So this was the last day of the 5 day test to see whether photoreading actually works. To recap, I chose “The Art of Speedreading People” by Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger. This book aims to give the reader tools and techniques for quickly assessing a person’s MBTI (Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, a development of the original Jungian typological system), and then suggestions on how to deal with that person more effectively.
I have attempted to read this book before in the conventional way. Now, 2 1/2 hours later, I have thoroughly analysed this book using the tools and techniques detailed in Paul Scheele’s “Photoreading Whole Mind System”. So, I hear you ask, does it work?
The answer has to be yes. This is a complex book with an awful lot of information scattered within a lot of repetition to hammer home the point. It is actually a very good book, although it suffers from a structure designed to read from cover to cover rather than to be dipped in and out of for reference.
Anyway I digress. I have now photoread the book 5 times. This involved going in to the photofocus state (not unlike the stare you need to “see” 3d images in magic eye patterns) and turning the page once a second. So you can see I have spent 5 x 200 = 1000 seconds (17 minutes) photoreading the book.
In addition I have spent just over 2 hours “super reading” (scanning pages very fast, using peripheral vision to pick out useful paragraphs), “rapid reading” (reading whole sections but as fast as I can, just to pick up the “theme”, and “skittering” (moving eyes around the page in brownian motion style, to pick out keywords). I’ve used a mind map (My mind map) to focus my attention on the key points of the book, and help me to formulate questions to extract the information from my photoreading. As you can see, there is quite a lot of info here from only 2 1/2 hours of reading, and I would say most of it has come out of my head rather than by referring to the book. Only the key component characteristics were taken directly from the book for completion, and even then I’m sure I could have written them myself if I had wanted to. It’s not complete (couple of areas that I would like to explore) and I will probably return to the book to do the exercises to bed in my knowledge, but I think it would be fair to say that considering the amount of time I’ve spent on the book, I’ve pretty much exhausted its content 
.
So now we get on to purpose. Purpose is all-important with this approach. Once relaxed down in to the accelerated learning state (for all intent and purpose, a self-hypnotic trance), it is important to “program” yourself with the purpose and motivation for consuming the text. What I mean here is if you consider your unconscious as a seperate entity, it needs to understand what you want from the book, and your motivation for doing so, before it will process the text to extract the information you want from it. This is similar to self-hypnosis and many NLP techniques in that you get what you are focusing on. So purpose is important, and yet I struggled with this in the first couple of sessions - my “purpose” was woolly at best. I now spend some time before I sit down to read, constructing my purpose and I would say that the latter sessions have yielded better results. I also found that giving my purpose a consequence (something I picked up from Adam Eason’s “Secrets of self-hypnosis”) seems to make the read more motivated and easier. So the questions I ask are:
a. in what way will the information I learn help me towards my goals
b. so in that case what level of information do I need
c. are there any specific points i need to get (ie the key questions to consider that I have formulated in prior previews or postviews)
d. how will i know when I’ve got what I want?
e. wow, that sounds cool, ok let’s go for it!
So my purpose was twofold - firstly I want to be able to instinctively identify a person’s MBTI. I say instinctively because it seemed to me that when we consciously learn a new skill our goal is to make it unconscious (or instinctive) anyway, like changing gears in a car, so I figured whilst I was using my unconscious to read the book, why bother bringing it to the conscious level only to put it back to unconscious? My unconscious mind is way smarter and more observant than me so why not let it tell me what someone’s personality type is? I find myself now consciously wondering what everyone’s MBTI is, and getting very quick “hunches” on it, which, on the people who know theirs, appears to be fairly accurate. On that basis I would say that my initial foray in to photoreading has been a success and I have already begun to use it on all documents that I am reading. After all, I should only improve with practice, I’m already finding that the time to get in to the right state of mind is decreasing, so with practice I should be able to switch it on instantaneously.
In summary then, this technique works. It’s not as easy as the book suggests, and it’s not magic in that your conscious mind has a very important role in the process. You do still read consciously, and in fact this is very important if you want to close the loop on the process and get the most from it. It’s not a “25,000 words per minute” speed reading system as suggested in the hype, but it is a very efficient way of extracting information from text and applying it.
Next up - “What to say when you talk to your self” by Shad Helmstetter.
