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hold on! before you scroll down this article, you can stop here and think about it. how fast do you usually read articles like this? is it a quick glance at the main points, or is it a sentence-by-sentence reading?

steve is a podcast lover. he subscribes to many podcasts. however, as the number of podcasts piles up, he gradually finds that he can’t listen to them anymore! another podcast fanatic, rachel kenny, inspired him.

rachel kenny started listening at 2x, 3x speed in order to listen to more podcasts. calculated in this way, listening to 5 hours a day is equivalent to listening to 15 hours of content, and you can listen to 20 to 40 episodes of podcasts every day...

steve also started trying to speed up listening to podcasts. it feels good, and as your brain gets used to listening to fast talk, accelerated podcasts become easier to understand. in fact, we can process text very quickly, and our reading speed can reach 250 to 700 words. research shows that the average person can understand 300 words per minute in accelerated audio.

when a normal american english speaker talks, the speaking speed is about 110 to 150 words. so it stands to reason that there is no problem in speeding up listening to podcasts.

steve quickly doubled the speed of listening to podcasts. after quickly getting used to it, he decided to increase the speed to 3 times. as a result, everything started to become confusing... steve found that he wanted to it takes your full attention to remember what was said in the podcast. although i can understand the words, it is difficult to understand an entire sentence. after listening to it at 3x speed for only 20 minutes, he felt as if his brain could no longer be "lit"... the headache made him close his eyes...

i don’t know if you feel this way, but there is so much good content on the internet now that you can’t finish it 24 hours a day! so in recent years, more and more people have begun to choose to "accelerate" audio-visual content. video and audio websites give 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x and 2x viewing options, and there are also various "three-minute movie watching" and other content online... an app called rightspeed even provides 10x speed listening to programs options.

so what impact will listening to podcasts or watching videos at twice the speed have on us? there is still much controversy over this issue. some people believe that speeding up is okay and even beneficial. a study in 2021 showed that if the teacher on the podium is using ppt to record a lecture video, 85% of students hope to speed up the playback, which will be more "useful" and allow them to concentrate more and obtain specific and useful information faster. content.

speeding up listening to podcasts and watching videos, like the speed-reading technique called "scanning," can be a useful tool for proactively finding important information.

in fact, this quick listening function was originally designed for the visually impaired. since they may usually rely more on auxiliary functions such as screen readers and text-to-speech, they can adapt to very fast speaking speeds and can even increase the speed of listening to podcasts to 5 to 6 times as long as they get used to it.

however, some people have suggested that browsing content on the internet at a faster speed will cause some negative effects.

a study by the american psychological association found that students' comprehension plummeted when lectures were played at 3x speed. moreover, although acceleration saves time and prevents students from being in a daze due to boring content, it may also affect students' belief and interest in learning.

in addition, spanish psychologist diego redolar mentioned that there are several points that need to be paid attention to. first of all, if you are used to watching content quickly, your brain will become accustomed to receiving this kind of stimulation, making it harder for you to focus, or your attention span will be shortened, and you will be impatient. in addition, fast-paced stimulation may cause you to ignore necessary details, making it difficult for your brain to process the content in depth and just "gulp down".

"this is risky in the developing brain before age 25," the psychologists wrote.

diego redolar also said: "each video or audio file has its own unique complexity. not to mention cultural works, such as movies, which are full of silence. this content is processed by the amygdala in the brain, and if we speed up, they it’s hard to detect.”

scholars who focus on digital music culture have discovered that people are even listening to music faster! speeded-up or remixed versions of some songs have become popular on tiktok. so in 2022, summer walker, a popular musician on social media, spontaneously released an accelerated remix version of his album, and the accelerated version of raye's single "escapism" produced by fans was actually better than the original version of the song. a lot of red!

another communication scholar said that if you speed up listening to podcasts and watching content, you will indeed save time, but what next? you might use the time saved to watch short videos...

in the age of information explosion, it is easy for us to get “stuck” in content and be overwhelmed by the overwhelming amount of knowledge. but in fact, for us, especially for teenagers whose brains are still in the development stage, "acceleration" is a behavior that needs to be vigilant. it is likely to have negative effects on attention, memory or critical skills, as well as cognitive, emotional and social development abilities. all have an impact.

therefore, in the overwhelming information flow, it is more efficient to filter out more valuable and high-quality content. listening attentively and slowly at 1x speed can also better understand the content.

references

[1]https://onezero.medium.com/i-tried-listening-to-podcasts-at-3x-and-broke-my-brain-d8823edecb7c

[2]https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/doree/meet-the-people-who-listen-to-podcasts-at-super-fast-speeds

[3]https://english.elpais.com/technology/2024-03-17/double-speed-messages-and-videos-a-time-saver-that-can-impact-our-memory.html

[4]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqv5x2qe8q6o

[5]https://www.forbes.com.mx/forbes-life/salud-que-son-los-speed-watchers/

[6]https://www.uoc.edu/es/news/2023/288-speedwatching-afecta-atencion-y-aprendizaje

[7]https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/09/us/podfasters-audio-accelerated-speeds-cec/index.html

[8]https://www.jstor.org/stable/26926423

[9]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2649675/

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