muflax65ngodyewp.onion/src/experiments/speedreading.pdc

% Speed Reading

Wait, what? Speed reading? Isn't that pseudoscience? Partially, sure. However,
not all of it, and that really surprised me. Yes, speed reading *is* real. This
is my collection of useful hacks.

Hacking your brain for fun and profit
=====================================

Binocular Rivalry
-----------------

While working through [Consciousness Explained] by Daniel Dennett, I encountered
several experiments that I doubted. So I tried to replicate them. Specifically,
binocular rivalry seemed weird to me. Binocular rivalry occurs when each of
your eyes sees a different thing, typically achieved by just setting up a
barrier between them, and showing different pictures to each, e.g. horizontal
stripes on the left and vertical stripes on the right, or different letters or
faces and so on. What happens is that occasionally one side will dominate over
the other and you will only be conscious of it. Most commonly, at first you
kinda see both sides, then they partially merge, in a very patchy way, and
suddenly your vision _flips_, i.e. one side becomes clear and the other turns
invisible. This process then alternates randomly, unless even a slight
disruption is introduced to one side, like a moving dot, which causes this side
to become dominant immediately.

Allegedly, you may control which side is dominant most of the time, but you can
not be conscious of both reliably. I didn't believe that and tested it by trying
to read two texts simultaneously. In fact, I actually managed to do that! The
main visual problem is focus. It is quite hard to have each eye focus a
different thing, but using e.g. [DXM], you can actually pull that off. But even
without it, you can try to focus a middle point and just make the letters big
enough so that you can read them even out-of-focus. The real problem comes from
assembling two sources of input into separate sentences; at first, they always
mixed and I couldn't understand anything.

Being Myselves
--------------

I then controlled for that by using series of numbers and suddenly I was able to
read to things at the same time! For a while, rivalry happened a lot, but soon I
got into mental soft focus and could read (but not parse sentences) just fine. I
then speculated that I might be able to exploit both halves of my brain. In
split-brain patients, who don't have a connection between their left and right
hemisphere, you actually get two independent consciousnesses and I did read up
on people that tried to induce this with normal brains. 

Because the left side of vision (i.e. left in both eyes) is handled by the right
hemisphere and vice versa, you can wear glasses that have either their left half
on each glass blocked by tape or the right side, and only give visual input to
one. This actually causes a significant effect if your two hemispheres are
currently in disagreement. Some people with depression or anxiety were able to
reduce it or turn it almost off temporarily while wearing such glasses! So for
example, you feel very nervous with your therapist, block the left side,
everything is the same, then instead block the right side, wosh!, your anxiety
is gone. It comes right back when you take the glasses off, but still, way cool! 

So by being able to make each hemisphere dominant at will, you can really fuck
with your mood. Find where your language side is (typically the left hemisphere,
thus the right side of vision) and block it - you become more empathetic and
reading gets harder. Block the other, reading is normal, but relating to content
is harder. The effect is typically not that large because both sides are still
internally connected, but I found it quite noticeable.

Anyway, I tried to improve on binocular reading by separating not only between
eyes, but sides of vision. Let my left half of my left eye read one thing and
the right half of my right eye another. Focus gets really tricky that way, but
it is doable. And lo and behold, I could, albeit slowly, read two things at
once! Parallel processing, bitches!

What's that all got to do with speed reading?!
----------------------------------------------

Binocular reading isn't really practical (for one, you look ridiculous, two,
it's very difficult and slow), but I got interested in *other* ways I could hack
my reading process. If I can read in parallel, can I also read non-linearly?
Start in the middle of a sentence, jump around and still get it? Read really
really fast? Maybe subconsciously?

Now we're getting there! First, let me clarify one thing: speed reading literature
is a complete and total *mess*. Barely anything scientific, vague claims, lots
of lies and false promises, no clear terms, nothing. To remedy this, I'm going
to state *exactly* what I mean and what this is about:

Speed reading involves any technique that makes you read a normal text faster
**without sacrificing comprehension**. No, it's not **skimming**: that only
tries to give you a basic overview of the text. The idea is to be able to
understand the text just as if you had read it "normally", even though the
process of getting there may be very different.

