15 ms·

We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed

211 points by hoodwink 4y ago

selfhifive 4y ago
What if the fixation points are not on every word but create a narrower space by being a couple inches in from either side of each line to use the classic speedreading trick of using peripheral vision? Has it been tried?
hoodwink 4y ago
Hey everyone, this is the follow up post to the experiment posted here on Hacker News a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31826204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31826204. I'll be hanging out in the replies today if there are any questions I can answer :)
- noobhacker 4y ago
  Excellent experimental design and analysis! Is there a way for me to buy you a coffee (or some cash equivalent)? I'd love to incentivize such rigor in online discourse. An obvious way is to try out readwise ;) but I mostly read online articles and (pirated) books, so I'm not sure I'm a good use case.
  - hoodwink 4y ago
    these might be the kindest words i've ever gotten in a hacker news thread so thank you! :D we've actually built an app for reading articles and ebooks (and RSS and PDFs and email newsletters and Twitter threads): https://readwise.io/read https://readwise.io/read still in private beta but we'll be entering public beta before summer is over!
- noobhacker 4y ago
  I stalked the post's author (your?) LinkedIn and didn't see any background in statistics. How do you know to design this experiment so nicely?
  - freemint 4y ago
    It is a pretty standard statistical test taught in any bachelor level class covering statistics (or earlier in Germany we did this in 11 the grade) . This setup also includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_(statistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_(statistics) another pretty standard method you learn by just looking how others do experiments.
- Llamamoe 4y ago
  I've said this via Twitter and I'll say it now: I'd expect there to be huge learning effect sizes for anything that alters the way we parse information, even in such "minor" ways as BR. I'd like to see what the difference would be like after a day, four, and a week of reading articles with BR, if that's viable to enlist people for at all.
janandonly 4y ago
So Bionic reading is just a form of speed reading? And it turns out that comprehension is suffering from trying to read faster... I think that most people, when they read, do a sort of automatic "speed reading" in their mind already. What I mean is: I notice that when I read, my eyes will skip parts of words where I don't need to see all the letters to know what word it is. What if all this trickery simply hinders our innate and built-in "automatic speed reading" capability?
- hoodwink 4y ago
  My best interpretation of the test results is that Bionic Reading is just an exotic text styling that has no impact -- positive or negative -- on reading speed or reading comprehension. If it were a form of speed reading, we would have observed faster speeds when using Bionic Reading (and probably lower comprehension as a trade-off). This is NOT what we observed.
- doliveira 4y ago
  I thought so too, but I've noticed in some "pair-programming-like" experiences that some people waste so much time reading posts and SO comments/threads that are obvious dead ends, and take too long to jump to the relevant section in logs or docs... So I think most people don't do speed reading at all
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  Note there is rapid eye movement you’re not conscious of
- darkerside 4y ago
  Having just tried it, I definitely felt like the bionic reading was completely unreadable. I am very much a skimmer, and to be fair, I haven't practiced with Bionic so it might get faster over time. But my initial reaction was honestly disgust.
- Mo3 4y ago
  More or less, but the creator is much more interested in patents and trademarks and selling API access for mind-boggling cost. It's obvious it's just snake oil.
dinkblam 4y ago
stopped reading at 'and the results might surprise you' if you want 'hackers' to read something, best not start with the same line as every ultra-low-quality invasive clickbait ad
- rasulkireev 4y ago
  should have continued reading. they follow with "not so surprising".
gnicholas 4y ago
> we intend to run some more tests in the hopes of discovering a screen reading technique that yields material benefits. We're aware of a couple other technologies that seem interesting including BeeLine Reader, Spritz, and Sans Forgetica. BeeLine founder here — feel free to reach out prior to your testing (nick@[domain]). We can share info on past testing and implementation techniques. We've wondered about Sans Forgetica in the past, which may increase reading comprehension (at the expense of speed). It might be interesting to try a BeeLine/Forgetica test, to try to get the best of both worlds!
- hoodwink 4y ago
  nice to meet you, Nick! shooting you an email now :)
- Poppys 4y ago
  This suggests that it is not that useful https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/previously_claimed_memory/ https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/previously...
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    Thanks for the info — I’d been hopeful about Forgetica based on some general research about disfluent fonts and memory. But I guess things don’t look so rosy for this particular one, at least based on this one study. Thanks for sharing!
- fsiefken 4y ago
  Coincidentally I was wondering a similar thing this morning. To get as much text as possible on paper for holiday reading I managed to get the text down 30% while by stripping out any vowel but the first in a word, replacing 'the' with '#', 'and' with '&' and of' with '%'. I also used the smallest Tahoma font and multiple columns. This increases reading complexity just as Sans Forgetica, but perhaps also increases reading speed somewhat- because words get stripped down to their 'essence' (perhaps similar to chinese or japanese script) and your eyes move less with multiple columns. In that 'word essence'sence this technique has similarities to Bionic Reading. Combining the two would be tricky, as what letters would be bolded with the devowel method and can you get closer to a word essense? The combination with Beeline and Bionic Reading or devoweling could have more potential. It's nice that Beeline has gray scale support. sed 's/ and / \& /g' -e 's/ of /\ % /g' -e 's/ is / \= /g' -e 's/ th / \# /g' -e 's/\B[aeiouAEIOU]//g' -e 's/\(.\)\1/\1/g' -e "s/'//g" sacred-world.txt > sw.txt
_bramses 4y ago
Hopefully in the future, language models will be able to read books for us and summarize whether or not they’re worthwhile. Bumping from 200 wpm to 300 wpm doesn’t put a dent in the 100+ million books circulating in print. Unrelated Readwise questions (love the work y’all do, thank you!) - any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go? - is there a random quote API that references all sources at once? - has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?
- layer8 4y ago
  Different people will have different opinions on which parts and aspects of a book are worthwhile or not. Books that were worthwhile to me ten years ago may not be worthwhile to me today, or in ten years, and vice versa. I don’t expect AI to be able to adequately address that anytime soon.
- prometheus76 4y ago
