11 ms·

An experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you read faster

160 points by hoodwink 4y ago

WalterGR 4y ago
A 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."
cstanley2 4y ago
This is really cool
arlix 4y ago
nice! Surprised to see I ended up reading faster without bionic reading
mhzsh 4y ago
It'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.
kminehart 4y ago
Linked at the end of the article is the short (15 minutes maybe) self-test: https://speed.readwise.io/ 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.
- BrightOne 4y ago
  23% faster with BR as well. 528 vs 419 WPM. Made a point about feeling comfortable while reading.
- lkxijlewlf 4y ago
  I was a mere 2% faster. 404 vs 396 WPM. Edit: 2% faster with BR.
- hoodwink 4y ago
  we'll definitely make a follow up post once we've gathered enough data here! hopefully in a week or so :) (my results were 2% faster with BR)
  - ACow_Adonis 4y ago
    have you considered implementing a false control (i.e. putting in a badly implemented bionic reading version and serving that to a random number of people to see whether people also report speed increases with "bad bionic reading"?) i know a significant number of people here are probably already familiar with what bionic reading is, but still, could be an interesting control.
    - hoodwink 4y ago
      yeah i acknowledged that in the experiment design discussion > We recognize this is clearly not a gold standard, double-blind RCT. Researcher and participant alike knew what Bionic Reading claims to achieve. We simply did not have time to (1) develop a mock Bionic Reading placebo that, for example, might bold the middle of the word instead of the beginning and/or (2) find a set of test subjects who are blissfully offline and unaware of this viral sensation. That said, we controlled for what we could and we think we've already gathered some fairly compelling evidence.
- ianferrel 4y ago
  I got 15% faster with the non-BR font. I was trying to do the same amount on each.
- Izkata 4y ago
  I got 1% faster with Literata (385 vs 390). Bionic made my eyes stutter so much I just didn't like reading it either.
- gcheong 4y ago
  12% faster with Literata.
- brendoelfrendo 4y ago
  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.
- blep_ 4y ago
  I was 17% faster with Literata. I can't tell whether I was intentionally going faster because I had preconceived negative opinions about BR. It's a possibility.
- memorable 4y ago
  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.
- fourthark 4y ago
  18% faster with Literata
- bejd 4y ago
  Also 23% faster with BR but I enjoyed reading that way less. As with yourself, I suspect that maybe I put pressure on myself to read faster for the BR. As the article says, a better comparison may be to have a fake version of BR as the control.
ushakov 4y ago
i 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"
deleted 4y ago
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daenz 4y ago
>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.
- bhaney 4y ago
  I'm guessing that the very next sentence was the actual reason: >This is likely because the first article was less challenging to read
  - daenz 4y ago
    That doesn't account for why the font affinity carries over to the rest of the test, which is why they propose multiple theories, but aren't sure.
saurik 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
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- btilly 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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/060961097X/ref=asc_df_060961097X/ 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.
westcort 4y ago
Here are some bookmarklets I developed to cut out the extra formatting, bolding, and other content on websites that makes them difficult to read. I would appreciate any feedback or modifications for improvement. Literata font with a peach background color to optimize reading speed and no selective bolding: javascript:void function(){javascript:(function(){var a=Math.floor,b=document.querySelectorAll("p, title, a, ul"),c=[],e="",f="",g="",h=0,k=0,l="",m="",n=window.open("","_blank");for(var d in b){var i=b[d].textContent;i%26%26(c=c+"\n"+i)}for(f=c,e=f.replace(/\n/g," "),g=e.split(" "),h=0;h<g.length;h++)k=a(g[h].length/3)+1,l=""+g[h].substring(0,k)+""+g[h].substring(k,g[h].length)+" ","."==g[h].substring(g[h].length-1,g[h].length)%26%26(l+=" "),m+=l;n.document.write("<html>"+m+"</html>")})()}(); Selective bolding with a peach background for those who find a benefit: javascript:void function(){javascript:(function(){var a=Math.floor,b=document.querySelectorAll("p, title, a, ul"),c=[],e="",f="",g="",h=0,k=0,l="",m="",n=window.open("","_blank");for(var d in b){var i=b[d].textContent;i%26%26(c=c+"\n"+i)}for(f=c,e=f.replace(/\n/g," "),g=e.split(" "),h=0;h<g.length;h++)k=a(g[h].length/3)+1,l=""+g[h].substring(0,k)+""+g[h].substring(k,g[h].length)+" ","."==g[h].substring(g[h].length-1,g[h].length)%26%26(l+=" * "),m+=l;n.document.write("<html>"+m+"</html>")})()}();
