Photoreading - first steps
Published by on December 8th, 2006
Stage one as described here happened a few weeks ago; it has been a while since I’ve had the chance to catch up on blog posting about it.
Reading the dictionary - 1 page per second.
The introductory “here’s a little taster of how this works” from the PhotoReading Whole Mind System, describes a technique to ‘photoread’ the dictionary, after which one should be able to determine the location of a word within its page. A little basic perhaps, but after flicking through several letters’ worth of pages in a thesaurus - a dictionary was surprisingly unavailable at the time - I did get a close match with each of the three word positions I tried to determine.
The odd thing about this experiment is not that you only get a second or so to scan each two-page spread of the book, but that you look at the book with ’soft eyes’. That means, no focus.
So how can you possibly see and register the position of a single word?
The system relies on being in the correct relaxed and receptive frame of mind and scanning through the book absorbing it almost instantly into your subconscious. The theory goes that your subconscious has a significantly greater capacity to register, store and analyse new information - partcularly visual information - instantly.
Attempt 1: A couple of minutes flicking through G, H, and I of the thesaurus. I sat and contemplated for a minute - as instructed - then determined a word in my head and imagined its position on the page (Unfortunately I did not make a rcord of the words, but I remember the positions clearly).
- Word 1: I determined was on the right page, at the bottom of the left column. It was in fact on the right page, at the bottom of the right colum. Close.
- Word 2: I determined was on the left page, left column, in the upper third of the page. It was located in the left page, left column, in the upper half of the page. Closer.
- Word 3: I determined was on the left page, left column, two lines up from the bottom. This was an exact placement. Spot on!
Word three gave me the shivers as I had not anticipated getting any of the positions that accurately. I deemed the attempt a success and the following day made a second attempt:
Attempt 2: This time involving Jen to select the words to target and therfore verify results. I failed dismally on each of the three words she chose.
After some thought, I realised this could have been down to Jen selecting the target words. If the words are being stored in the subconscious, then some words will inevitably be more prominent in that memory than others. In the first attempt, it was those more prominent words which I extracted from subconcious memory and therefore more accurately positioned - I didn’t have to think where they were, my subconscious remembered them above others. In the second attempt, which took greater concentration and effort to visualise the word positions, the words were randomly selected by another regardless of their prominence and successful storage in the subconscious brain. If you accept the whole use of the subconscious mind in this way then that is a plausible deduction.
It has been a good few weeks since having the time and capacity to pick the study up once again, but now with re-alignment of other aspects of my personal time, expect more progress updates to come.
[tags]photoreading, subconscious, self development[/tags]
