I usually listen at 1.5x passively.
But what you said made me curious. I listened to this podcast at 3x. I was able to understand all the words, but my conceptual understanding decreased. I also have to listen actively -- not passively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SFkwdm0PP0
At 4x, I could only understand the shape of the sentences but could no longer make out the words. But I turned on the captions and found I could keep up. Turns out reading at 4x works, listening at 4x doesn't.
English is also spoken with different prosodies and cadences. For instance, I can understand Singaporean English perfectly, but it's less amenable to being sped up. I tried listening to this lecture in Singaporean English in 3x and found that I could barely understand it.
Blind people often go upto 600 words per minute and more with text-to-speech, which is, I think, would be an equivalent to 5x and more.
In fairness, they cannibalize their visual cortex to do that:)
There's the cue for my biennial reread of Peter Watts' Blindsight.
Went into my list. Appreciated :)
Did you read his followup Echopraxia? How would you say it compared to Blindsight?
I'm pretty sure you can train yourself to do the same, but the effort probably doesn't seem worth it for most people.
But its robotic and predictable, human speech is not.
> I usually listen at 1.5x passively.
Eminem's song "Rap God" has a segment where he goes at about 6 words per second (@4m23s):
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbGs_qK2PQA
Racine sings the english translation of the Disappearance of Hatsune Miku much faster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tohDycgc-H8
However, there is a difference between a rehearsed and practiced performance and communication that makes these things more a feat of acrobatics.
For a time in the 1980s John Moschitta was well-known for making fast-talking commercials:
* FedEx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeK5ZjtpO-M
* Micro Machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzd11GMBONg
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Moschitta_Jr.
i can catch a single fastball. sometimes. i cant catch 1 per second
1.7x here as a matter of course.-
PS. I wonder if, even peripheralally, having one of 'em newfangled AI glasses teleprompting you at the same time, could get one up to 2.0x or higher.-