Reading is important. (Okay, duh .) It’s the key to unlocking the world’s accumulated knowledge; and it allows us to experience other people, places, cultures, technologies, and wisdom, all without peeling our butts off the couch.
(It kinda feels like humanity’s greatest literary works are heading for obscurity. After all, can you imagine anyone born after the year 2000 reading Mark Twain, Jane Austen or, lawd forbid , Leo Tolstoy?)
Well, as much the ceaseless advancement of technology is creating problems, it’s also concurrently solving it! And in the case of humankind’s declining commitment to reading anything more than the latest social media headlines is bionic reading.
How does it work? I’m glad you asked, but first, allow us to introduce ourselves…
We’re the brains, minds, and hearts behind the world’s smartest study app , and a team of people who are devoted to helping anyone and everyone, everywhere, to learn faster, whatever their goals.
To this end, we’ve brought together millions of super smart, self-motivated learners, educators, and experts to compile comprehensive collections of digital flashcards for just about every knowledge-intensive subject under the burning sun, from actuarial science to zoology.
Naturally, as people who are passionate about optimizing the learning process , we keep our ears to the ground for technological developments that align with our mission, which is how we came to hear about bionic reading.
And so, eager to share our discoveries, we wrote this guide so that we may equip you with every possible tool to rise to the challenge of your unique learning journey.
So let’s get back to that question…
What is bionic reading and do I need special glasses to do it? Read the following passage from Stanislas Dehaene’s book Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read :
The reader’s brain contains a complicated set of mechanisms admirably attuned to reading. For a great many centuries, this talent remained a mystery. Today, the brain’s black box is cracked open and a true science of reading is coming into being. Advances in psychology and neuroscience over the last twenty years have begun to unravel the principles underlying the brain’s reading circuits. Modern brain imaging methods now reveal, in just a matter of minutes, the brain areas that activate when we decipher written words. Scientists can track a printed word as it progresses from the retina through a chain of processing stages, each of which is marked by an elementary question: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?
Now, here’s the SAME blurb, but converted with a bionic reading app …
Th e read er’s bra in contai ns a complicat ed se t o f mechanis ms admirab ly attun ed t o readi ng. Fo r a gre at man y centuri es, thi s tale nt remain ed a myste ry. Tod ay, th e bra in’s bla ck bo x i s crack ed ope n an d a tru e scien ce o f readi ng i s comi ng int o bei ng. Advanc es i n psycholo gy an d neuroscien ce ove r th e las t twen ty yea rs hav e beg un t o unrav el th e principl es underlyi ng th e bra in’s readi ng circui ts. Mode rn bra in imagi ng metho ds no w reve al, i n jus t a matt er o f minut es, th e bra in are as tha t activa te whe n w e deciph er writt en wor ds. Scientis ts ca n tra ck a print ed wor d a s i t progress es fro m th e reti na throu gh a cha in o f processi ng stag es, eac h o f whi ch i s mark ed b y a n elementa ry questi on: Ar e the se lette rs? Wha t d o the y loo k lik e? Ar e the y a wor d? Wha t doe s i t sou nd lik e? Ho w i s i t pronounc ed? Wha t doe s i t mea n?
Okay, I don’t know about you but during the first passage, my brain wandered off probably about 17 times…
Is it lunchtime yet?
Why is abbreviation such a long word?
If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does a hipster buy its album?
But the second passage… my eyes and brain flew right through it and I was actually engaged with what it was saying! The bold formatting gave my eyeballs little “footholds”—little anchor points—to hang onto and from there the information just poured into my brain, rather than me having to fight and excavate meaning from the passage itself.
Why does bionic reading work? The entire premise of bionic reading is based upon the fact that your brain thinks and processes information faster than your eyes can read it . It’s also remarkably talented at “filling in the missing gaps”. For example:
Wh– di– th– chick– cro– th– ro–?
(Because it was free range, har har .)
So, therefore, if you reduce the amount of text your eyeballs have to read by half—without compromising the integrity of the text itself—you should be able to read it twice as fast, right?
YES!
The way bionic reading apps accomplish that is by bolding the first few letters in a word . This provides your eyes with artificial fixation points, as well as much less text to actually read, while your brain—in its own talented way—completes the rest of the word.
This is how bionic reading works.
Through the distribution of bolded text, you’re only focusing on the highlighted initial letters, while your brain completes the word, allowing you to rip through pages of writing in half the time.
