Speed Reading Tips: Supersonic Readers Take the Advice of the Sages – Why Not You?

Remember when you were young and went to your favorite swimming hole and couldn`t wait to dive into the water and your parents, or other adult would tell you to look before you dive in?

Or, have you ever ventured out on a long road trip; did you first look at a map?

Or, do you remember the Aesop Fable of the Fox and the Goat?

Although these examples may seem to differ they all have a powerful meaning to understanding our 4th Key to Supersonic Reading (the ability to read and comprehend at rates above the 600 wpm threshold of linear sub-vocal reading. Key Concept Four is the easiest of the 4 keys to employ, makes the previous 3 keys easier to apply, but is the most forgotten and overlooked concept that leads to problems in comprehension at high rates when not employed.

The Fourth Key Concept of Supersonic Reading is referred to as using the Gestalt.

Gestalt means: An organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.

How this applies to the Dynamic Speed Reading Methodology is that when you have something to read that is more than a paragraph or so, your mind will be better able to respond to the meaning of the text, especially at super fast rates, if you stop to first consider the whole before focusing on the parts. When reading then consider first the organization of the material, before jumping into reading the first words and sentence of the text to be read.

What the three examples listed in the beginning of this post are meant to suggest is that before you read anything that has more than a few paragraphs look before you leap. Know the overall direction and how the various pieces fit into the whole. This requires a little pre-thinking.

And remember, when I mention pre-thinking, we`ll assume that you know that reading comprehension is actually thinking and responding to the meaning of the text.  IT DOESN`T MEAN MERELY MOVING YOUR EYES RAPIDLY!  It`s how fast your mind can respond to the meanings that constitutes reading with comprehension.

Similarly, if you venture on a long road trip, have you looked at the map of the journey first to understand the general direction and the main roads to be taken? If you are approaching a swimming hole do you look first to see if the water is deep enough to dive safely? Remember, the fox humiliated the goat in the Aesop Fable warning him to be sure there is always a way out before venturing into something unknown, to look before he leapt.

When reading applies this centuries old wisdom to your reading and sees how comprehension will become easier for you. I also invite you enroll in The Dynamic Speed Reading Masers Program for a wealth of comprehension strategies and tactics as well as proven developmental exercises to stretch and grow your skills. It will provide you with the keys to reading at the speed of thought.

Is Your Brain Being Re-wired Without Your Approval?

A colleague of mine, Robert Tanner, just published an article that has great relevance for everyone in this Digital Information Age which inevitably creates overload for us.

Go to Conquering the Email Burden 

The Naomi Tran reference is true for highly efficient readers. Unfortunately most people still approach their information without changing the strategy and tactics they learned as grade-schoolers, thus they fall behind!

As Nicholas Carr notes in his latest books and articles, the digital age has caused many to change their behaviors in dealing with information overload. Neuron-scientists are beginning to investigate the emergence of the possibility. But Carr`s writing causes us to take a pause and think about the long term implications.

I think you`re Robert is correct about his conclusion that time is money and then describing the catch-22 that organizations face regarding the re-training of their people. Retraining for mastery of information overload does require hands-on training (or in this case re-training) of the brain. But how do organizations provide for that time away from work?

These challenges go way beyond the email overload. They require us to learn to read, think, and remember in new ways. In order to conquer Information Overload, we need to properly train our brain to meet the challenge.

Speed Reading Tips: Avoid the Trap of Focusing on “Eye-Span”

When learning to speed read, the saying that a little information can be a dangerous thing still applies. Consider the term eye-span. Even though I`ve been teaching people from all walks of life how to speed read for 30 years, I have only recently received many questions about it. For new learners coming into my programs, the question keeps coming up early in training. I don`t even use the term in my training. The new learner has read something about it somewhere. There is too much concern for it though.

Eye-span is referred to the amount of text someone takes in with the eyes for each stopping, or fixation of the eyes. By stating eye-span, someone has already been doing some investigating about speed reading. There is much misinformation about the topic. It is true that part of the goal of speedreading is to allow the eyes to take in more for each stop of the eyes (fixation). A traditional linear reader typically takes in one to three words per fixation. That is inefficient when you consider the total area of clear focus the eyes have at normal reading distance. This normal area of sight measures between one to three inches in diameter. Sight is always dimensional – that means there is both a horizontal and vertical field.

The problem of learning to speed read and eye-span becomes apparent due to marketing and the fact that many programs try to teach you to widen the horizontal span. In fact many programs, especially speed reading software programs, will train your eyes way beyond the natural limitation of the sight experience that is about 3 inches using only the horizontal field. These types of training exercises try to stretch that span to six inches or more telling the learner to go straight down the page with one fixation per line, line by line.