- bruce343434 4y ago
 Probably a good idea to add `font-size: 0.5cm` in there or something.
- quasarj 4y ago
 Did you never find the Reader Mode button?
bruce343434 4y ago
I notice that I no longer spend energy actively scanning lines with bionic reading - my eyes snap automatically. I'm able to look at the text "from a distance" and the words just enter my mind, and I did get 31% faster reading from bionics according to this test.
- icoder 4y ago
 A whopping 0% here >< 272 vs 272 wpm, English is not my native language and I just ran a 5k, not sure if that has any relevance
lkxijlewlf 4y ago
I read once that when we read, our eyes bounce along the tops of the letters. A demonstration removed the lower parts of the letters, and interestingly, I was able to still read the words. I would like to see this same test but with a font that removed the lower half of the words in each sentence. Just for kicks and giggles...
Zababa 4y ago
421 wpm with bionic reading, 447 without, but I had the impression of being faster with bionic reading, something about reading being more smooth. I guess it's smoother but slower overall.
KerrAvon 4y ago
> When you click the button below, you'll begin reading the first of two Paul Graham essays, each approximately 5 minutes in length. My idea of hell. I'll wait for a better choice of source material.
karaterobot 4y ago
In 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.
- malshe 4y ago
  I agree 100%. I think the fundamental flaw in seeking methods to speed read is the inherent assumption that there is an equal tradeoff between higher speed and lower comprehension. Alas, bad comprehension is probably many times more harmful than lower reading speed. So the tradeoff is highly imbalanced due to the highly dissimilar importance weights attached to comprehension and speed.
- Bjorkbat 4y ago
  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.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    In defence of skimming books: Not everyone is enjoying reading the same way. Not even one person in different contexts. There are books where I'm going to be engaged completely. There are others I'll enjoy for main plot but will want to skip the fluff. I'm extreme cases I'll gloss over a whole paragraph as "whatever, I don't care about the scenery". Being able to skim quickly to the next interesting part is a good skill. But the comment made me think - can we even improve the comprehension, as in processing what we read? (not as in understanding the vocabulary/structure) I've never heard of ways to purposefully do that.
  - roelschroeven 4y ago
    For me an important part of reading fast is finding out which parts are interesting and which parts are not, and then focusing more on the interesting parts.
horsawlarway 4y ago
I don't understand. From their own metrics - speed went up by a lower percentage than comprehension dropped. This sounds like a terrible idea...
- bmacho 4y ago
  I don't think they are comparable..
TT-392 4y ago
I have dyslexia, and I can't scan read(if that is the right word), I have to basically read entire words. This stuff forces me to scan read, which means I just don't understand the text anymore.
ryzvonusef 4y ago
https://speed.readwise.io https://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 storybooks, often I just LOOK at a whole paragraph or even the whole page and just pick out the relevant word of two in a story. Unlike actual educational content, where the exact text matters, in fiction, after having developed a hobby to read for entertainment for so long and having gotten used to so many tropes, I just often just breeze through and look for the word that confirms which direction the author is taking that paragraph in, and often just glide over the paragraph and go to the next one. It's like learning how to drive, I guess. At some point you are not supposed to look at every thing, you just take the overall picture and just go. Not sure what is achieved by making every road sign and billboard flashing neon is supposed to achieve in such a scenario. Not all words are worthy of equal attention, most are meant to be glossed over. ____ but for actual educational purposes, the best test IMHO is to use it for the boring but important texts, like training manuals. See if it actually helps people learn and retain more import information about the new tool or procedure they are learning about.
- btilly 4y ago
  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.
  - ryzvonusef 4y ago
    That's why I specified story books instead of online articles, because with story books, you build a rapport with the author and you have kinda narrowed down the options they will take, on a meta level. But good point on hacking people's tendency to glide, I shall keep that in mind.
ironlake 4y ago
1% faster with bionic reading, but I was eating chips and dip so maybe I was just distracted by stuffing my face.
dwighttk 4y ago
Hit finished reading and got a blank page… Was there an ad or something?
- belkarx 4y ago
  There wasn't. What lists is your adblocker running? I got my results with standard uBlock.