Plain text may hold the secrets to life itself, but to the eyes, it can appear like a sheer cliff wall. Bionic reading apps come along and pepper that wall with hundreds of little foot- and handholds so that scaling it goes from being long and arduous to swift and easy.
How do I apply bionic reading? The question now is, how can you apply bionic reading because, let’s face it, who publishes books with half the letters in every word bolded?
The answer lies in the technology Bionic Reading GmbH . The technology includes an Application Programming Interface (API) that enables developers to create specialized bionic reading apps and extensions.
These bionic-based tools allow you to read a range of materials including ebooks, RSS feeds, and websites. If all of this sounds like Greek to you, just get the free Bionic Reading app and you can begin reading bionic-formatted books right away using your current e-reading app or device.
No tutorials or step-by-step guides necessary. You don't need to learn to do anything special in order to start bionic reading.
Does bionic reading help with ADHD? Aside from helping everybody to read faster, bionic reading apps are also helpful for people with ADHD , to whom a large body of text has the intellectual appeal of a cinder block. Heck, I don’t have ADHD and yet look how distracted I got during that passage I shared with you earlier!
In bionic reading-formatted text, the use of artificial fixation points makes reading a lot smoother for people who can be easily distracted; plus, when you're able to breeze a lot quicker through text and actually understand it, reading itself becomes so much more satisfying and less frustrating .
Remember, there's no one-size-fits-all solution for ADHD, and everyone is different. But a bionic reading app can be a helpful tool for some people with ADHD.
[If you’re a student and this resonates with you, check out ‘Test prep tips for people with ADHD ’]
Brainscape’s use of bionic reading techniques to improve the accessibility of flashcards
Finally, how is Brainscape using aspects of bionic reading to improve learning?
Brainscape is a study app that breaks down knowledge-intensive subjects into vast collections of neatly-organized flashcards . In this way, Brainscape is already making the processing of large amounts of information a lot easier: by breaking it down into its most salient facts, which it then reframes into question-and-answer pairs.
But where the app starts overlapping with bionic reading principles is in the formatting of the flashcards themselves…
Firstly, the lore within our flashcard-authoring guidelines is to keep each question-and-answer pair super short, punchy, and to-the-point : no long reams of texts. (By the way, this applies to any kind of flashcard , whether you’re using pen and paper to make them or different flashcard app.)
Sure, you can add some exposition in the footnotes of a flashcard, but the question and the answer themselves should be short and incredibly targeted. This keeps the user hyper-focused on the learning task at hand.
Secondly, we highly recommend the use of special formatting like bold , italics , and underlining to draw the eye to key words and phrases within the text of the flashcards, making them easy to understand and super quick and efficient to process, as you’re working through them.
The following side-by-side screenshots of the question (left) and answer side (right) of one of Brainscape’s biology flashcards from our free Get Smarter collection of general knowledge flashcards illustrates the above points quite nicely…
The left-hand screenshot shows the question side of a biology flashcard. Note the short question that focuses only on a singular fact with the real essence of the question having been written in bold. The right-hand screenshot shows the answer side of the same flashcard with the answer—A, B, AB, and O—appearing at the top. This is the most salient information we want users to walk away with. Below that, then, we’ve provided more information in the footnote of the flashcard. [Read: The complete guide to making & studying flashcards online ]
So while the term “Bionic Reading” was coined by that Swiss startup, who then named an API after it, bionic reading is also emerging as, quite simply, a verb that refers to the technique of reading with the assistance of certain tools and tricks that make the task of comprehending long-form text a whole lot faster and easier!
Oh, and if you’re interested, here are even more tools and tricks for reading faster…
Final thoughts on bionic reading Bionic reading is like having a superpower to read really fast and remember a lot of information. Just like Spiderman flies through a city by shooting webs out his wrists and Superman wears his underpants outside his costume without people making fun of him, bionic readers can read and learn faster than others .
But, instead of getting superpowers from a spider bite or gamma rays, bionic readers use special techniques and tools to help them read faster and understand what they read better. (And no, you don’t need special eye glasses…)
Bionic reading is a powerful technique that can help you read more efficiently and effectively, so, whether you're a student, a professional, or just someone who wishes they could read more, bionic reading apps are definitely a technology worth experimenting with!
How to read faster and better How to read a textbook—and remember what you’ve read The complete guide to making & studying flashcards online 