  We already have rating systems and reviews that are human-generated and human-curated to help you decide if a book is "worthwhile". How could an AI language model improve on that? In other words, why would you trust AI more than human curators/reviewers?
  - kadoban 4y ago
    An AI could tailor it to the person, put it in context of other things already read, and essentially create a course of study for you. Humans can do the ~same, but it's pretty expensive. An AI could also improve on the status quo by being more consistent and there's _some_ possibility that it could be less biased than in human in several ways.
- hoodwink 4y ago
  hey there! thanks for the kind words :) on AI-based booked summarization, here's a really interesting article by OpenAI on the topic: https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/ https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/ *any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go?* we have a new browser extension (yet unreleased) that enables you to highlight the native page (i think that's what you're asking) *is there a random quote API that references all sources at once?* at the individual user level, yes. readwise.io/api_deets *has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?* not yet, but my cofounder tristan did push a huge full-text search update a few months ago that makes search results 10x better than they were before
rasulkireev 4y ago
For me, it was a little surprising that there was no effect at all. For whatever reason it felt like it ought to have an impact. However, if I think about it, reading has been done for thousands of years and by now something like that would have prevailed if it was effective. Anyway, we need more experiments like this. I bet there are a ton of things out there that we think make out lives better, but in reality don't do a thing.
- hoodwink 4y ago
  thanks rasul! on an individual basis, there is some evidence that reading with your "best" font may have a meaningful impact on reading speed with no loss of comprehension. but you could probably unlock these gains by simply switching from, say, arial to garamond (i made that up for illustrative purposes), rather than implementing this complex font style.
codingdave 4y ago
I'm not surprised that this slows down most people. But I'd be curious about a more targeted audience of people with known reading problems: people with dyslexia, for example. Or even regardless of speed, does it help overall with people who have comprehension problems with written communication?
- hoodwink 4y ago
  i got that feedback a lot after initially posting the experiment: > Since posting this experiment, I've received a lot of side comments along the lines of, "Well, of course I don't expect Bionic Reading to work for most people, but for [my subpopulation], it really works." If that were the case, we might expect to see disproportionate benefits for those participants who read faster with Bionic Reading than for those who read faster without Bionic Reading. Let's look at how many participants read faster with each font and their average speed gains. there might be some specialized effect on folks with known reading problems, but bionic reading makes no claims to specifically work for those people but rather the whole population so that's what we decided to test.
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    It would be interesting to ask people after the test: Have you been diagnosed with, or do you believe you have, dyslexia, ADHD, visual impairment, or other reading challenges? It would also be interesting to ask people if they felt it was easier to read with the new tech or the old way. Speed is one metric, but subjective impressions of reading ease are also relevant.
    - hoodwink 4y ago
      we were testing bionic reading’s claim. they make no claims to only working when reading challenges are present.
  - thorum 4y ago
    > Let's look at how many participants read faster with each font and their average speed gains. “Average speed gains” doesn’t seem like the best metric here. A graph showing the distribution of users across different WPM differences would be much more informative. Sure, the average user doesn’t see outsized results, but are you saying that zero participants in your test read substantially faster with BR?
GrinningFool 4y ago
Thanks for posting this - I appreciate the thorough analysis, as well as complete transparency around methods and data.
- hoodwink 4y ago
  thanks marc! appreciate the kindness. ps- philly native here :)
avivo 4y ago
I think what would be most interesting and helpful is an augmented form of reading that is semantic. I would love to have bold and italics and even section headings and table of contents that are toggleable on and off as I read anything, to quickly skim and focus on the most relevant content. I can also imagine a version of this which is contextual, based off a query, or a personalized recommendation system. I spend much more time skimming than reading, and skimming to determine if something is worth reading. Anything that can support that is incredibly valuable and would increase my functional reading speed for accomplishing tasks.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
O__________O 4y ago
Here’s what appears to be an independent review of Spritz: https://www.tsw.it/wp-content/uploads/Rapid-serial-visual-presentation-in-reading-The-case-of-Spritz-1.pdf https://www.tsw.it/wp-content/uploads/Rapid-serial-visual-pr... One of the issues with tests like these is that the companies sponsor the research and they are one-off vs long exposure studies; that is as with most interfaces with high-throughput, takes time for the mind to adjust. My guess that given human speech appears to have a universal transmission rate of around 39-bits per second, that on average that’s going to be the actual performance target: https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  > human speech appears to have a universal transmission rate of around 39-bits per second This is unacceptable, we need a modern language that packs information tighter!
  - danudey 4y ago
    We need to start in schools, teaching our children to speak in zstd. It could more than triple their throughput!
  - atulvi 4y ago
    Not a language, but a font: https://dotsies.org/ https://dotsies.org/ Discussed in HN multiple times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703805
  - carlob 4y ago
    I know you're probably joking, but for those out of the loop, the result your parent was referring to is that more verbose languages have faster speakers and the two effects compensate one another pretty well. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
  - Terr_ 4y ago
    I think this is in jest, but to answer seriously: No, I think that's actually backwards, trying to make a language more "packed" will harm information flow. Evidence suggests the real limit is how quickly human brains can take ideas/qualia, convert them into abstractions, and encode the abstractions into language. This is because (A) very different languages still exhibit similar limits and (B) those limits appear to be governed by the sending-side. People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them. So trying to make the language more "compact" would likely just waste precious brain-cycles on the compression step, which isn't actually necessary when your mouth already supports talking faster. Technology analogy: Two computers are collaboratively solving a problem with back-and-forth messages. The network connection is actually very good, however the bottleneck is the CPU in each computer. Will the problem be solved faster if you change the transmission style from plaintext to gzipped?