  - dwighttk 4y ago
    Default list for 1Blocker
danamit 4y ago
10% faster with literata, altho with bionic i had 0 issues losing tracks of where I was or skipping lines but accident, which made me think i was reading faster, but apparently i was not.
kaba0 4y ago
I believe the screen is a huge factor in it as well that should be accounted for.
- hoodwink 4y ago
  we’re capturing desktop versus mobile :)
belkarx 4y ago
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?)
- hoodwink 4y ago
  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.
steve76 4y ago
Gordonjcp 4y ago
400ish wpm with normal text, 0wpm with "Bionic Reading" wibbly wobbly fonts. It just doesn't look like text.
deleted 4y ago
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ACow_Adonis 4y ago
It'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).
JaceLightning 4y ago
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
JaceLightning 4y ago
I 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.
- Tarsul 4y ago
  Same. I found it impossible to concentrate. Similar disrupting effect as gifs (visual noise) next to the text or similar.
demopathos 4y ago
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
Tagbert 4y ago
But does it help you retain what you read? Speed workout comprehension is pointless.
- lijogdfljk 4y ago
  I take it you didn't read the article? It answers that (ish)
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    Thanks. I was busy and have seen several naive articles promoting speed readying recently and assumed this was one more.
lom 4y ago
Bionic reading: 317 WPM Literata: 317 WPM You read 0% faster with Bionic Reading I guess I’m a pretty consistent slow reader.
- quasarj 4y ago
  Way faster than me, and at the top end of average, based on everything I can find online. I'm curious though, what the average is among "readers" lol.
  - desas 4y ago
    Bionic 633 wpm, literata 803. I do read quickly but I have read that essay before, so perhaps I only skimmed it. I wasn't certain on one of the comprehension questions.
m463 4y ago
Another sort of physically interesting thing that might unexpectedly help some people: read with the opendyslexic font.
popcube 4y ago
respect 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.
thevagrant 4y ago
Faster 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.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  I wouldn't be too concerned that using specialized fonts would become a dependency. I run BeeLine Reader, a similar tool that uses color gradients instead of bolding, and we've not heard this from our users much (though we did wonder about it when we were starting out). People do like specialized fonts and wish they had them on platforms where they're unavailable, but it's not like it becomes a crutch that you can't live without.
georgeburdell 4y ago
Interesting website. I never considered in my 30-something years of reading that I was a slow reader but apparently I am (<250 WPM). Most of my reading (outside of the internet) is scholarly articles for my job.
pratyushmittal 4y ago
I found Bionic 10% slower than Literata. But I also found I am a verrrry slow reader. My reading speed came to 147 wpm. Any recommendation to improve this?
- sj4nz 4y ago
  When I was in school reading coaches encouraged the awareness of subvocalization (where you mimic the text as if you were speaking it, but not aloud). If you find yourself doing that while reading, stop/suppress that.
nestorD 4y ago
If the authors of the article are reading this: I would also do a test to see if the variance of the two groups (bionic vs normal) is significantly different. I did not check it but bionic might be very beneficial to some and detrimental to others which would not be seen when looking at the mean (you should also plot the distributions, it pretty much always a good first reflex).
- hoodwink 4y ago
  for sure. due to this improved experiment design, we should now have the data to perform paired analyses rather than just looking at means. what test do you use to compare variances though?
  - nestorD 4y ago
    There are several options but the Levene test should be appropriate: https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/eda35a.htm https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/eda35a...
seydor 4y ago
Why do people want to read faster? You can also write tersely. Or not overload yourself with useless information
mmarq 4y ago
I’m not 100% sure it works for everybody, but it probably helps that English have shorter words where the stress tends to be on the first syllable, doesn’t have genders, always requires an explicit subject and has simple verb conjugations. Would it work with languages that have longer words and a case system?
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shever73 4y ago
19% faster with Bionic Reading. I'd like to try again with different source articles that are not already part of my field of expertise. I felt as if I could answer the comprehension questions without having read the articles.

