Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsid | Hacker News Reader

Question: What happens when you're reading?

For me, my inner voice kind of repeats it, if that make sense. Can't wrap my head around what "understanding" would be without that lol.

View on HN

This isn't directly related. It's likely a product of how you were taught to read. You can learn to read without it by trying to have the inner voice say something different like 'a, e, i, o, u' while reading. It takes practice but it increases your reading speed.

Is comprehension changed?

I don't know of any particular studies on this, but in my own experience comprehension is changed by how quickly I read, not whether the voice is used. Learning this just raises the speed limit for when you want to read easily comprehensible texts such as news or comments.

Thanks for the pro tip!

I just reread your post with my inner voice repeating “foo” over and over. Is that the kind of thing I should practice? I don’t understand.

Yes that works too, probably a nicer one for the HN audience as well! If you can learn to read that way, eventually you won't need to repeat any more and you can read without the voice.

Hmm, I then hear my inner voice repeating that text and shouting FOO at the same time. It makes me feel stupid because I can't stop repeating what I read.

I glance at the paragraph, it glows briefly, I blink, I trace a spiral from the center counter clockwise, and if I still don’t have comprehension, I go back a couple paragraphs or try again the agonizing word by word way. Sometimes I read left to right to left depending on text width and such. I can usually keep math in the right order but I'm known to add left-to-right which involves the concept of 'one past nine' as a 'digit' for the sake of forcing it into base 10 math, and then I unroll the carries right-to-left, but not always, it depends.

> I trace a spiral from the center counter clockwise, and if I still don’t have comprehension, I go back a couple paragraphs or try again the agonizing word by word way

Wow. What?

My experience on reading isn't as dramatic as the person you're replying to, but similar.

I read whole paragraphs and/or sentences in one go. I don't really know "how" I do it, and there are limits (it really, really helps to know the author and their writing style). My eyes hit the paragraph, flick to see the end of it, traverse back up half-scanning each line, then I scan through the lines from the top, and afterwards I know what the paragraph was saying. It takes a few seconds per paragraph.

I can't recite it verbatim but I can effectively describe the content of the paragraph accurately.

If I have to read something word-for-word it's so slow that I tend to get bored or frustrated quickly. I don't find that slow, word-for-word reading gives me much more than by inhaling paragraphs whole.

Yep, basically like this. I can’t repeat anything I read verbatim, but I can remember a sentence someone said and quote it back to them easily when context requires it.

I don't know, man. I work with my brain as best I can. Some pages of books are an entire page of "glance, glance, okay, that's all meaningless" next-page. But I also remember books as intensely as TV or in-person experiences, if not moreso.

If I'm trying to figure out whether what I've just written will make any sense to other human beings, sometimes I'll say a fragment of it out loud to hear the emotion and make sure it's landing properly. My edit history on HN is probably >99% of my comments have edits within sixty seconds of sending it, because Fixed-width reads different than Sans-serif, and I can't absorb many Fixed-width fonts very well in white-on-black, certainly not whatever the browser defaults are. (InputMono Light dethroned Menlo Regular after ten years in my Terminal, and I miss it any time I'm in the browser. Yes, I know I how to fix that in the browser.)

Reading is the inverse but the same: sometimes I have to do five passes on a paragraph or page, just to fully grasp whatever it's trying to say.

Have you been tested for dyslexia or other disabilities?

Seconding this. This description sounds like severe dyslexia to me, and the good news is there are a lot of resources and therapies out there which might be able to greatly improve your quality of life if you choose to seek them out.

Definitely worth speaking with an appropriate medical professional for diagnosis.

When I read normally, I hear it in real time. There’s a “default” voice, or I can make it a character voice at will. If I want to read a lot faster, I switch the voice off. I seldom do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com