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Comment by martindbp | Hacker News Reader

Is there any actual research/study on the efficacy of bionic reading? If it improves reading speed / comprehension significantly then it's really a no-brainer.

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I did a wholly unscientific test on the example listed on the bionic reading website. I finished reading the normal example in 12 seconds, and the bionic reading example in 11.5, which I'd say is within the margin of error/normal variance. I don't see the advantage of this, but I'd love to see evidence that suggests otherwise.

I think the hype is being driven mostly by a subset of ADHD folks who have discovered that this might be the “trick” that stimulates them enough to be able to read.

Like I really don’t know how to describe it but the lack of stimulation is debilitating and manifests in physical pain that I basically have to sleep off like a headache. Unless I can hyperfixate on a book I pretty much can’t read and I can’t control what the gremlins in my brain choose to hyperfixate on. It’s a miracle I make it through English.

Agreed, this sounds similar to Beeline reader (https://www.beelinereader.com/) which I didn't find helped my reading speed (per their test as well) despite lots of studies cited.

I found that beeline did help me, to the point that I briefly paid for it. I stopped when I realized it was reporting back every site I visited to the developer’s Google Analytics.

Hi Paul, BeeLine creator here. We do log URLs visited on an anonymous basis, so we know where the tool is being used and where we should optimize. These data are never linked to individual user accounts, and I think we'll remove this logging soon from the paid version, since we get enough data via the free users. But even with the free users, we never link this data to users or email addresses. This is detailed in our very short privacy policy, as we take user privacy very seriously.

Please reach out (contact in profile) if there's further info I can provide on this, or if you have other questions. We launched on HN many years ago and have been glad to have so many HN/YC'ers using our tech on their devices and in their apps.

I too have been wondering if this is mostly placebo. For familiar words, don’t our brains automatically read entire words as a single fixation point? I.e. we don’t read in terms of letters, but see the word as an atomic unit?

I would guess that my brain, by seeing certain words hundreds of thousands to millions of times, has found a more efficient way to identify it than the same word with a few letters bolded. Of course, this is based on no data, I’m genuinely curious if this helps.

My n=1 is that it makes me slightly slower but probably within the margin of error. I find that I recognize whole words at a time, and the shape of the word is unnatural to me when half-bolded like this, which might inhibit recognition slightly. Perhaps after an adjustment period it would be useful, but in my current state, it is not.

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