Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words (31 page)

Eye Exercises

Following Javal’s discovery in 1879—that faster readers made fewer saccades as their eyes moved across each line of text—instructors began striving to train everyone to change their eye movements. Students were told over and over that they must “widen the eye span” and were put through a wide variety of exercises to do so. They would intensely strain to widen their fields of vision, forcing their eyes to almost bulge out of their sockets. But the only result of these exercises (besides possibly a severe headache) was that they could barely concentrate on what they were reading.

The same was true of the many exercises meant to train the eyes to move faster. The eyes have always been quicker than the mind. Regardless of how wide your eye span is, or how fast you move your eyes, there is nothing to see until your mind sees it.

The fallacy of trying to change the physical movement of the eyes is a classic case of treating the symptom rather than the cause. Eye movements in reading are simply the symptoms of the mental processes the person uses while reading. The eyes are only servants of the mind. Concentrate on seeing whole ideas, and the eyes will comply by automatically fixing on the appropriate sets of words.

Don’t concentrate on the symptom; focus on the mental process of seeing ideas and let your eyes do their job on their own.

Subvocalization Distractions

Verbalizing or subvocalizing is often considered the bane of reading improvement. How wonderful if we could eliminate this one most destructive habit! And how easy it is to do according to several speed reading courses—just distract yourself. Believe it or not, it is common to suggest that if you were to repeat nonsense sounds aloud while you read, then you would not be able to internally hear the sounds of the words you were reading.

For example, one course recommends reciting the vowels while you read a book; say, “A E I O U” over and over while you follow your finger across each line of text. I couldn’t even understand what I was reading if someone else were standing in the room reciting vowels, let alone if I were doing it myself. Where is the common sense?

If you want to read faster, you need all the concentration you can muster. You aren’t going to help things if you are distracting yourself with verbal gibberish.

Skipping Unimportant Words

One suggestion to read faster is to simply read
fewer words
; this is accomplished by skipping all those “unimportant” words. But if you are going to skip any words at all, you first have to know
which
words you are going to skip. That means you have to check each word to see if it’s unimportant. This seems to defeat the purpose, since you have to at least peek at each word to see if you can ignore it.

Not only is this method unworkable, but even attempting to concentrate on this word filtering process would subtract a lot of mental energy that could be used for comprehension. Plus, there is a good chance that you might skip some words that were actually very important to the text’s meaning—words that could completely alter the essence of what you read.

And besides, if it were really possible to speak or write with fewer words, I’m sure we would be speaking and writing that way already—why would we continue to waste our time with all those worthless and avoidable, unimportant words?

PhotoReading

PhotoReading was developed by Paul Scheele in 1993 and claims to teach you how to read with only a quick glance at each page. It sounds like this would be wonderful, but so would the ability to fly with only the help of a Superman cape.

Some people have shown they have the ability to read this fast. The most famous was Kim Peek, who read and remembered more than nine thousand books at a speed of about ten seconds per page, with each eye scanning its own page independently! But Kim was a savant. Savant syndrome is a rare but extraordinary condition in which persons with serious mental disabilities, including autism, have some “island of genius” which stands out from the general population. There have probably been fewer than one hundred real savants in the past century. Even though savants appear to have incredible reading skills, they are “reading without reckoning.”

There is one interesting fact about savants which might have a strange bearing on reading with the right brain. A few people have actually become savants later in life, often after suffering damage to the brain’s left hemisphere. It seems, perhaps, that shutting off certain left-brain activities might have somehow liberated previously latent right-brain skills. This means that those exceptional skills may lie dormant, to some degree, in all of us, so perhaps by purposefully applying our imagination and visual skills, we are activating those very areas which savants are using. (This is just a thought, but please don’t give yourself a brain injury to try this.)

PhotoReading among the non-savant population, however, has never been proven. In fact, PhotoReading was specifically studied by the NASA Ames Research Center and researchers came to the following conclusion:

“These results clearly indicate that there is no benefit to using the PhotoReading technique. The extremely rapid reading rates claimed by PhotoReaders were not observed; indeed the reading rates were generally comparable to those for normal reading. Moreover, the PhotoReading experts showed an
increase
in reading time with the PhotoReading technique in comparison to normal reading. This increase in reading time was accompanied by a decrease in text comprehension. These results were found for two standardized tests of text comprehension and for three matched sets of expository texts.”

In the end, as a course of study for improving your reading, I would suggest that pursuing better comprehension is going to lead to a lot more success than trying to become a savant.

