PhotoReading

Does it sound impossible to read 25,000 words per minute with a 75% comprehension? Not at all! I learned how to photoread using this cool technique developed by Paul Scheele that I am going to share with you. You’ll be able to digest entire textbooks, articles and newspapers that have been piling up, or read hundreds of emails just a matter of minutes. And no, it’s not ‘speed reading’, and it’s not ‘photographic memory’ either. It’s not magic – but it really works! Anyone who can read a book can learn how to do it.

Most folks read the same way they were taught in grade school – at about 200 words per minute with a 55% comprehension level. And sadly, most remain at this level while stacks of untouched newspapers, magazines, mail, articles, books and reports clutter your living space. When will you ever find the time to read for pleasure with so much to sift through? So many people are trying to cope in the information age using the same reading skills they learned in grade school!

The challenge isn’t whether photoreading is possible, but rather how to incorporate photoreading into your everyday activities, just like eating and sleeping. After I learned how to photoread, I felt much more on top of things in my life, because I had the information I needed to make effective decisions. While I used to spend days reading science textbooks and technical journals, now I only spend minutes per document and I have a clear desk feeling at the end of the day, both at my office and in my home. I can keep up with all the latest daily news in 10 minutes.

The main presumption when picking up a book is that you must read every word in order to understand its message. Not only that, but the book must be read all at one speed: painfully slow.

You know from experience that you don’t have to read every word to get the gist of what a paragraph is talking about. Nor do you have to read an entire textbook at the same speed. We’re going to learn how to super-read, rapid-read, and photoread. Think of it as giving your car a new set of gears: you only had first gear available in your car, and now I’m going to show you how to use 2nd gear, 3rd gear, and overdrive.

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The basic idea behind photoreading is this: you have to give up the idea that you must read every single word in a book in order to know what’s inside the book. That’s going to be a challenge for a lot of folks who grew up like I did, when my brain insists on reading every word and even re-reading it because I felt I didn’t read a sentence right. Photoreading skips over this entirely because the basic idea behind it says that you don’t have to know the book consciously, but rather subconsciously, in order to know what’s inside.

You’re probably a bit skeptical now (I know I was at first, too, so it’s a good sign), especially when I saw someone photoreading a 450-page book that was upside-down and they were flipping through the pages backwards! Yes, he really had an 85% comprehension on the textbook, as proven on his exam two hours later.

So now you are ready for the mechanics. Basically, here’s how it works:

First, figure out your basic purpose for reading the material. Is there a question that this book can answer for you? What is your intent behind wanting to reading this book? Photoreading won’t work if you do not have a purpose for reading. It’s important to realize that photoreading is not the same thing as reading for pleasure (which you will be able to do a lot more of, because you won’t have stacks of textbooks and emails to read through anymore!).

After you have a clear sense of why you are reading the material and the question(s) it will answer for you, it’s time to get into a resourceful, alert, relaxed state. It’s best to start photoreading before you go to bed, because your conscious mind is already getting ready to shut off… which is exactly what we want to do. When we photoread, we want to bypass the logical conscious mind and dump all the information directly into the subconscious mind. (This is the part where you’ll have to un-learn that you must read every word.)

After you’ve photoread a book at a good rate (usually one or two seconds per page), you now have the contents of the book in your mind, so now you will earn how to build a bridge between your subconscious and your conscious so you have access to the information.

Here’s a video that shows the actual EEG brain scan as a brand-new student photoreads a book. Electroencephalography (EEG) is how scientists record the electrical activity by measuring voltage fluctuations (which come from neurons of the brain). When you do an activity, you’ll see different wave patterns of the brain’s spontaneous electrical activity. For example, delta waves are seen most often in babies and also when adults are asleep. Theta waves are seen more often in young children, relaxed or sleepy adults, and also in meditation.

Okay – are you ready to really learn how to do this? Here are the basic steps on how to photoread:

