Trevor Smith remixed Cory Doctorow's novel, Eastern Standard Tribe as a speed-reader: a Java applet that zaps the novel at you, one word at a time.
I recommend everybody try this, at least once. I haven't read the book, and just five sentences of this thing made my brain explode.
Load the speed-reader, and adjust the speed to just a little faster than you think you're capable of. You start experiencing the words without them passing through your conscious brain. It's like they're being projected directly onto your back-brain, meaning communicated without comprehension.
It's more than a little trippy.
That's great!
I read about this kind of thing when I did my thesis in Natural Language Processing. The popular theory is that we don't actually read each individual word, but we skate along on our expectation of what the next word will be, based on what we've seen already. "Well written" text (subjective though that term may be) is usually the one that gives us the least surprise overall (the overall surprise being the sum of the surprise at each individual word).
The reason I think the speed reader is so trippy is that we usually recognise words by their shape (as evidenced by taht meme taht wnet aruond a fwe mnoths ago). With the speed reader we don't have the groups of word shapes to guide us through the text.
NLP and language generation is so cool, particularly because all you need is a basic computing platform and semi-decent scripting language.
You can install a service for OS X that'll read content to you the same way, too -- but I can't seem to find the link for it right now.
This is interesting! I wonder, you could probably evolve a new UI metaphor for HUDs, small screens & alert boxes ("foo has signed in") based on this kind of thing.
Hmm...
It's fun, and it also feels good when I stop.