On Speed
Most people speak at 100-150 words per minute. And they read at 150-250wpm. If you're an experienced or professional reader, you can probably manage 400-500.
With a month's practice, you can get up to 1000 - the problem being that although you can comprehend text that fast, retaining it for more than a few seconds is difficult. It's as though your short term memory is a small shelf, and pushing a rapid stream of new things on one end pushes other things off the other end - before you have a chance to move them to the bigger shelf of longer term memory.
I can get my reading speed comfortably up to 800, with high comprehension and low retention, and I use it for proof-reading and finding specific information that skip-reading would likely miss.
There are techniques for going faster than 1000, and retaining what you've read by chunking it up into gestalts. But they're very difficult and I never had the patience to learn them.
All of which means...people speak painfully slowly. Really, talking is a terrible way to make spoken words. The geek who uploads a video CV communicates less in five minutes than his written CV does in thirty seconds - and it's annoying to 're-read'. The half-hour radio documentary gives you a handful of facts delivered at a snail's pace, padded with waffle and repetition.
So why not...listen to your radio at double the speed? Record the show, put it through some time-compression freeware - so the 'tempo' doubles but the pitch doesn't - and double your listening ability.
And that's what I'm doing. Today I listened to a biography of Joesph Grimaldi and the letters of Arthur Conan Doyle at double speed - coming to around twenty five minutes each. Seeing as the average human attention span is 20-30 minutes, I think that's a plus.
There are people who download a dozen podcasts a week, and by slightly hacking their iPods, get through them all with time to spare.
Next thing to try: Putting an ebook through a text-to-speech reader, doubling the speed and have my phone read to me at a speed that's comfortable to listen, but physically impossible to speak.
The above article, read by a not-quite-perfect mechanical voice, in one minute sixteen seconds:
On Speed.
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Yeah, but where's the pleasure? I like listening to Stephen Fry's podcasts because I like his voice and what he has to say. If I listened to him at double speed I might glean more, faster, but the pleasure would be gone. The same with novels.
ReplyDeleteWe're only here once so chill out, relax and enjoy. However if you enjoy listening at double speed that's all well and good, carry on. It's just not for me. ;)
Captcha: gragsan - an agent of the dark one that should have made it into 'The Wheel of Time'.
PS The 'on speed' mp3 is wondrous and songworthy. :)
You're quite right that listening and reading pleasure is generally inversely proportional to pleasure - at least for the kinds of speech we read and listen to for pleasure, like Mr Fry.
ReplyDeleteBut I'm thinking of the textbooks and science podcasts, which do have their own pleasures, but which you wouldn't call relaxing.
I've just listened to a short essay by Trotsky which would have taken me 35 minutes to hear at normal speed, and maybe 15 minutes to read. It took 6 minutes, and I reckon I got as much as I would have done reading it. Including points where I disagree with the author.
Rapid listening isn't something you could do for enjoyment, but if you're like me and often spend half hours doing nothing but walking from one place to another, it's a good way to keep the brain active and stop boredom.
One thing you can't do of course is put it on in the background and tune in and out. It does need constant attention.