Learn at Double the Speed

Have you ever wanted to learn something but reading a book takes you forever? You can double the speed at which you learn with a simple technique.

Listening Versus Reading

I’ve noticed that I’ve always been a relatively slow reader. I love reading a good book, letting the imagery play in my mind and savoring the moments. This is a lot of fun for fantasy and “pleasure” books but it’s a big hindrance when I want to learn something by reading a book. It often would take me weeks to get through a book which is too long for me so I would not do it.

Enter Audio Books

About 5 years ago I discovered Audible, an online audio book website, through a trial program they had at the time. I purchased my first book which was “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey, and listened to it as I did a daily 30 minute walk around a tree lined trail at our local park. I was hooked. Not only was I enjoying the content, I really loved how the author read the book adding a large amount of meaning with the way he read it, his emotions, and intonations.

They say that about 40% of communication is in the voice, 45% in body language, and 15% from words. Just by listening to the author read the book I got 40% more meaning. Not only that, it was super easy to listen as I walked.

Faster Please

Stephen’s reading cadence was on the slow side for me. He was slowly and carefully reading the content in order to make sure that everyone could consume it. I really wanted him to go faster and lucky for me there was an easy way to it by clicking the speed up button. I started with 1.8X and then 2.0x. I noticed for me that anything faster made it difficult to keep up.

2X the Speed

Now I could get through a book at twice the speed. So instead of 20 hours, I could listen to the book in 10 hours. This was a major game changer. While it worked well for me, I thought most people would not have the same experience until I read an article that there was actually clinical trials done for this specific scenario.

Clinical Trials

There have been clinical trials to test this with mixed results. Some have concluded that listening up to 2x speed works just as well as 1X, but getting to 2.5X caused lower performance on recall tests.

Other trials have shown a reduction in performance by increasing the speed.

Some trials indicate that listening to content twice at 2X speed gets better results than once at 1 X speed. Same amount of time on the material but consuming it twice in the 2X scenario.

Will it Work for You?

My own experience and several other’s who have tried this indicate that it depends on the listener, the cadence of the reader, and your attention.

If the reader is reading slowly and you find that it’s too slow for you, speed it up. If you find that you are missing ideas, slow it down.

Attention and Focus are also Important

While automated behaviors don’t require a lot of conscious thought (like walking, highway driving, eating), listening to new content does. You can only focus on one none automatic thing at a time so if you listen at normal or higher speed, your focus really needs to be on the content to get the most out of it. This is normal when reading a book, but can be more challenging when listening because you can do other activities at the same time. Choose other activities that are automatic like walking, exercising, washing dishes, yard work, etc. to get the best results.

Don’t Forget Practice

While consuming content is a start, this content will not be retained or be useful to you unless you actually use it, teach it, or practice it. It’s just how our brains work. Stuff that is not used, gets flushed. Reading a book about playing piano will not help you unless you practice.

Try it, you Might Like it

I highly encourage you to give it a try. It takes very little effort and can open the door for you to consume a lot more books, faster, with good learning results. I also encourage you not to hesitate on purchasing audio content. If you think about the cost of one lecture in college, about $400 last time I did the calculation, a $15 audio book is a major bargain for gaining knowledge.