I love to find new, interesting, neat things — ideas, discoveries, innovations that can change the world or change the way we look at the world. We should all do our best to hold onto that proverbial “child’s sense of wonder,” although many of us don’t.
On the other hand, I have long been a card-carrying skeptic. If it’s too good to be true, it isn’t. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Occam’s Razor says the funny-looking clouds at sunset are probably not UFO’s, but either some simple atmospheric phenomenon, a jet trail, or a rocket launch out of Vandenberg. There are no gigantic international conspiracies with thousands of evil henchmen and minions flying black, stealth helicopters and “disappearing” anyone who finds out about them. And so on.
So when I saw this, my first reaction was, “Yeah? Right, I’ll bet. It’s too early for April Fool’s Day, isn’t it?”
On reading the article, it seems at the least that someone will soon be putting out an app that will try to do what they claim, letting you double, triple, quadruple, or more your reading speed, with better comprehension to boot. Given their coverage in the mainstream media, I went to their website to see their example.
I encourage you to go take a peek. I’m not 100% convinced yet, and I would like to see it in a real world application with something other than their advertising and promotional materials. But, at least at first, it did seem to work, work amazingly well, and be really easy to get used to very quickly.
The example they have starts you off at 250 words per minute, which they say is just a touch faster than most people read. I thought that it was real slow, dragging. Then you’re shown how to pick a faster speed. I went straight to 500 wpm and was very surprised at how easy it was right off the bat. I then pushed it to 600 wpm (which is the fastest that the demo goes) and found that I could read, but I had to both relax (don’t think about it, just do it) and concentrate (don’t look away!) simultaneously.
My first impression is very positive, to say the least.
But that brain of mine is already looking at the problems that there might be. For example, when reading normal text, our eyes tend to jump around. In dialogue, we jump back a couple of lines to make sure we know who’s speaking which lines. In exposition, we jump back to check something that we might have glazed over at first, but now realize what we were being told. I often have to flip back a few pages or a chapter to double check something.
E-books are great for this by the way, especially since on most of them these days you can search, flag items, bookmark passages, make notes, and so on. I would be curious how Spritz will allow you to do that.
More importantly, I said that I had to really concentrate at the faster speeds to get everything. If there was information that I needed to process for a second, I missed the next half sentence or more. If the cat (with claws freshly sharpened) jumped onto my lap (she did), then the distraction caused me to miss quite a bit.
I’m sure there’s a way for the software to allow you to go into a “browse” mode, and I’m sure that there will be a way to jump back a little bit if you get distracted. For all I know, they may be using the forward facing camera on the smartphone to be tracking your eye movements, allowing the software to “know” when you got distracted and mark that spot in the text. Now that would be cool, if a little bit spooky at first.
Anyway, check this out for something interesting that may be more than just a technological parlor trick. If it works as advertised, it could really help us speed through our daily reading. (You do read a lot daily, don’t you?)
I just hope that neither e-books nor this kind of technology ever replace the option of having a good, old fashioned, “dead tree” type of book to read while sitting out on the porch at sunset with a beverage of choice.
LATE NOTE: Just before publishing this, I went and browsed the Spritz website a bit more. A couple of other very nice bits to check out if you go there:
- It seems that every sub-page on the website (“Developers”, “The Science”, “FAQ”, etc) can in turn be “Spritzed”. Just click on the button at the top of the page. A little bit more of a demonstration on how it works, and it seems to continue to work well.
- Read the FAQs. You can skip over some of the technical ones if you wish, but there are some funny nuggets buried in there. One of the big concepts that I took away from my MBA program was “corporate culture,” and I like one that’s got a sense of humor and some actual wit to back it up. And about four screens down, the picture under “Human Trials”? That’s funny!
They’re hiring programmers and database experts, I wonder if there’s room for a jack-of-all-trades accountant and office manager dude?
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 