I''m not sure about you, but reading has always been one of my secret pleasures. I was one of those
kids who hid under their covers at night, flashlight blazing, reading my way through one novel after another. Now as a college student, I find myself reading more then ever, but usually in some inch thick textbook I have no interest in. I came across "Photo Reading: The Whole Mind System" while browsing the web and nabbed a copy thinking it was another none of those speed reading books. It sat on my hard drive for quite some time until summer vacation rolled alongand by chance, I took it down and had a go at it. To my utter surprise, the first thing it covered was how everything I knew about reading was wrong. Regular reading, the process of reading word by word, has always been the slowest and worst way to read. I don''t know if you had this experience before, but when you read a very technical manual word by word, by the time you reach the end of one sentence, you forget what the sentence was talking about. this is simply one of the follies of "traditional reading." Your conscious mind can only take in 7 bits of information at a time. With the photo reading system, you read entire pages at a time, taking the meaning into your subconscious mind. I guess you could liken it to
subliminal messaging where you imprint a page of the book directly into your inner mind without having your conscious mind knowing. Such a notion was laughable, and I remembering chuckling to myself as I realized what the book was suggesting. Simply by looking at the page for a split second, I can obtain the information with out reading a single word?That''s just plain nonsense isn''t it? Just for kicks I tried one of the little activities in the book. It calls for "photo reading" in the
dictionary for 5 min. (photo reading consists of relaxing and looking with de-focused eyes at the page and flipping through it in a rhythm fashion.) after wards, think of a word and guess where on the page it is. To my utter none amazement nothing happened. I fumbled around, half-ass-dly trying to imagine where words are with the hit ratio of a blind ball player with no arms. Although not unexpected, I was still disappointed with the results. But giving it one last shot, I decided on the word "Prince" for some reason. (I photo read M,N,O,P) and the strangest thing occurred. A blurry yet unmistakable impression of the word and it''s description spread out from the bottom half of one page to the upper first roll of the following page wafted into my mind. I read through the section with my eyes all blurry so it was impossible to make out any of the words when I photo read and I don''t recall having ever looked up the word prince before... Yet there it was, on the dictionary just as I have seen it. I''m a little too freaked out right now to go any further with photo reading.but I''m still suspicious of it''s claims. Basically, by setting up a purpose, your subconscious mind should be able to pick up on the information you want and absorb the information independently into your inner mind. Through activation, or reading blurbs out of the original, you can retrieve the information from the subconscious into the conscious mind. Although an interesting concept I don''t know anyone in real life who have accomplished this, (except a video of Derren Brown doing the Dictionary thing or something similar to it. But I''m pretty sure it was just a trick) With my limited experience with photo reading, I can not make an unbiased statement on the book besides that it was an interesting read.