160 points by hoodwink 4y ago

A 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."

cstanley2 4y ago

This is really cool

arlix 4y ago

nice! Surprised to see I ended up reading faster without bionic reading

mhzsh 4y ago

It'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.

kminehart 4y ago

Linked at the end of the article is the short (15 minutes maybe) self-test: https://speed.readwise.io/ 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.

BrightOne 4y ago
23% faster with BR as well. 528 vs 419 WPM. Made a point about feeling comfortable while reading.
lkxijlewlf 4y ago
I was a mere 2% faster. 404 vs 396 WPM. Edit: 2% faster with BR.
hoodwink 4y ago
we'll definitely make a follow up post once we've gathered enough data here! hopefully in a week or so :) (my results were 2% faster with BR)
- ACow_Adonis 4y ago
  have you considered implementing a false control (i.e. putting in a badly implemented bionic reading version and serving that to a random number of people to see whether people also report speed increases with "bad bionic reading"?) i know a significant number of people here are probably already familiar with what bionic reading is, but still, could be an interesting control.
  - hoodwink 4y ago
    yeah i acknowledged that in the experiment design discussion > We recognize this is clearly not a gold standard, double-blind RCT. Researcher and participant alike knew what Bionic Reading claims to achieve. We simply did not have time to (1) develop a mock Bionic Reading placebo that, for example, might bold the middle of the word instead of the beginning and/or (2) find a set of test subjects who are blissfully offline and unaware of this viral sensation. That said, we controlled for what we could and we think we've already gathered some fairly compelling evidence.
ianferrel 4y ago
I got 15% faster with the non-BR font. I was trying to do the same amount on each.
Izkata 4y ago
I got 1% faster with Literata (385 vs 390). Bionic made my eyes stutter so much I just didn't like reading it either.
gcheong 4y ago
12% faster with Literata.
brendoelfrendo 4y ago
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.
blep_ 4y ago
I was 17% faster with Literata. I can't tell whether I was intentionally going faster because I had preconceived negative opinions about BR. It's a possibility.
memorable 4y ago
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.
fourthark 4y ago
18% faster with Literata
bejd 4y ago
Also 23% faster with BR but I enjoyed reading that way less. As with yourself, I suspect that maybe I put pressure on myself to read faster for the BR. As the article says, a better comparison may be to have a fake version of BR as the control.

ushakov 4y ago

i 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"

deleted 4y ago

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daenz 4y ago

>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.

bhaney 4y ago
I'm guessing that the very next sentence was the actual reason: >This is likely because the first article was less challenging to read
- daenz 4y ago
  That doesn't account for why the font affinity carries over to the rest of the test, which is why they propose multiple theories, but aren't sure.

saurik 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
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btilly 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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/060961097X/ref=asc_df_060961097X/ 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.

westcort 4y ago

Here are some bookmarklets I developed to cut out the extra formatting, bolding, and other content on websites that makes them difficult to read. I would appreciate any feedback or modifications for improvement. Literata font with a peach background color to optimize reading speed and no selective bolding: javascript:void function(){javascript:(function(){var a=Math.floor,b=document.querySelectorAll("p, title, a, ul"),c=[],e="",f="",g="",h=0,k=0,l="",m="",n=window.open("","_blank");for(var d in b){var i=b[d].textContent;i%26%26(c=c+"\n"+i)}for(f=c,e=f.replace(/\n/g," "),g=e.split(" "),h=0;h<g.length;h++)k=a(g[h].length/3)+1,l=""+g[h].substring(0,k)+""+g[h].substring(k,g[h].length)+" ","."==g[h].substring(g[h].length-1,g[h].length)%26%26(l+=" "),m+=l;n.document.write("<html>"+m+"</html>")})()}(); Selective bolding with a peach background for those who find a benefit: javascript:void function(){javascript:(function(){var a=Math.floor,b=document.querySelectorAll("p, title, a, ul"),c=[],e="",f="",g="",h=0,k=0,l="",m="",n=window.open("","_blank");for(var d in b){var i=b[d].textContent;i%26%26(c=c+"\n"+i)}for(f=c,e=f.replace(/\n/g," "),g=e.split(" "),h=0;h<g.length;h++)k=a(g[h].length/3)+1,l=""+g[h].substring(0,k)+""+g[h].substring(k,g[h].length)+" ","."==g[h].substring(g[h].length-1,g[h].length)%26%26(l+=" * "),m+=l;n.document.write("<html>"+m+"</html>")})()}();

bruce343434 4y ago
Probably a good idea to add `font-size: 0.5cm` in there or something.
quasarj 4y ago
Did you never find the Reader Mode button?

