Myth-buster: adults typically read 200 to 400 words a minute. A 2016 scientific review of speed-reading methods found they mostly amount to skimming, and comprehension drops as speed climbs. The bottleneck isn't the eye but language processing. The best accelerator is still a rich vocabulary and plenty of practice.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.