Take a look at Howard Berg, reading 30.000 wpm. I think that is where a lot of the frustration and failure comes from: by not being in the right state of mind - as phony as this may sound.Īfter having read a lot about speed reading, I think Skousen is the most sincere about it. And this program requires you to use visualization and relaxation techniques extensively. As I said, you must submit yourself to the program as Jason Bourne did. Then again, as you can be an excellent speed reader at a word-per-minute count of let's say 5,000, 2,500, or even 1,200, why bother trying to train your recall to get up to 25,000 and more. So, in principle, if you have sufficiently trained your recall ability (combining the remembering process with mind-mapping), I am willing to believe that the results proposed by Scheele and Welch are possible. How well your understanding (comprehension) really is, you will see, when you try recalling what you have just read. This is basically the same as saying: You move your eyes over a text (SEEING) and understand its content. In fact, the author says that as soon as your eye movement gets better, your understanding (comprehension) will come back as well. Move your eyes quickly but smoothly over a paragraph and try to recall what you have just read.ĭeveloping this skill (REMEMBERING) is, IMHO, the most important one of the three skills suggested. Anyway.) Besides practicing your eye movement on exemplary target texts and building vocabulary accordingly, the most important skill, you need to to practice in order to improve your speed reading, is remembering. Even though I think, Christian meditation should work as well. Speed reading depends a lot on your mental state, and I do not think you will come around some relaxation or even meditation methods. I actually wanted to write more about this but for now I will just cut to the chase: The Skills are rapid but smooth EYE MOVEMENT, UNDERSTANDING (combined with concentration and vocabulary building) and REMEMBERING. (I guess in the 80s and 90s that sounded really cool.)Īnyway, the point is - and that was also the cause of my personal frustration - you cannot expect these methods to work if you are not willing to put in a lot of time for practicing speed reading, which is not the same as reading.Īccording to Skousen speed reading consists of three different subskills which must be acquired separately. Recently, I have come across a copy of Owen D, Skousen's Alphanetics Rapid Reading Program. I also "tried" Paul Scheele's method which is basically the same as Richard Welch's. Having read a lot of different books on the topic, I found the different explanations very frustrating. Personally, I tried different approaches to speed reading several time during my university time because I am a very lazy person. He strikes me as someone who has thought a lot about these things, researched it, tried it, and willing to give an honest Cohen: Great site! (I just stumbled over it today while looking for practical examples of using memory towns for learning languages.)Īnyway, speed reading. I would like to know Ben Pridmore's opinion on both speed-reading and photic stimulation. And researching the companies that sell them gave me more pause. Interesting but still a little hokey IMO. Photic stimulation is a blinking of LED lights at a certain frequency to attune the mind to certain beta (alpha?) levels. Recently I took a cursory interest in photic stimulation, which Dominic O'Brien claims helped his performance by 20-30%. And I tend to read stuff I am interested in at a much slower pace and several times.įurther, if you research speed-reading you'll see many knowledgeable people question its efficacy. Frankly, I often find some of the things that have keen interest in are often covered obliquely in a throw away sentence or as they say, reading between the lines. I think there might be something to speed-reading as the are many reputable people out there do read at high speeds, but I don't think it is orders of magnitude of difference (800-900 wpm versus 300-400 and different rates for different material) and I think a lot of us slow plodding readers do it when she peruse news articles, etc. Tony Buzan is also a proponent, though he strikes me as more of a preacher rather than a practitioner. Ramon Campayo is a proponent of speed-reading at hyper-fast levels, so I don't discount the possibility. I know there are the rare cases such as Kim Peek or a handful of other savants, but a normal brain with normal demands could not operate this way. I have researched it and, IMHO, it is nonsense. This is similar, if the not the same idea, as photoreading (by Paul Scheele).
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