Flash Recall

The six-second countdown is fixed and doesn't pause or extend, whether or not you've finished reading when it runs out. Read at whatever pace you can, and when the timer hits zero, everything past your very first character goes dark and the typing surface takes over immediately — there's no buffer between the two states.

Once typing starts, there's no clock running against you the way there is during the reading window; this stage is untimed, and your net WPM, gross WPM, and accuracy are measured the same way they are on every attempt anywhere on the site, from the moment your first keystroke lands. What's different is what you can see while that happens: your own finished characters stay visible behind the caret, right or wrong, and the one you're currently on is highlighted and legible, but everything past it stays invisible until you actually reach it.

Finishing the twelve words brings up the ordinary results screen, and starting again draws a completely fresh set of twelve words with a new six-second window — nothing here is fixed the way Ghost Race's passage is, so you can't build familiarity with one specific set of words across repeated attempts.

The rule is exact, not impressionistic. Anything you've already typed remains on screen, coloured to show whether it landed right or wrong, and the single character you're currently on is highlighted and readable — the same caret convention every other page on the site uses. Everything past that position is rendered invisible rather than deleted: it still holds its width and its place in the line, so the passage doesn't visually reflow as you move through it, but there's nothing legible there. You get a look backward and a look at exactly where you are. There is no look forward.

True Touch Typing: The No-Look Discipline and the guide on Why Not Looking at the Keys Works are both about removing the keyboard as a visual reference. Flash Recall removes a different reference for the whole rest of the attempt — the passage itself, everywhere past your current position — which tests a separate kind of independence: whether you can hold and reproduce a sequence of words with no visual fallback at all, rather than whether your fingers can find a key without looking down at it.

Long enough to require actually sequencing several words in order, rather than just holding one thing in mind, but short enough that six seconds is a realistic window to read the whole thing at least once. A much longer passage would turn this into pure memorisation with almost no typing left in it; a single word would remove the sequencing element that makes recall meaningfully different from simple recognition. Since nothing past your current position is ever shown, length is really the only dial controlling how hard the memory side of this gets.

On an ordinary test, a shaky opening can be salvaged just by reading a little further ahead before your hands catch up. That option is gone the moment the caret passes a word here — there's no rereading, no falling back on the screen, because the screen has nothing left to show for it. A hesitant start now means exactly what it looks like: the six seconds weren't enough, and there's no recovering that inside the same attempt.