The Ink-Pot and the Palette

The popcorn-eating study is fascinating. The first thing that went through my mind is "Maybe it also works in reverse: we eat in front of the TV so we don't have to feel the subliminal effects of advertising." It would explain a lot about the current level of obesity in the western world. My science is bad science.

On Spreeder, I installed the extension in my browser (Chrome). I think it also has a "bookmarklet" for Firefox. That way it's kind of omnipresent and available when needed.

I'm finding the two-word chunks to be about optimum, at least for now. Three felt overwhelming at 500 WPM, but too slow at 400. Supposedly you can speed up as you get used to the technology. It's less useful for fiction, I find, because of how much is usually conveyed with typography and layout--paragraphs, extra line spacing for significant break, italics and bold, etc.

It almost goes without saying that I don't want to speed-read fiction--takes a lot of the fundamental pleasure out of it--but fiction is a good case study for the technology because it's fascinating to see how you get the gist of a story as if speeds by. I tried Spreeder on a short but explicit piece of fanfic last night and really, it was hilarious at that speed. All the important porn-words flashed by, and of course those words still snag the eye a bit, so the words immediately following them in the flashing sequence got lost, and I was left with just the, uh, bones of the porn.