If you’re like me, there are probably hundreds of lectures and TED Talks that you wished you had the time to watch. Fortunately, now there’s a learning hack to get through all those videos a lot faster by watching YouTube videos at 2x regular speed.
I know what you’re thinking, what’s the point of watching videos faster if you’re probably not going to remember it nearly as well? According to Wikipedia, a comfortable rate of speech for listening is about 150 words per minute, which is the speed of most audiobooks and lectures.
However, research suggests that we are very capable of listening with full comprehension at a rate of speech of up to 300 words per minute. In fact, when we are reading we are absorbing the information at about that speed already.
So, here’s how you do it:
- On your YouTube video page, select Settings in the bottom right of the video player.
- Select the first option “Playback Speed” and change it to 2.
I gave it a try myself by watching different videos and attempting to summarize what I’ve seen at regular speed and at 2x speed. I found that I can remember the important points just as easily at 2x speed. Give it a try for yourself and you may be surprised at just how great it works. If you find that you’re not comfortable with 2x speed, 1.5x is worth testing as well.
