Woody Allen once joked that he'd finished War and Peace in 20 minutes after taking a speed-reading course, summing up his insights as "it involved Russia". Twenty minutes might be a bit of a stretch but, according to Boston-based start-up Spritz, the average reader will soon be able to get through a work the length of Tolstoy's opus in less than 10 hours.
In February Spritz released a demo on its website inviting users to test themselves reading at various speeds of up to 600 words a minute. An accessible and clever example, it shows how the text streaming technology works while praising users as they progress upwards with their word count.
Humans read linearly by using the fovea, the centre point of the retina, to distinguish between individual letters.
The time-consuming part of this consists of having to move from one focal point to the next. The rapid movement of the eye as it makes these involuntary, imperceptible shifts is known as the saccade, a quivering motion that can often lose focus or slip onto the wrong line as we read.
These lapses cost readers time have an impact on concentration. The Spritz technology reduces the amount of movement needed by flashing one word at a time into a screen known as a redicle.
Even as the words flash at an ever increasing pace, readers are still able to register the text. Or put simply, the words move instead of the eye.
Rapid serial visualisation presentation technology (RSVP), where individual words flash up on a screen, has been around for decades.
The innovation at the centre of Spritz is the addition of a single-character optimal recognition point (OPR), where the ideal letter in each word of black text is highlighted in red or another preferred colour.
Spritz is to date only available as an email application on the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Gear 2 but it was shipped to developers worldwide earlier this month so plans for expansion are imminent.
Big claims
While stressing that the application aims to augment the reading experience as opposed to replacing it, the company's website still makes some big claims.
For example, you can now "technically" read Ayn Rand's 645,000-word Atlas Shrugged in a day, though the tongue-in-cheek tone of the site recommends taking some breaks.
With an upper-range average of 1,000 words per minute, Spritz in theory lets you read a standard-length commercial novel in 90 minutes.
No more bragging that you've finished Infinite Jest or devoted years to In Search of Lost Time . Secondary-school students should also take note: that's To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye done before lunchtime, and throw in The Old Man and the Sea if you get up early.
Today’s technology is constantly offering readers more. More choice, more devices, more formats, more access to more material. But when it comes to the physical act of reading, it is unable to offer the most sought-after more of all – time.
As reading habits continue to evolve, it is not surprising to find renewed interest in something that purports to do this.
Although a natural fit with our frenetic social media culture and its insatiable appetite for content, speed reading is not a particularly modern phenomenon.
Ingest material
An American teacher, Evelyn Wood, brought the practice to global prominence in the 1950s. Wood found that reading down as opposed to across a page of text enabled her to ingest material to the point where she said she could read 2,700 words a minute.
Spritz asserts that anyone who can read can spritz, defining the term as “a quick, direct burst of information that’s very finely formed and easy to understand”.
Applicable to a variety of content, from emails to texts to social media to digital books, it is certainly a captivating idea. While it is easy to see how it might work for shorter content, it is somewhat unfathomable for books and will remain so until readers can test it on standard-length texts.
After all, how many novels are read or remembered in quick, direct bursts? Acknowledging this, the company says its main focus is on short-term reading activity such as mobile news and communication.
This issue of length has been the primary problem with RSVP technology in the past. Our brains can input and process material using this technique, but as with the laborious task of reading itself, we must take frequent breaks. With each break, the brain gets disrupted and must relocate.
Detailed or difficult texts take time to understand and for their lessons and meanings to lodge. Comprehension and speed do not generally go hand in hand or, as Spritz itself says: “Just because you’ve got a Ferrari, driving it around town at 200mph is probably a bad idea”.
Other variables such as literacy, intelligence, concentration, memory and fatigue make Spritz’s flippant assertion that the app will work for everyone (excluding babies and zombies) hard to believe.
Critics have also pointed out that the research at the core of the business is opaque, alluded to on the company’s site as “eye-tracking studies” in general without attributing the findings to any scientific bodies in particular. Spritz says this is a bid to protect its intellectual property.
Knowledge, pleasure, diversion, utility, curiosity, discovery – the list of reasons people read is long and varied.
If Spritz does take off, it is likely to be in the areas of news and communication as opposed to literature.
That said, there will no doubt be readers who can't resist its charms. Who wouldn't want to devour Ulysses in four and a half hours? Spoiler alert: it involves Dublin.
