| Author: | Stefano |
|---|---|
| category: | Biology |
Occasionally, I have to write using a pen. I've never had a beautiful calligraphy (by the way, a tautology, since calligraphy already comes from the Greek for "beautiful writing") but I realized that with time my skills became worse and worse. The reason, I feel, is that my brain wants a higher throughput of concepts than my body can achieve in practice. My writing gets worse because I want to write faster to deal with my stream of thoughts, hence my accuracy for better lines and circles goes down.
So apparently our hands and fingers are slower at transmitting data than the stream of thoughts arising from our brain. They are, in other words, a bandwidth bottleneck. This is true, but not the only factor: our actuators can be much faster, but calligraphy itself is intrinsically slow. Handwriting allows you to express around 30 words per minute. Type on a keyboard, and you can achieve a much higher throughput: 70-100 words per minute. Even staying in the realm of pen-writing, if you become proficient in Shorthand, the 200 words per minute you can achieve is enough to transcribe a live conversation, although I am not sure it's still enough to transcribe your thoughts. Even speaking is, in fact, a relatively slow activity: around 200 words per minute. Audiobooks are generally sold in a shorter, abridged version, because a written book is assumed to be read silently with your eyes and mind, an activity allowing around 250 words per minute of input. Reading it aloud takes much more time, and audiobook listeners (and publishers) generally prefer the shorter version to keep the time investment on the convenience side. People are normally comfortable with a 150-160 word per minute conversation, and publishers tend to focus on this target.
That said, there are many techniques to improve our I/O bandwidth. For input, speed reading techniques allows you more than 300 words per minute without sacrificing understanding. I've found this very interesting blog post about speed reading I wanted to share. Rapid Serial Visual Presentation techniques such as the one you can access through Zap Reader can be used to achieve more than 300 words per minute. Personally, I found it useful only for short texts. After a while, the fast flashing of words does not allow me to assimilate concepts properly. Also, I get dizzy.
For output, learn how to type faster is capital when you write code for a living, and in general for any activity involving communication of large amounts of data from your brain to someone/something else. As Jeff Atwood claims in his blog, programmers are typists first, programmer next.