By Olivier Acuña Barba •
Published: 12 Jul 2025 • 19:33
• 4 minutes read
Students believe they are learning faster speeding up video lectures and audiobooks, but their scores reveal a different story | Credits: fizkes/Shutterstock
People globally are reading less and less, and watching more videos and listening to more podcasts than ever before.
According to a 2022 Gallup survey, Americans are reading fewer books per year than ever before. And according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, the time people spend reading has dropped steadily over the past 20 years. In Europe, the trend is similar. A European Commission report revealed that 47.2 per cent of European Union (EU) citizens had not read a single book in 12 months.
The Reading Agency in the UK released a study that says that 50 per cent of adults in the United Kingdom do not read regularly. The data reveal a significant decrease in the number of people reading regularly compared to 2014, when 58 per cent stated they picked up a book frequently.
More smartphones, fewer readers, more videos
Habits are changing, and that’s primarily due to the widespread ownership of mobile phones. As a point of reference, let’s take the US, where 98 per cent now own a cellphone of some kind, and 91 per cent own a smartphone, up from 35 per cent in 2011, according to a 2024 Pew Research survey.
According to Statista, as of April 2025, approximately 5.56 billion people are regular internet users. Of all internet consumers, nearly 92 per cent watch digital videos every week, and 78 per cent of them watch them online, while 55 per cent watch videos every day, according to Telemprompter.
Although statistics on the global adoption of adjusting the speed of audiobooks, podcasts, and videos are not yet available, according to a BBC report, many people worldwide are utilising the feature that enables this adjustment.
More and more students are speeding up lectures
“For example,” said BBC in an article on the subject, “a survey of California students found that 89 per cent of them changed the speed of online lectures, while numerous media articles have appeared about the widespread use of speed-reading.”
Listening or viewing things more quickly has numerous advantages in today’s world, where we are always in a hurry to complete tasks efficiently, such as on the bus or on our way to school or work. Many students believe they can learn faster or more if they speed up the digital content they need to study.
Speeding up content allows one to believe that they can consume more content in less time or review duplicate content multiple times to get the most out of it, which could be helpful in an educational context.
Watching videos in fast-paced mode is also a good way to maintain our attention and interest throughout the video, thus preventing our minds from becoming distracted.
These are the upsides, so what about the downsides?
When a person is exposed to oral information, researchers distinguish three phases of memory: encoding the information, storing it, and then retrieving it.
During the encoding phase, the brain requires time to process and comprehend the stream of words it receives. Words must be extracted, and their contextual meaning must be retrieved from memory in real time.
People typically speak at a speed of about 150 words per minute, although doubling that speed to 300 or even tripling it to 450 words per minute is still within the range of what we consider intelligible.
The issue is rather the quality and longevity of the memories we form. Information is temporarily stored in a memory system called working memory, where it is transformed, combined and manipulated into a form suitable for transfer to long-term memory.
Overload and information loss
Since our working memory has a limited capacity, if too much information is uploaded too quickly, it can lead to cognitive overload and information loss.
A recent meta-analysis examined 24 studies on learning from lecture videos. The studies varied in design, but generally involved playing a video lecture at normal speed (1x) for one group and at faster speeds (1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, and 2.5x) for another group.
The tests consisted of recalling information, answering multiple-choice questions to assess recall ability, or both.
The meta-analysis showed that increasing playback speed had increasingly adverse effects on test performance. At speeds up to 1.5 times, the cost was minimal. But at speeds of two times or higher, the adverse impact was moderate to large.
Speeding up videos meant lower scores
To put this into context, if the average score for a group of students was 75 per cent, with a typical variance of 20 percentage points in either direction, increasing the playback speed to 1.5x would reduce each person’s average score by two percentage points. Increasing the speed to 2.5x would result in an average loss of 17 percentage points.
Interestingly, one of the studies included in the meta-analysis also looked at older adults (ages 61 to 94) and found that they were more affected by viewing content at faster speeds than younger adults (ages 18 to 36).
This may reflect a weakening of memory capacity in otherwise healthy individuals, suggesting that older adults should view content at normal speed or even slower playback speeds to compensate for this effect.
The researchers have yet to determine whether watching videos at higher playback speeds has long-term effects on mental function and brain activity or if people can recover from the damage it causes.
A lot more research and testing need to be done to understand whether younger generations will adapt to viewing and listening to content at faster speeds, and whether, in time, it will not become a mental health issue.
