The Invisible Mentor

Do You Speed Read?

June 23rd, 2009 |

Review of The PhotoReading Whole Mind System by Paul Scheele

PhotoReading, a term coined by Paul Scheele, is “mentally photographing” the printed page at rates exceeding 25,000 words per minute. According to Scheele, “The PhotoReading process bypasses the conscious mind and sends the information to storage bins in the other-than-conscious. This means that when you are PhotoReading you will have little or no conscious knowledge of the materials. It is all there some place, but consciously you may not know it. Don’t worry, as long as you can “activate” it to the conscious mind so that you can use the information however you use information.”

The PhotoReading System which is comprised of five steps: preparing, previewing, PhotoReading, activating, and rapid reading, are actually options that you can use depending on what your needs are.

Preparing
In the preparation stage, explicitly state your purpose for reading the material then enter into a state of relaxed alertness.

Previewing
Survey your reading material quickly, looking for about 20 trigger words, words that are repeated, in the sub-title, highlighted and so on. Decide if it’s necessary to read further.

PhotoReading
Ask yourself why you want to PhotoRead the material, relax your body, calm your mind and confidently flip through your reading material.

Activating
Allow time to elapse before you enter into the activation stage. Let the information incubate, then probe your mind by asking yourself questions about the material. Super read the parts that attract you.

Rapid Reading

Quickly move through your reading material from start to finish, at a speed comfortable to you. Zip quickly through the information that you’ve established to be unimportant and spend more time on more important information.

Scheele suggests that to manage your time effectively, you should sort all your reading material into levels of priority, handle paper only once, always have reading material with you – you never know when you’ll have a few minutes, and preview everything that’s important.

Five – 1 Great Ideas

When the best readers read, they do so in an active, purposeful, questioning and fully engaged manner
To effectively read, you must begin with a clear sense of purpose, why are you reading the material and what do you hope to accomplish?
Set specific reading goals
After you’ve read important information, create a visual diagram of the key ideas

The PhotoReading Whole Mind System has some very good information, but the concepts may be somewhat foreign to most people. I recommend that you read it, but I think that for you to understand and use the new concepts, you’ll need to follow-up with a seminar on the topic.