Can you read faster in seconds?

You’ll read faster, understand more, and spend half the effort doing it.

I love running experiments like this on myself. I first encountered this idea back in 2014, when Spritz appeared. It’s a way of presenting text in which words appear on the screen one at a time, usually right at the center of your field of view.

Up to 1000 words per minute!

I was eager to test the technology and noticed a difference almost immediately. Admittedly, it wasn’t only my reading speed that grew — so did the bags under my eyes. Staring at a single point for long stretches turned out to be difficult for me.

Now a new method is going viral: Bionic Reading. The idea is simple: the first letters of each word are bolded so your brain automatically fills in the rest. The result: you read at lightning speed without losing comprehension, and your eyes tire less (!)

There are already open-source fonts, apps, and browser extensions that let you reformat text in a couple of seconds.

I’ve gotten older since 2014, and these days I look beyond the marketing promises. So I dug up a few studies that call the method’s effectiveness into question. The available experiments found no statistically significant improvement in reading speed or comprehension: the method appears to have little or no measurable effect.

Oh well! The important part is that this doesn’t stop millions of people, myself included, from believing in magic and embracing a sense of adventure. Share your take in the comments — I’ll be over here installing this font on my Kindle!