My brother had some speed reading books. Unfortunately, neither he nor I could get it to work, and my dream of rattling through a book in seconds, Short Circuit-style, remains merely a dream. However, I
can still announce "Input!" whenever I open a book, which is nearly as good. At any rate, having flunked speed reading school, I shall share my experiences with you.
The rationale behind the method was always explained along the lines of "when you look at a painting of a tree, you don't look at the roots, bark, leaves etc. as separate pieces, you look at the tree as a whole. Why not READ that way?"
Now, I'm no visual psychologist or neurologist, but I suspect that reading and looking at a picture use rather different parts of the brain, so it's probably not possible to compare the two. It was also stressed that to start reading really quickly you have to stop sub-vocalising the words as you read them, and just trust your subconscious to take it all in. Perhaps the part of me that was saying "this is palpable nonsense" was interfering with my subconscious, but having dragged my eyes over a page of text, I found myself in the entirely unsurprising position of not knowing a single word of it.
The one bit of the books that one might consider to be useful were those that dealt with normal reading. One is advised to use a finger or other guide (like a pencil) to keep one's eyes focussed on the line of text. I find that quite helpful. There, the one useful 'secret' of speed reading revealed! Truly, I am the Masked Magician of speed reading.
However, beyond this tit-bit, things begin to go a little awry. Based on the principle that you can read several words simultaneously on a line (which is true), it is suggested that you can extend this field of vision to take in entire lines, then two lines, three lines and so on until you can read a whole paragraph in one mighty glance. Yeah, right.
It is also suggested that instead of doing all that tedious moving of the eyes back to the start of the next line when you finish the previous line, you just read the next line backwards. Combined with the 'power glancing' I described above, you are supposed to be able to try reading two lines in a forwards sweep and then the next two lines in the backwards sweep and so on, gradually increasing the amount you take in, until your eyes are veritable word-hoovers.
"But James," I hear you ask, "wouldn't that mean you were reading half the words in the wrong order?". How true. But don't worry, reassure the books, look at the following backwards sentence:
You can understand that, right? It's got something to do with mats and cats, you get the general idea. See, that whole thing about writing sentences with the words in the right order, it's a myth, promulgated by old-fashioned slothful slow-readers!
Actually, I'm pretty sure that none of the books used 'the cat sat on the mat' as an example, but they were all along those trivially moronic lines. Strangely, I never saw an example taken from a physics textbook. Taken to extremes, what the speed readers are suggesting is that, given that they reckon that they can read whole lines and paragraphs in the wrong order, is that you could take all the words in a book, place them in random order (or hell, alphabetical order) and they would still be able to make sense of it. This is clearly absurd.
Mind you, if you think speed reading is stupid, take a look at
photoreading. Speed reading? Yesterday's 21st century learning technique, daddio! With PhotoReading(TM), you take a mental photograph of each page, with, yes, one's subconscious. The main part of the technique involves staring at the middle of the book and defocussing your eyes, so that you see double, and then, er, turning the pages. It's so simple and effortless, it's almost as if you were doing absolutely nothing of any value whatsoever! Incredible. Let me know if you can get this to work. It may be that my subconscious now knows a hell of a lot more than I do. Unfortunately, if it does know, it ain't telling.
edited for various abysmalspelling/grammar/usage crimes against English