carapace 4y ago
If you want to read fast write a little tool to do "Rapid Serial Visual Presentation". The basic idea is that you flash words on a screen in the same location so that your eyes don't have to pan back and forth, you just look straight ahead. Your eyes and brain can recognize whole words as a gestalt (without reading each letter.) That's it. This method cuts out most of the physical overhead of reading. When I played with it I got to the point where I could read over 500 words/minute. I could read faster than my internal voice could speak.
jacobsenscott 4y ago
No surprise. It's been shown over and over that speed reading, no matter the gimmick, doesn't work. It is just another one of those self help fads that never goes away because it is super easy to re-package and sell. Just read without thinking about how fast you are reading and you'll do fine.
- natrys 4y ago
  Did you speed read this article? They weren't measuring whether speed reading itself works, rather whether bionic reading works for speed reading.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Have we isolated the writing style with these experiments? I have no trouble believing that speed reading concise, efficient writers represents a loss of information. But some writers just will not get to the fucking point, and those were the books/classes where I was a little jealous of the speed readers. I need to read and retain about 10% of this garbage, but my brain is not cooperating on skimming.
layer8 4y ago
> there's no universal best font […] different fonts increase reading speed for different individuals My takeaway is that system fonts, reader mode fonts, etc., should always be configurable.
affgrff2 4y ago
What I would really like to instead of methods that help me speed up my reading is something that has a model of my knowledge and can summarize information to the points I don't know yet and are relevant to me. Does someone know if that exists or if there is research on it?
thenerdhead 4y ago
There's no shortcuts to anything in life. Thinking so is a fool's errand. You get better at reading by reading and deliberately practicing it. Speed reading is a completely different skill than comprehension. Comprehension is a completely different skill than entertaining yourself. The fundamentals aren't going anywhere. They'll be here when you realize speedreading, bionic reading, and summaries are just distractions.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  This is trivially disprovable; it's easy to think of longcuts, ways to accomplish or learn something inefficiently. There would be no difference between a great teacher and a terrible teacher otherwise. Or a great coach and a terrible coach.
  - runevault 4y ago
    The entire software industry is based on creating new efficiencies... On top of all the stuff you said I just... don't see how anyone could believe that.
  - m463 4y ago
    I've always thought research papers were a longcut to comprehension. I don't know if this is because the subject matter is novel, or that the authors are better at math and science than writing. I wonder if there could be a standard for grading a research paper on readability to raise the status quo.
    - cedilla 4y ago
      Unfortunately, readability is at odds with other, more important goals of the authors, like shoe-horning in references to all important papers in the field, especially if they're likely to be written by reviewers. Also, a lot of work must be shown to demonstrate completeness and rigorousness, and that doesn't help comprehension either. The trick is to read only the segments of the paper that are actually worth reading, which is often only the abstract, conclusion and maybe implementation details.
lucideer 4y ago
> tl;dr. Actually no, the results will probably not surprise you. After analyzing data from 2,074 testers, we found no evidence that Bionic Reading has any positive effect on reading speed. I've seen a lot of viral social media posts about bionic reading recently and this is the very first time I've ever seen anyone mention reading speed. Everything I've seen is selling bionic reading for greater reading comprehension and focus. Never mentions speed. Granted the article measures reading comprehension too (though I'd have some doubts about the methodology of 3 MCQs on a PG article - this part of the test didn't seem high on the author's priority list). Did the authors just waste a lot of their time because they didn't pay attention to the claims or are we just in very different bubbles?
- hoodwink 4y ago
  giant hero section on bionic-reading.com: "Did you know that your brain reads faster than your eye?" title of bionic-reading.com: "Faster. Better. More focused. Reading." does "faster" not refer to speed to you or something?
  - lucideer 4y ago
    I'd heard of Renato but not the registered trademark (why don't they use the font throughout the website)? I guess that answers my question: different bubbles
kleer001 4y ago
I'm not surprised at all. Maybe I'm just older, have seen more, and have a better tuned BS meter.
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  This is just the 2022 version of Spritz(2014). Before that... SQ4R - Survey/question/read/recite/reflect/review Gummy bear trick - Place candy/gummy bears on the pages and eat them as you read them. SparkNotes - Read someone else's summary of what you need to absorb.
TeeMassive 4y ago
Why they didn't test for comprehension of the text? This is a huge flaw of this study
- hoodwink 4y ago
  https://blog.readwise.io/bionic-reading-results/#comprehension https://blog.readwise.io/bionic-reading-results/#comprehensi...
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Perhaps you did not comprehend the writeup, which describes this aspect of their analysis in some detail.
aeturnum 4y ago
This fits with my experience so I believe it! That said, I did feel like the bionic rendering made me more likely to read every word as opposed to skimming sentences. It also made reading feel more "percussive" which can be fun. Definitely an interesting line of inquiry even if it's over-hyped.
WhitneyLand 4y ago
What about instead an AI project that rewrites content for fastest consumption and easiest comprehension? Not a summary, but kind of like a lossless re-encoding for maximum human efficiency. You could even allow custom reader profiles that take into account things like vocabulary an subject expertise.
- a3w 4y ago
  So, the gist bot that some subreddits already use? It has a different name than gist which I cannot recall, but probably an ML algorithm.
  - lkbm 4y ago
    AutoTLDR, which uses smmry.com[0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotl...
    - WhitneyLand 4y ago
      I was specifically proposing not a summary, because I know summaries are already done and they have their purpose. But for people who want to read faster in a lossless way this wouldn’t apply.
  - WhitneyLand 4y ago
    Not the same, it just summarizes.
    - a3w 4y ago
      Oh, true, that even works with german texts, so the TLDR-bot has probably limited language comprehension and does not rephrase things.
tmalsburg2 4y ago
