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Exceedingly slow narration, particularly what's normal for audiobooks, is annoying to me because it's slower than I process words. It's like walking with someone whose pace is far slower than your natural gait -- it takes more energy and concentration to slow down. It's why slow-talkers are so annoying.

This isn't "how fast can I go through this" but "what is a comfortable pace"?

So I bump the speed up, though usually fairly modestly: 1.25x - 1.5x is generally enough.

I've noticed that preferred speeds vary tremendously with the quality of the work and speaker -- high-density information and an exceedingly good speaker, and I'll slow down. Slapdash redundant content and poor speaker, I'll speed up.

The degree of polish in the production matters tremendously. I've listened to CPG Grey's YouTube videos (highly polished) and podcasts (a lot of chit-chat with his co-host). The videos work well at normal speed, or perhaps slighly sped up. The podcasts I find nearly unlistenable, though they improve at much higher speeds (1.75x - 2x).

I'm totally with you, I speak at effectively 1.5x in real life, so that's what feels natural to me listening. But I get turned off if something needs to be sped up _beyond_ reasonable human speaking speed to be palatable, like 2.5x or 3x. It's like putting a pile of salt on really bland food. I get the feeling that I'm panning for gold.

I can't keep up with fast talkers and I like my books and movies at nominal speeds. When things are fast I can't pay attention. My brain needs to extra cycles to wander and consume and let my focus be split.

I watch lectures online at 1.5-2x for a similar reason. At that speed I have to concentrate. Slower and it is easy for my mind to wander.

Yes, and the painful slowness becomes even more evident if you speed it up to the 1.25/1.5x range, get comfortable with it, and then go back to 1x. IME, it sounds like the speaker is going over-the-top to enunciate, like you're a small child or have learning disabilities or something.

Audiences vary, and many listeners of audiobooks are visually disabled who may also have hearing problems. Pitching the default to these seems a fair deal, particularly as speeding up is so straightforward.

That's interesting. If you're talking about Hello Internet, I enjoy listening to them at 1x. I find it quite relaxing to listen to passively.

To date, this is the only podcast I can actually enjoy. I generally do other things while listening, and feel like I'm in the company of friends.

It undoubtedly has a relatively low density of information however I wouldn't speed it up, I would slow it down!

As a slow walker I respectfully disagree on the energy to slow down vs speed up! Concentration may be equal however. I get absolutely exhausted keeping up with you fast walkers. :)

Yup! _+1

I think some audio books are slightly slowed down by default, many I've listened to sound more natural at about 1.2x

Part of the reason for this is that its rare for audiobook software to have a 0.9x playback option, but common to have a 1.25x option.

I tend to listen to audio books at 2.5-2.8 times speed and all media I consum is at 2x speed.

Tip there are 10s of chrome extentios that allow you to change all html videos to 2x speed or even higher (including most ads on sites like YouTube and Hulu)

I used to watch a lot of lectures at a high speed. But I've came to realize that the faster I watch something, the faster I forget it.

It is like the infromation doesn't have the time to settle in my memory, despite me understanding it.

It's maybe because when things are slow, I can use the dead time to think about the implication/corner cases of what's being said.

If you really want to understand it, I would encourage you to write down notes about it by hand.

For some reason I do not yet understand, the motion of physically putting pen(cil) to paper helps ingrain that information into your brain, in a way that typing it into a computer does not.

Some people say writing is better because typing is "unnatural", but from an evolutionary standpoint both are extremely, equally unnatural activities. There's no reason moving a cylinder of graphite with one hand should be inherently better matched to the brain than moving squares of plastic with two.

My personal guess is that, with fast typing speeds, it's too easy to just copy things word for word. With writing, you have to at least rephrase it and reorganize it to fit the notes reasonably on the page, which forces some processing to occur. I take notes solely by typing, but I only have retention if I do it slowly and reflectively.

I have a pet theory that our brains are hard-wired to store information "better" if it bears some kind of personal/individual imprint.

In other words, we can "store" knowledge more efficiently when written in our own handwriting than when typed into a neutral/generic text editor.

Hmm... then perhaps it's good that I'm extremely particular about how I type my LaTeX, down to microadjustments to the kerning to make it look nicer.

There is a difference: people have been using small handheld objects to create images on flat surfaces for tens of thousands of years. Moving squares of plastic to remotely and invisibly trigger a change in the patterns of light emitted by an electronic display is somewhat different. This could explain some of the studies that have found differences in retention of typed and handwritten notes, but there are many confounding factors.

While writing is ancient, in almost all cultures the ability to write hasn't been widespread until a few centuries ago. It just isn't that useful in agriculture when books cost a fortune, and historically almost everybody was a farmer. I doubt an ability possessed by a small portion of the population over a few thousand years had a large evolutionary impact.

This varies by person. Not everyone learns by writing. Some only learn b hearing or seeing. Some can only learn by doing. Most of us are a mix. I learn just abou every way except for writing or typing. Online lectures i do best by playing at 1.2x at most and pausing regularly to let me think of implications and to crosslink to things i have already learned.

This post was far more controversial than i thought it was. I keeps gettin voted up and down. Anyone explain why?

IMHO it's primarily because you have to process and comprehend the information in order to make a decision about what's important enough to jot down.

Although, anecdotally, I find that writing notes by hand is better for recall than typing.

I'm not sure if this is because writing activates different parts of the brain, or simply because writing is slower and forces me to therefore think harder and comprehend better because I need to be 2x as selective about what makes it into my notes.

