Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words (9 page)

I’ve already mentioned that this takes practice, but you would be surprised how many people give up when they discover practice is required. Another group quits when they find it will take longer than an hour. I wish I could help these people, but the subjects of tenacity and persistence would be a whole other book. However, with proper practice and technique, you will see positive results. It may seem difficult at first, but this is really just actively
thinking
about what you read.

Keywords

Another helpful thing to notice is that the last word is often the “key” word in each meaningful phrase. It’s like the other words in the phrase were leading up this this word. Focusing on these key words can make your reading smoother as you more quickly zoom in on the main idea of each phrase.

As you practice reading thought-units, you will develop the right-brained habit of creating visual and conceptual representations of what you read. This alone will make your reading flow more smoothly, as you read with a deeper and more conceptual understanding, and you
experience
the text rather than just listen to it.

But even though you are conceptualizing each phrase as a meaningful idea, these individual phrases do not stand alone. Each phrase is still a link within the larger meaning of a whole sentence. As you conceptualize phrases, you must also link them together as interlocking bricks into the completed structure of the whole sentence.

Looking at these keywords is one way to pull the phrases together. This does not mean ignoring other words. It just means paying special attention to words that describe who or what is involved, or what is happening. For example, here is a sentence divided into thought-units and with possible key words underlined.

Dorothy
lived
in the
midst
of the
great
Kansas
prairies
,
with Uncle
Henry
,
who was a
farmer
,
and Aunt
Em
,
who
was
the farmer’s
wife
.

Even though you are reading this sentence in meaningful phrases, there are certain words which represent the overall direction and framework of the sentence. You can’t skip or ignore any words, but these key words will give you a very good idea of what the sentence is about. Paying special attention to these will increase your comprehension and reading speed because these words will tie the thought-units together and add an overall structure to the sentence.

There are no exact rules of grammar for selecting these key words, but they are usually the subjects and verbs of the sentence. They are also—as in the example above—quite often the first word of the sentence and then the
last
word in each phrase.

However, just as the word-groups you select don’t have to be perfect, neither do the keywords—they just have to work. You are simply focusing on the words that act as a summary to the sentence.

This may seem like a lot to think about while reading, but it is only another helpful tool for focusing on ideas versus words. With practice, the habit of seeing text as larger meaningful ideas should become internalized and unconscious and assist in making the most use of our finite amounts of cognitive energy.

Practice Exercise #4

As you do the practice exercises, remember that speed is the result of better comprehension. Bring each thought-unit into clear focus by visualizing or conceptualizing its meaning, and let the speed increase as a natural result. You don’t want to feel like you are
pushing
your speed, but rather
pulling
it along behind your faster, more powerful comprehension.

One more suggestion
―
besides practicing with the exercises, you should start to apply reading thought-units to your regular reading. In fact, there is no reason not to apply this method to the regular text portions of this book. Just remember not to go faster than you can comprehend, and remember to not include too many words at in each phrase; smaller thought-units are easier to quickly imagine while you are learning.

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

The War of the Worlds
by H. G. Wells

The War of the Worlds

No one
would have believed
in the last years
of the nineteenth century
that this world
was being watched
keenly and closely
by intelligences
greater than man’s
and yet as mortal
as his own;
that as men
busied themselves
about
their various concerns
they were scrutinized
and studied,
perhaps almost
as narrowly as a man
with a microscope
might scrutinize
the transient creatures
that swarm
and multiply
in a drop of water.
With infinite complacency
men went
to and fro
over this globe
about
their little affairs,
serene in their assurance
of their empire
over matter.
It is possible
that the infusoria
under the microscope
do the same.
No one gave a thought
to the older
worlds of space
as sources
of human danger,
or thought of them
only to dismiss
the idea
of life upon them
as impossible
or improbable.
It is curious
to recall
some of the mental habits
of those departed days.
At most terrestrial men
fancied there might be
other men upon Mars,
perhaps inferior
to themselves
and ready to welcome
a missionary enterprise.
Yet across the gulf
of space,
minds that are
to our minds
as ours are
to those of the beasts
that perish,
intellects
vast and cool
and unsympathetic,
regarded this earth
with envious eyes,
and slowly
and surely
drew their plans
against us.
And early in
the twentieth century,
came the great
disillusionment.