But what can be achieved? First, measure your current reading speed. Say, pick a
Wikipedia article, read it, time yourself and then count the words. Average
among most people is about *200-250wpm* (words per minute). Good college
students read at about *300-350wpm*. A fast conventional reader gets up to
*500wpm*, maybe *600wpm* if they are really good. Speed reading, on the other
hand, falls into a range of about *800 to 1400wpm*. Because a normal page in a
book has about 350 to 450 words, depending on font size, people typically read
about 30 pages per hour, college students about 50 to 60 and speed readers about
150 to 250.  Those numbers are of course averaged over a lengthy text and don't
have to be constant - a difficult paragraph may slow you down and a simple one 
may just fly by.

What about **comprehension**? There are two components to it: **understanding**
the text and **remembering** it. Understanding means being able to follow it,
being able to give a summary of it and so on. Remembering involves still knowing
details, all characters or arguments involved and so on.

I am only interested in techniques that *maintain* a high level of
comprehension, typically a retention of 80-90% of the content. Sacrificing
quantity for quality is right out. Nonetheless, it is still true that topics
that are difficult to understand will always be read slowly, no matter the
technique used. Reading about theoretical physics will be slow unless you have
studied it. No speed reading technique will fix this problem. Most texts,
however, fit nicely into your rough skill level and the limiting factor is, in
fact, your reading, not your understanding.

Related to that, a common objection to speed reading is that it kills the
enjoyment, or that maybe you are just reading too easy texts. "Why hurry
something good?" I don't agree with this sentiment *at all*. If you enjoy
reading so much, why not read at 1 sentence per hour? Why not watch Star Trek at
one scene per day? What, that would be mind-numbingly boring? Why yes it would!
Also, if you increase your throughput, you become able to handle more complex
structures. A series filling thousands of pages is suddenly just as manageable
as a comic book was before. Reading up on moral philosophy by reading works
by/about the 10 or 20 most influential thinkers over the course of a week or two
is doable. Books become what Wikipedia articles were before. So if you don't
like high bandwidth and all the benefits that come with it, this just isn't for
you.

Finally, a note on **subvocalization**. When reading, there are basically 4
different ways with regards to sound:

1. *Reading out loud*. This is what beginners may do, or what you do when
   reading to someone. It was actually quite common in ancient times and the
   idea that you could read silently was very weird to many Romans.
2. *Reading to yourself internally*. You basically still do the same thing,
   including moving your tongue, but you don't produce a sound. This is often a
   transitional period for early readers (and make no mistake: for every
   language I learned, I went through that phase again). It will disappear with
   practice.
3. *Subvocalization*. You still *hear* the sound, but you don't feel that you
   produce it. Muscle movement doesn't exist (at least not any you would notice)
   and speed is greatly improved. You often skip words, or only hint at the
   sound. This is the normal mode for most people to be in, even many deaf (who
   often are not 100% deaf), and this is the *inner voice* most of us use to
   think.
4. *Reading in silence*. Finally, reading without hearing any associated sound.
   No inner voice, but direct meaning, just as you look at a map, for example.
   Because visual processing is, for almost everyone, vastly superior to aural
   processing you can read much faster that way.  Personally, I believe that the
   problem is that understanding an inner or outer voice is necessarily
   sequential, but the brain never *is* sequential, it is always parallel, so it
   simulates it. This is quite slow. Visual processing, on the other hand, is
   not - you can parse many parts of an image or scene at the same time and only
   coordinate results at the very end. Also, your visual hardware is far more
   optimized and greater in size.

Techniques
==========

The Conventional Approach - How to read fast the normal way
-----------------------------------------------------------

The easiest hack is to just read faster - you do everything you'd normally do,
just faster. As I mentioned, you can go up to about 600wpm that way. When I was
starting out with speed reading, I was already reading at 450wpm. How did I get
that fast?

