Learning at double-speed?

W ouldn’t it be great if we could learn things double speed? Well, maybe we can. At least according to a study out of the University of California.

During the pandemic many students have been watching or catching up on lectures by watching recordings of lectures. These researchers wanted to know what happens if the recordings are speeded up – often students will speed through these recordings anyhow. What they found is that these can be sped up to about double the speed without any loss of comprehension or knowledge. It seems that this is down to how we process spoken speech. We tend to speak at about 150 words per minute and can process speech at up to 275 worlds per minute – almost double the speed. More than doubling the speed reduces comprehension.

They conducted different experiments, for example by watching twice at double speed, spaced by a week, or watching once at normal speed and once at high speed. Watching twice did marginally increase scores.

So, the summary is that watching speeded up video of lectures – up to twice the normal speed does not reduce comprehension and watching twice double speed improves comprehension (but not by very much).

Seems like this is a good idea then – but beware of cognitive load, cramming your day with double-speed lectures may also not be so good – that’s probably another experiment to conduct.