Completely unsurprising. The bottleneck in reading is not visual recognition of words or eye movements. Source: decades of actual research on this topic.
- pluc 4y ago
  Headline: Does Bionic Reading actually work? We timed over 2,000 readers and the results might surprise you First line: tl;dr. Actually no, the results will probably not surprise you fuck this
- hinkley 4y ago
  We'll figure something out though. It was big news about ten years back in sports medicine that cooling off the lower arms was unreasonably effective for recovery, even, IIRC, better than a full body ice bath. I don't know if they still do it, but at the time they were showing off these weird baggies you put over your arms like oversized mittens and ran coolant through. We know sleeping helps with memory retention. We know that NSAIDs influence experiences of emotional pain. What other folk remedies and completely random things also work on memory? I forget, is caffeine now established wisdom or do they keep going back and forth on that?
t_mann 4y ago
Meta comment: I'd appreciate if we could adopt the 'academia style' for headlines (ie tell the results right away) instead of the 'clickbait style' (click here to find out). So in this example: "Bionic reading does not change reading speed: results from our experiment" instead of "Does Bionic reading work? ...".
- SimonPStevens 4y ago
  I really hope Dang or one of the others in charge here is reading this and is willing to consider it. The change suggested here would be one of the greatest single improvements to the signal-to-noise ratio on this site, and even news in general. It would be a policy change rather than a tech change really, and would need some enforcement. Just a reminder on the submission page, and perhaps a banner at the top of the home page highlighting the policy change, and directing people to flag titles in the wrong form. (Or, failing that, does anyone have any suggestions for good tech news sources where the titles are in this format, this is definitely something I want to see)
  - gnicholas 4y ago
    It would also be easy to prompt you to consider rewording if your title has a question mark. There would be some false positives, but I'd think the vast majority would benefit from rewording.
- sbeckeriv 4y ago
  I read once that a headline that ends in a question mark is almost always a no. I think the thought is that positive answers to a question are shared as a statement. Much like you shared. It saves me a few clicks?
  - madrox 4y ago
    You ended with a question mark, so I must assume it doesn't save you a few clicks. I'll take my downvotes now.
- dang 4y ago
philosopher1234 4y ago
my reading bottleneck is understanding and contemplation, not eye motion. for that bionic reading seems useless
deleted 4y ago
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thorum 4y ago
The article’s conclusion doesn’t seem to match the data they collected. They found that most people (52%) do read faster with bionic reading, the effect is generally quite small, but large for some minority of users - at least one user read 293 WPM faster with Bionic Reading! The authors then average results (good and bad) across all users, resulting in a number close to zero, and conclude Bionic Reading doesn’t work for anyone, even calling it a placebo effect at the end. The problem is, all brains are not the same. It doesn’t have to work equally well for everyone to be valuable.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > the effect is generally quite small, but large for some minority of users - at least one user read 293 WPM faster with Bionic Reading! Well, that's not really something you'd want to admit in your paper, much less advance as an argument. The obvious conclusion is that there's a mistake in your data, not that some users will see an increase in reading speed of 4.9 words per second.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- tristanho 4y ago
  The results are what you would expect if you measured two identical fonts, ie random. You can make the _claim_ in your comment, but there isn't statistical evidence that this effect is more than random, or if the same people were tested again their results wouldn't be opposite. Put another way, it doesn't pass the null hypothesis.
  - thorum 4y ago
    I think the best approach would be a graph showing the distribution of users across different WPM differences, and if possible a second experiment with two non-BR fonts (to see how much random variation is expected). The positive results might all be noise, but I don’t think that should be the default assumption.
Barrin92 4y ago
can we kill this entire fad of speed reading and productivity life hack nonsense already? I propose we start to advocate slow reading in the spirit of Peter Norvig's learn programming in 10 years, and tell people to actually enjoy what it is they're reading.
- therealdrag0 4y ago
  Agree. Even beyond enjoyment I’ve heard multiple very accomplished people in a variety of fields (from theology to math) say in interviews “I’m actually a very slow reader.” So sure reading fast would be nice, but I think that’s mostly biological whereas slow quality reading you have full control of and we need to focus on that instead.
  - w-j-w 4y ago
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Ok, but… I love being able to speed read. Love it. And I can’t speed read many things, like philosophy or “zorba the Greek.” Lol just kidding I totally speed read that shit (but slow down when necessary)
- spoonjim 4y ago
  Well there is some stuff you want to enjoy and there's other stuff you want to process as fast as possible so you get more time to read the stuff you enjoy :)
- ffhhj 4y ago
  “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
- irjustin 4y ago
  I disagree. There are things I want to learn and I really don't care for the fluff. Ironically (or not?) self-help books are absolutely full of fluff but at their core can have very useful/helpful ideas. They just get expounded upon back up with 10 specific examples where each example starts at the beginning of the person's life in full detail. Speed reading has helped me get through those books and learn something where I would have wasted so much time or actually never even picked the book up.
TT-392 4y ago
I find it increadibly hard to read, so I really hope it doesn't become a common thing. So I am kinda happy about these results.
anjc 4y ago
Can you show the distribution of reading speeds. If this font has a multimodal effect then the t-test mightn't be appropriate.
- hoodwink 4y ago
  i made the dataset publicly available. all the distributions are approximately normal.
Blackthorn 4y ago
The whole thing was a hilariously transparent marketing strategy to begin with for their stupidly expensive (and tracks-everything-you-read) API.
- refulgentis 4y ago
  I don't think so, and I have 0 interest in any of these companies -- I did find it notable they were checking a company's claim, on a company blog, but I also found it notable there was 0 mention of how this related to their company
  - Blackthorn 4y ago
    Sorry, don't think I was clear. I don't mean this study, I mean Bionic Reading and their virality in the first place.
woopwoop 4y ago
If your reading speed is the limiting reagent for your understanding a piece of writing, you should read something else. It's like if the limiting factor in your programming speed is typing. The thing to fix is probably not your typing speed.

