When I wrote this post the other day about photoreading, prompted by an email, I realised that in the chaos of the last few months I hadn’t done any photoreading for many months, since before Christmas.
So long in fact that I’d forgotten the technique. I’d never got to unconscious competence with it, so I’m fairly annoyed at myself and determined to get back on the horse. I hadn’t experienced spontaneous activation but I had some good results with being able to recall specific facts when asked, and being able to mind map a book’s salient points in about a third of the time it would usually take me (I like to borrow books, mind map them then give them back, you see - it saves on storage space!)
Anyhoo so I’m not back to square one but I’m back on the squares in some way. How am I going to do it? Well I am setting myself the challenge of photoreading 3 books a day. Actually photoreading 3 books a day is pretty easy - 10-20 minutes in the office before everyone comes in… finding the time to postview and activate them is the challenge, so I think I’ll have to go and have a look at my “to read” book pile and decide how I’m going to achieve this. My aim is, by the summer, to be able to get in to PR state in an instant and to have a handful of spurious activation examples documented on this site. Once you can get in to state spontaneously, then no-one can actually tell that you are doing anything different, other than the fact that you are turning the pages really quickly… but lots of people do that as they browse a book anyway.
All this and a little baby? Challenge I know but my books are piling up again and I need to crack on!
Related Articles:
- Photoreading
- Listening to my unconscious
- Read and learn faster... the next chapter
- Conversations with my unconscious
- The last post on photoreading for a while
- Photoreading: Day 5
- Photoreading: Day 4
- Photoreading: Day 3
- Photoreading: Day 2
- Moonlighting on the programme
- Photoreading: Day 1
- More about photoreading
- Reading faster than a speeding bullet
April 5th, 2007 at 8:43 am
I just took a look on Wikipedia about photoreading. It seems like an interesting concept but surely you cannot take in all that a book offers you, details will be missed that maybe important to the plot (unless I’m totally misreading what photoreading is). Surely reading a book is about getting into it and immersing yourself in the characters as you follow the story through, it would be impossible to get that level of involvement when photoreading?
April 5th, 2007 at 9:37 am
If you are talking about Novels… then the interesting thing to experience here is that by letting your unconscious mind read the book first, you might actually find that your experience is enriched as your mind can imagine richer and more vivid images of the story. Remember that it is your unconscious mind that deals with turning words in to representations, so if the author tells you about the wizened tree surrounded by hanging mist deep inside the thick, silent forest, it’s your unconscious mind that converts the words you read in to meaning, imagery, sounds and feelings. If your unconscious has already had a chance to process the book, then when you read it your unconscious says “aha, I’ve already constructed this scene, here it is!” and you might experience the book more than you would if the last time you read it is the first time you read it. With novels the idea is that you photoread the book and then read it normally, although I find that I read it quicker than I would normally, but with a deeper level of understanding of the plot, and a more vivid “experience” of it.
With non-fiction, I find that it helps me extract the salient and relevant information from the book in about a third of the time. I’m still an “L” plates photoreader though, it takes me time to relax and get in to the right frame of mind. Hope that answers your question. Matt