proprietary bits they added were not compelling, so other companies just implemented vanilla versions and therefore didn't have to pay them anything.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#70In my experience, more people need to work on reading comprehension than reading speed. Comprehension is what actually matters, and is what seems to be in short supply. If Bionic Reading promised increased reading speed with no loss of comprehension, and provided it, all it would mean is that people would misunderstand things at a faster rate.
I’ve been thinking of that a lot as well. What’s the point of being able to read fast if you miss the fine details? What’s the point if you read so fast that you just sort of forget everything?
One of the many issues I have with contemporary literate culture, another being those who insist on reading a large volume of books, on being “well read”, rather than focusing on quality.