211 points by hoodwink 4y ago

What if the fixation points are not on every word but create a narrower space by being a couple inches in from either side of each line to use the classic speedreading trick of using peripheral vision? Has it been tried?

hoodwink 4y ago

Hey everyone, this is the follow up post to the experiment posted here on Hacker News a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31826204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31826204. I'll be hanging out in the replies today if there are any questions I can answer :)

noobhacker 4y ago
Excellent experimental design and analysis! Is there a way for me to buy you a coffee (or some cash equivalent)? I'd love to incentivize such rigor in online discourse. An obvious way is to try out readwise ;) but I mostly read online articles and (pirated) books, so I'm not sure I'm a good use case.
- hoodwink 4y ago
  these might be the kindest words i've ever gotten in a hacker news thread so thank you! :D we've actually built an app for reading articles and ebooks (and RSS and PDFs and email newsletters and Twitter threads): https://readwise.io/read https://readwise.io/read still in private beta but we'll be entering public beta before summer is over!
noobhacker 4y ago
I stalked the post's author (your?) LinkedIn and didn't see any background in statistics. How do you know to design this experiment so nicely?
- freemint 4y ago
  It is a pretty standard statistical test taught in any bachelor level class covering statistics (or earlier in Germany we did this in 11 the grade) . This setup also includes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_(statistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_(statistics) another pretty standard method you learn by just looking how others do experiments.
Llamamoe 4y ago
I've said this via Twitter and I'll say it now: I'd expect there to be huge learning effect sizes for anything that alters the way we parse information, even in such "minor" ways as BR. I'd like to see what the difference would be like after a day, four, and a week of reading articles with BR, if that's viable to enlist people for at all.

janandonly 4y ago

So Bionic reading is just a form of speed reading? And it turns out that comprehension is suffering from trying to read faster... I think that most people, when they read, do a sort of automatic "speed reading" in their mind already. What I mean is: I notice that when I read, my eyes will skip parts of words where I don't need to see all the letters to know what word it is. What if all this trickery simply hinders our innate and built-in "automatic speed reading" capability?

hoodwink 4y ago
My best interpretation of the test results is that Bionic Reading is just an exotic text styling that has no impact -- positive or negative -- on reading speed or reading comprehension. If it were a form of speed reading, we would have observed faster speeds when using Bionic Reading (and probably lower comprehension as a trade-off). This is NOT what we observed.
doliveira 4y ago
I thought so too, but I've noticed in some "pair-programming-like" experiences that some people waste so much time reading posts and SO comments/threads that are obvious dead ends, and take too long to jump to the relevant section in logs or docs... So I think most people don't do speed reading at all
wahnfrieden 4y ago
Note there is rapid eye movement you’re not conscious of
darkerside 4y ago
Having just tried it, I definitely felt like the bionic reading was completely unreadable. I am very much a skimmer, and to be fair, I haven't practiced with Bionic so it might get faster over time. But my initial reaction was honestly disgust.
Mo3 4y ago
More or less, but the creator is much more interested in patents and trademarks and selling API access for mind-boggling cost. It's obvious it's just snake oil.

dinkblam 4y ago

stopped reading at 'and the results might surprise you' if you want 'hackers' to read something, best not start with the same line as every ultra-low-quality invasive clickbait ad

rasulkireev 4y ago
should have continued reading. they follow with "not so surprising".

gnicholas 4y ago

> we intend to run some more tests in the hopes of discovering a screen reading technique that yields material benefits. We're aware of a couple other technologies that seem interesting including BeeLine Reader, Spritz, and Sans Forgetica. BeeLine founder here — feel free to reach out prior to your testing (nick@[domain]). We can share info on past testing and implementation techniques. We've wondered about Sans Forgetica in the past, which may increase reading comprehension (at the expense of speed). It might be interesting to try a BeeLine/Forgetica test, to try to get the best of both worlds!

hoodwink 4y ago
nice to meet you, Nick! shooting you an email now :)
Poppys 4y ago
This suggests that it is not that useful https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/previously_claimed_memory/ https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/previously...
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Thanks for the info — I’d been hopeful about Forgetica based on some general research about disfluent fonts and memory. But I guess things don’t look so rosy for this particular one, at least based on this one study. Thanks for sharing!
fsiefken 4y ago
Coincidentally I was wondering a similar thing this morning. To get as much text as possible on paper for holiday reading I managed to get the text down 30% while by stripping out any vowel but the first in a word, replacing 'the' with '#', 'and' with '&' and of' with '%'. I also used the smallest Tahoma font and multiple columns. This increases reading complexity just as Sans Forgetica, but perhaps also increases reading speed somewhat- because words get stripped down to their 'essence' (perhaps similar to chinese or japanese script) and your eyes move less with multiple columns. In that 'word essence'sence this technique has similarities to Bionic Reading. Combining the two would be tricky, as what letters would be bolded with the devowel method and can you get closer to a word essense? The combination with Beeline and Bionic Reading or devoweling could have more potential. It's nice that Beeline has gray scale support. sed 's/ and / \& /g' -e 's/ of /\ % /g' -e 's/ is / \= /g' -e 's/ th / \# /g' -e 's/\B[aeiouAEIOU]//g' -e 's/\(.\)\1/\1/g' -e "s/'//g" sacred-world.txt > sw.txt

_bramses 4y ago

Hopefully in the future, language models will be able to read books for us and summarize whether or not they’re worthwhile. Bumping from 200 wpm to 300 wpm doesn’t put a dent in the 100+ million books circulating in print. Unrelated Readwise questions (love the work y’all do, thank you!) - any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go? - is there a random quote API that references all sources at once? - has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?