My money's on the latter, but who knows?

I think this is likely it. In my opinion, it reminds me of autoencoders. Having to compress the information means understanding the content enough to discard unnecessary bits.

I can roughly keep up in real time with speaking on the keyboard. Even though speaking is a bit faster than my max rate around 90 wpm, by dropping filler words and gaps I can mostly avoid summarizing and quote verbatim. When transposing at full speed like that, I feel like a conduit at times, very little sticks deeply in memory.

Contrast with writing notes, where I'll only write down things I find particularly important. Most of the time I'm just trying to actively listen.

Purely anecdotally, I feel like when I am typing and summarizing to the same compression ratio as writing, my retention with typing is better, because I can do it without looking, it's faster, and I can tune back in to the speaker.

On the other other hand, with a laptop open, I'm much more likely to get distracted with emails/tasks.

Bottom line, I think we need to study more axes of this problem, if only because it gives neat insights into cognition.

Here's a paper on the topic which presents some ideas: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976145245...

Also, I was amazed at how listening twice to a history lecture really helped my retention. I'd listen while walking to my next campus class.

People tend to enjoy genre fiction because it is full of predictable filler. Not all entertainment has to be surprising or life changing.

Just spending time in the moment with an enjoyable story is not wasting it.

I think this really is a case of to each his own. Pure fiction with drawn out descriptions and excess vocabulary drives me to anger.

I think I have a similar thing visually, where above a certain text size, I have a very hard time reading. The optimal text size for me is pretty small, even on a standard resolution display.

After doing speed reading exercises a few years ago I initially also started to use the techniques for novels, but that was a bad mistake in my opinion.

While I could get my comprehension percentage quite high with a bit of training, I lost all connection to the characters and story, stopped imagining the scenes and felt like the reading the book was a waste of time.

Novels should be read at a natural pace to give room to your imagination and dive into the story. You can still quickly scan over boring/repetitive filler text, but I did that without caring about WPM already.

With other things like textbooks / articles / reports cranking up your WPM and applying your attention more selectively by focusing on or re-reading critical parts is a very helpful skill though.

Maybe "speed readers" still receive knowledge at around 39bps - they just filter out a lot more.

I think there's something to that. You're zipping through just listening for the highlights. Similar to how you can listen to a full podcast, or often just watch highlight clips on Youtube and feel like you "mostly" enjoyed it. You got the best stuff. Obviously that isn't what some people want, but it's an interesting optimization.

> . If you can process content much faster than it was meant to be played, it doesn't mean you're learning much faster than you could, it means the novel information density is low.

I 'read' your comment using TTS at 3x. What does that say about the information density of your comment?

(Little to nothing. TTS at that speed is still marginally slower that I normally read with my eyes. Human speech is generally much slower than is necessary to be understood.)

That's a good point, 3x speaking speed is reading speed, so there's nothing unusual about using it on comments largely intended to be read. That makes perfect sense.

What doesn't make sense to me is consuming things that have a _set_ speed, such as video/TV or lectures, at a dramatically faster speed.

I imagine it's a compromise between cutting through the fluff and using the primary source material.

You could just read the plot synopsis or watch the highlights, but sometimes those don't convey build-up, suspense, or other data that are hard to losslessly compress.

Being comfortable with the "boilerplate" of a given medium or genre usually lets you skim or skip it to jump right into the good stuff.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks while doing other things; walking, cleaning, cooking, traveling, playing games, etc. Every time I try speeding up, even just to 1.25x, I don't enjoy it as much, as it feels rushed and stressful. I think it could be interesting to learn to listen and read at extremely high speeds, but nothing more than interesting, and I'm even doubting the usefulness of it.

On the flip side, I listen to podcasts at 2x and now the hosts' voices sound weird when I hear them at 1x elsewhere.

Same here. I go anywhere from 2.1 to 2.5 based on the podcast.

Mummy, why is everyone in real life drunk?

heh, when I slow audiobooks down to 1x it sounds like the reader is drunk. I usually go with 1.5-2x depending on the reader.

As I used to tell my boss: a man page read once thoroughly is worth more than ten-times skimming it quickly.

Any content that can be sped up [by 8x] without loss is not worth listening to in the first place.

"That's just, like, your opinion, man."

Obviously the people who are getting something out of it, otherwise they wouldn't do it?

"Don't yuck my yum."

> I can read fast, and I typically go through fluffy NYT bestseller nonfiction at 600 WPM. But when I do this I constantly have a sneaking suspicion that I'm just wasting my time. When I read a good book full of new ideas, I barely go at 150 WPM, but the time always feels well-spent.

I do the same, but with Hacker News comments :)

Hey, I never said my comment was a novel insight! I'm here to waste time too. ;-)

In my experience the best books routinely stop me dead in my tracks. I just started Invisible Man and every paragraph is littered with really deep themes, I can normally finish a 500 page book in a few days (a majority of my reading is done during my commute) but this will definitely be a slow burn.

I think it depends on the speaker. I watch most videos at 1.5x speed, and some slow speakers with gaps at 2x.

Fluff has value. Fresh cotton candy should be eaten rapidly. It’s fluff. It’s allowed :)

For me, when I'm reading something dense, my WPM fluctuates. It could be 300WPM in the easy areas, and down to 30WPM in the conceptually challenging areas.

I can watch videos like Linus Tech Tips up to 2x speed and get just as much out of it as otherwise.