[HN Gopher] Show HN: We made an experiment to test if Bionic Rea...
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Show HN: We made an experiment to test if Bionic Reading helps you
read faster
Author : hoodwink
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-06-21 16:53 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.readwise.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.readwise.io)
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| 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).
| WalterGR wrote:
| 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."
| ironlake wrote:
| 1% faster with bionic reading, but I was eating chips and dip so
| maybe I was just distracted by stuffing my face.
| JaceLightning wrote:
| 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
| belkarx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| JaceLightning wrote:
| 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.
| saurik wrote:
| 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]
| tzs wrote:
| > I want my eyes to scan across the text rather than ratcheting
| from one word to the next word, which is both slow and
| exhausting.
|
| An interesting experiment is to try reading a word at a time,
| but without moving the eyes. Here's [1] a command line program
| that takes text on standard input and displays it one word at a
| time in a fixed position on the screen, holding each word for N
| milliseconds (3N milliseconds if there is punctuation) where N
| defaults to 250 but can be set on the command line.
|
| At the default 250 msec per word I found it very easy to read
| the material I tested with (random extracts from a Project
| Gutenberg edition of"The Valley of Fear", by Arthur Conan
| Doyle). That works out to around 160-180 wpm. (Not the 240 wpm
| you would expect from 250 msec/word because of the delays for
| punctuation).
|
| At 200 msec/word, it still feels like a very slow read. Rate
| was around 270 wpm.
|
| 150 msec/word gave around 320 wpm. Still not a problem keeping
| up.
|
| 120 msec/word pushed it up to around 380 wpm and it starts to
| get hard for me. If I don't quite catch a word and have to
| think a little to figure out what it was I can get distracted
| enough to miss more words unless some punctuation comes up soon
| to give me a little break.
|
| 100 msec/word, around 480 wpm, is still reasonably
| comprehensible but at that point requires a lot of focus and
| feels tiring even though my eyes don't have to move. Sometimes
| not moving can be as tiring as moving when you are trying to
| not move for a long time.
|
| I would not want to read a lot this way, but there are some
| places I wish it were offered. Many music players for example
| if the title does not fit in the space available autoscroll it
| back and forth. It can be very hard to read it while it is
| scrolling. A word flash display might work better there.
|
| [1] https://pastebin.com/70eYTDkk
| btilly wrote:
| I saw that demonstrated on Hacker News some years ago, in a
| web form.
|
| It. Was. Horrible. For. Me.
|
| My eyes are used to processing much bigger chunks than a
| single word, and know how to move to the chunk size that they
| used. Therefore I topped out at a fraction of my usual
| reading speed.
| btilly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| I simply read a lot of science fiction/fantasy as a kid,
| and it happened naturally. I would view claims that a
| random person could be taught to read at my speed with
| skepticism. But I've met other people who read as fast as I
| do.
|
| As a kid I thought I was simply a slightly fast reader
| until I happened to take a copy of
| https://www.amazon.com/Clan-Cave-Bear-Jean-
| Auel/dp/060961097... to a bath. I started, got caught up
| with the story, finished it, and finished my bath. My
| mother was so astounded that she quizzed me to verify I had
| actually read the book, and then estimated how what my
| reading speed had to be.
|
| The weirdest thing is that my brain really does play
| catchup. I told my mother to test me by picking random
| spots and reading a few sentences. I was then able to tell
| her what was going on, and when handed the book could find
| the passage. That I was able to do. But the book was still
| jumbled up in my brain - I couldn't have given a plot
| summary for a day or so.
|
| I strongly suspect that this kind of "brain pipelining"
| with large amounts of buffering is critical for really fast
| reading. Get every slow step out of the loop, only do
| what's fast. Let the slow bits of your brain catch up.
| steve76 wrote:
| karaterobot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| 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...
| dwighttk wrote:
| Hit finished reading and got a blank page...
|
| Was there an ad or something?
