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January 27, 2020 10:00 pm

'I Tried Listening To Podcasts at 3x and Broke My Brain'

'Podfasters' listen to their favorite pods at 1.5x, even 2x speed. But how fast is too fast? From a report: Bumping the speed up to 1.5x was initially jarring. People were talking so quickly that I had to stop what I was doing and focus on the audio to keep it from falling into background chatter. After about 20 minutes of this intentional listening, however, it felt like my brain had adjusted. What at first felt rushed and slightly wrong, now felt natural. Once I found that I could go back to doing the things I normally do when I listen to podcasts -- brush my teeth, do the dishes, fold the laundry -- I bumped up the speed another notch to the 2x barrier. Like the previous jump in speed, the first 15 to 20 minutes required an additional level of focus to get my brain to match the cadence of the conversation. But once I was there I felt like I didn't have to strain to understand what was being said -- my brain just "learned" how to listen to this accelerated pace. In our discussion of breaking 2x, Uri Hasson, director of Princeton's Hasson Lab, brought up one population that handles sped-up speech much better than the rest of us: the visually impaired. A 2018 University of Washington study attempted to quantify human listening rates by measuring the intelligibility of audio from a text-to-speech generator played at increasingly faster speeds. Researchers found that the average sighted person could comprehend around 300 words per minute, or about double the average talking speed of an American English speaker. Visually impaired subjects, however, vastly outperformed sighted subjects at speeds past 2x, demonstrating comprehension at rates even approaching 3x. The researchers hypothesized that this difference between sighted and visually impaired listening rates was attributed to one group being more familiar with synthesized text-to-speech voices. At 2x, the experience of listening to audio began to change: Though I could understand the words, they seemed to have less emotional resonance. At these high speeds, my brain seemed to shift away from assessing people's feelings towards baseline comprehension. At the end of each sentence, I'd feel a little twinge of joy, not because of anything happening in the podcast, but just because I had understood the words. Hasson points out that single word comprehension is really only one dimension of comprehension. Our brains do not work like computers. We can recognize words very quickly, but to integrate them into a sentence, a sentence into a paragraph, and a paragraph into a larger narrative takes time. Feeling competent in my base-level comprehension at 2x, I crossed the threshold into 3x. It took every ounce of concentration to just register what was being said. After 20 minutes, my brain couldn't settle into the rhythm of the conversation. I sat there for an hour, with my eyes closed, hoping that my brain would eventually "click" like it did before, but it refused.

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