The planet Mars,
I scarcely
need remind the reader,
revolves about the sun
at a mean distance
of 140,000,000 miles,
and the light
and heat it receives
from the sun
is barely half
of that received
by this world.
It must be,
if the nebular hypothesis
has any truth,
older than our world;
and long before
this earth
ceased to be molten,
life upon its surface
must have begun
its course.
The fact that
it is scarcely
one seventh
of the volume
of the earth
must have
accelerated its cooling
to the temperature
at which life
could begin.
It has air
and water
and all that is necessary
for the support
of animated existence.

Yet so vain is man,
and so blinded
by his vanity,
that no writer,
up to
the very end of
the nineteenth century,
expressed any idea
that intelligent life
might have
developed there far,
or indeed at all,
beyond its earthly level.
Nor was it
generally understood
that since Mars
is older than our earth,
with scarcely a quarter
of the superficial area
and remoter from the sun,
it necessarily follows
that it is not only
more distant
from time’s beginning
but nearer its end.

The secular cooling
that must someday
overtake our planet
has already gone
far indeed
with our neighbor.
Its physical condition
is still largely
a mystery,
but we know now
that even
in its equatorial region
the midday temperature
barely approaches that
of our coldest winter.
Its air is much more
attenuated than ours,
its oceans have shrunk
until they cover
but a third
of its surface,
and as its
slow seasons change
huge snowcaps gather
and melt about
either pole
and periodically inundate
its temperate zones.
That last stage
of exhaustion,
which to us
is still
incredibly remote,
has become
a present-day problem
for the inhabitants
of Mars.
The immediate pressure
of necessity
has brightened
their intellects,
enlarged their powers,
and hardened
their hearts.
And looking across space
with instruments,
and intelligences
such as we
have scarcely
dreamed of,
they see,
at its nearest distance
only 35,000,000
of miles sunward of them,
a morning star of hope,
our own warmer planet,
green with vegetation
and grey with water,
with a cloudy atmosphere
eloquent of fertility,
with glimpses
through its drifting
cloud wisps
of broad stretches
of populous country
and narrow,
navy-crowded seas.

And we men,
the creatures who inhabit
this earth,
must be
to them at least
as alien
and lowly
as are the monkeys
and lemurs to us.
The intellectual
side of man
already admits
that life is
an incessant struggle
for existence,
and it would seem
that this too
is the belief
of the minds upon Mars.
Their world is far gone
in its cooling
and this world
is still crowded
with life,
but crowded only
with what they regard
as inferior animals.
To carry warfare
sunward is,
indeed,
their only escape
from the destruction
that,
generation
after generation,
creeps upon them.

And before we judge
of them too harshly
we must remember
what ruthless
and utter destruction
our own species
has wrought,
not only upon animals,
such as
the vanished bison
and the dodo,
but upon
its inferior races.
The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?

The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety—their mathematical learning is evidently far in excess of ours—and to have carried out their preparations with a well-nigh perfect unanimity. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have seen the gathering trouble far back in the nineteenth century. Men like Schiaparelli watched the red planet—it is odd, by-the-bye, that for countless centuries Mars has been the star of war—but failed to interpret the fluctuating appearances of the markings they mapped so well. All that time the Martians must have been getting ready.

During the opposition of 1894 a great light was seen on the illuminated part of the disk, first at the Lick Observatory, then by Perrotin of Nice, and then by other observers. English readers heard of it first in the issue of Nature dated August 2…

Chapter 5: Skills

Every skill requires practice, but some strategies exist that can boost any practice to maximum effectiveness—and some of these strategies are especially suited to reading skills. A little consideration of these strategies before continuing with the exercises will be time well-spent.

Force vs. Technique