What if you could read stupid fast?

Scanning my headlines today, I came across a curious article in FastCompany about Spritz, a technology that promises to speed your reading up to 250-1,000 words per minute (average reading wpm scores are between 180 on a monitor and 300 on paper according to a variety of places I located online).

Part of what was interesting about the article was the up front admission that not all reading is the same. Here are a couple of excerpts:

“Spritzing [sic] is not for everyone,” CEO and co-founder Frank Waldman tells Co.Design. “But for digesting emails, social media streams, and news especially, it allows you to read more in a shorter amount of time." 

and later...

“If you’re reading Shakespeare, you’re not going to want to do it with Spritz,” Waldman admits. “But with a romance novel, for example, people skim like crazy anyway. They just rip through a book, reading for plot. Are they savoring every word? Probably not.”

Whether people read romance novels for plot or for the steamy bits is not really the question, it's about that 'savoring' idea and whether some writing is fast food while other writing is haute cuisine. This plays into the myth of 'difficult' writing to some extent, as well as, on a cognitive level, what happens when you read.

Designers (who after all, are often responsible for the look and feel of what we read, that's not an author's job) know that some typefaces facilitate reading and others discourage it. They may also be familiar with research that shows that we read words all at once as a result of shape recognition and through predictions about what will come next in a given sentence. Some designers have even begun to develop type for readers who deal with reading-disruptive problems like dyslexia. Though reading began as a means of recording and transmitting the human voice, it lost that function more or less with the advent of printing in the west (according to Steven Roger Fischer, who write a great History of Reading). Though a number of readers still sub-vocalize out of habit, we can read at speeds that greatly outpace our ability to speak.

Spritz apparently exploits some of those cognitive loop holes by aligning text around a certain key space on the screen and flashing through it centered on that axis. Certain letters are rendered in red and their position in the word helps your mind decode them more quickly. Words flying by at the 500-word per minute rate were easy enough for me to follow.

All of which is fascinating, but it makes me think about the evolutionary conditions that led to reading in the first place and wonder whether or not we are living up to our potential. Presumably, our ability to read grew out of the evolutionary need to find meaning in the indexical signs in the landscape. Those who could 'read' the footprints of possible prey in the mud or dust, interpret how recently made they were and the direction the animal was headed, had an evolutionary advantage over those who couldn't infer that information from visible markers.

By that theory, the ability to read on a primitive level is shared with a large number of species who can figure out information from what they see. Written language didn't come along until approximately 4,000 years ago (some 30,000 - 50,000 years after early people started scratching patterns into ochre or paintings on the walls of caves), so it is arguably an aspect of our mental faculties that was latent until a function appeared for it.

Would I want superpowers of speed in reading? Yes and no...I realize that I often don't fully understand the impact of something when I first see it, and my books bristle with post-it flags that beckon me back into passages I need to think about. Watching words race by on Spritz, I wonder what happens if I try to reflect while I read, if I'll get myself tripped up and crash like a runner who has lost his stride. But the whole problem makes me wonder if we aren't actually endowed with powers we simply haven't discovered - capacities to read, to communicate, to notice - that we just haven't pushed hard enough to obtain but which lie dormant inside us, like the power of reading did for centuries.