downer67

Not exactly “intended”, but rather, for want of a better quote, the person you’ve replied to, chose Ghost In The Shell reference, based on a J.D. Salinger quote.

The “author”, meanwhile, wrote the article we’re discussing in this HN thread.

  so much fun stuff to do

Some of us...

DID NOT. (and still do not)

...have "fun stuff" to do.

So, I'm able to recognize each individual word that cycles through the display, but I was unable to construct the narrative, and imagine the concepts conveyed. So I could verify that what I saw was a word, for each word shown to me, but lost all cognition of a prior word upon seeing the next word, leaving the words disconnected by a sort of partitioning amnesia induced by the processing overhead of word recognition.

I noticed that after I had failed to conceptualize the words, what my mind was doing when reading the raw source text from the input field, was it was referencing some of the text up front, and then performing a re-trace, after new information in subsequent sections and sentences.

This seems like a pretty important component, and highly dependent on the writer's style, and tone, which cannot be anticipated programmatically, thus, there doesn't seem to be a silver bullet rule for reading speed, universal to all passages of text.