The New York Times reports that time-compressed audio is making it possible to listen to an hour's worth of speaking in 30 minutes or so (depending on how fast you like to go.) The real surprise, here, is that listening comprehension seems to go up with the increase in speed:
Perhaps even more significant, the technology may have benefits beyond saving time and money. "People who are listening at accelerated speeds learn just as much, and there's some evidence they may learn even a bit more," said Kevin Harrigan, an associate professor at the Center for Learning and Teaching Through Technology of the University of Waterloo in Canada. The consensus is that the extra brainpower needed to follow speedy speech enhances comprehension. "If you're listening at accelerated speeds," said Joel Galbraith, a researcher in Penn State's instructional systems program, "it forces you to not do anything else, so you're more focused on it."
And this is interesting:
Synthesized accelerated has many other devotees. "When I listen to the newspaper, I tend to go as high as 650" words per minute, said Gregory Rosmaita, a Web designer based in Jersey City. Because Mr. Rosmaita is blind, his interface with computers is audio-based, in the form of a synthesized voice that reads text aloud. He prefers British English to American in this regard. "With the more clipped British speech," he said, "I can increase the rate even faster."
He said he had become so accustomed to accelerated speech that normal rates could sound unnatural. "It's actually difficult to comprehend the speech when it becomes that slow," he said. "It's sort of like watching a marquee scrolling one letter at a time rather than one word at a time."
We don't have to have wires plugged into the backs of our necks in order for technology to change us. Here's a guy who has grown so accustomed to getting his audio information in fastforward mode that he has a hard time processing it at standard speed. He's been machine augmented; it's now difficult for him to function in the strictly human world.
I wonder if this is the beginning of a trend. There's never been any question that we can think faster than we can talk or write. If we can bridge that gap on the receiving end, isn't it just a matter of time before we figure out a way to bridge it on the sending end? I love my IBM ViaVoice dictation interface. Using it certainly saves time over typing. But how much more quickly could I write if I didn't have to vocalize at all?
A number of years ago I read a book on composition called Writing is a Mode of Thinking. That may soon be true in a much more literal sense than the author intended.
via KurzweilAI.net
So if I want to comprehend fully why odd finite simple groups are cyclic, then I just play the proof [1] at 650 words a minute! Wow, that sounds easy!
[1] Feit, W. and Thompson, J. G. "Solvability of Groups of Odd Order." Pacific J. Math. 13, 775-1029, 1963.