bruce343434 4y ago

I notice that I no longer spend energy actively scanning lines with bionic reading - my eyes snap automatically. I'm able to look at the text "from a distance" and the words just enter my mind, and I did get 31% faster reading from bionics according to this test.

icoder 4y ago
A whopping 0% here >< 272 vs 272 wpm, English is not my native language and I just ran a 5k, not sure if that has any relevance

lkxijlewlf 4y ago

I read once that when we read, our eyes bounce along the tops of the letters. A demonstration removed the lower parts of the letters, and interestingly, I was able to still read the words. I would like to see this same test but with a font that removed the lower half of the words in each sentence. Just for kicks and giggles...

Zababa 4y ago

421 wpm with bionic reading, 447 without, but I had the impression of being faster with bionic reading, something about reading being more smooth. I guess it's smoother but slower overall.

KerrAvon 4y ago

> When you click the button below, you'll begin reading the first of two Paul Graham essays, each approximately 5 minutes in length. My idea of hell. I'll wait for a better choice of source material.

karaterobot 4y ago

In 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.

malshe 4y ago
I agree 100%. I think the fundamental flaw in seeking methods to speed read is the inherent assumption that there is an equal tradeoff between higher speed and lower comprehension. Alas, bad comprehension is probably many times more harmful than lower reading speed. So the tradeoff is highly imbalanced due to the highly dissimilar importance weights attached to comprehension and speed.
Bjorkbat 4y ago
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.
- viraptor 4y ago
  In defence of skimming books: Not everyone is enjoying reading the same way. Not even one person in different contexts. There are books where I'm going to be engaged completely. There are others I'll enjoy for main plot but will want to skip the fluff. I'm extreme cases I'll gloss over a whole paragraph as "whatever, I don't care about the scenery". Being able to skim quickly to the next interesting part is a good skill. But the comment made me think - can we even improve the comprehension, as in processing what we read? (not as in understanding the vocabulary/structure) I've never heard of ways to purposefully do that.
- roelschroeven 4y ago
  For me an important part of reading fast is finding out which parts are interesting and which parts are not, and then focusing more on the interesting parts.

horsawlarway 4y ago

I don't understand. From their own metrics - speed went up by a lower percentage than comprehension dropped. This sounds like a terrible idea...

bmacho 4y ago
I don't think they are comparable..

TT-392 4y ago

I have dyslexia, and I can't scan read(if that is the right word), I have to basically read entire words. This stuff forces me to scan read, which means I just don't understand the text anymore.

ryzvonusef 4y ago

https://speed.readwise.io https://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 storybooks, often I just LOOK at a whole paragraph or even the whole page and just pick out the relevant word of two in a story. Unlike actual educational content, where the exact text matters, in fiction, after having developed a hobby to read for entertainment for so long and having gotten used to so many tropes, I just often just breeze through and look for the word that confirms which direction the author is taking that paragraph in, and often just glide over the paragraph and go to the next one. It's like learning how to drive, I guess. At some point you are not supposed to look at every thing, you just take the overall picture and just go. Not sure what is achieved by making every road sign and billboard flashing neon is supposed to achieve in such a scenario. Not all words are worthy of equal attention, most are meant to be glossed over. ____ but for actual educational purposes, the best test IMHO is to use it for the boring but important texts, like training manuals. See if it actually helps people learn and retain more import information about the new tool or procedure they are learning about.

btilly 4y ago
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.
- ryzvonusef 4y ago
  That's why I specified story books instead of online articles, because with story books, you build a rapport with the author and you have kinda narrowed down the options they will take, on a meta level. But good point on hacking people's tendency to glide, I shall keep that in mind.

