Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words (4 page)

“Does it hurt?”
asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,”
said
the Skin Horse,
for he was
always truthful.
“When
you are Real
you don’t mind
being hurt.”

“Does it happen
all at once,
like being
wound up,”
he asked,
“or bit
by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen
all at once,”
said
the Skin Horse.
“You become.
It takes
a long time.
That’s why
it doesn’t
happen often
to people
who break easily,
or have
sharp edges,
or who
have to be
carefully kept. Generally,
by the time
you are Real,
most of your hair
has been
loved off,
and your eyes
drop out
and you get
loose in the joints
and very shabby.
But these things
don’t matter
at all,
because once
you are Real
you can’t
be ugly
, except to people
who don’t understand.”

“I suppose
you are real?”
said the Rabbit.
And then
he wished
he had
not
said it,
for he thought
the Skin Horse
might be
sensitive.
But
the Skin Horse
only smiled.

“The Boy’s Uncle
made me Real,”
he said.
“That was
a great many
years ago;
but once
you are Real
you can’t become
unreal again.
It lasts
for always.”

The Rabbit sighed.
He thought
it would be
a long time
before this magic
called Real
happened to him.
He longed
to become Real,
to know
what it
felt like;
and yet
the idea
of growing shabby
and losing
his eyes
and whiskers
was rather sad.
He wished
that he could
become it
without
these
uncomfortable things
happening to him.

There was
a person
called Nana
who ruled
the nursery.
Sometimes she took
no notice of the playthings lying about, and sometimes, for no reason whatever, she went swooping about like a great wind and hustled them away in cupboards. She called this “tidying up,” and the playthings all hated it, especially the tin ones. The Rabbit didn’t mind it so much, for wherever he was thrown he came down soft.

One evening, when the Boy was going to bed, he couldn’t find the china dog that always slept with him. Nana was in a hurry, and it was too much trouble to hunt for china dogs at bedtime, so she simply looked about her, and seeing that the toy cupboard door stood open, she made a swoop.

“Here,” she said, “take your old Bunny! He’ll do to sleep with you!” And she dragged the Rabbit out by one ear, and put him into the Boy’s arms.

That night, and for many nights after, the Velveteen Rabbit slept in the Boy’s bed. At first he found it rather uncomfortable, for the Boy hugged him very tight, and sometimes he rolled over on him, and sometimes he pushed him so far under the pillow that the Rabbit could scarcely breathe. And he missed, too, those long moonlight hours in the nursery, when all the house was silent…

Chapter 2: How Can You Read Faster?

“I don’t know, Marge… trying is the first step towards failure.”

—Homer Simpson

Perhaps you’ve tried all the popular speed reading tricks:

• Pushing your speed
  
• Trying not to verbalize
  
• Widening your eye span
  
• Using your finger as a pacer
  
• Ignoring “unimportant” words
  
• Making fewer eye stops per line
  
• Practicing moving your eyes faster
  

But these haven’t worked.

They might have temporarily increased your words per minute as you pushed yourself to read faster, but this increase was probably accompanied by a loss of comprehension. What good is that? If you read twice as fast but only understand half as much, you haven’t gained a thing.

So, what can you do? How can you read faster and also maintain comprehension?

Sometimes the easiest way to find the solution to a problem is to make sure you are asking the right question to begin with. The right question can often be found by carefully determining what the real goal is.

What do you really want?

What you really want is to be able to pick up a book and understand what the author is saying in the least amount of time.

The key word is “understand.” You are not just trying to finish the book faster; you are trying to collect
ideas
, to collect
experiences
, and to collect
information and knowledge
.

So the real question is…

“How can you
comprehend
faster?”

The answer to this question is what makes
Reading with the Right Brain
different. This book is based on the principle that
comprehension must come first
, and therefore, using your right
conceptual
brain is key. The point of reading is to comprehend meaning, and the old methods that push you to see more words per minute miss that important point.

This book aims at a very specific target—the real act of reading. It is not about pre-reading, memorizing, or study habits. Instead, this book focuses specifically on what happens between the time the text enters your eyes as an image and when the information assimilates into your brain as knowledge.

Other skills—such as previewing, asking yourself questions, mind mapping, etc.—might be useful, but none of these are really about
reading
; they are about everything
around
reading. If you want to know more about these peripheral skills, there are abundant resources already available.

Reading with the Right Brain
is specifically about how to increase the speed of transferring ideas from the text to your brain. It focuses on how to read across each line of text, lock on to the information, and comprehend and assimilate this information into knowledge.

