I regularly listen to lectures on YouTube at 2x speed and my comprehension is fine. I can even go a bit faster with a browser plugin. This took practice. I gradually increased the speed over time. I think I can probably read text even faster than that.
There are limitations. If the speaker has a thick accent, I can’t comprehend it as fast. If the concepts are difficult, then even though I understand the words, I often still have to pause the video while I think it through.
I have heard of blind people who use a narration interface on their smartphones and work up to 7x speed narration. If there are no surprises, humans can process language much faster than they can speak it.
Yeah, it definitely does seem to be possible to listen faster than we usually speak; at the same time, in public speaking classes, one is encouraged to speak slowly, so as to maximize the understanding of the audience. As you mention, the difficulty of concepts can require slowing down. While you can easily pause or rewind a video when you hit a part that you find tricky, you can’t do that in a presentation. Furthermore, what one person finds easy could be hard for someone else, but then the two people could be in the opposite positions a few sentences later.
Perhaps most ideas have some fraction of the people that need to process the idea, and the ideas that are hard vary from person to person, so in order to allow everybody to digest the parts they find tricky, a public speaker has to speak much slower than the people can actually understand, so no-one gets left too far behind while they’re deep in thought.
I regularly listen to lectures on YouTube at 2x speed and my comprehension is fine. I can even go a bit faster with a browser plugin. This took practice. I gradually increased the speed over time. I think I can probably read text even faster than that.
There are limitations. If the speaker has a thick accent, I can’t comprehend it as fast. If the concepts are difficult, then even though I understand the words, I often still have to pause the video while I think it through.
I have heard of blind people who use a narration interface on their smartphones and work up to 7x speed narration. If there are no surprises, humans can process language much faster than they can speak it.
Yeah, it definitely does seem to be possible to listen faster than we usually speak; at the same time, in public speaking classes, one is encouraged to speak slowly, so as to maximize the understanding of the audience. As you mention, the difficulty of concepts can require slowing down. While you can easily pause or rewind a video when you hit a part that you find tricky, you can’t do that in a presentation. Furthermore, what one person finds easy could be hard for someone else, but then the two people could be in the opposite positions a few sentences later.
Perhaps most ideas have some fraction of the people that need to process the idea, and the ideas that are hard vary from person to person, so in order to allow everybody to digest the parts they find tricky, a public speaker has to speak much slower than the people can actually understand, so no-one gets left too far behind while they’re deep in thought.