Normalization – 1

I was surprised to learn yesterday that blind people can be trained to listen to audiobooks at 5-6x speed.

Given that blind people don’t utilize their visual cortex, blind people’s brains rewire themselves to direct this excess capacity to their auditory regions. This is a tribute to the brain’s ability to adapt.

Several sighted folks train their own brains to listen to podcasts and audiobooks at 2x or faster. They do this by bumping up the speed in steps of 25% until their brains normalize comprehension at that elevated pace.

Stretch goals work because of the brain’s ability to adapt to what once felt uncomfortable and normalize it.

Note: I present a contrarian perspective in another post.