Hacker News Reader

Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

Is this a left/right brain split specific thing or is there another thing going on? ever explore it?

I can do neither of these things. One voice dominates, self speaking, reading, listening to another person talk to me - the rest of them get 'left behind'.

View on HN

The trick is to read without sounding out the words in your head. Then since you're not thinking in speech when reading, you have room to listen.

Hrm... I'll have to try it. When I speed read I shut down the internal monologue, but if someone was talking to me I'm skeptical I'd be able to read effectively still, but maybe I'm being too negative.

I'll give it a try.

I’d heard that this is, to some extent, impossible, because everybody subvocalizes when they read. Wikipedia supports this, but I guess the goal is to minimize subvocalization rather than to eliminate it completely?

“Micro-muscle tests suggest that full and permanent elimination of subvocalizing is impossible.”

I know this is true for me. If I press the tongue to the roof of my mouth while reading, I can’t stop the muscles from moving very slightly as I read.

Sometimes I wonder how many things we've "proven" because our studies aren't large enough to observe all the edge cases. I sometimes wish I could contact the researchers and volunteer myself as a counter-example.

I haven't hooked myself up to electrodes and measured nerve response, but as far as I can tell I don't subvocalise when I read. I can also turn off my internal monologue; I don't have to hear the words in my head as I read them though I typically do.

I tried this when reading Ready Player One (I counted to eight in my head to stop vocalizing). I did read it much faster (in fact, faster than my partner who is a native English speaker/reader). I cannot vouch for how much I remember of the book though. I think it's less, because I remember watching the movie thinking "oh, right, that's what happened" about a major plot part. That's never happened with other books that I first read, then watched the movie/series adaptation of.

It's hard to avoid subvocalizing when you're thinking about avoiding it. It's like not thinking about the pink elephant.

I feel like that experiment would be easy to contaminate..

Sometimes if I'm stuck in speech/subvocalizing mode it can take awhile to get out of it.

I think the easiest way to tell if I'm subvocalizing or not by checking my current reading speed. Subvocalizing can slow things down.

Also I think I'm more liable to subvocalize during fiction, with lots of dialogue involved. Acting out the characters in my head slightly.

Also, that way you can read alot faster, you just scan all words in a sentence and let your brain handle the translation of visuals directly to concepts.

For me it's a little bit of a struggle to read like that, I need to count in my or use my inner monologue otherwise to accomplish that, otherwise my reading slows down automatically. I'm sure you can train both ways of thinking.

I think it's just practice. I used to be an internal monologue reader into my 20s until I worked to not be one(because I wanted to increase my reading speed). Maybe I was neurally set up to achieve this - I am strongly left handed and have been told by many people they dont understand my thought process on things(not in a bad way, just sort of "where the heck did you come up with that") throughout my life.

Just start looking at text and don't let yourself say the words in your head.

mmmm reading w/o internal monologue isn't the problem. It's reading effectively while listening to someone else speak. My brain just then is listening to the person and whatever I'm reading just sort of doesn't take.

Maybe I haven't tried it enough.

I don't know a lot about the subject, but wouldn't it be included in the price you pay for reading slower due to reading+speaking+listening in the whole process the fact you absorb more? (not defending any side, just questioning)

I switch between the two. If I'm having trouble fully grokking something, I have to resort to the "read and recite every word in my head" method.

Most of the time, I speed read and seem to somehow use another system to take in the information. I usually just absorb the important bits. When speed reading I can definitely simultaneously carry on other conversations much more easily than when I'm internal monologue reading, but one or both is still going to suffer to some degree, for me. That's super impressive if you can really maintain both at 100% simultaneously.

I work in information security, and often rely on the speed reading approach when trying to determine if something is legitimate or not within a sea of noise. For example, there was a malware alert that triggered on a giant JavaScript blob. These alerts are often false positives (or "benign true positives"). My co-worker prettified it and asked me to help take a look. In total, it took up about 20 or 30 screen heights. I took his mouse and just started rapidly scrolling and scanning for anything suspicious-looking, and after a few seconds he looked at me like I was insane and asked how I could possibly analyze the code like that.

I was able to vet it as "very likely clean" in about 10-15 seconds, while it took him several minutes of mentally processing every character in every line. That said, this is kind of like an inverted bloom filter: if there's a match, it's definitely a true positive, but if I don't see anything suspicious, there's some small chance of a false negative. So I "hit the bloom filter" first as a kind of efficient cache. If there's a match, then I've saved a lot of time. If there's no match, and if it's important that I need to be 100% certain with my conclusion, I make the full "database call" (line-by-line read).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com