ironlake 4y ago

1% faster with bionic reading, but I was eating chips and dip so maybe I was just distracted by stuffing my face.

dwighttk 4y ago

Hit finished reading and got a blank page… Was there an ad or something?

belkarx 4y ago
There wasn't. What lists is your adblocker running? I got my results with standard uBlock.
- dwighttk 4y ago
  Default list for 1Blocker

danamit 4y ago

10% faster with literata, altho with bionic i had 0 issues losing tracks of where I was or skipping lines but accident, which made me think i was reading faster, but apparently i was not.

kaba0 4y ago

I believe the screen is a huge factor in it as well that should be accounted for.

hoodwink 4y ago
we’re capturing desktop versus mobile :)

belkarx 4y ago

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?)

hoodwink 4y ago
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.

steve76 4y ago

Gordonjcp 4y ago

400ish wpm with normal text, 0wpm with "Bionic Reading" wibbly wobbly fonts. It just doesn't look like text.

deleted 4y ago

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ACow_Adonis 4y ago

It'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).

JaceLightning 4y ago

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

JaceLightning 4y ago

I 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.

Tarsul 4y ago
Same. I found it impossible to concentrate. Similar disrupting effect as gifs (visual noise) next to the text or similar.

demopathos 4y ago

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

Tagbert 4y ago

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

lijogdfljk 4y ago
I take it you didn't read the article? It answers that (ish)
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Thanks. I was busy and have seen several naive articles promoting speed readying recently and assumed this was one more.

lom 4y ago

Bionic reading: 317 WPM Literata: 317 WPM You read 0% faster with Bionic Reading I guess I’m a pretty consistent slow reader.

quasarj 4y ago
Way faster than me, and at the top end of average, based on everything I can find online. I'm curious though, what the average is among "readers" lol.
- desas 4y ago
  Bionic 633 wpm, literata 803. I do read quickly but I have read that essay before, so perhaps I only skimmed it. I wasn't certain on one of the comprehension questions.

m463 4y ago

Another sort of physically interesting thing that might unexpectedly help some people: read with the opendyslexic font.

popcube 4y ago

respect 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.

thevagrant 4y ago

Faster 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.

gnicholas 4y ago
I wouldn't be too concerned that using specialized fonts would become a dependency. I run BeeLine Reader, a similar tool that uses color gradients instead of bolding, and we've not heard this from our users much (though we did wonder about it when we were starting out). People do like specialized fonts and wish they had them on platforms where they're unavailable, but it's not like it becomes a crutch that you can't live without.

georgeburdell 4y ago

Interesting website. I never considered in my 30-something years of reading that I was a slow reader but apparently I am (<250 WPM). Most of my reading (outside of the internet) is scholarly articles for my job.

pratyushmittal 4y ago

I found Bionic 10% slower than Literata. But I also found I am a verrrry slow reader. My reading speed came to 147 wpm. Any recommendation to improve this?

sj4nz 4y ago
When I was in school reading coaches encouraged the awareness of subvocalization (where you mimic the text as if you were speaking it, but not aloud). If you find yourself doing that while reading, stop/suppress that.

nestorD 4y ago

If the authors of the article are reading this: I would also do a test to see if the variance of the two groups (bionic vs normal) is significantly different. I did not check it but bionic might be very beneficial to some and detrimental to others which would not be seen when looking at the mean (you should also plot the distributions, it pretty much always a good first reflex).

hoodwink 4y ago
for sure. due to this improved experiment design, we should now have the data to perform paired analyses rather than just looking at means. what test do you use to compare variances though?
- nestorD 4y ago
  There are several options but the Levene test should be appropriate: https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/eda35a.htm https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/eda35a...

seydor 4y ago

Why do people want to read faster? You can also write tersely. Or not overload yourself with useless information

mmarq 4y ago

I’m not 100% sure it works for everybody, but it probably helps that English have shorter words where the stress tends to be on the first syllable, doesn’t have genders, always requires an explicit subject and has simple verb conjugations. Would it work with languages that have longer words and a case system?

deleted 4y ago

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shever73 4y ago

19% faster with Bionic Reading. I'd like to try again with different source articles that are not already part of my field of expertise. I felt as if I could answer the comprehension questions without having read the articles.