1. State Your Purpose In order to read effectively, you’ve got to have a clear sense of purpose about why you’re reading the material in the first place. Do you want an overview of the main points? Ideas for inspiration? Learn how to fix the sink? Keep your purpose at the front of your mind as you begin this process. You must state your purpose everything you read to engage your concentration. I’ll repeat this purpose over and over throughout this entire process so it stays at the front of my mind.
2. Get into the Ideal Reading State When the body is relaxed and the mind is alert, you are more able to comprehend what you are reading and recall it later when you need it. Place your reading material in front of you, relax by closing your eyes, and sit as you would in a state of positive expectancy. I usually say something to myself like this: “During the next few minutes, I will read this book for ideas to help improve my understanding of astronomy.”
3. Preview When reading effectively, you must take a big picture perspective at first. Take 60 seconds to look over the material, figure out if it’s even worth reading, and make the decision on whether to continue or look for something else to read. I usually look over the table of contents, or if it’s an article I look at the headers, bold type, first and last paragraphs. I’ll also restate my intention to read the material as I look it over.
4. PhotoFocus This is where you get your ind in a resourceful state. There are many different ways to do this, and I’ve shown you my favorite way in the video (seeing the ‘hot dog’ and the ‘blip page’), but you will want to find your own method as you play with these ideas.
5. PhotoRead Maintain a steady state while flipping through the pages. Usually I will repeat over and over something rhythmic (like “all I need is within this book…”  or even “keep the state and see the page…” in order to keep the flow going. I often can’t turn the pages fast enough! At the end, close the book with a sense of mastery over the content, and think something like this: “I am curious as to how many ways my mind can demonstrate that this information is available to me.”
6. Postview This is where you go back through the book for only about 10 minutes, looking at the text on the covers, the index (especially for words that have a ton of pages listed after them), bold or offset text, previews, summaries, figures, charts, and graphics. I also look for 10-20 trigger words that leap out at me and begin to formulate questions that I want answered. I survey the book by looking only at one page every 20 or so, looking at any interesting sections that catch my attention that may relate to my purpose.  Although it’s tempting to get sidetracked and start reading deeply, I resist and keep moving through the book. I want to get the maximum benefit from every second I spend reading the book, and if I slow down too soon, I usually end up slugging through pages and pages that don’t serve my original purpose.
7. Activate This step is easy: just walk away from the material for 20 minutes to a full day. By taking a break, you are letting your mind work with the  new content. After the break, review the questions you formulated from step 6 (above) and the trigger words. It’s important to not expect immediate results right away. Your purpose now is to alert your brain to the questions you wanted answers to, and to give your mind the time it needs to get your answer to you. Stay relaxed and curious, and you’ll find that bridge between your conscious and subconscious become sturdier the more questions you ask.
8. Comprehension This comes in layers, so you’ll want to play around with different methods to find the ones that work best for you. Restate your purpose for reading as you ‘super-read and dip’. Super-reading is done by rapidly moving your eyes down the center of each page, looking for meaning using a softer gaze. When I first tried this, I was amazed how much my peripheral vision picked up on the sides! I got so distracted that it was hard to learn how to super-read. If a sentence grabs you, go in and ‘dip’ – read a sentence or two – and go back to super-reading again. You ‘dip’ whenever you have a ‘hunch’ or something catches your attention.
9. More on Comprehension By the way, learning to trust myself was one of the hardest things for me at this stage! My mind would often say something like this: “Stop! Go back!! You missed a word… you are not reading carefully enough! Now go back and do it right!” By just taking a breath and moving on, I wouldn’t get stuck there. I also learned just to wildly dance around the page, like a bug on the surface of a pond, just zooming around until I hit something worthwhile. This works best if you first read the topic sentence of a paragraph, then zigzag your eyes quickly over all the words in the paragraph. You’ll be able to quickly understand the main points. If you still can’t, go on to tread the last sentence.
10. Mind Map This is totally optional, but I found it to be a very fast and efficient way to get long-term retention and synthesizes the information acquired by super-reading and dipping. You can think it through or write  it out on paper – whichever works best for you. First, the core idea starts at the center. Supporting ideas are written on connecting lies that radiate out from the core concept. These ideas are trigger words or key terms (three words or less each). Draw images next to the words when you can, and colorize the map ti indicate how you’ve organized the material. There are several great books on this, including Mind Map by Tony Buzan and Mind Mapping by Joyce Wycoff.
11. Rapid Read Often you know exactly which parts of the book you want to study in more detail, so rapid reading is used after you super-read and dip, especially if a chapter is super-important or highly technical that you really need more time with it. To rapid read, move swiftly through the text, taking as much time as you need. When you have already read a paragraph or page during one of the previous steps (above), zip past it. When you recognize the information as understood or redundant, zip past it. Anything unimportant, just zip past it. You’ll find you need to move slower when the text contains unfamiliar information or you find something important you want to explore in detail. The end result is that you move through the book at different speeds, depending on the importance and your prior knowledge of the content. Just keep moving – don’t get stuck or sidetracked. If something doesn’t make sense – don’t re-read it.. keep going and assume that you’ll pick it up somewhere else.

Why This Works There’s an important distinction between reading for relaxation, for information, for understanding, and for challenging and deepening your mind. Reading for pleasure is easy – we all learned how to do this in grade school. But how do we handle the rest?

I want you to watch a video from Paul (the person who first developed this idea) on the basics. This video below was taken from his infomercial about his program. In the video above, I show you the basics so you can get started right away. Watch this video below so you have a general idea about what photoreading is:

Elementary is the kind of reading we learn how to do when we first learn to read. The question we ask our mind at this stage is: What does the sentence say? That’s all we want to know. Unfortunately this is where a lot of us remain when reading everything. In fact, our current educational system stops here and doesn’t teach kids about the next three reading levels!

Inspectional reading is where you scan the page and read superficially. This is useful when you want to get a general idea of what a text is about and what kind of information it contains so you can decide if this is something you want to spend time reading. Ever read an entire article and reached the end with the feeling that the whole thing was an entire waste of time? If you have read inspectionally, this would have saved you time up front.

Analytical reading is when you thoroughly go through the material. This is when you are highly active in getting into the book, making the book your own. When you really want to understand something you read analytically. Francis Bacon once said: “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Analytical reading is when you are chewing and digesting it.

Syntopical reading is when you take on several books on the same topic in order to put together the ideas into a new one that can’t be found in only one book. This is where you make new connections and coming up with new insights.

These four types of reading were defined back in the 1940s… and yes, we’re still mostly doing only the first kind. However, there is a fifth type of reading: Photoreading. This is where we incorporate all four of these ideas together in one fell swoop, and we do it quickly because we’re also engaging how the mind truly learns and absorbs material.

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