PhotoReading: the Whole Mind System?
Paul Scheele, the developer of PhotoReading, explains this technique
as an integration of your conscious and "other than conscious" (or
unconscious) mind in the process of extracting information from
the written material. However, the way he teaches it first separates
the two "minds," and only loosely combines their efforts at the last
two stages of the process.
Specifically, setting the goal and previewing the book (the first
two steps) are mostly conscious processes of becoming familiar with
the content, extracting keywords 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 the way (chanting, rythmic page turning, photo-focus),
and let the uncoscious take 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 unconscious memory and processing power together
in extracting the most important information and re-coding it for
our conscious mind. Normally, only one of the two 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 cover to cover linear processing), it is still far less
than optimal strategy to process written material. In my experience,
separating the process into purely conscious and purely unconscious
steps limits our brain processing power. What if we could make conscious
and unconsious minds cooperate from the start? Can it improve our
ability to process information?
My experience suggests that the answer is definitely yes! Here
is an alternative strategy that I found myself using much more effectively
than the classical "vanilla" 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 that 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. It 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 you know which data is the right
one or not.
The purpose is why you want that information or data. The
purpose provides you with motivation, the reason for taking the
effort, and helps you focus on the task.
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 learn the syntax and semantics of the specific programming
language (for instance, C++), and programming techniques which are
required by the instructor. The purpose, 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 motivates 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 very 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 perceive the images (about 5-15 pages per
second) by running your thumb through the right edge of the book. The
purpose of this step is to get an idea of what is inside the book, to
pick out some important keywords and illustrations, and to understand
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 contents are rather ambiguous and
not as descriptive as we would like. This step helps you clarify what
the author meant by certain keywords or idioms in the table of
contents, and provides you with a rough map of what you can get from
this book.
To some of you, this may sound too unreal (how on earth can I go
through the book 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 search 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 you 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 notice the length of the description is of each
idea that you want to learn, thus, estimating 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 do it with
any book you are considering to read. It will take you 10-20 seconds
to zip through the book several times, back and forth, so you can see
both even and odd pages, and have several passes through the material
that attracted your attention in the table of contents, or on the
first pass through.
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. Your conscious mind
can then steer the focus of your unconscious mind to a more refined
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), and 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 information in too
short period of time, I prefer to deep-scan only the most interesting
and the most important portions of the book, which I identified
through the 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 construct a detailed picture of the material,
especially how it is structured, what are 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 you would have to photoread,
incubate (wait for 20 minutes, or better overnight), and then
activate, which is generally a slower process than photoreading, the
"prepare - scan - deep scan" process is at least 5-10 times as fast,
and in my experience, 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 piece 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
parts of the book, but it is still a very high-level and approximate
view. If you need, 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 in my version it becomes a slow and more thorough version
of deep scanning. I usually 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 section 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 takes 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 this is your pleasure reading or a class textbook reading, you
have a choice of rapid reading or studying the book.
For most pleasure reading books I would heartily recommend rapid
reading, or even regular reading from the start. This way you get all
the pleasure of re-living the lives of the main characters and being
in the moment that the author intended to create. In other words, do
not photoread a detective novel, you'll know the answer to the puzzle
before you even start, which spoils all the fun. Remember, not all
books are meant for fast information processing. However, rapid
reading technique may be a good way to speed up your consumption
of prose, and Paul Scheele 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 useful is taking an exam on the
material from the textbook, or acquiring new skills or knowledge for
your work.
Studying should only be done once you have completed all the previous
steps, including skittering and dipping. You will be spending
significant amounts of time going through the material and
scrutinizing every word the author is saying, possibly doing the
exercises or reworking the proofs of theorems. Therefore, you have to
be sure you are studying exactly what you need in the best portions of
the book. Also, the rest of the book is always there for you to
consult, in case you 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 giving any useful hints,
then fast scanning is your friend again. You will be amazed 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 unconscious mind at every step of the process, and
together they work as an interactive team, adjusting and refining
information processing in real time.
Regular photoreading is similar to having two people working
independently, briefly communicating the results to each other once in
a while, and immediately going back to their cubicles.
In contrast, my system resembles two people working together in a
team, brainstorming together the ideas and new information the moment
it becomes available. One plus one in this case is certainly much
greater than two.
If photoreading is orders of magnitude faster than regular reading,
just as photography is much faster than drawing pictures by hand, then
a better name for my system would be KinoReading, as
cinematographic capture of information is orders of magnitude more
efficient than photography.
