Writing the Mind Read my mind, as I'm writing it down for you...

About Me Name: Scriptuoso Location: United States The list of my interests says it all. Or, does it?.. View my complete profile I see what you are saying! The Revealing Power of Art Degrees of conscious trance Food and Sex Zone The Art of Argument: I agree, you are... wrong! The Creation Sunday, October 24, 2004 KinoReading: Beyond PhotoReading PhotoReading: the Whole Mind System? Paul Scheele, the developer of PhotoReading, explains this technique as an inte gration of your conscious and "other than conscious" (or unconscious) mind in th e process of extracting information from the written material. However, the way he teaches it first separates the two "minds," and only loosely combines their e fforts at the last two stages of the process. Specifically, setting the goal and previewing the book (the first two steps) ar e mostly conscious processes of becoming familiar with the content, extracting k eywords and key concepts, which will later serve as triggers for the unconscious mind. Next step, the actual photoreading process, is a totally unconscious activity. In fact, this step is designed specifically to take your conscious mind out of t he way (chanting, rythmic page turning, photo-focus), and let the uncoscious tak e over. The idea is to "download" the photographic images of the pages into our unconscious memory for later (completely unconscious) processing. Finally, activation and rapid reading steps connect the conscious intent and un conscious memory and processing power together in extracting the most important information and re-coding it for our conscious mind. Normally, only one of the t wo steps is done (either activation or rapid reading), and this is exactly when the conscious mind finally gets a chance to talk to the unconscious and receive the knowledge and information it needs. Integrating the Steps While the above steps can be done much faster than regular reading (conscious c over to cover linear processing), it is still far less than optimal strategy to process written material. In my experience, separating the process into purely c onscious and purely unconscious steps limits our brain processing power. What if we could make conscious and unconsious minds cooperate from the start? Can it i mprove our ability to process information? My experience suggests that the answer is definitely yes! Here is an alternativ e strategy that I found myself using much more effectively than the classical "v anilla" photoreading.

The following are the steps of my own version of the photoreading system. It is very important to note that all of these steps are only effective when done in a special state of trance called accelerative learning state. Paul Scheele does a great job teaching it, and in what follows, I assume that you always go into t hat focused and relaxed state of mind before even taking a book. 1. Prepare The first step is to state your goal, purpose, and intent for reading a book. I t is similar to regular photoreading, however I like to make a fine distinction between a goal and a purpose, and stress the importance of intent. The goal is what you want from the book, what kind of information, what specific ideas, techniques, specific knowledge or data you want to extract, and how do y ou know which data is the right one or not. The purpose is why you want that information or data. The purpose provides you w ith motivation, the reason for taking the effort, and helps you focus on the tas k. Finally, the intent is the commitment to obtaining the information from the book . The intent provides the driving force for accomplishing the reading, sharpens the focus of attention to the stated goal, and keeps you in the best flow state of mind while reading. For example, a goal for reading a textbook for a programming class can be to le arn the syntax and semantics of the specific programming language (for instance, C++), and programming techniques which are required by the instructor. The purp ose, on the other hand, is to get a good grade in class, to become an expert in C++ programming, to get a better job, or whatever else is important to you and m otivates you to read the book. Lastly, setting the intent to achieve the goal is what makes you to take action and actually do the reading. Notice, that not only I distinguish the goal from the purpose and intent, but I also suggest that your goal should be verifiable. That is, there is a specific way by which you know you have achieved your goal. In our example it may be the ability to answer the test questions on the midterm, or read the course syllabus and match the keywords with the concepts you have learned from the book. Often, it helps to go through the table of contents, especially if you are not familiar with the book, and study it for a few seconds. This often gives you a v ery good idea of what this book is about, and what information more specifically to look for in the latter steps. 2. Quick Scan This is a version of the photoreading step taken to its extreme. Mechanically, you will take a book and flip through the pages as fast as your eyes can perceiv e the images (about 5-15 pages per second) by running your thumb through the rig ht edge of the book. The purpose of this step is to get an idea of what is insid e the book, to pick out some important keywords and illustrations, and to unders tand more precisely the structure of the book and the quality of information it provides (what we often call depth). Quite often, the phrases in the table of co ntents are rather ambiguous and not as descriptive as we would like. This step h elps you clarify what the author meant by certain keywords or idioms in the tabl e of contents, and provides you with a rough map of what you can get from this b ook. To some of you, this may sound too unreal (how on earth can I go through the bo ok so fast and still get something out of it?!). Nontheless, each of us has done

this many times in the past, for other reasons. For example, have you ever used a piece of paper as a bookmark, and had it slip inside the book? How do you sea rch for it? Exactly! What are you looking for when you flip the pages at a movie -frame speed? Obviously, you have an image of that piece of paper in mind, and y ou let your eyes match it when the pages fly by. So, you can do it already. By the same principle, you can be searching for the keywords from the table of contents which you want to understand better, or noti ce the length of the description is of each idea that you want to learn, thus, e stimating the depth of explanation, and so on. The key is to be able to do this on purpose, and take the skill you already have to the new context -- extracting written information. The scanning step is so fast that there is no excuse not to you are considering to read. It will take you 10-20 seconds book several times, back and forth, so you can see both even have several passes through the material that attracted your ble of contents, or on the first pass through. do it with any book to zip through the and odd pages, and attention in the ta

