Reading Fast vs. Speed Reading vs. PhotoReading

Jason James 18 months ago

Learn to photoread for free:

Step 1: Enter the PhotoReading State

Place the StereoReading page or other reading material before you. Close your eyes and become aware of every part of your body. Sit up straight. Put both feet on the floor. Breathe deeply and evenly. Relax.

Now imagine that you are hovering just above and behind yourself. Open your eyes and look at the screen (or pages), imagining that you are reading over the top of your own head. When you read, you will notice the part of the monitor on the edge of the screen (or your hands on the edge of the pages). The technique of peering from behind your head has actually widened your visual perspective, allowing you to take in both facing pages at once.

At this point, your brain waves should have slowed to a leisurely 8 to 12 cycles per second – the so-called Alpha State (your normal waking Beta State is 12 to 23 cycles per second). Psychologists have found that this relaxed but alert state of mind is ideal for learning.

Step 2: State Your Purpose for Reading

Before you start reading, silently state your purpose for reading this particular material. Francis Bacon once said, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Paul Scheele put it more bluntly: “Some things are worth reading in great detail. Others are not worth reading at all.”

Most of us never plan out reading. We pick books and magazines at random and simply start reading. This behavior is terribly inefficient. Reading a book can take days, a long article more than an hour. Such time-consuming tasks should be managed as carefully as any other important job you do.

If you want to read Shakespeare’s sonnets, you should probably read them the old-fashioned way, “chewing” and “digesting” every word. But if you subscribe to an online service and have avoided reading the 250-page user’s manual for six months, you may prefer to “swallow” it whole through PhotoReading. Or you may choose to StereoReading a large online text which is so large it would be hard to focus on for the time necessary without the stereogram image. Even if you wish to read Shakespeare’s sonnets you may want to StereoRead or PhotoRead them first so that you may have a subliminal preview of them. This opens up the possibility of increasing the quality of your experience. Be realistic with your choice. Ask yourself before starting:

· What do I expect to gain from reading this material? Will the text teach you to use your new computer, explore a favorite hobby in greater depth, speak a foreign language, or gain insight into a current social issue? Determine in advance exactly how you expect to be made more capable or better informed by reading the material.

· What level of detail do I want? Do you need to learn and remember every fact in the text, the major points of each chapter, or just one or two key facts or techniques? Decide in advance.

· How much time am I willing to commit right now to achieving my purpose? After answering the first two questions, you may decide that the text is not worth your time at all. Perhaps it’s worth only 5 minutes. You be the judge.

Step 3: Preview

The greater feel you develop before hand for the text as a whole, the easier you will find it to PhotoRead or StereoRead. You can look a text over beforehand at the StereoReading Main Page by not selecting any background. First, survey the book’s overall structure. Read the Table of Contents; the titles; the text on the front and back cover; and any boldfaced or italicized print. Also read any boxes, diagrams, or charts. This should give you an excellent feel for the book’s structure and content.

Next identify the key trigger words, that is, words that jump out at you as you scan the text. The author uses them again and again because they represent key facets of the text’s theme. Find out exactly what the trigger words mean, and you will understand the book.

Finally, do a mini-inventory. Have your priorities changed during the preview process? In many cases, you will find that after completing the preview you have obtained everything you need from the text.

Previewing Is Optional Readers may find that they can PhotoRead quite well without previewing. Indeed, there may even be some advantage in doing so. Priming the brain beforehand with too much conscious information about the book can sometimes block more subtle insights from the subconscious. Win Wenger from Project Renaissance and Paul Scheele from Learning Strategies Corporation are collaborating on a research project regarding this issue. Until the results come in readers are encouraged to decide for themselves whether or not to use the previewing stage. Readers may want to start out using previewing, yet experiment later on in not using it. Either choice will produce comparable results.

Step 4: Approach the Theta State

Before either StereoReading or PhotoReading, you want to achieve profound relaxation that opens up your right brain and gives you access to unconscious memory. That means descending into a deep Alpha State very close to the Theta State, which lies between 4 and 8 cycles per second. The Theta State is ideal for working with mental imagery and other right-brain activities.

Close your eyes and breathe deeply, letting anxiety flow out with each breathe and tranquillity flow in. Each time you exhale, think of the word relax. The first few times you PhotoRead, you might want to lie down first and relax each major muscle group of your body, one at a time, while repeating the word relax each time you exhale. Be careful not to fall asleep. Our body tends to link the Theta State with bedtime. Eventually, you will gain the knack of entering this state without such elaborate preparations. With practice, a couple of deep, slow breaths will serve as a adequate trigger.

An alternative is to engage in a 5- to 10-minute session of Image Streaming before you PhotoRead. It will achieve the same effect.

Step 5: Attain PhotoFocus

When you focus precisely on single words or sentences, your left brain switches on and your right brain switches off. So much for your Theta State! When you are StereoReading or PhotoReading, never focus on specific words. This isn’t too hard a step if you are StereoReading since the stereogram background focuses your conscious attention and doesn’t allow your eyes to see the text. When PhotoReading you should either diverge your eyes as if you are looking at a stereogram, seeing a “blip” page in-between the two pages (more on this in The PhotoReading Whole Mind System), or concentrate your attention on the white space around the letters. Imagine yourself looking over the top of your head as you gaze at the entire page at once, as well as your two hands holding the book on either side. The page will take on an almost three-dimensional appearance. When you gain that sense of depth, you have attained PhotoFocus.

Step 6: PhotoRead

Now start turning the pages or scrolling down the screen. As a beginner, you will want to start slow at first, allowing 1 to 2 seconds per page or section. Remain relaxed at all times. Let your mind stay as blank as possible. Avoid negative thoughts or gently bounce away from them if they occur. Especially avoid generating such self-fulfilling prophecies as: “This isn’t going to work.” One way to keep your mind relaxed and positive is to chant to the rhythm of the page turning. You might chant “Relax . . .Re-lax . . .” or “Keep the state . . . See the page . . .” If you are StereoReading you may want to look at all the intricacies of the 3-D image while the text is scrolling down. Play little mind games concerning the stereogram image, such as focusing on one part and then another, to keep your mind focused during the really long texts. Do not try to read the text at all, but be sure to look at all words at least once. When StereoReading fast you can’t always verify this. Yet since the text scrolls up the screen (or down if you want to soak up the information in a different way) yo