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hen, in a comprehensive study of over 100 high school students with dyslexia done in 2013, using techniques that included eye tracking, we were able to confirm that the shortened line formats produced a benefit for many who otherwise struggled with reading.

For example, Marco Zorzi and his colleagues in Italy and France showed in 2012 that when letter spacing is increased to reduce crowding, children with dyslexia read more effectively.

A clever web application called Beeline Reader, developed by Nick Lum, a lawyer from San Francisco, may accomplish something similar using colors to guide the reader’s attention forward along the line.  Beeline does this by washing each line of text in a color gradient, to create text that looks a bit like a tie-dyed tee-shirt.

one aims to increase the throughput of the brain’s reading buffers by changing their capacity for information processing, while the other seeks to activate alternate channels for reading that will allow information to be processed in parallel, and thereby increase the capacity of the language processing able to be performed during reading. 

The brain is said to be plastic, meaning that it is possible to change its abilities.

people can be taught to roughly double their reading speed, without compromising comprehension.

Consider that we process language, first and foremost, through speech. And yet, in the traditional design of reading we are forced to read using our eyes. Even though the brain already includes a fully developed auditory pathway for language, the traditional design for reading makes little use of the auditory processing capabilities of the brain

While the visual pathways are being strained to capacity by reading, the auditory network for language remains relatively under-utilized.

Importantly, our early indications suggest that the least effective method of reading may be the one society has been clinging to for centuries: reading on paper.

Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex tasks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple and when they don’t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An example would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio. That’s fine. But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being on Facebook—each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.”

Young people think they can perform two challenging tasks at once, Meyer acknowledges, but “they are deluded,

This ability to resist the lure of technology can be consciously cultivated

“The good thing about this phenomenon is that it’s a relatively discrete behavior that parents actually can do something about,” she says. “It would be hard to enforce a total ban on media multitasking, but parents can draw a line when it comes to homework and studying—telling their kids, ‘This is a time when you will concentrate on just one thing.’ ”

Stop fretting about how much they’re on Facebook. Don’t harass them about how much they play video games. The digital native boosters are right that this is the social and emotional world in which young people live. Just make sure when they’re doing schoolwork, the cell phones are silent, the video screens are dark, and that every last window is closed but one.