This is why you like to speed up podcasts, movies and music

Nicholas Quah is far from the only person to speed up his podcasts.

But, as a critic with New York Magazine and Vulture, he is one of the few to make a public plea to the world to not only speed up podcasts but also virtually every kind of media. 

To some it’s a crazy trend. (According to American sportswriter Bill Simmons, it’s sociopathic.) But for those who agree with Quah, it’s the new way of life. 

To answer why people might be drawn to doing this, CBC News talked to some of the leading researchers in cognitive science about what double-time music, podcasts and movies does to our brains. 

Podcasts

According to Audible, about five per cent of its audience listens at speeds of 1.5 times or faster, while 1.25 times is the most common choice.

UCLA psychology professor and metacognition researcher Alan Castel says this trend actually makes perfect sense — at least for younger listeners. In a study on learning, he found that when college-aged students listened to lessons at up to double their intended speed, there was almost no decline in information retention. 

And while comprehension does start dropping off when people listen at more than double the average speech rate, some can be trained to understand speech at more than three times normal speed. So the more often they listen to sped-up podcasts, the better they get at taking them in. 

Castel also found in a followup study that when speed was increased, listeners were less likely to experience “mind wandering” — distracted thoughts about unrelated topics. 

For Quah, who has spent the last five years only listening to podcasts if he’s sped them up, he agrees that he can understand things just as easily at a faster rate. On whether speedier podcasts are more able to hold his attention, he’s skeptical. 

“Is it because when it’s faster, it locks you in to pay closer attention? I understand things as quickly, or about the same either way,” he said. “Or ignore it in the same pace either way — let’s put it that way.”

Music

Since two Norwegian DJs invented “nightcore” in the early 2000s — the technique of increasing the tempo of existing songs — sped-up music has become a mega-genre. Alongside unofficial recuts made by fans on TikTok, artists from SZA to Oliver Tree have taken to simultaneously releasing sped-up versions of their tracks alongside the original, significantly bumping up interest and listener counts. 

Simone Dalla Bella, a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal who researches music’s effect on the brain and body, said the prevalence of the trend fits from a neuroscience perspective. 

In one study done by his lab, researchers took a slow song that was originally perceived as sad and gradually sped it up. Overwhelmingly, listeners would eventually begin to see the song as happier, or simply happy, even though every other aspect of the piece stayed the same. 

Traditionally, Dalla Bella said, it was thought that an increase in speed of roughly 20 per cent was the upper limit — any higher, and the altered pitch and beat became too noticeable. Our brains then start to see it as a different song, something that nightcore has taken advantage of.

But stay within that threshold and you’re creating songs that are both different yet similar enough to the originals that listeners know to create novelty, something our brains crave.

The results are basically remixes that may require far less effort to create, relying on increases in tempo and pitch — which themselves lead to automatic responses like increased respiration, heart rate, dopamine levels and pleasure, Dalla Bella’s research suggests. And since music doesn’t rely on language in the same way as podcasts or movies, there’s effectively no upper limit on how fast you can go.  

According to Quah, that is part of what drives the popularity.

“There is a certain tempo that feels good for people and certain keys that trigger emotions,” he said. “I think we’re in search of a certain upper limit. But the limit will change because we’re plastic.”

Movies

Though it’s one of the more controversial mediums to speed up, pumping up the playback rate for movies and TV has definitely gained popularity. Though Netflix declined to offer specific numbers, the streaming service added the ability to adjust playback speed back in 2020 — a feature Quah said he’s often taken advantage of.

James E. Cutting, a cognitive scientist and author of Movies on Our Minds: The Evolution of Cinematic Engagement, says the trend is even older than that. According to a study he published, people have been speeding up movies for nearly a century; since 1935, the average length of shots in films has decreased from about 12 seconds to roughly four seconds. At the same time, IQ levels have crept up around the world — at a rate that can’t be explained by evolution or education.

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The answer, he said, is the “ubiquitous access to pictures, graphs and displays of all kinds” — in other words, visual media. And as we’ve gotten more used to the format of visual media like film, we’ve gotten better at pulling information quickly from our screens.

But films may not be keeping up with us. So instead of the often-assumed fact that attention spans are shrinking, audiences could theoretically be trying to speed up movies to match the speed moviegoers have unconsciously adapted to, Cutting said.

Quah says that reasoning matches his experience. But also, as the proliferation of visual media has exploded, so has the motivation to quickly see what’s worth your time. 

“That consumption pattern tends to force them to ask the question: Do I still want to stay here?” he said. “Because I have, like, 50,000 other options.”