I am shamelessly referencing our Insider’s Insights (IIs) to Dr Who’s TARDIS – our latest edition on responding to journal reviewers was released this week. Simply put, our Insider’s Insights ARE bigger on the inside. The deception is deliberate. Our Insider’s Insights are designed to act as a ready resource on special subjects – they can be used to quickly check on specific points, brush up on a subject (if have 5 minutes to spare) or serve as a starting point if you are looking for a deeper understanding. We have taken the time to identify the key points so you don’t have to. The II format provides the information you need in an easy to access fashion while also providing references to the source materials. The information they contain has been curated by your peers and is designed to help you do your job.

Why is this important? We live in a ‘just-in-time’ society – we face pressures on our time from every angle. And yet, we work in a highly regulated industry where we are expected to absorb, understand and apply ever more information. All aspects of our industry require us to gain competence, and this necessitates more learning than ever before. As Alexander observed in his poem, ‘Essays on Criticism,’ published in 1711, we cannot know everything. Obviously, he put it more eloquently than me. He wrote “once science will one genius fir, so wide is art so narrow human wit.” Technology may have made the pharmaceutical industry safer and those working in it more informed, but it has not made our jobs any easier. Although many of us have seen a reduction in printed materials in the face of online and mobile sources of learning – we are still being expected to read more and more about less and less (particularly in the field of clinical study oversight).

Information overload is happening everywhere. For example, over 1.9 million new book titles were published in the last year alone, and a recent estimate put the indexed Internet at 4.59 billion pages and growing, the great majority of which include significant amounts of written text. It can be argued reasonably that those of us working in the pharmaceutical industry are expected to identify, ‘soak up’ and curate all the ‘necessary’ information. We need to be aware of and able to follow all necessary guidelines. It’s not just the practitioners of medical research facing information overload, don’t forget those acting as subjects in clinical trials. Volunteers recruited to clinical studies are expected to read, digest and agree to the conditions described within consent forms and patient information leaflets: documents that were once 2–4 pages long in the 1990s are now 25–35 pages of complex text (circa. 10,000 words).

Since the average college-level reader reads about 200–400 words per minute, it is no wonder many of us feel unable to read all we should, never mind all we would like to read (who ever reads all the terms and conditions relating to the latest service you may have signed up to?). No one has found a way of increasing the number of hours in a week. Are there more efficient ways of reading that anyone can access?

I remember in 1970’s and ‘80’s seeing adverts in magazines for speed-reading programs that sold the dream of being able to read much faster with full comprehension. There seems to be signs that the concept is catching on again – this time driven by ‘new’ software applications (e.g., Spreeder, Spritz, Outreader) that claim to increase your reading speed by using technology to manage the pace of your reading and help eliminate ‘bad reading habits’ like subvocalizing (moving your lips while reading) or eye movement regressions. Can we really use this technology to markedly increase our reading speed (to 2000 or more words per minute)?

I was fascinated to learn about the saccadic (French for jerk) movements of the eye when I was a physiology undergraduate in the 1980s. It seems that as we read, our eyes very briefly fixate on a portion of text, and then jump to another. Mostly, we are happily unaware of this mechanism. It all happens extremely quickly. For example, an experienced reader has an average fixation period of about 250 milliseconds and the average saccade (jump) taking only 25–30 milliseconds. That is mind-numbingly fast.

The physiology of the eye dictates that only a small portion of our visual field has the acuity necessary to process normal print size letters. We all have different focal ranges for this ‘high acuity’ zone located at the fovea (the centre of the retina), and its efficacy varyies slightly with type size and distance. Even when you include the para-foveal area, where vision is still somewhat clear, it rarely encompasses more than 20 letters. Objects beyond this narrow span show up with ever decreasing acuity – our processing acuity becomes blurred. This contrasts with the idea promoted by most speed-reading programs, that you can train yourself to use your peripheral vision to absorb whole lines or even pages at a single fixation.

As your eye moves through a document saccadically you will sometimes make regressions, those are eye movements that go back to previously read text. We can expect around 10–15% of our eye movements to involve regression – even skilled readers, and these serve an important purpose. Although some regressions happen because a saccade overshoots (racing ahead in the text), most serve to address failures in comprehension. Put simply, something we have just read (or think we read) didn't make sense as we processed the incoming information. In milliseconds the muscles positioning our eyes are recruited to correct the problem by returning the fovea’s focus to the text we just scanned – perhaps we missed or misread a word. This phenomenon has been identified as a potential inefficiency that we might use technology to correct by exposing us to one word at a time, beamed, as it were directly to the fovea and doing away with need for scanning text. In fact, comprehension suffers when a process called rapid serial visual presentation techniques (used to show readers one word at a time) are used to eliminate regression (as occurs in some popular speed-reading programs, like Spritz). This effect is particularly noticeable with texts are complex and longer than your average sentence – typically the sort of texts we are expected to absorb in the pharma industry.

Speed-reading programs also aim to cut down fixations of longer than the usual 250 ms. Once again, these perceived deficiencies have a reason and are not caused by lack of visual perception but rather because of difficulties we may experience with word identification or understanding. Both regressions and extended fixations increase in all readers with the unfamiliarity or conceptual difficulty of the text – it is evident that such speed reading solutions may not be the solution if comprehension is the goal. This raises the question, could there be ways we might read smarter if there is no obvious shortcut to reading faster? This is a question we asked ourselves when designing our Insider’s Insights. We considered the purpose of the IIs and concluded that we needed to find an efficient way of imparting information to the busy people in our industry – enabling different users to use our documents in different ways. The goal was to split key ‘understandings’ into defined areas on the page, minimising long strings of text. We have attempted to find a happy medium between summarising the data in a infographic-style format, providing valued content that can quickly assimilated, as well as identifying sources for additional information. Please let us know how they can be improved if you disagree.

We would love to hear your opinion, Niche is committed to regularly delivering new issues of the Insider’s Insight – you can sign up here to get notification of when new issues are released. This year, we have delivered three new editions and we have a further 10 in the pipeline for the next 12 months. Topics are selected when our team identify subjects that would be well served by information being provided to foster understanding. The authors of our Insider’s Insights are practitioners in the field and they bring their experience and insight to the documents they create.