2025-03-03-essay-on-speed-listening

Using a program (TTSReader), I was able to adjust to speed listening to text at ~600 words per minute. At first, this was just a clever way to manage visual snow syndrome, but I soon realized this could impact our lives in many ways and was a teachable skill.

' When engineers first tried to develop reading machines for the blind in the 1940s, they devised a set of noises that corresponded to the letters of the alphabet. Even with heroic training, people could not recognize the sounds at a rate faster than good Morse code operators, about three units a second. Real speech, somehow, is perceived an order of magnitude faster: ten to fifteen phonemes per second for casual speech, twenty to thirty per second for the man in the late-night Veg-O-Matic ads, and as many as forty to fifty per second for artificially sped-up speech. ' - Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct

Being 15 times faster than morse code operators already entails potential military applications, you may recall how the Navajo language was used in WWII as an unbreakable language. There is no reason why people couldn't be trained to speed-listen, I thought; one could even be trained to speed-listen to text along with being trained in stenography, which currently allows court room transcriptionists to type at rates exceeding 300 words per minute.

Yet this is just the tip of the speed-listening iceberg. How would this impact our educational institutions? Must we spend 8 years speed-listening before doing higher math? Could you deradicalize extremists by having them hear more than one book? Could you force politicians to hear every word of every law they write? Would executive assistants start doing this? Would Rabbis studying the Torah? Would monks have speed-listening meditation chambers? Wouldn't Chinese be more efficient than English? What about languages that rely on clicking sounds? As we learn more and more about the universe across intergenerational time, would we have to learn this? Would we have to invent a way to absorb more information more quickly? People already read braille. What if I invented a way to touch a book and instantly absorb it in just the same way as I can touch a table and know that it's made of metal or wood?

' In our community, man is recognized as immature until the age of twenty-one, and the modern period of education for the higher walks of life continues until about thirty, actually beyond the time of greatest physical strength. Man thus spends what may amount to forty per cent of his normal life as a learner, again for reasons that have to do with his physical structure. It is as completely natural for a human society to be based on learning as for an ant society to be based on an inherited pattern. '

' Man, like all other organisms, lives in a contingent universe, but man's advantage over the rest of nature is that he has the physiological and hence the intellectual equipment to adapt himself to radical changes in his environment. The human species is strong only insofar as it takes advantage of the innate adaptive, learning faculties that its physiological structure makes possible. ' - Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings

As Norbert Wiener suggests, our very physical development is inexorably linked to our need to learn.

' In the case of most of the mollusks, as well as in the case of certain other groups which, though unrelated, have taken on a generally mollusk-like form, part of the outer surface secretes a non-living mass of calcareous tissue, the shell. This grows by accretion from an early stage in the animal until the end of its life. The spiral and helical forms of those groups need only this process of accretion to account for them. '

' If the shell is to remain an adequate protection for the animal, and the animal grows to any considerable size in its later stages, the shell must be a very appreciable burden, suitable only for land animals of the slowly moving and inactive life of the snail. In other shell-bearing animals, the shell is lighter and less of a load, but at the same time much less of a protection. The shell structure, with its heavy mechanical burden, has had only a limited success among land animals. ' - Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings

Here Norbert Wiener establishes by metaphor that the stages of human development are marked by molts, likening knowledge itself to an external exoskeleton to which we are attached. Knowledge offers protection from homelessness or starvation, but like the mollusk's shell it may be discarded one day for the sake of survival. If speed-listening became widespread, I realized that it would have a severe impact on human consciousness and life, potentially increasing the "mechanical burden" on the human mind.

' I was talking the other day to a college president who said: 'You know, I'm so busy now that I'm going to have to get a helicopter.' I said: 'Whatever you do, don't do it. Because if you get it, more will be expected of you. You'll be expected to go to more places faster.' And you see, in this whole problem of speed, of getting advantages in life - because we can move about rapidly - we forget that speed is only of real advantage to you if you're the only person who has it. ' - Alan Watts

All these quotes were items I found while speed-listening. As a graphic design major, one of my interests was creating a virtual educational institution to help people become more upwardly mobile. Growing up I watched Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Alan Watts and others on YouTube. These people were great as communicators, not scientists. The movie Precious also made an impact on me; a person's development shouldn't be limited by their geographical origins, like being born in Harlem. We have the technology to put the best communicators in a recording studio and broadcast that to everyone. Teachers today might become tutors managing a collection of individuals tomorrow, the way education works now can change.

' It seemed to me that I must recognize two main directions in the forces at work - two seemingly antagonistic tendencies, equally deleterious in their action, and ultimately combining to produce their results: a striving to achieve the greatest possible expansion of education on the one hand, and a tendency to minimize and weaken it on the other. The first-named would, for various reasons, spread learning among the greatest number of people; the second would compel education to renounce its highest, noblest and sublimest claims in order to subordinate itself to some other department of life - such as the service of the State. ' - Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions

This quote from Nietzsche foreshadows his break from academia and his descent into a lifestyle of interrogating humanity as a creature who invented knowing. After all, if the science communicators are serious about our over-arching intent to know the universe, why would we ever eject a student from the school system? I maintain that it's these two wheels of Nietzsche's logic that shredded Nietzsche's sanity. Wouldn't it be nice to have an educational institution where people can go to understand the universe? I think so. Many other idealistically-minded people would, but that's not how things really work, and it is bound to become a wrench in the workings of any educational institution.

' I don't care. I want to learn how to speed-listen anyway. '

Maybe right now you're thinking: "Wow, that's bleak, but I don't care. I want to learn how to speed-listen anyway." And I have good news for you, you can learn it. The first book I ever listened to was The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, but I slowly but surely supplemented my usual time gaming with listening to books using TTS (text-to-speech). If that's still of interest to you, here's some general advice . . .

• 1. Learn how to tolerate the mechanical voice first, it doesn't matter how human it sounds
• 2. Slowly build up your tolerance to faster and faster speeds
• 3. After you adjust to hearing faster than average, experiment with different voices
• 4. Take some time to decompress and relax after a session, cognitive overload is a real possibility

In my experience, the medium is great for historical, philosophical, psychological or anthropological information. It's not so great for math, or anything with spatially relative parameters for that matter. But with many tech communicators saying that the biggest programming language right now is English, I'd argue that learning how to speed-listen to text can be immensely beneficial for any job that requires a copious amount of reading.