layer8 4y ago
Different people will have different opinions on which parts and aspects of a book are worthwhile or not. Books that were worthwhile to me ten years ago may not be worthwhile to me today, or in ten years, and vice versa. I don’t expect AI to be able to adequately address that anytime soon.
prometheus76 4y ago
We already have rating systems and reviews that are human-generated and human-curated to help you decide if a book is "worthwhile". How could an AI language model improve on that? In other words, why would you trust AI more than human curators/reviewers?
- kadoban 4y ago
  An AI could tailor it to the person, put it in context of other things already read, and essentially create a course of study for you. Humans can do the ~same, but it's pretty expensive. An AI could also improve on the status quo by being more consistent and there's _some_ possibility that it could be less biased than in human in several ways.
hoodwink 4y ago
hey there! thanks for the kind words :) on AI-based booked summarization, here's a really interesting article by OpenAI on the topic: https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/ https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/ *any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go?* we have a new browser extension (yet unreleased) that enables you to highlight the native page (i think that's what you're asking) *is there a random quote API that references all sources at once?* at the individual user level, yes. readwise.io/api_deets *has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?* not yet, but my cofounder tristan did push a huge full-text search update a few months ago that makes search results 10x better than they were before

rasulkireev 4y ago

For me, it was a little surprising that there was no effect at all. For whatever reason it felt like it ought to have an impact. However, if I think about it, reading has been done for thousands of years and by now something like that would have prevailed if it was effective. Anyway, we need more experiments like this. I bet there are a ton of things out there that we think make out lives better, but in reality don't do a thing.

hoodwink 4y ago
thanks rasul! on an individual basis, there is some evidence that reading with your "best" font may have a meaningful impact on reading speed with no loss of comprehension. but you could probably unlock these gains by simply switching from, say, arial to garamond (i made that up for illustrative purposes), rather than implementing this complex font style.

codingdave 4y ago

I'm not surprised that this slows down most people. But I'd be curious about a more targeted audience of people with known reading problems: people with dyslexia, for example. Or even regardless of speed, does it help overall with people who have comprehension problems with written communication?

hoodwink 4y ago
i got that feedback a lot after initially posting the experiment: > Since posting this experiment, I've received a lot of side comments along the lines of, "Well, of course I don't expect Bionic Reading to work for most people, but for [my subpopulation], it really works." If that were the case, we might expect to see disproportionate benefits for those participants who read faster with Bionic Reading than for those who read faster without Bionic Reading. Let's look at how many participants read faster with each font and their average speed gains. there might be some specialized effect on folks with known reading problems, but bionic reading makes no claims to specifically work for those people but rather the whole population so that's what we decided to test.
- gnicholas 4y ago
  It would be interesting to ask people after the test: Have you been diagnosed with, or do you believe you have, dyslexia, ADHD, visual impairment, or other reading challenges? It would also be interesting to ask people if they felt it was easier to read with the new tech or the old way. Speed is one metric, but subjective impressions of reading ease are also relevant.
  - hoodwink 4y ago
    we were testing bionic reading’s claim. they make no claims to only working when reading challenges are present.
- thorum 4y ago
  > Let's look at how many participants read faster with each font and their average speed gains. “Average speed gains” doesn’t seem like the best metric here. A graph showing the distribution of users across different WPM differences would be much more informative. Sure, the average user doesn’t see outsized results, but are you saying that zero participants in your test read substantially faster with BR?

GrinningFool 4y ago

Thanks for posting this - I appreciate the thorough analysis, as well as complete transparency around methods and data.

hoodwink 4y ago
thanks marc! appreciate the kindness. ps- philly native here :)

avivo 4y ago

I think what would be most interesting and helpful is an augmented form of reading that is semantic. I would love to have bold and italics and even section headings and table of contents that are toggleable on and off as I read anything, to quickly skim and focus on the most relevant content. I can also imagine a version of this which is contextual, based off a query, or a personalized recommendation system. I spend much more time skimming than reading, and skimming to determine if something is worth reading. Anything that can support that is incredibly valuable and would increase my functional reading speed for accomplishing tasks.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

O__________O 4y ago

Here’s what appears to be an independent review of Spritz: https://www.tsw.it/wp-content/uploads/Rapid-serial-visual-presentation-in-reading-The-case-of-Spritz-1.pdf https://www.tsw.it/wp-content/uploads/Rapid-serial-visual-pr... One of the issues with tests like these is that the companies sponsor the research and they are one-off vs long exposure studies; that is as with most interfaces with high-throughput, takes time for the mind to adjust. My guess that given human speech appears to have a universal transmission rate of around 39-bits per second, that on average that’s going to be the actual performance target: https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594

ASalazarMX 4y ago
> human speech appears to have a universal transmission rate of around 39-bits per second This is unacceptable, we need a modern language that packs information tighter!
- danudey 4y ago
  We need to start in schools, teaching our children to speak in zstd. It could more than triple their throughput!
- atulvi 4y ago
  Not a language, but a font: https://dotsies.org/ https://dotsies.org/ Discussed in HN multiple times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18703805
- carlob 4y ago
  I know you're probably joking, but for those out of the loop, the result your parent was referring to is that more verbose languages have faster speakers and the two effects compensate one another pretty well. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
- Terr_ 4y ago
  I think this is in jest, but to answer seriously: No, I think that's actually backwards, trying to make a language more "packed" will harm information flow. Evidence suggests the real limit is how quickly human brains can take ideas/qualia, convert them into abstractions, and encode the abstractions into language. This is because (A) very different languages still exhibit similar limits and (B) those limits appear to be governed by the sending-side. People can comprehend spoken words at a higher rate than they can spontaneously emit them. So trying to make the language more "compact" would likely just waste precious brain-cycles on the compression step, which isn't actually necessary when your mouth already supports talking faster. Technology analogy: Two computers are collaboratively solving a problem with back-and-forth messages. The network connection is actually very good, however the bottleneck is the CPU in each computer. Will the problem be solved faster if you change the transmission style from plaintext to gzipped?