| belkarx wrote:
| There wasn't. What lists is your adblocker running? I got my
| results with standard uBlock.
| mhzsh wrote:
| 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.
| westcort wrote:
| 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(v
| ar d in b){var i=b[d].textContent;i%26%26(c=c+"\n"+i)}for(f=c,e=f
| .replace(/\n/g," <br></br> "),g=e.split("
| "),h=0;h<g.length;h++)k=a(g[h].length/3)+1,l="<span style='font-
| weight:lighter'>"+g[h].substring(0,k)+"</span><span style='font-
| weight:lighter'>"+g[h].substring(k,g[h].length)+"</span>
| ","."==g[h].substring(g[h].length-1,g[h].length)%26%26(l+="<span
| style='color:red'> </span>"),m+=l;n.document.write("<html><p
| style='background-color:#EDD1B0;font-size:40;line-
| height:200%25;font-family:Literata'>"+m+"</p></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(v
| ar d in b){var i=b[d].textContent;i%26%26(c=c+"\n"+i)}for(f=c,e=f
| .replace(/\n/g," <br></br> "),g=e.split("
| "),h=0;h<g.length;h++)k=a(g[h].length/3)+1,l="<span style='font-
| weight:bolder'>"+g[h].substring(0,k)+"</span><span style='font-
| weight:lighter'>"+g[h].substring(k,g[h].length)+"</span>
| ","."==g[h].substring(g[h].length-1,g[h].length)%26%26(l+="<span
| style='color:red'> * </span>"),m+=l;n.document.write("<html><p
| style='background-color:#EDD1B0;font-size:40;line-
| height:200%25;font-family:Arial'>"+m+"</p></html>")})()}();
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Probably a good idea to add `font-size: 0.5cm` in there or
| something.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| > 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.
| TT-392 wrote:
| 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.
| gnicholas wrote:
| It looks like the non-Bionic text is lighter than the Bionic text
| (and lighter than the text used for the questions). I could be
| wrong, but this seems like something you'd want to equalize.
|
| Otherwise, the lower contrast of the non-Bionic text could be
| artificially boosting Bionic's apparent performance.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| 400ish wpm with normal text, 0wpm with "Bionic Reading" wibbly
| wobbly fonts. It just doesn't look like text.
| demopathos wrote:
| 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
| horsawlarway wrote:
| I don't understand.
|
| From their own metrics - speed went up by a lower percentage than
| comprehension dropped.
|
| This sounds like a terrible idea...
| bruce343434 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| kminehart wrote:
| Linked at the end of the article is the short (15 minutes maybe)
| self-test: https://speed.readwise.io/.
|
| Curious what results people here got. I got 23% faster with BR
| but I couldn't tell if I was just trying harder.
| Izkata wrote:
| I got 1% faster with Literata (385 vs 390). Bionic made my eyes
| stutter so much I just didn't like reading it either.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| 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.
| BrightOne wrote:
| 23% faster with BR as well. 528 vs 419 WPM. Made a point about
| feeling comfortable while reading.
| lkxijlewlf wrote:
| I was a mere 2% faster. 404 vs 396 WPM.
|
| Edit: 2% faster with BR.
| hoodwink wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ianferrel wrote:
| I got 15% faster with the non-BR font. I was trying to do the
| same amount on each.
| gcheong wrote:
| 12% faster with Literata.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| danamit wrote:
| 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.
| ushakov wrote:
| 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"
| kaba0 wrote:
| I believe the screen is a huge factor in it as well that should
| be accounted for.
| hoodwink wrote:
| we're capturing desktop versus mobile :)
| [deleted]
| arlix wrote:
| nice! Surprised to see I ended up reading faster without bionic
| reading
| Zababa wrote:
| 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.
| Tagbert wrote:
| But does it help you retain what you read? Speed workout
| comprehension is pointless.
| cstanley2 wrote:
| This is really cool
| daenz wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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