The bulk of the data processing in this step is done in your unconscious mind, but a few most important bits and pieces of information trickle through to your conscious mind in real time, giving you a sense of participation and progress. Y our conscious mind can then steer the focus of your unconscious mind to a more r efined goal, which improves the quality and precision of the extracted data. 3. Deep Scan This is a much slower and thorough process of going through the material, and I usually do it at a normal photoreading speed (flipping 1-2 pages per second), a nd scanning both pages with a soft (but focused!) gaze. Since this process takes 5-10 minutes for the entire book, flooding your conscious mind with too much in formation in too short period of time, I prefer to deep-scan only the most inter esting and the most important portions of the book, which I identified through t he quick scan process and from the table of contents. Again, both conscious and unconscious mind participate in the process together, providing you with immediate feedback and sense of involvement. You will constr uct a detailed picture of the material, especially how it is structured, what ar e the most important keywords and their meaning, and what more specifically the book provides to you. The amount of information you get after this step is roughly equivalent to the quick activation step of the "vanilla" photoreading. Taking into account that yo u would have to photoread, incubate (wait for 20 minutes, or better overnight), and then activate, which is generally a slower process than photoreading, the "p repare - scan - deep scan" process is at least 5-10 times as fast, and in my exp erience, provides much better results. It is important to mention that deep scan does not have to be done linearly. In fact, it is often more advantageous to deep-scan various portions of the book, jumping back and forth as you sense the need for more information about certain keywords, ideas, and notions. By the way, it is perfectly fine to slow down to skittering and dipping speeds during the deep scanning step whenever you happen to notice a very important pie ce of information and want to absorb it in more detail. Just make sure you don't get caught into slow regular reading or studying at this step, and resume deep scanning as soon as you have gotten enough information to proceed. Remember, the goal of this step is to get a more detailed understanding of the important part s of the book, but it is still a very high-level and approximate view. If you ne

ed, you can always go back later and study that particular paragraph or section in more detail. 4. Skittering and Dipping This step is directly taken from the Paul Scheele's photoreading process, and i n my version it becomes a slow and more thorough version of deep scanning. I usu ally do it after finishing the deep scanning of all the parts of the book that I consider important. This way I know that I am not going to waste my time on a s ection which is not that important. Often, this step gives me so much information that I tend to call it "studying. " For many popular technical and not-so-technical books, skittering is all it ta kes to really study the material in sufficient depth, at least intellectually. 5. Rapid Reading and Studying Once you have decided to really go for the gory details, depending on whether t his is your pleasure reading or a class textbook reading, you have a choice of r apid reading or studying the book. For most pleasure reading books I would heartily recommend rapid reading, or ev en regular reading from the start. This way you get all the pleasure of re-livin g the lives of the main characters and being in the moment that the author inten ded to create. In other words, do not photoread a detective novel, you'll know t he answer to the puzzle before you even start, which spoils all the fun. Remembe r, not all books are meant for fast information processing. However, rapid readi ng technique may be a good way to speed up your consumption of prose, and Paul S cheele has a good tutorial on that in his PhotoReading course. For technical books, once you decide to go for the really deep understanding of the material, you are up for studying the book. Examples of when this step is u seful is taking an exam on the material from the textbook, or acquiring new skil ls or knowledge for your work. Studying should only be done once you have completed all the previous steps, in cluding skittering and dipping. You will be spending significant amounts of time going through the material and scrutinizing every word the author is saying, po ssibly doing the exercises or reworking the proofs of theorems. Therefore, you h ave to be sure you are studying exactly what you need in the best portions of th e book. Also, the rest of the book is always there for you to consult, in case y ou want to clarify the details of a certain definition or an idea. If you do not remember where this definition is located, and the table of contents is not giv ing any useful hints, then fast scanning is your friend again. You will be amaze d at how easy you can find the right page in the book any time you need it! Conclusion The new system of photoreading which I have just described works for me orders of magnitude faster and better than the regular photoreading by Paul Scheele. I believe that the reason is a tighter integration of the conscious and unconsciou s mind at every step of the process, and together they work as an interactive te am, adjusting and refining information processing in real time. Regular photoreading is similar to having two people working independently, bri efly communicating the results to each other once in a while, and immediately go ing back to their cubicles. In contrast, my system resembles two people working together in a team, brainst orming together the ideas and new information the moment it becomes available. O

ne plus one in this case is certainly much greater than two. If photoreading is orders of magnitude faster than regular reading, just as pho tography is much faster than drawing pictures by hand, then a better name for my system would be KinoReading, as cinematographic capture of information is order s of magnitude more efficient than photography. posted by Scriptuoso | 7:02 PM 0 Comments: Post a Comment << Home