Between talking over the sound of TikTok clips in class, placating parents who want to explain why Tarquin deserves special treatment and squeezing a bit of teaching into the gaps, teachers probably have enough to do without providing raw material for politicians’ ambitions. Not that that would stop them, and this election has seen the We Need to Do Something About Falling Literacy Standards By Getting Back To Basics boat floated by some candidates to see if it had vote-winning potential.
The brief flurry sparked interest in new reading strategies. Is there perhaps a revolutionary new technique out there waiting to be taken up by the education community?
Why yes, there is. Over at bionic-reading.com you will find that the way you read is decidedly behind the times and a bionically bookish future could be yours. Bionic Reading® is the brainchild of Swiss typographer Renato Casutt.
“There is only one bionic reading,” proclaims his homepage, its dogmatism belying his country’s tradition of neutrality. His profession does not often get much attention, and there is a revenge-of-the-nerds feeling to this whole enterprise.
According to the website, “Reading and text comprehension is essential for active participation in today’s society”, which was a pretty hot take in the 15th century.
Bionic, according to the New Zealand Oxford Dictionary means “having artificial body parts or the superhuman powers resulting from these”. Although Casutt doesn’t propose any sort of implant, he is promising to turn you into a super-reader. He has the technology – or rather the apps, which you can buy at various price points – to make that happen.
The aim of Bionic Reading is “Faster. Better. More focused. Reading.” – punctuated exactly like that but with each word on a separate line and in a giant type size.
It must be quite simple, right? After all, it relies on the “interplay of ‘Fixation’, ‘Saccade’ and ‘Opacity’.” Okay, maybe not that simple. (Saccade is a fancy name for eye movement.)
Let’s put it another way – put any block of text into the BR app and its algorithm will highlight certain parts – called fixation points – to help the eye move more quickly over the words while retaining more of their meaning. You can feed whole books into the app if you like.
It’s based on the idea that you only need to read some of the letters to understand words. Why bother slogging your way through a whole word when you really only need to see part of it?
The brain moves faster than the eye, so give the eye less opportunity to slow the brain down. In theory. The brain however, still needs to process the meaning of the words it has absorbed so quickly.
Here’s an example of text after it is put through the online converter at 10015.io/tools/bionic-reading-converter:
Anyone moving across the Tasman will find
themselves facing many of the difficulties
they thought they were leaving behind.
Of course, it overlooks that the meaning is just one of the pleasures of reading – there is also the sound, the pleasure to be had from seeing words well used, the opportunity to take ourselves out of our surroundings briefly and the other mental benefits that come from a leisurely peruse of a page.
Authoritative research showing the effectiveness and benefits of BR has been frustratingly meagre. Claims it is helpful for the neurodivergent or people with ADHD certainly make it sound worth checking out for members of those communities who have trouble reading.
According to its own X (formerly Twitter) feed, a test of 12 people was conducted by BR and the “results are not clear. But it can be said that the majority had a positive effect. But of course, there were also [some] who found the effect disturbing.”
The Readwise website tested it on 2000 people and found people on average read more slowly with BR text, noting drily, “These results correspond with common sense and the existing body of research showing that reading comprehension is inversely correlated with reading speed.” Slow down and let that sink in for a moment.
Reading faster and understanding more have historically been seen as antithetical. If you want better understanding of what you read, traditionally, you have read more slowly. There is nothing about Bionic Reading to suggest that will change anytime soon. Otherwise, in the time it’s taken to read this, you could have knocked off War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
