Our “TRAIN THE BRAIN” technology or how I am practicing my speed listening.
I first started my research on video speed and its impact on comprehension and retention last summer when my friend (and my co-founder now) told me he had invented an adaptive playback speed and we together started working on personalizing the video speed to the user’s attention span.
Words Per Minute (WPM) consumption
There is a natural gap between how many words you speak and how many words you can comprehend. You actually speak much slower than you can understand. The word-per-minute rate for an average speaker in English is around 130–150 wpm, but you can very easily understand the material at 200 wpm. For example, Tony Robbins usually does his podcasts and talks at around 200 wpm and we all perfectly understand him and love listening to him. And here’s an interesting thing; I trained my brain to listen to him even faster.
So, before giving details on how exactly I trained my brain, I want to explain WHY I started all this and WHY having your own pace on video materials is so important.
Why should we watch videos at our own speed instead of the speed imposed by the content maker?
Every human being has a unique brain structure. Every single person has a different cognitive load capacity, and to reach the cognitive capacity's most optimal usage, everyone should consume online content at their OWN pace. However, when video content is being recorded, it’s recorded with one-pace-fits-all logic. So we have a mismatch here. The creation happens at one speed, and the consumption happens at infinite variability. This is when we started working in the direction of speed personalization.
Taking into consideration the amount of data we interact with daily, it is fully NATURAL for us to look for ways to consume more information in less time.
In this video, I tried to articulate the importance of personal speed and how a “one size fits all button” that just brute force multiplies and divides the speed by a factor does not work, especially for non-native English speakers like me and most people I know and interact with. Actually, only 30% of English speakers worldwide are native (around 1.1 billion people speak English as a second or third language).
This is an original WPM curve of an online learning video, and you can see that the speed in one single video changes from 116 to 226 wpm. Now let’s imagine that you are a non-native English speaker and your comprehension AND retention are at their best when consuming the material at the speed of 160-170 wpm. Clearly, you have a problem here. Now let’s imagine that you try to solve your problem and apply 1.25 or 0.75 fixed speed-ups. Do you think your problem is solved? Of course not. If you ask me, it’s even worse. That’s why we’ve created the only personalized adaptive speed solution (Saima).
Now, that we already have the solution, we can fix you at 170 wpm and let the AI do the magic. We will automatically speed up and slow down to match your cognitive capabilities.
But this is only the beginning. After going a bit more into cognitive science and working with neuroscientists, we realized there is so much room to improve the cognitive load. It is limited, but an average person is far from using the cognitive load most optimally.
Our “TRAIN THE BRAIN” technology or how I am practicing my speed listening
There are so many papers, research, articles, and people talking about speed reading, how it affects your everyday life, and how one can benefit when practicing speed reading techniques. One of the main topics is “you free up some time for another book" or “you free up some time to spend with your family." What about people who watch the news, listen to podcasts, watch educational content, or any other content?
People spend 90.4% more watching television than reading a book.
Online learning platforms together have over 200 million active users.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics:
In 2020, 5.4 million college students (74%) took at least one class online
A little more than 1 in 10 postsecondary institutions offers courses primarily online
2.8 million students (15%) attend primarily online colleges
UC Berkeley conducted very interesting research recently, called “The Representation of Semantic Information Across Human Cerebral Cortex During Listening Versus Reading Is Invariant to Stimulus Modality.” Nine participants listened to and read narrative stories while whole-brain BOLD activity was recorded by functional MRI. The semantic maps recovered in the study show that semantic tuning in individual participants is very similar across the two modalities, meaning that our brain reacts similarly to the information, whether it’s in a written or verbal form.
This made me think and start working in the “speed listening” direction since speed reading has already proven its efficacy.
Have you ever watched something online and caught yourself thinking about anything BUT the video you are watching? Like what to wear tomorrow or what to cook tonight?
Happened to all of us, right? There are two explanations for this:
a. The speed is too slow initially, and you are bored.
b. The speed was okay at the beginning, but after a short period, you got used to the speed, the speaker, the tone, and overall pace, and your brain is bored again
Well, science calls this mind wandering. You get easily distracted when the speed of the video is not optimal for YOUR personal cognitive load at any given point in time. When your brain is bored, you lose focus. When you lose focus, you start multitasking and thinking about something else or simply take your phone and start scrolling.
This is exactly when we started working on our “TRAIN THE BRAIN” technology and this is how I improved my listening skills. And now I can easily listen to Tonny Robbins at 230WMP, and I still have a long way to go.
First of all, we identify each person’s cognitive ability baseline (this is a topic for another article; if short, we cooperate with neuroscientists and our users pass a short cognitive questionnaire). After we’ve identified the baseline, we start increasing the speed in one single video in an unnoticeable manner for the user, keeping the brain always stressed enough.
This is when the cognitive load is working at its peak, you are less inclined to get distracted, you understand everything perfectly, AND save a lot of time. After some time, your brain is ready to increase the initial base level, and our tool suggests you change the base level by X amount of words per minute.
Nowadays, our environment is loaded with incredible volumes of information. If we transfer all sounds we hear, all pictures we see, and smells, thoughts, and tastes to pixels, bytes, and gigabytes, our daily collected data will exceed the data collected by a medieval man during all his life. We did not grow a bigger brain, instead, we gradually increased everyday information load, and nowadays we must deal with information processing, storing, and further possessing.
Professor Manvelian, the Chairman of the Department of Neurology at Yerevan State Medical University quoted this once, which I think beautifully sums up all of the above.
Have you ever thought about the last quote? Are we all using our supercomputer called “The Brain” effectively and efficiently?