Cynics stop here. You are not going to like this post. All gone? Good, then I will begin. Some of you may have read previous posts on the subject of photoreading. Well, I continue to practice it and I’ve gotten some good results to date. I’m still getting through 3-4 books a week, not bad considering the time I have to read. I’m also photoreading a lot of work material and the quality of my attention and comment on documents that I have to approve has gone up considerably.
Now one of the interesting things about Photoreading is where you get the information from. Photoreading engages much more than just the left side of the brain, it is a two-way interaction with your conscious and unconscious.
Eh?
That’s right, the essence of Photoreading is this: You consciously form questions about the material, that your unconscious has read.
And your unconscious replies.
However, it doesn’t always reply in words, it doesn’t always reply immediately. But then you already knew that. Have you ever tried to remember someone’s name, or a location, only to say “it’s on the tip of my tongue!”. Later, maybe a day, maybe an hour, the name suddenly pops in to your head… well that is your unconscious. I like to think of this process as a massive building with a little lobby. Behind the lobby is a collection of photographs, books, memories, speeches, songs, everything that you have experienced, all stored and catalogued. In the lobby there is a wall with a little hatch and a locker.
When you want a piece of information from the store (your unconscious), you write a request and pop it in the hatch. The little bloke in the store toddles off to find it, but then he pops the answer in the locker.
Now the answer may be an image, a word, a sound, a smell, a sensation, who knows? After all if we didn’t specify the format of the answer, it could be anything. And the likelihood is that we will actually miss the answer coming to us in a number of forms.
I am still a novice photoreader, and I don’t practice half as much as I would like, but I have learnt that if I want answers, I need to be quiet enough inside to hear them. This means keeping calm and being receptive to the possibility that my “intuition” is actually telling me something.
This has had a strange side-effect. It turns out that my intuition (or my other-than-conscious) knows a whole lot of stuff that I (my conscious) doesn’t know. In the last week it has told me flight numbers, page numbers and names of people that I didn’t consciously know. You see it turns out that the other than conscious is a lot smarter than the conscious. Not convinced? Well imagine if you had to keep your balance, breathe, regulate body temperature, heart rate, and process every single image from your eyes 25 times a second, as well as detect threats to your wellbeing from every sense? Well your unconscious is doing all that as well as processing memories, your digestive system and listening out for the slightest whimper from your sleeping baby.
It really is that smart. Whereas it has been proven that the conscious mind can only process 7 +/- 2 items at any one time, the unconscious can process 20,000 items at a time. It is very smart. And if it is that smart, then isn’t it a waste to ignore what it has to say? Wouldn’t it be beneficial to listen to your very smart self once in a while? I certainly think so, and so I shall continue to do so.
I have recently found a book that considers this subject. For Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling The Tipping Point explores the extraordinarily perceptive and deceptive power of the sub-conscious mind. Gladwell’s major claim is that decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as a decision made cautiously and deliberately. What we are actually doing is what Gladwell calls “thin-slicing”. When we leap to a decision or have a hunch our unconscious is sifting through the situation in front of us looking for a pattern, throwing out the irrelevant information and zeroing in on what really matters. Our unconscious mind is so good at this that it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and protracted ways of thinking. Much of this is utterly mysterious but some of the most astonishing and useful examples of thin-slicing can be learned.
What’s that you say? Time for a cup of tea? Well who am I to argue!!
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