To You Who Want To Tap Into Your Brain’s Potential To Be More Productive

Today I will share with you another Productivity tip from the Stress Relief Tips series: Tap into your brain’s natural capability to process information at a faster speed.

There’s an optimum speed to everything we do. We have a comfortable speed for walking, talking, thinking and writing. And you get the best result when you fuction at your optimum speed.

We are watching a lot more videos these days as they are the preferred mode of delivery for tutorials, homestudy courses or videos of conference.You can watch more videos in less time by increasing your listening and viewing speed while increasing your comprehension, absorption and retention of the information.

What is speed listening and speed viewing? And why would you want to learn and use this skill?

Speed listening involves watching videos and listening to it at a speed faster than normal. Instead of using an hour to go through a session, you may only need 20 or 30 minutes of listening time.

Most video-based information has little visual (just bullet points or images) and the slides move very slowly. It is audio that we want to speed up. In speed listening you are not necessarily hearing every word linearly, but your brain can make sense of words and phrases you heard in its context.

Because your brain can process many more words-per-minute than it is subjected to, speed-listening does not necessarily require much effort or training.

You can easily speed up your audio to 1.4 times of regular speed without putting any extra strain on your brain to process and assimilate the information.

Why would you want to do that?

1 – Most people speak at 150 words per minute. Research tells us that human brain is most comfortable processing verbal information at speeds of 300 words per minute. That is about comfortable reading speed for most of us.

That means you can quite comfortably speed up your audio to 2 times the speed and save half the time on learning new information. With a little training you can speed it up to 4 times the normal and yet listen with understanding (provided there is no voice distortion or squeaky chipmunk voice).

2 – Listening to audio at 150 words per minutes is slow.  You get bored, distracted and you want to multi-task or you’ll fall asleep. Contrary to common belief it takes more energy to do things at a slower speed. It drains you of your stamina!

But if you play the video at 600 words per minute, you will want to listen attentively and that causes you to be more mentally engaged. You are more focus and engaged and your energy level is also higher.  And because your energy level is higher, you learn better, faster and retain for longer time. It sounds counter intuitive but trust me research has found this to be true.

Spend 30 minutes of focus and concentrated listening to go through your information instead of an hour of mindless wandering. Get more than when you are engaged and functioning at your optimum rhythm.

3 – when you do listen to audios at normal speed you now find things to be very relaxed and comfortable and you can add in some scheduled multi-tasking. Get the most out of your time by listening to your information audio while you work out or do household chores.

I have shown you the tool to use to speed up your video playing in another post. Refer to that if you need to. If you want to grab the application that allows you to control video play back speed you can click here. In a coming post I will share with you how you can ‘train’ yourself to speed listen to a speed more than 2 times the normal speed. Stay tuned.

Do you think you will try using this tip? Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below, I love to hear your thoughts on this.