Hacker News Reader

Comment by gm-conspiracy | Hacker News Reader

Can you speed read?

That...is a fascinating question. Usually when dealing with verbal thought, it turns into voices in my head, unlike the OP. That might be why while I can read pretty fast, I still can only do so about carnival barker or auctioneer speed, rather than faster than speech. I could be automatically limited in my rate of comprehension due to how it's being processed, still as a 'voice', rather than visuals that map directly to concepts. I would -love- to see survey results on that, whether people had tried to speed read, if, having tried, they succeeded, and whether they tend to/ever have an 'internal voice' in their minds when thinking

You can train yourself to speed read (and shut down the subvocalization that gets in the way, at least temporarily) so I don't think it's totally dependent on not having an inner voice at all, though that might help. It's interesting. (To train: use a metronome and your finger. Scan each line with your finger on each beat, have your eyes follow your finger and try to understand what you're reading by sight. Eventually you'll get to a BPM faster than even your auctioneer speed so your subvocalization just won't be able to keep up with your finger, and so to understand you'll force yourself to stop subvocalizing. Increment the metronome. Occasionally do stretch goals where you increment by a large amount at the cost of comprehension, then go back down to a speed still above where you originally started, and that becomes your new base. Eventually you can wean yourself off both but you may still need one or both every now and again to power through something at full speed and full concentration. At some point you may start processing multiple lines at once.)

Yeah, I figured I could eventually teach myself; it's never been something I cared about enough. Even at my fastest, my recollection and enjoyment suffered. If it was fiction, appreciating the author's prose and word choice and flow was more important, and seemed best enjoyed by vocalizing it, and if it was non-fiction, then capping my speed helped me understand and consider and generally grok the concepts.

At my somewhat-below-fastest (which is still faster than my current normal, as I'm a lazy reader these days) my concentration, recollection, and enjoyment was the best -- plus I finished everything way faster. For anything serious (and I mean you seriously want to enjoy something or seriously want to grok something) you will have to slow down. But that doesn't mean you can't go faster than your current fastest and still get those other things out of reading that you want. It's all in the training. Don't train with William Faulkner.

I subvocalize when I read. I'm capable of recognizing written words without subvocalizing, but they don't have any meaning. There are two cases when I'm reading, though.

- For pleasure, when the goal is to enjoy the book, rather than to get through it quickly

- For information/knowledge, where it's useful to really slow down and think about what I'm reading. Even when I'm "subvocalizing" (an inaccurate term because it generally implies mouthing the words without making sound), I can read faster than I can understand, if the information is novel.

Here's an informal survey

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4wttu4/do_you_hear_a...

Yes, but that's a bit orthogonal (I don't think it has to do with not having/using an inner voice). I could since I was young, which made the teachers irritatedly think I was joking when I was done before the rest of the class were a third of the way into the text.

Which inevitably leads to additional questions probing your actual comprehension. Fortunately, after a few weeks in each grade, I found that teachers did tend to accept it. After sufficient probing attempts that felt like they were trying publicly disgrace me for claiming to have read the material but not actually doing so...

So, how did you learn to read or sight words?

Sight words were a new concept to me when I saw that's what they were using to teach my son, so I have to assume it was standard reading. I don't have a clear memory one way or the other though, so I can't be sure.

With me, they wouldn't even bother, they'd just say "stop joking around and read", so I just re-read the whole thing, more slowly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com