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The Speed Reading Course

By Peter Shepherd

& Gregory Unsworth-Mitchell

Email: shepherd@trans4mind.com

Web site: Tools for Transformation

The Speed Reading Course

Introduction

We all learn to read at school, after a fashion. But for most of us, this is not an

optimal use of our brain power. In this course you will learn to better use the

left brain's focused attention combined with the right brain's peripheral

attention, in close harmony. Good communication between the brain

hemispheres is a pre-requisite for creative thinking and also a sense of well-

being, where thoughts and feelings are integrated.

As you probably expect, this course will also teach you to read much faster and

at the same time, to remember more of what you have read. These are

obviously great advantages.

There is another major benefit. Most of us, as we read, 'speak' the words in our

heads. It is this subvocalisation that holds back fast reading and it is

unnecessary. It is possible to have an inner speech, a kind of 'thought

awareness,' that isn't linked to the tongue, mouth and vocal chord muscles, and

this is much faster and more fluent. Cutting out the identification of

vocalisation and the stream of thought gives a surprising by-product. Many of

us think that our constant subvocalised 'speaking voice' is who we are. Finding

out that you can think and be aware without a vocal stream of words, opens up

your consciousness to the usually unrecognised domain of intuition and

spiritual awareness. You'll have a better sense of who you really are. Try it and

see!

The Definition of Reading

Reading may be defined as an individual's total inter-relationship with

symbolic information. Reading is a communication process requiring a series

of skills. As such reading is a thinking process rather than an exercise in eye

movements. Effective reading requires a logical sequence of thinking or

thought patterns, and these thought patterns require practice to set them into the

mind. They may be broken down into the following seven basic processes:

Recognition: the reader's knowledge of the alphabetic symbols.

Assimilation: the physical process of perception and scanning.

Intra-integration: basic understanding derived from the reading material

itself, with minimum dependence on past experience, other than a

knowledge of grammar and vocabulary.

Extra-integration: analysis, criticism, appreciation, selection & rejection.

These are all activities which require the reader to bring his past

experience to bear on the task.

Retention: this is the capacity to store the information in memory.

Recall: the ability to recover the information from memory storage.

Communication: this represents the application of the information and

may be further broken down into at least 4 categories, which are:

* Written communication;

* Spoken communication;

* Communication through drawing and the manipulation of objects;

* Thinking, which is another word for communication with the self.

Many problems in reading and learning are due to old habits. Many people are

still reading in the way that they were taught in elementary school. Their

reading speed will have settled to about 250 w.p.m. Many people can think at

rates of 500 w.p.m. or more, so their mind is running at twice the speed of

their eyes. A consequence is that it is easy to lapse into boredom, day-dreaming

or thinking about what you want to do on the weekend. Frequently, it is

through this type of distraction that you find you have to re-read sentences and

paragraphs, and you find as a result, ideas are difficult to understand and

remember.

The basic problem - the mismatch between thinking speed and reading speed -

arises for the most part from the inadequate methods by which reading is

taught. Since the War there have been two main approaches: the Look-Say

method and the Phonic method. Both methods are only semi-effective. In the

Phonic method a child is first taught the alphabet, then the different sounds for

each of the letters, then the blending of sounds and finally, the blending of

sounds which form words. This method works best with children who are left-

brain dominant. In contrast, the Look- Say method works best with children

who are right-brain dominant. It teaches a child to read by presenting him with

cards on which there are pictures of objects, the names of which are printed

clearly underneath. By using this method a basic vocabulary is built up, much

in the manner of learning to read Chinese. When a child has built up enough

basic vocabulary, he progresses through a series of graded books similar to

those for the child taught by the Phonic method, and eventually becomes a

silent reader. In neither of the above cases is a child taught how to read quickly

and with maximum comprehension and recall. An effective reader has usually

discovered these techniques all by himself.

