An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
blog.readwise.io
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
#2A few pages down is the answer to what (hopefully) many are wondering:
"Here's how we've designed the pilot study:
...
4. After finishing each document, we asked three multiple choice questions to control for and confirm comprehension."
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#3This is really cool
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#4nice! Surprised to see I ended up reading faster without bionic reading
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#5It's cool to see that someone is trying to test these claims. Not long ago, the BR site was shared on my work Slack and there were some that immediately argued "Yup, I can read faster using this and comprehend everything", which is quite a bold claim to make after reading a paragraph. Personally, having bolded letters sprinkled across my screen feels noisy and distracting, so it's a bit hard to get past that mental block.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#6Linked 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.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#7i could concentrate myself better on the regular text
with Bionic Reading i had to re-read some sentences until i've processed them correctly
note that i'm not a native speaker
personal result:
Bionic Reading: 234 WPM
Literata: 262 WPM
"You read 11% faster with Literata"
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#8[deleted]
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#9>you should notice a funny pattern: almost every person's fastest font was the font they received on the first article.
Is it possible that people "calibrate" their brains towards a specific reading style, and that first style induces the calibration? Similar to how you can calibrate to quickly pick out a picture of a specific object, from a gallery of pictures, after you've prepared yourself to see that picture.
Re: An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster
#10I 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 eyes diagonally downwards across the text to let my brain sort out entire lines of words at once... the last thing I want is to go single word by single word.