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How reading actually works

Reading

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Reading feels smooth. It is not. Your eyes move in small jumps, about four or five every second. While your eye is moving, you see nothing at all. Your brain hides the gap, so you never notice it. The reading happens in the pauses between those jumps. Each pause lasts about a quarter of a second. In that time you read a few letters around one spot. The rest of the line is blurry. That goes unnoticed too, because your eye has already moved on. The jumps are not free. Your brain has to aim every one of them. And about one jump in seven lands backwards, on words you have already read. Sometimes you meant it, because the sentence was hard. Often it is just doubt. It costs the same either way. Showing one word at a time takes the aiming away. If every word lands in the same spot, your eye has nowhere to go. The aiming is gone. So is the glance ahead at the next word, and so is the glance back at the last one, and both of those were doing something. The trade runs in two directions, not one. There is a catch, and we would rather say it than hide it. Reading is not only seeing words. You also hold the sentence in your head, notice when something is off, and slow down when you need to. A stream that never slows takes that away. Past a point you are not reading faster. You are just reading less. So the goal is not to go as fast as the screen can go. It is to remove the work of moving your eyes, then sit at the speed where you still understand. For some people that is faster than reading on paper. For others it is about the same, and what they get instead is comfort. One more thing happens, and it is harder to measure. The words come on their own. So there is nothing to skim. You cannot slide your eyes down the page and tell yourself you got the idea. Every word is shown to you once. Either you were there, or you were not. That is the whole idea. One spot on a screen, and everything else out of the way.