I could credit reading practice. I do read a lot, especially on the web, but
that's not all that plausible. I know enough people who easily read just as much
as I was reading at 14 years of age, and I was reading about 400wpm back then,
too. Sure, you need to be fully fluent in a language to do that, but most people
never seem to go beyond 300wpm, no matter how much practice they have reading
texts.

So what *do* I credit? Video games. I'm serious. I played a *lot* of shooters
and racing games and this really improves your ability to react *fast* and react
to inputs from *anywhere* in your field of vision. You are also forced to shift
your attention around a lot and figure out threats as fast as you can. I also
notice that in anyone I know that played a lot of fast games: Their attention
jumps around a lot faster than normal, no matter what they are working on. 

The typical example is taking a gaming teenager and having their teacher watch.
Give the teen a computer menu to figure out, or a form to fill out or something
like this, and watch how desperately the teacher tries to keep up, even though
the teacher surely has plenty more reading practice. Still, no chance
whatsoever, and the same goes for all non-gaming teens. But any gamer will have
no problem, no matter the age.

So if you read only 200 or 300wpm, you are not playing enough. Get Quake 3 or Halo or
Starcraft, a big supply of caffeine and *train*. After a while, your reading
speed will pick up, I'm certain of it. Some people, especially those with ADHD,
may be better at this than others, but most gamers I know read fast, no matter
what their attention span normally is.

Turning off subvocalization
---------------------------

Chunking
--------

I highly recommend [Look, Ma; No Hands!], a book that teaches semantic chunking
very well. (And it's short and precise. You get results very fast.)

Once you read at a very high speed, it really makes a huge difference how large
your chunks are. Here's a little demonstration:

![chunk size 1](fast.gif)   
![chunk size 4](slow.gif)

Both animations run at the same reading speed of 1000wpm, but the first one
shows every word on its own, while the second one uses groups of 4.

Once you go beyond about 10 chunks / second, visual processing starts lagging
behind more and more. After-images, too slow eye movement and so on start
interfering with your reading. This means you can read maybe 600wpm if you read
every word on its own, but increasing your chunk size from just 1 to 2
immediately doubles your speed! The benefit is obvious, so pacing trade-offs
when increasing chunk size are often worth it.

The highest possible chunk size, according to all sources I read, seems to be
about one paragraph, which is about 100 to 150 words long. I suspect that a main
problem here is the size of the area you can keep in focus. Chunking a whole
page at once is probably impossible because you could never get all words to be
sharp and readable.

Font Size
---------

You can only succesfully chunk if you can actually get enough words into focus.

I was often reading texts at very high font sizes, like 30pt or so. Hey, I have
bad eye sight and sit quite far away from my monitors. But I found that this
makes it really hard to read fast, so I fixed my setup. I moved my monitors a
lot closer and decreased my font size. *A lot*. 

In my experience, a font size of 12pt (assuming normal DPI) is the *largest* you
want to use. I currently read websites at 10pt, which seems to be the best
compromise between readability and strain on the eyes. (I also find it hard to
read Japanese below 10pt. There just aren't enough pixels left.) 

At those sizes, the font used matters a lot. I've always been very fond of the
Microsoft fonts, even though I haven't run any of their systems for years.
Regardless, experiment and use something that is clean and very easy to read.

Speaking of font size, column width matters just as much. It's no use if you see
a lot of text, but the current paragraph fits into one huge line across your >20
inch display. The maximum line length should be about 100 characters or 20
words. 

If you are a console hacker, then I'd also recommend checking out bitmap fonts.
They really shine at such sizes. Remember that you can only fix bugs in code
that you see. The more lines fit on your screen, the better you can debug. 

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation
--------------------------------

Woah, that's a big word, when really, it just means "flashing words really
fast". RSVP

Late Binding
------------

Late Binding is a concept from computer science. Basically, instead of resolving
what an expression means right away (like when the program is generated), the
system waits until the latest possible moment. 

Reading nonlinearly
-------------------



[Look, Ma; No Hands!]: http://www.semanticrestructuring.com/lookma.php
[Consciousness Explained]: /reflections/con_exp.html
[DXM]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DXM