So my latest book is “The Photoreading Whole Mind System”, by Paul Scheele. The system was invented by Paul Scheele to help people read books rapidly, and designed as an adaptation of speed reading, which Scheele described as requiring much practice and being tiring to the mind. The distinguishing feature of PhotoReading is that it is claimed to make use of the unconscious mind to rapidly absorb material, as opposed to conventional reading or speed reading, which utilises the conscious mind.
PhotoReading is divided into five main steps:
1. Defining your purpose for reading
2. Previewing the book
3. Photoreading
4. Activation
5. Rapid reading
In the first step, the reader defines his or her purpose for reading the material he or she wishes to PhotoRead. After that, he or she “previews” the book by reading key headings and subtitles to get a feel for the book. The third step, which can be considered to be the key of the system, is the actual PhotoReading step, in which the reader adopts a style of reading the book which is purported to allow the information to flow directly to the unconscious mind.
The idea is then to “activate” the information, allowing the conscious mind to extract information directly from the unconscious photos of the book. Is it bobbins? Well, I don’t know, I’m still reading step 2, but I’ll let you know if it works. It is actually based on some fairly simple NLP presuppositions, that the unconscious has a far greater ability to absorb and process information than the conscious mind has. Quite whether the difference is 25,000 words a minute remains to be seen. But even if it doubled your reading and comprehension speed, it would be very useful in today’s world of information overload. Given the number of books I seem to be reading simulataneously, a book in ten minutes would be very, very handy 
July 24th, 2006 at 4:35 am
[...] I came upon a blog post about a very intriguing book called “The Photoreading Whole Mind Systemâ€. This book claims to be able to teach an individual how to read at 25,000 words per minute. That seems rather crazy, but I don’t want to throw out a novel idea because its promoter engages in a little bit of hyperbole. [...]