There are 2 problems with this:
1. Natural sight takes in the horizontal field as well as the vertical field. So this is an unnatural muscular change for the eyes, not to mention merely an enlarged linear approach to reading.
2. The new learner`s mind is busy thinking about the mechanics of the eyes, rather than focusing on the meaning of the print.

Remember I pointed out that sight is dimensional? Try this experiment. Take a page of mostly text that the printed area across measures six to eight inches and has big paragraphs. Now, focus your eyes somewhere in the middle of the text. Lock your eyes still. Take a pen or pencil and draw a circle around how much print you can clearly see. Don`t worry about understanding the text, just focus on clarity of the sight experience, or how much you see. Measure the area. It is probably somewhere between one to three inches in diameter. This is your natural cone of sight.

When you speed read, you are trying to move this cone of sight across and down the page. However, you don`t want to be concerned by how many words you are seeing. You want your mind to search out meaning from the text. However, without training the mind to respond and comprehend with these words appearing out of order, it will be quite frustrating because you do not comprehend.

Please know that you can not read if you do not comprehend. Comprehension is the key. Comprehension is getting meaning from the print. Too often I get learners who say they learned to go through material at 1500-2500 words per minute, but they don`t understand. They have gone through the visual training, but not the cognitive training, or comprehension.

With this focus on eye-span the learner gets too concerned over the technical aspects of the eyes, or mechanics, and forgets about the meaning of the text. The mind gets overloaded because there is competition for what the mind is doing. You can`t comprehend if you`re so focused on the technical aspects of what the eyes are doing. So forget about what your eyes are doing. Push for the meaning!

For all our years of teaching speed reading, we teach learners to open that 1-3 inches in diameter in a natural manner and search for idea chunks, or meaningful groups of words. It is not about word groups, word clusters, or the number of words that is important. It is about stopping the eyes on meaning groups. Speed Reading is a process by which the reader is searching for meaning from the print in a more efficient manner. Eye-span only plays a part of the reading process, but gets nearly all the attention in most speed readingtraining.

Why not get the help you deserve and overcome your information overload?

Speed Reading Tips: What Do Hackers and Time Management Have to Do with Speed Reading?

The term "hack" has been used in recent years to refer to a short cut, or more efficient way of doing things. From time to time I will continue to post reading hacks that can help you with both your speed and comprehension, as well as being tactics for more efficient reading. Today's reading hack is going to look at your day and your time management as it relates to reading, whether you read traditionally, or with a "DynamicSpeed Reading" approach.

If you're like most people, one, if not the very first thing you do when you sit at your work station is to open up your email application. Of course you want to do that because you want to: 

·        

• Be responsive to your customers,
• Be responsive to your co-workers,
• "Be respectful" to your friends,

Or, for some other reason that may or may not be as praiseworthy, such as a procrastination technique because your brain hasn't fully awakened Right?

Wrong!!!

Be honest with yourself. What have you noticed about this habit? For most people they realize that a big chunk of their most productive time has vanished leaving them late to get other important tasks and activities accomplished.

Additionally, time challenged people most often find their day being consumed by all kinds of activities that require them to focus outside themselves to the other people in the workplace - phones, email, texts. im's, meetings, drop-ins, etc. Because they want to be perceived as being an "accessible team player," they put off their important work related reading (except for email) for when "things quiet down." Or, they adopt an attitude of, "when I can get around to it."

But here's the problem - "around to it never comes." By the time it does come, you find yourself exhausted from all the other activities of the day. You may try your best to do the reading at these times. But what happens? Do you find yourself falling asleep? Or, do you find your mind drifts off to all sorts of other things rather than the meaning of the material you are supposedly                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           reading?

Unless you are the exception, this is the norm. Not just for you, but for most people in today's digital world.

So here's your Speed Reading and Time Management Hack 

(there's actually 2 parts to this that will save you enormous amounts of time)

            1. Do not open email first thing in the morning (there are some rare exceptions to this rule). Take care of other important high payoff activities first.

            2. Schedule and block off time slots to do your important readings. If you need to read things that will take more than 2-5 minutes, if it doesn't get scheduled, you will fall into the trap as described above. Why shouldn't it scheduled and blocked off like any other important meeting or activity? Schedule your reading time for when your brain is freshest for the day. During work hours you may have to put up temporary "do not disturb" signs, or go to a quieter place in the office.                                                                        

What do you think?