by Olivier Acuña Barba •Published: July 12, 2025•19:33•Read for 4 minutes
Students believe they are speeding up video lectures and audiobooks faster, but their scores reveal a different story | Credit: Fizkes/Shutterstock
People around the world are increasingly easier to read, watching more videos, and listening to more podcasts than ever before.
According to 2022 Gallup investigationAmericans read fewer books a year than ever before. and According to For the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the amount of time people spend reading has declined steadily over the past 20 years. In Europe, the trends are similar. European Commission Report It revealed that 47.2% of European Union citizens have not read a single book in 12 months.
British reading agency released a study It says that 50% of UK adults don’t read it regularly. The data reveals a significant decrease in the number of people reading regularly compared to 2014, when 58% said they frequently featured the book.
More smartphones, fewer readers, more videos
Habits are changing, primarily due to widespread ownership of mobile phones. As a reference point, let’s take a look at the US, where 35% to 98% own some kind of mobile phone in 2011 and 91% own smartphones, according to Pew Research in 2024. investigation.
According to PoliticianAs of April 2025, approximately 55.6 billion people were regular internet users. Of all internet consumers, nearly 92% watch digital video every week, 78% watch online, and 55% watch videos every day. According to To Telemprompter.
According to a BBC report, statistics on global adoption that regulate the speed of audiobooks, podcasts and videos are not yet available, but many people around the world are taking advantage of the ability to make this adjustment.
More and more students are accelerating their lectures
“For example,” the BBC said. article On the subject, “A survey of California students found that 89% changed the speed of online lectures, while many media articles have appeared about the widespread use of speed reading.”
Listening and watching things faster has many advantages in today’s world. We are always in a hurry to complete tasks efficiently, such as going to the bus, school or work. Many students believe that speeding up the digital content they need to study will help them learn faster.
You can believe that speeding up your content will allow you to consume more content in time. Additionally, multiple reviews of replicated content may be useful in an educational context.
Watching the video in a fast-paced mode is a good way to maintain our attention and interest throughout the video, and therefore prevents our minds from being distracted.
These are advantages, but what about the downsides?
When a person is exposed to oral information, researchers distinguish between three phases of memory, encode and store the information before obtaining it.
During the encoding phase, the brain needs time to process and understand the flow of words it receives. Words need to be extracted and their contextual meanings must be retrieved in real time from memory.
People usually speak at a speed of about 150 words per minute, but doubling that speed to 300 or tripling it to 450 words per minute is still within the scope of what is clear.
The problem is rather the quality and lifespan of the memories we form. Information is temporarily stored in a memory system called working memory. Here, it is converted, combined and manipulated into a format suitable for transfer to long-term memory.
Overload and information loss
Because working memory is limited, information is too fast can lead to cognitive overload and loss of information.
A recent meta-analysis explored 24 studies on learning from lecture videos. Although the design of the study was varied, it usually included video lectures at normal speeds (1x) in one group and faster speeds (1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, and 2.5x) in another group.
The test consisted of answering multiple choice questions to assess recall information, recall ability, or both.
Meta-analysis showed that increased regeneration speeds have an increasingly negative effect on test performance. It was up to 1.5 times faster and the cost was minimal. However, at speeds more than twice as high, the negative effects were moderate to great.
Speeding up the video resulted in a lower score
To make this into context, if the average score for the student group is 75% and there is a typical variance of 20% points in either direction, increasing the playback speed by 1.5 times will reduce each person’s average score by 2% points. Increase the speed by 2.5 times and the average loss is 17% points.
Interestingly, one study included in the meta-analysis also looked at older adults (ages 61-94) and found that viewing content at a faster rate than younger adults (ages 18-36) was affected.
This may reflect a weakened memory capacity in otherwise healthy people, suggesting that older people need to view content at a slower normal or playback speed to compensate for this effect.
Researchers have not yet determined whether watching videos with high playback speeds will have a long-term effect on mental functioning and brain activity, or whether it will recover from the damage it causes.
More research and testing needs to be done to understand whether younger generations will adapt to content viewing and listening at a faster rate, and whether it will not become a mental health issue in time.
