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The Philosophy

Slow it down. Engage your body to match with your brain.

The Intent

For the past ten years, I have read almost everything on my phone, tablet, or computer. Recently, a friend asked me about the last book I read, and I realized how little of it had stuck. Trying to remember a names of characters form a recent book was hard. Trying to remember anything specific from a decade of reading felt impossible. Skimming across the page had become the norm, and as a result I could not recall what I had read. I tried to slow myself down, but a few paragraphs in I would find myself distracted and speed reading again.

What changed things was noticing that I quietly mutter the words as I type them, and that I remembered what I typed far better than what I read. That observation is what put this site together.

Cognitive Patience

There is no specific research on this exact practice, but there are a few papers I found that back up what I have experienced. Maryanne Wolf warns that our “digital reading circuit” is being trained for speed, multitasking, and skimming. That efficiency comes at a cost: the slow atrophy of our capacity for critical analysis, empathy, and deep reflection. By tying the words of a book to the mechanical act of typing, I am hoping to re-engage what she calls the deep reading brain. From my own experience, it sharpens focus and helps the words stay with me longer.

Desirable Difficulty

Cognitive Disfluency is the idea that making a task slightly harder can actually improve learning and retention. When information is too “fluent” or too easy to consume, the brain tends to bypass deep processing. By not tracking where you are in the text, on top of asking you to type every character, the site creates its speed bump. It is meant to slow everyone down.

Citations & Reading

  • Wolf, Maryanne (2018). Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.
  • Alter, Adam L., & Oppenheimer, Daniel M. (2009). “Uniting the Tribes of Fluency to Form a Metacognitive Nation.” Personality and Social Psychology Review.
  • Newkirk, Thomas (2011). The Art of Slow Reading: Six Habits of Mind for a Post-Literate Culture.