Lori asks: When you ask someone a question where they have to remember something, everyone seems to look up and off to the side. Why do we do this? Down and to the left, straight-head but unfocused, and, of course, up and to the right, when asked a tough question or to recall a long-buried memory, most of us shift [...]
Category: Read
A speed reading mode. Contribute to emacsmirror/spray development by creating an account on GitHub.
To address the fact that many of us are on the go and pressed for time, app developers have devised speed-reading software that eliminates the time we supposedly waste by moving our eyes as we read. But don't throw away your books, papers, and e-readers just yet -- research suggests that the eye movements we make during reading actually play a critical role in our ability to understand what we've just read.
A new Web app is making waves, claiming to offer effortless speed reading, but experts say it doesn't really work.
iOS: Speed reading is a great skill to have when you need to quickly get through a massive block of text, but it takes time to learn how to do it. Syllable is an app that teaches you speed reading techniques by pulling articles from your clipboard, Pocket, or Instapaper.
iPhone: Speed reading is tough to learn, but Velocity is an app that makes it easy. Just toss in an article from Instapaper, Pocket, or your clipboard, and then Velocity displays it word by word so you can read it fast.
iPhone: If you read a lot, it's probably a good idea to learn speed-reading. And the best way to learn is to go through your current backlog of things you want to read. So if you have a lot of articles saved in Pocket, Instapaper or Readability, you're in luck, because Outread will help you get through them and learn speed-reading in the process.
I’m really excited about a new speed reading app called Spritz 24. The only drawback is that it only allows readers to go up to 600wpm at the moment.
Spreeder 11 also looks good.
I can read at 1,000 wpm there without it feeling too much like “skimming”, though it’s possible to miss an important word like a number when blinking– edit: see below. I think it would be better if the full text were written below it so that one could look up any words that were missed.Those apps seem to break the speed limits mentioned in this article 5.
Check them out and let me know what you think…
Edit: I did some searching online and found some more apps, which I’ll link to below. I think the words are missed at 1,000wpm speed not because of blinking, but because certain kinds of text don’t work at this speed. I just tried it with some text from the wiki and I think that it’s too fast for lists and numbers in general. One improvement that could be made is to automatically slow down half or quarter the speed when encountering things like numbers and lists. Maybe it would also help readers if the apps would slightly pause at punctuation.
Edit 2: on further experimentation, I think the 1,000wpm speed is skimming. When using their simple-English examples, it works, but nothing beyond “skimming” when using normal text, like this random example 2 from Wikipedia.
If you’re looking for a quick memory fix, move your eyes from side-to-side for 30 seconds, researchers say. Horizontal eye movements are thought to cause the two hemispheres of the brain to interact more with one another, and communication between brain hemispheres is important for retrieving certain types of memories.
👓 rapid eye movement from dominique o’brien | General Memory Chat | Art of Memory Forum
Hi, in a TV-show about all kinds of crazy world records I saw dominique o’brien memorising 50 objects that were placed on some kind of running track. When he was doing this, his eyes moved from side to side in a very fast pace. This reminded me of an incredibly smart IT-guy (I felt like Forrest Gump in comparison) that came to our warehouse to implement a new computer system. If he was asked a very difficult question he would look up in the air and his eyes would behave precisely like those o...
Possibly tangentially related:
- If you sit on a swivel chair (safer than doing the same thing standing up) and gently place your fingertips on your closed eyes while you turn around and around, you’ll be able to discern that your eyes will still exhibit saccadic movement even though you can’t “see” anything. (Not sure if this is true for the blind, but it’s worth considering who this may not be true for and why.)
- Rapid Serial Visual Presentation methods for speed reading (Spritz and related apps) work well primarily because they limit saccadic eye movements which take up a proportionally large portion of your reading time. (Ultimately I think there is an upper limit to how fast one can read and comprehend and retain information.)
- The visual systems of chickens are responsible for their odd walking manner in which they throw their heads forward and then move their body underneath them while their head remains stationary. Essentially while their head is moving, they’re “blind”.
Is it possible that saccades of the eye are tied into our visual processing and memory systems in a manner deeper than we’re consciously aware? Does reading on a page help our comprehension or long term memories more because the words have a location on a page versus RSVP reading methods? Do our mental visualizations (imagination) change depending on these visual/reading methods? What effects to these have on our memories?
Some interesting questions worth pondering/researching.
A while ago I wanted to move all my Instagram posts for my three IG accounts to WordPress. To my surprise I couldn’t find any tools for that. I asked in the IndieWeb forums but nothing there either. I found a feature in IG where you could export all posts to a ZIP file on your computer. I download...
👓 Trump's Allies Have Been Attacking The Person They Say Is The Whistleblower Since 2017 | BuzzFeed News
He's been accused of being “pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia.”
👓 Cracking pass codes with De Bruijn sequences | John D. Cook
Suppose you have a keypad that will unlock a door as soon as it sees a specified sequence of four digits. There’s no “enter” key to mark the end of a four-digit sequence, so the four digits could come at any time, though they have to be sequential. So, for example, if the pass code is 9235, if you started entering 1139235… the lock would open as soon as you enter the 5. How long would it take to attack such a lock by brute force? There are 104 possible 4-digit codes, so you could enter 000000010002…99989999 until the lock opens, but there’s a more efficient way. It’s still brute force, but not quite as brute.
An interesting serendipitous read just as I’m coincidentally doing some other combinatorial work relating to Polya and De Bruijn.
👓 More on attacking combination locks | John D. Cook
A couple weeks ago I wrote about how De Bruijn sequences can be used to attack locks where there is no “enter” key, i.e. the lock will open once the right symbols have been entered. Here’s a variation on this theme: what about locks that let you press more than one button at a time?
Originally bookarked on November 06, 2019 at 12:08PM
👓 The Web Falls Apart | Baldur Bjarnason
The web's circle has expanded to contain the entire world. But the centre is not holding.
I get where Baldur is coming from and I’m watching the area relatively closely, but I’m just not seeing the thesis from my perspective.