LifeDev

I stumbled upon this speed reading tool via del.icio.us. It’s a handy little tool that trains your mind to read at a faster pace, mainly because it doesn’t allow your mind to do two things: backtrack over what’s already been read and subvocalization.

The purpose behind apps like these is to train our minds to get rid of all the other crap. So, by having a steady input of text, we erase our dependency on backtracing. By increasing the reading speed, subvocalization can’t keep up and eventually goes away. The key here is that we don’t need to subvocalize to process information, as much as we may think we do.

I’ve been using it for the past day here and there, and it’s starting to become easier. You can adjust speeds, window size and “chunk” size (the number of words you see on the screen at a time).