This book is NOT about pushing your reading speed, widening your eye-span, or suppressing bad reading habits. It is not another book of speed reading tips, tricks and “secrets.” This book IS about learning to pay more attention to your reading.

Rather than eye exercises, this book focuses on exercising your mental processing, because reading is essentially a
mental
activity, not a
visual
one. Therefore the instructions and exercises in this book are intended to strengthen your powers of concentration and focus.

The techniques and practice exercises in this book will show you how to read faster by comprehending faster. The way you’ll do this is by learning to
conceptualize
your reading.

What is conceptualizing?

Read the phrase, “
the big black dog
” and concentrate on imagining what this group of words means. Imagine a big black dog, but don’t only think of an image; think of what a big black dog means to
you
. Is it friendly? Is it scary? Is it beautiful? Is it smart? Do you remember any big black dogs?

Exactly what you imagine is not important—whatever pops into your head is OK; what
is
important is that what comes into your head is an
idea
, that you instantly imagine the meaning of the phrase. This is thinking
conceptually
.

This visual and conceptual concentration causes information to be passed to the right side of your brain, the side that specializes in the conceptual nature of ideas. It also connects the information to all the attributes—both visual and abstract—you associate this information with to create a larger, more complete idea of what the information means. The end result is a big-picture idea, the real essence of what the information means to you.

The right hemisphere of your brain has no verbal understanding. It can connect words with ideas, but it doesn’t think in words. It does, however, have the powerful ability to imagine whole, complex ideas at once. This is how the right brain gives you clearer and faster comprehension, by processing information in larger and more meaningful chunks.

So far, this has been a basic introduction to conceptualizing, and there will be more discussion later about how to conceptualize different types of information. For now, realize that in order to conceptualize ideas, you’ll need to be able to read
whole phrases
at a time, because there is seldom enough information in individual words to form meaningful mental concepts.

A short group of words, in the form of a meaningful phrase, can describe a complete, stand-alone idea. Phrases may be only a few words long, but together these few words can represent distinct pieces of information which can be easily imagined as whole units of meaning.

These meaningful pieces of text could be called “phrases,” “word-groups,” “clauses,” “units of meaning,” or “thought-units.” But regardless of the label, they consist of any groups of words which represent whole ideas
you can visualize or conceptualize.

Reading whole ideas increases your reading speed in two ways:

1. Concentrating on the bigger picture results in processing more meaningful information.
   
2. Taking in more words at a time results in reading more words per minute.
   

Reading whole phrases is like taking larger strides when you run. Switching from walking to running doesn’t mean just moving your legs faster, but also lengthening your stride, thereby covering more distance with each step. This is basically how conceptualizing helps you read and comprehend faster, by letting you see a bigger picture and taking in larger blocks of information at a time.

In normal, unaided text, you have to perform both parts of this skill on your own. You have to concentrate on finding the meaningful word-groups, and at the same time, focus on the larger meaning of those word-groups. Trying to learn both parts of this skill together can be mentally overwhelming. It can be difficult to focus on meanings and concepts at the same time you are trying to select the meaningful word-groups.

But the formatted text in the exercises in this book will eliminate the work of finding phrases, allowing you to concentrate more attention on imagining the larger concepts. This makes it easy to practice reading in larger concepts. Then once you become familiar and comfortable with processing information in larger chunks, you will be able to pick out the phrases automatically on your own in normal, unformatted text.

Don’t confuse reading thought-units with the more common advice to make fewer eye-stops per line. Reading meaningful phrases is very different than simply trying to read in groups of some arbitrary number of words at a time. Instead, it is actively seeking conceptual units of information. In fact, it is this proactive, searching frame of mind which will make these word-groups automatically appear to you. This is because when you are aware that the information is in larger blocks of text, those blocks will become easier to recognize. Sentences are not smooth, consistent flows of evenly distributed information; they are more like clumps of ideas. Knowing this, and looking for these clumps, is what helps you see them.

As an example, consider this sentence:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

This should not be viewed as just a string of words, “
It—was—a—bright—cold—day—in—April,
” with each word adding just one more additional piece of information.

The sentence is actually better understood as
clumps
of ideas, “
It was—a bright cold day—in April
,” where each clump adds a specific and meaningful block of information to the sentence.

The exercises in this book identify these blocks of information for you. After practicing with these exercises, these meaningful phrases will automatically appear to you in regular text as you look for ideas and concepts. When you scan text for meaningful ideas, you will automatically focus on word-groups that represent the more complete and meaningful building blocks of the sentences—the separate ideas which can be imagined as pictures or concepts.