Practice Exercise #18

I really wish there
were
some secret magical ways to
instantly
read faster and avoid the necessity of exercise and practice, but gimmicks only waste the little precious time we have available for making real improvement. Instead, exercise your comprehension skills by concentrating on meaning in order to improve your real reading speed.

Practice with this next exercise and continue to focus your attention on imagining the meaning of each thought-unit. Faster reading comes from broadening that information channel, widening it from the narrow word-by-word method to passing along whole concepts and ideas at a time.

Note: The following exercise, although taken from a fascinating and popular novel,
may not be suitable for children
due to the nature of the subject matter. It was included here because it is a compelling piece of literature that does a good job of keeping the reader’s attention.

When you’re ready, begin reading the first thousand words of

The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Orczy

The Scarlet Pimpernel

PARIS:
SEPTEMBER, 1792

A surging,
seething,
murmuring crowd of beings
that are human
only in name,
for to the eye
and ear
they seem naught
but savage creatures,
animated by vile passions
and by the lust
of vengeance
and of hate.
The hour,
some little time
before sunset,
and the place,
the West Barricade,
at the very spot where,
a decade later,
a proud tyrant raised
an undying monument
to the nation’s glory
and his own vanity.

During the greater part
of the day
guillotine
had been kept busy
at its ghastly work:
all that France
had boasted of
in the past centuries,
of ancient names,
and blue blood,
had paid toll
to her desire for liberty
and for fraternity.
The carnage
had only ceased
at this late
hour of the day
because there were other
more interesting sights
for the people
to witness,
a little while
before the final closing
of the barricades
for the night.

And so the crowd
rushed away from
the Place de la Greve
and made for
the various barricades
in order to watch
this interesting
and amusing sight.

It was to be seen
every day,
for those aristos
were such fools!
They were traitors
to the people
of course,
all of them,
men,
women,
and children,
who happened
to be descendants
of the great men
who since the Crusades
had made the glory
of France:
her old NOBLESSE.
Their ancestors
had oppressed the people,
had crushed them
under the scarlet heels
of their dainty
buckled shoes,
and now the people
had become
the rulers of France
and crushed
their former masters—
not beneath their heel,
for they went shoeless
mostly in these days—
but a more
effectual weight,
the knife
of the guillotine.

And daily,
hourly,
the hideous
instrument of torture
claimed its many victims—
old men,
young women,
tiny children
until the day
when it would finally
demand the head
of a King
and of a
beautiful young Queen.

But this was
as it should be:
were not
the people
now the rulers
of France?
Every aristocrat
was a traitor,
as his ancestors had been
before him:
for two hundred years now
the people had sweated,
and toiled,
and starved,
to keep a lustful court
in lavish extravagance;
now the descendants
of those who had helped
to make those courts
brilliant
had to hide
for their lives—
to fly,
if they wished to avoid
the tardy vengeance
of the people.

And they did
try to hide,
and tried to fly:
that was just the fun
of the whole thing.
Every afternoon
before the gates closed
and the market carts
went out in procession
by the various
barricades,
some fool
of an aristo
endeavored to evade
the clutches
of the Committee
of Public Safety.
In various disguises,
under various pretexts,
they tried to slip
through the barriers,
which were
so well guarded
by citizen soldiers
of the Republic.
Men in women’s clothes,
women in male attire,
children disguised
in beggars’ rags:
there were some
of all sorts:
CI-DEVANT counts,
marquises,
even dukes,
who wanted
to fly from France,
reach England
or some other
equally accursed country,
and there try
to rouse foreign feelings
against the glorious
Revolution,
or to raise an army
in order to liberate
the wretched prisoners
in the Temple,
who had once
called themselves
sovereigns of France.

But they were nearly
always caught
at the barricades,
Sergeant Bibot
especially
at the West Gate
had a wonderful nose
for scenting an aristo
in the most perfect
disguise.
Then, of course,
the fun began.
Bibot would look
at his prey
as a cat looks
upon the mouse,
play with him,
sometimes for quite
a quarter of an hour,
pretend to be hoodwinked
by the disguise,
by the wigs
and other bits
of theatrical make-up
which hid the identity
of a CI-DEVANT noble
marquise or count.

Oh!
Bibot had a keen
sense of humor,
and it was well worth
hanging round
that West Barricade,
in order
to see him catch
an aristo
in the very act
of trying to flee
from the vengeance
of the people.