carapace 4y ago

If you want to read fast write a little tool to do "Rapid Serial Visual Presentation". The basic idea is that you flash words on a screen in the same location so that your eyes don't have to pan back and forth, you just look straight ahead. Your eyes and brain can recognize whole words as a gestalt (without reading each letter.) That's it. This method cuts out most of the physical overhead of reading. When I played with it I got to the point where I could read over 500 words/minute. I could read faster than my internal voice could speak.

jacobsenscott 4y ago

No surprise. It's been shown over and over that speed reading, no matter the gimmick, doesn't work. It is just another one of those self help fads that never goes away because it is super easy to re-package and sell. Just read without thinking about how fast you are reading and you'll do fine.

natrys 4y ago
Did you speed read this article? They weren't measuring whether speed reading itself works, rather whether bionic reading works for speed reading.
hinkley 4y ago
Have we isolated the writing style with these experiments? I have no trouble believing that speed reading concise, efficient writers represents a loss of information. But some writers just will not get to the fucking point, and those were the books/classes where I was a little jealous of the speed readers. I need to read and retain about 10% of this garbage, but my brain is not cooperating on skimming.

layer8 4y ago

> there's no universal best font […] different fonts increase reading speed for different individuals My takeaway is that system fonts, reader mode fonts, etc., should always be configurable.

affgrff2 4y ago

What I would really like to instead of methods that help me speed up my reading is something that has a model of my knowledge and can summarize information to the points I don't know yet and are relevant to me. Does someone know if that exists or if there is research on it?

thenerdhead 4y ago

There's no shortcuts to anything in life. Thinking so is a fool's errand. You get better at reading by reading and deliberately practicing it. Speed reading is a completely different skill than comprehension. Comprehension is a completely different skill than entertaining yourself. The fundamentals aren't going anywhere. They'll be here when you realize speedreading, bionic reading, and summaries are just distractions.

bpodgursky 4y ago
This is trivially disprovable; it's easy to think of longcuts, ways to accomplish or learn something inefficiently. There would be no difference between a great teacher and a terrible teacher otherwise. Or a great coach and a terrible coach.
- runevault 4y ago
  The entire software industry is based on creating new efficiencies... On top of all the stuff you said I just... don't see how anyone could believe that.
- m463 4y ago
  I've always thought research papers were a longcut to comprehension. I don't know if this is because the subject matter is novel, or that the authors are better at math and science than writing. I wonder if there could be a standard for grading a research paper on readability to raise the status quo.
  - cedilla 4y ago
    Unfortunately, readability is at odds with other, more important goals of the authors, like shoe-horning in references to all important papers in the field, especially if they're likely to be written by reviewers. Also, a lot of work must be shown to demonstrate completeness and rigorousness, and that doesn't help comprehension either. The trick is to read only the segments of the paper that are actually worth reading, which is often only the abstract, conclusion and maybe implementation details.

lucideer 4y ago

> tl;dr. Actually no, the results will probably not surprise you. After analyzing data from 2,074 testers, we found no evidence that Bionic Reading has any positive effect on reading speed. I've seen a lot of viral social media posts about bionic reading recently and this is the very first time I've ever seen anyone mention reading speed. Everything I've seen is selling bionic reading for greater reading comprehension and focus. Never mentions speed. Granted the article measures reading comprehension too (though I'd have some doubts about the methodology of 3 MCQs on a PG article - this part of the test didn't seem high on the author's priority list). Did the authors just waste a lot of their time because they didn't pay attention to the claims or are we just in very different bubbles?

hoodwink 4y ago
giant hero section on bionic-reading.com: "Did you know that your brain reads faster than your eye?" title of bionic-reading.com: "Faster. Better. More focused. Reading." does "faster" not refer to speed to you or something?
- lucideer 4y ago
  I'd heard of Renato but not the registered trademark (why don't they use the font throughout the website)? I guess that answers my question: different bubbles

kleer001 4y ago

I'm not surprised at all. Maybe I'm just older, have seen more, and have a better tuned BS meter.

thenerdhead 4y ago
This is just the 2022 version of Spritz(2014). Before that... SQ4R - Survey/question/read/recite/reflect/review Gummy bear trick - Place candy/gummy bears on the pages and eat them as you read them. SparkNotes - Read someone else's summary of what you need to absorb.

TeeMassive 4y ago

Why they didn't test for comprehension of the text? This is a huge flaw of this study

hoodwink 4y ago
https://blog.readwise.io/bionic-reading-results/#comprehension https://blog.readwise.io/bionic-reading-results/#comprehensi...
gnicholas 4y ago
Perhaps you did not comprehend the writeup, which describes this aspect of their analysis in some detail.

aeturnum 4y ago

This fits with my experience so I believe it! That said, I did feel like the bionic rendering made me more likely to read every word as opposed to skimming sentences. It also made reading feel more "percussive" which can be fun. Definitely an interesting line of inquiry even if it's over-hyped.

WhitneyLand 4y ago

What about instead an AI project that rewrites content for fastest consumption and easiest comprehension? Not a summary, but kind of like a lossless re-encoding for maximum human efficiency. You could even allow custom reader profiles that take into account things like vocabulary an subject expertise.

a3w 4y ago
So, the gist bot that some subreddits already use? It has a different name than gist which I cannot recall, but probably an ML algorithm.
- lkbm 4y ago
  AutoTLDR, which uses smmry.com[0] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ https://www.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotl...
  - WhitneyLand 4y ago
    I was specifically proposing not a summary, because I know summaries are already done and they have their purpose. But for people who want to read faster in a lossless way this wouldn’t apply.
- WhitneyLand 4y ago
  Not the same, it just summarizes.
  - a3w 4y ago
    Oh, true, that even works with german texts, so the TLDR-bot has probably limited language comprehension and does not rephrase things.

tmalsburg2 4y ago

Completely unsurprising. The bottleneck in reading is not visual recognition of words or eye movements. Source: decades of actual research on this topic.

