NEW YORK, May 26 — As we head into exam season, it’s important for students to find ways to revise as efficiently as possible. Certain methods, such as “bionic reading,” can be of help here. Here’s how it works.

Children often learn to read between the ages of four and six. However, it’s a skill that develops throughout your life. Some people even watch YouTube videos to help them become more effective readers. But is it possible to read faster than we already do while still maintaining our comprehension skills? Renato Casutt believes so.

This Swiss designer and typographer has developed a technique that promises to help us read (and understand) a text more efficiently. It is called bionic reading, and essentially involves putting the first letter or letters of a word in bold to create visual focal points. These points apparently help the eye to quickly fly over the text while our brain does the rest. “Bionic reading is a new method facilitating the reading process by guiding the eyes through text with artificial fixation points. As a result, the reader is only focusing on the highlighted initial letters and lets the brain center complete the word,” reads the technique’s website.

Renato Casutt founded the start-up Bionic Reading to allow as many people as possible try his new reading method. And many Twitter users have given it a go, including Juan Buis, a UX writer working for Minecraft and Spotify. “It’s incredible how reading this feels like finally unlocking 100% of your brain,” he wrote on the social network. His post has 116,500 likes, and has been shared more than 17,400 times.

Faced with the scale of enthusiasm, the start-up has recently put a text converter online that can convert any document and page into bionic reading text. Its next aim is to see this method one day integrated into the functions of many applications. “We want our reading method to be used worldwide as a standard in all kinds of software products,” Renato Casutt told Newsweek.

The bionic reading craze is a testament to the fascination, if not to say obsession, with reading in the collective subconscious. Many people dream of reading more efficiently to reduce the inevitable stack of reports, memos and other documents that stack up every morning on their desk. So does speed reading make us more productive? Yes, but only if you are able to understand (and retain) what your eye is reading at high speed. Otherwise, you might end up reading the same document twice... — ETX Studio