| After
considerable evidence, they concluded
that reading speed wasn't limited by
the ability of the brain to process
information, what really slows us down
is the mechanics of the age
old process of reading. They discovered
two main challenges that keep us plodding
along.
1) The
slow, laborious work of moving our
eyes from word to word across the
page and…
2) The habit
from childhood of "Sounding Out"
each word silently as we read.
What was their solution to
overcoming these limitations?
They used technology to alter the
way they displayed the words to their
subjects. The result was a startling
and immediate leap in reading speed.
What
was this new method?
Basically, they made a movie
out of the words. They projected words
one at a time onto the center of a
screen. By eliminating eye-movement
they found they could display the
words at a very high rate of speed
and the subjects were able to dramatically
increase their reading speed while
maintaining comprehension. They simply
sat back and "watched" the
words. Their brains did the rest.
Reading
and understanding 1600 words per minute
The results in the lab were astounding
in more ways than one. The test subjects
were reading information about yacht
building (a subject none were familiar
with) at 1600 words per minute. Later
comprehension testing revealed that
even at that incredible speed their
understanding was comparable to reading
far more slowly on paper.
Brain
scans tell the story
How was this possible when
most people struggle to read barely
200 words per minute? The answer lies
in how our brains process information.
It turns out that when the subjects
underwent brain scanning as they read
in the lab, a different area of their
brain lit up than had been associated
with "traditional reading".
It seems the visual cortex
was doing the work of understanding.
This is the same region of the brain
that recognizes and understands non-verbal
symbols. (like stop signs and toxic
labels). And this is the key point.
Written words are just symbols.
And the human brain is "hard-wired"
to process visual symbols incredibly
quickly. We don't have "sound
out" words to ourselves to understand
them, we can simply recognize them
and know instantly what they mean.
In other words, the limitations to
reading speed have to do with how
fast we can SEE and
recognize the word symbols, how quickly
they can be displayed to us, not how
fast our brains can process them.
RapidReader is the practical
application of this research
At SoftOlogy IdeaWorks, the goal was
to adapt these principles to create
a practical solution for use in the
real world. After more than 10 years
of research, the result is RapidReader.
Now you can have a convenient, computer
assisted tool that does what all computer
applications do, allows you to choose
when to let your computer make an
everyday task easier for you.
Patented
"Speech Mimic™" technology
The Rhythm of Language.
When you use RapidReader for the
first time you will notice the rhythm
of the display of words as your reading.
In addition to applying new clinical
research to everyday reading tasks,
SoftOlogy IdeaWorks invented a patented
breakthrough concept; it's called
Speech Mimic Technology (SMT). This
is a critical advance in using the
computer for accelerating your reading
in daily use. As you use RapidReader
you will notice a cadence or rhythm
of the display of the words. This
display is carefully modulated to
"time" the words so they
are displayed in the rhythms of human
speech. Humans are "hard-wired"
from birth to understand speech. What’s
more, even before we understand the
words themselves, the rhythm of language
is highly significant to our understanding
of the context of what's being said.
Our brains are structured to use rhythm
as a component of comprehension. The
Speech Mimic Technology was developed
to take advantage of this natural
ability. As a result, comprehension
is easy, comfortable and natural even
at very high speeds.
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