Hack Your Brain: Bionic Reading - Panacea or Placebo?
In the Star Trek episode Space Seed, [Khan] said, "Upgrade a mechanical device and you might double the productivity. But upgrade the man, you win a thousand times Most of our hacks focus on the mechanical or electromechanical type, but we better get better at it safely.The problem is most of us don't want to mess with our DNA or have surgery, so it kind of limits our options.
We're always interested in less invasive hacks, so we've definitely taken note of Bionic Reading. However, a recent article claims to debunk the benefit claims. The company promoting the technology says a study by the Swiss University showed that although the results were unclear, "the majority had a positive effect". They also claim, anecdotally, that the technique can help people with dyslexia. What is the truth ? We don't know, but it's an interesting discussion to follow.
If you've never seen it before, Bionic Reading - which, by the way, might not be free to use - is a way to use a dark font to emphasize certain key parts of words. For example, you can read this article using Bionic Reading. [Daniel Doyon] analyzed the reading of 2,074 testers and found that participants actually read slower when using the bionic reading technique.
Even if you're not particularly interested in bionic reading, designing the experiment to account for taking random data from the internet is pretty cool on its own. For example, they removed data from "tire-kickers" and "quitters" from the pool. To their credit, however, they made all data available, filtered and unfiltered.
We think you could get more mileage through training. We've seen plenty of brain hacks over the years, some of which even make sense.
In the Star Trek episode Space Seed, [Khan] said, "Upgrade a mechanical device and you might double the productivity. But upgrade the man, you win a thousand times Most of our hacks focus on the mechanical or electromechanical type, but we better get better at it safely.The problem is most of us don't want to mess with our DNA or have surgery, so it kind of limits our options.
We're always interested in less invasive hacks, so we've definitely taken note of Bionic Reading. However, a recent article claims to debunk the benefit claims. The company promoting the technology says a study by the Swiss University showed that although the results were unclear, "the majority had a positive effect". They also claim, anecdotally, that the technique can help people with dyslexia. What is the truth ? We don't know, but it's an interesting discussion to follow.
If you've never seen it before, Bionic Reading - which, by the way, might not be free to use - is a way to use a dark font to emphasize certain key parts of words. For example, you can read this article using Bionic Reading. [Daniel Doyon] analyzed the reading of 2,074 testers and found that participants actually read slower when using the bionic reading technique.
Even if you're not particularly interested in bionic reading, designing the experiment to account for taking random data from the internet is pretty cool on its own. For example, they removed data from "tire-kickers" and "quitters" from the pool. To their credit, however, they made all data available, filtered and unfiltered.
We think you could get more mileage through training. We've seen plenty of brain hacks over the years, some of which even make sense.
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