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Comment by furyofantares | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely, good for you. I’m glad that works for you. But it’s a strange reply. I’ve described an attention disorder and a method for coping with it and your suggestion is that maybe I shouldn’t have the disorder in the first place. Which I agree with, but it’s not particularly helpful. I suppose that’s not fair. Let me try again: I’d love it if I could mindwander a bit while still paying attention to the lecture, the entire problem is that I cannot do this. That inability is called an attention disorder. If I have time to mindwander at all then I immediately get lost in my thoughts and am unable to pay any attention to the lecture.

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Well, it's ambiguous from my perspective, with no more information, whether or not the behaviour was a genuine disorder or just caused by bad habits (akin to causes mentioned in the currently highest voted post[1]). It sounds like it was the former, in which case I'm sorry. I guess I was also not really thinking about it as a reply to you specifically, but rather to the entire audience of readers here on HN who I wanted to give a heads up on, in the context of your comment, that it's possible to experience lectures in more ways than one.

[1] http://nautil.us/issue/52/the-hive/modern-media-is-a-dos-att...

I don't think it's a disorder or a bad habit. People process information at different speeds, if you're out of your comfort zone, that processing will be inefficient.

To be fair, your original comment did not mention a disorder, and a reasonable person could assume a lack of a disorder from the comment alone.

It's true that I did not use the word 'disorder' and I understand that not everyone has given much thought to attention disorders. But being unable to choose where to focus attention or to sustain that focus is what an attention disorder is.

Have you tried mindfulness? I have had the same experience as you have (it sounds like) in that I am able to speed listen more effectively at 2-2.5x than at 1x. Since I've started trying to be more mindful and meditate regularly, the improvement in focus I've experienced is incredible.

I agree that the idea of mindwandering while paying attention is foreign. I think I had a slightly different response than the grandparent, which is to drag the rest of the people in the seats along with me. I am sure there were many people who were bothered by my questions and hand-raising (in 200 person lectures), but sometimes my questions were real questions silently shared by others in the class. I think it isn't uncommon that students treat lectures as very inconvenient 3D video explanations, and many professors are so bored and detached that to veer slightly off course is to disgruntle them significantly. I think of it this way: as the student, paying tuition, your instructor is effectively working for you. If you left, they would not be able to do this part of their job (which some would prefer). If your professor isn't facilitating your task at hand (conveying a holistic understanding of the topic under discussion), then they aren't being effective at what you are paying for them to do, and it might behoove one in such a position to take active corrective action (drag a better explanation of the topic at hand out of the professor). This is all somewhat cavalier as I haven't been in school for a long time, but I feel like it was an approach that helped me, given it is hard for me to multitask as described, and would have helped others whom I have known.

Thank you for bringing this up. Throughout college I have had this issue and one of my favorite things was when a professor would publish the audio recordings of lectures so that I could listen at 1.75x-2.5x and rewind in case I wanted to rethink something. I also really enjoyed that app where you have words changing at the same location at 600 wpm. I tried speed reading a normal book but I would always get way more tired than with this approach. I really wish they had multiple choices for learning instead of the same technique for past 10 000 years which is known not to work for everyone

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