Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

> Bionic reading aims to encourage a more in-depth reading and understanding of written content

by reading faster? I mean the examples are pretty compelling and it did feel like I was reading faster, but at the same time their goals are at odds - faster reading doesn't necessarily mean more attentive reading, or being able to absorb more information.

Still, interesting technique. I just wish they made their examples / comparisons actual text instead of images; surely they can just write a snippet of JS or some HTML to render the effect in the browser itself. Or would that be giving up their secret sauce?

Also if any of the authors are here, please get rid of the "small text in between big text", I'm not sure if I need to read the one and then the other, or refocus my eyes on the big then the small text.

I think the less friction there is between the words on a screen and you having them in your head, the more readily you're going to absorb it. And attention is a demanding resource to expend, even if non-ADHD people don't notice it due to having ample supply.

But yes, this would be awesome to see as a browser extension. Maybe I'll get around to it at some distant point in the future.

It was explained in the link title before the change - their hypothesis is that our eyes are the bottleneck - the brain can understand more quickly than we can read. So by speeding up our eyes, we can understand more information.

I saw it as "reading with less effort" and "faster" is kind of a shorthand for "less likely to get bored waiting for my eyes to catch up".

I'd be more likely to read a longer piece of text (average content, not something I'm deeply interested in) if it was "easier" to read -- I get through it faster, or have to make less effort to get to the end.

As another comment said, this would be good for those with short attention spans or those with reading disabilities like dislexia to focus better. I would want to see an epub renderer so I can read ebooks with this method.

I had better comprehension on the Bionic text right off the bat, personally.

I'm on mobile so maybe that is why, but I noticed that I skipped over the sentence a bit. As in, I didn't notice the periods and comma at first. Would bolding the punctuation marks cause any issues?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com