[saurik]

I 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.

[tzs]

> 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 there is punctuation) where N defaults to 250 but can be set on the command line.

At the default 250 msec per word I found it very easy to read the material I tested with (random extracts from a Project Gutenberg edition of"The Valley of Fear", by Arthur Conan Doyle). That works out to around 160-180 wpm. (Not the 240 wpm you would expect from 250 msec/word because of the delays for punctuation).

At 200 msec/word, it still feels like a very slow read. Rate was around 270 wpm.

150 msec/word gave around 320 wpm. Still not a problem keeping up.

120 msec/word pushed it up to around 380 wpm and it starts to get hard for me. If I don't quite catch a word and have to think a little to figure out what it was I can get distracted enough to miss more words unless some punctuation comes up soon to give me a little break.

100 msec/word, around 480 wpm, is still reasonably comprehensible but at that point requires a lot of focus and feels tiring even though my eyes don't have to move. Sometimes not moving can be as tiring as moving when you are trying to not move for a long time.

I would not want to read a lot this way, but there are some places I wish it were offered. Many music players for example if the title does not fit in the space available autoscroll it back and forth. It can be very hard to read it while it is scrolling. A word flash display might work better there.

[1] https://pastebin.com/70eYTDkk

[btilly]

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.

[gnicholas]

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.

[btilly]

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 brain constantly trying to catch up to my eyes.

[ziddoap]

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 skepticism"

[btilly]

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.

[dirkc]

Does that take any enjoyment out of reading for you? I tried speed reading for a brief stint, but then decided to stop. For me reading a good book is like savoring good food, I wouldn't want to chug it down.

[roelschroeven]

Not speaking for btilly here, strictly for myself: I think it depends on the kind of book, kind of writing, and personal expectations. When reading a novel, I'm mostly interested in the story and character development, and less in things like long descriptions of the environment (which Jean Auel does, a lot, though maybe not as much in the first one IIRC). I'm like the kid always asking "what's next" even before the narrator finishes his sentence.

So I like to read fast, and maybe there are some things I'm missing but I don't feel like that's a loss.

Mind you I'm not really speed reading (I think), I just read pretty fast. And skip uninteresting pieces of text (by skip I mean read some words or parts of sentences here and there, like the start and/or end of paragraphs, to know what the text is about so I know where to resume normal reading).

Now food is something else entirely :) I'm a pretty fast reader but a slow eater.

[btilly]

It depends on the book. Most sci-fi/fantasy I enjoy at speed. Anything where I want to find out what happens NEXT. But poetry and math I would want to read more slowly. I read more quickly than I think, and a full appreciation of the rhythm of language takes time.

What I do isn't what most people call speed reading, though. I don't skip any words, and can recognize and pull out exact phrases. I don't know how much text I could hold like that. When I was 19, a long book. But I think my capacity has gone down with age.

[spartanatreyu]

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.

[smeej]

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.

[roelschroeven]

950 wpm is impressive.

I did the test from the article, and got about 500 wpm with the standard font (about 400 wpm on the Bionic Reading thing). Even that speed is at the limit; I'm already skipping parts of the text that don't seem to contribute much (I could still correctly answer the reading comprehension quizzes at the end though).

I ignore all those fads too. This Bionic Reading font in particular feels completely backwards: it tries to make me read word by word which is needlessly slow.

[tveita]

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.

[joyeuse6701]

Yes, I think some of the popularity with Bionic reading is for ADHD users who I believe are slow readers in part because they have to go back and reread because they lose focus. I am one of them, and according to this, I am 15% faster with Bionic reading.