pluc 4y ago
Headline: Does Bionic Reading actually work? We timed over 2,000 readers and the results might surprise you First line: tl;dr. Actually no, the results will probably not surprise you fuck this
hinkley 4y ago
We'll figure something out though. It was big news about ten years back in sports medicine that cooling off the lower arms was unreasonably effective for recovery, even, IIRC, better than a full body ice bath. I don't know if they still do it, but at the time they were showing off these weird baggies you put over your arms like oversized mittens and ran coolant through. We know sleeping helps with memory retention. We know that NSAIDs influence experiences of emotional pain. What other folk remedies and completely random things also work on memory? I forget, is caffeine now established wisdom or do they keep going back and forth on that?

t_mann 4y ago

Meta comment: I'd appreciate if we could adopt the 'academia style' for headlines (ie tell the results right away) instead of the 'clickbait style' (click here to find out). So in this example: "Bionic reading does not change reading speed: results from our experiment" instead of "Does Bionic reading work? ...".

SimonPStevens 4y ago
I really hope Dang or one of the others in charge here is reading this and is willing to consider it. The change suggested here would be one of the greatest single improvements to the signal-to-noise ratio on this site, and even news in general. It would be a policy change rather than a tech change really, and would need some enforcement. Just a reminder on the submission page, and perhaps a banner at the top of the home page highlighting the policy change, and directing people to flag titles in the wrong form. (Or, failing that, does anyone have any suggestions for good tech news sources where the titles are in this format, this is definitely something I want to see)
- gnicholas 4y ago
  It would also be easy to prompt you to consider rewording if your title has a question mark. There would be some false positives, but I'd think the vast majority would benefit from rewording.
sbeckeriv 4y ago
I read once that a headline that ends in a question mark is almost always a no. I think the thought is that positive answers to a question are shared as a statement. Much like you shared. It saves me a few clicks?
- madrox 4y ago
  You ended with a question mark, so I must assume it doesn't save you a few clicks. I'll take my downvotes now.
dang 4y ago

philosopher1234 4y ago

my reading bottleneck is understanding and contemplation, not eye motion. for that bionic reading seems useless

deleted 4y ago

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thorum 4y ago

The article’s conclusion doesn’t seem to match the data they collected. They found that most people (52%) do read faster with bionic reading, the effect is generally quite small, but large for some minority of users - at least one user read 293 WPM faster with Bionic Reading! The authors then average results (good and bad) across all users, resulting in a number close to zero, and conclude Bionic Reading doesn’t work for anyone, even calling it a placebo effect at the end. The problem is, all brains are not the same. It doesn’t have to work equally well for everyone to be valuable.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> the effect is generally quite small, but large for some minority of users - at least one user read 293 WPM faster with Bionic Reading! Well, that's not really something you'd want to admit in your paper, much less advance as an argument. The obvious conclusion is that there's a mistake in your data, not that some users will see an increase in reading speed of 4.9 words per second.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
tristanho 4y ago
The results are what you would expect if you measured two identical fonts, ie random. You can make the _claim_ in your comment, but there isn't statistical evidence that this effect is more than random, or if the same people were tested again their results wouldn't be opposite. Put another way, it doesn't pass the null hypothesis.
- thorum 4y ago
  I think the best approach would be a graph showing the distribution of users across different WPM differences, and if possible a second experiment with two non-BR fonts (to see how much random variation is expected). The positive results might all be noise, but I don’t think that should be the default assumption.

Barrin92 4y ago

can we kill this entire fad of speed reading and productivity life hack nonsense already? I propose we start to advocate slow reading in the spirit of Peter Norvig's learn programming in 10 years, and tell people to actually enjoy what it is they're reading.

therealdrag0 4y ago
Agree. Even beyond enjoyment I’ve heard multiple very accomplished people in a variety of fields (from theology to math) say in interviews “I’m actually a very slow reader.” So sure reading fast would be nice, but I think that’s mostly biological whereas slow quality reading you have full control of and we need to focus on that instead.
- w-j-w 4y ago
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Ok, but… I love being able to speed read. Love it. And I can’t speed read many things, like philosophy or “zorba the Greek.” Lol just kidding I totally speed read that shit (but slow down when necessary)
spoonjim 4y ago
Well there is some stuff you want to enjoy and there's other stuff you want to process as fast as possible so you get more time to read the stuff you enjoy :)
ffhhj 4y ago
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few are to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”
irjustin 4y ago
I disagree. There are things I want to learn and I really don't care for the fluff. Ironically (or not?) self-help books are absolutely full of fluff but at their core can have very useful/helpful ideas. They just get expounded upon back up with 10 specific examples where each example starts at the beginning of the person's life in full detail. Speed reading has helped me get through those books and learn something where I would have wasted so much time or actually never even picked the book up.

TT-392 4y ago

I find it increadibly hard to read, so I really hope it doesn't become a common thing. So I am kinda happy about these results.

anjc 4y ago

Can you show the distribution of reading speeds. If this font has a multimodal effect then the t-test mightn't be appropriate.

hoodwink 4y ago
i made the dataset publicly available. all the distributions are approximately normal.

Blackthorn 4y ago

The whole thing was a hilariously transparent marketing strategy to begin with for their stupidly expensive (and tracks-everything-you-read) API.

refulgentis 4y ago
I don't think so, and I have 0 interest in any of these companies -- I did find it notable they were checking a company's claim, on a company blog, but I also found it notable there was 0 mention of how this related to their company
- Blackthorn 4y ago
  Sorry, don't think I was clear. I don't mean this study, I mean Bionic Reading and their virality in the first place.

woopwoop 4y ago

If your reading speed is the limiting reagent for your understanding a piece of writing, you should read something else. It's like if the limiting factor in your programming speed is typing. The thing to fix is probably not your typing speed.