Neither the Look-Say method nor the Phonic method, either in isolation or in

combination, are adequate for teaching an individual to read in the complete

sense of the word. Both these methods are designed to cover the first stage of

reading, the stage of recognition, with some attempt at assimilation and intra-

integration, but children are given little help on how to comprehend and

integrate the material properly, nor on how to ensure it is remembered. The

methods currently used in schools do not touch on the problems of speed,

retention, recall, selection, rejection, concentration and note taking, and indeed

all those skills which can be described as advanced reading techniques.

In short, most of your reading problems have not been dealt with during your

initial education. By using appropriate techniques, the limitations of early

education can be overcome and reading ability improved by 500% or more.

For example, skipping back over words can be eliminated as 90% of back-

skipping is unnecessary for understanding. The 10% of words that do need to

be reconsidered are probably words which need to be looked up in a dictionary

and clearly defined.

GOLDEN RULE: When studying this course, and indeed, whenever

reading passages that you want to understand and make use of, make sure

never to pass by a word or concept that you do not understand. If you do

pass by a misunderstood word or concept, the rest of the text will

probably become incomprehensible, and you will feel distracted and

bored. If it's worth reading at all, then you owe it to yourself to define

any word you're not sure of, or find the misunderstood word(s) in the

concept that is unclear and sort that out before going further. If your

studies bog down, go back to where you were doing well, clear up your

understanding and start off again from that point.

Techniques in this course will reduce the time for each fixation (the

assimilation of a group of words simultaneously) to less than a quarter of a

second, and the size of fixation can be increased from one or two short words

to as many as five words or half a line. Your eyes will be doing less physical

work; rather than having as many as 500 tightly focused fixations per page,

you will be making about 100, each of which is less fatiguing, and reading

speed will exceed 1,000. w.p.m. on light material.

The Eye and its Movements

In order to understand how we read and how reading may be improved, we

must first look a little at how the eye works. Light entering the eye is focused

by the lens onto the retina, which lines the inside of the eye. The retina itself

consists of hundreds of millions of tiny cells responsive to light. Some cells -

the cones - respond to specific colours; others - the rods - to the overall light

intensity. These cells are connected to a web of nerves extending over the

retina, which relay information to the visual cortex.

The centre of the retina, called the fovea, is a small area in which the cells are

much more tightly packed, so that the perception of images falling on the fovea

is much sharper and more detailed than elsewhere on the retina. When we focus

our attention on something, the light from that item is focused onto the fovea -

this is called a fixation.

A reader's eyes do not move over print in a smooth manner. If they did, they

would not be able to see anything, because the eye can only see things clearly

when it can hold them still. If an object is still, the eye must be still in order to

see it, and if an object is moving, the eye must move with the object in order to

see it. When you read a line, the eyes move in a series of quick jumps and still

intervals. The jumps themselves are so quick as to take almost no time, but the

fixations can take anywhere from a quarter to one and a half seconds. At the

slowest speeds of fixation a student's reading speed would be less than one

hundred w.p.m.

Thus the eye takes short gulps of information. In between it is not actually

seeing anything; it is moving from one point to another. We do not notice these

jumps because the information is held over in the brain and integrated from

one fixation to the next so that we can perceive a smooth flow. The eye is

rarely still for more than half a second. Even when you feel the eye is

completely still (as when you look steadily at a fixed point such as the

following comma), it will in fact be making a number of small movements

around the point. If the eye were not constantly shifting in this way, and

making new fixations, the image would rapidly fade and disappear. The

untrained eye takes about a quarter of a second at each point of fixation, so it is

limited to about four fixations per second. Each fixation of an average reader

will take in two or three words, so that to read a line on this page probably

takes between three and six fixations. The duration of the stops and the number

of words taken in by each fixation will vary considerably, depending on both

the material being read and the individual's reading skill.

Although the sharpest perception occurs at the fovea, images that are off-centre

are still seen, but less clearly. This peripheral vision performs a most valuable

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