Sep 08
It’s difficult to succeed when you don’t believe that you can.This same challenge applies to succeeding with PhotoReading. If you think it’s something magical. Something that only mystic with special abilities can do then you will hinder your success with the PhotoReading system.
Let me tell you the secret of PhotoReading.
It’s not mystical, It’s [...] [...more]
Posted: under Uncategorized.
It’s difficult to succeed when you don’t believe that you can.This same challenge applies to succeeding with PhotoReading. If you think it’s something magical. Something that only mystic with special abilities can do then you will hinder your success with the PhotoReading system.
Let me tell you the secret of PhotoReading.
It’s not mystical, It’s not magic. The system as a whole uses skills you naturally use everyday. If you are reading this you have the most important skill for PhotoReading mastery. You already know how to read. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow you naturally read it’s your ability to understand this at whatever your current speed of reading is.
PhotoReading is the next step in reading. The skills that you should have been taught when you entered high school. What you learned in Elementary or Primary school is what you needed to know to master the first stage of reading. Getting the basics. The PhotoReading system takes you to the next level.
When you learn PhotoReading in a live seminar, home study course or even the book you will notice that you are taught some additional reading skills. Skills that help set your focus for reading. You could easily double your reading speed by applying these basic skills.
The PhotoReading step also uses some of your natural skills. If you drive a car you use this skill more than you realise to get you to your destination. Brain research also shows more and more that there is more perceptual powers in the networks of your non-conscious mind than your conscious mind can access. To say we use only 1% of our mind when talking about the conscious mind is an over estimate. If you ever consider the art of reading you might notice that it involves a lot of non-conscious processes.
Do you ever go back to re-read a sentence because, you didn’t understand it? Who told you you didn’t understand it? Your non-conscious processes of course.
Do you ever re-read something because you realised you missed a word or read it wrong? Again, who told you? You’re no longer reading to your primary school teacher or tutor. So it was a non-conscious part of your mind that is monitoring this. You have a non-conscious part of your mind watching over you as you read.
With the PhotoReading step you give your non-conscious mind a mental snap shot of the text you wish to read. Don’t worry about your mind being able to handle this non-consciously. It can. As you have proved to yourself if you’ve ever re-read words or sentences of a book. The non-conscious mind is already working for you.
The challenge is realising that the PhotoReading step is not done consciously and it requires trusting that part of you that you trust for so many other experiences. You know when you need to go to the bathroom don’t you?
One of the misunderstandings about the PhotoReading system is “reading at 25,000 words a minute”. It isn’t reading at 25,000 words a minute it’s PhotoReading at 25,000 to 100,000 words a minute. One is conscious the other is not.
Reading is done consciously and cannot comfortably exceed 1000 words a minute. Faster than that you have to start skimming. If you take the figure that the conscious mind can only handle 7 plus or minus 2 bits of information a second and allow that one word is one bit. The maximum reading speed is 560 words a minute. The average reading speed is 190 words a minute.
PhotoReading is done with the non-conscious mind and isn’t satisfying to the conscious mind because it isn’t reading as we know it. The non-conscious mind takes in 2 million bits of information a second. Therefore non-consciously 25,000 to 100,000 is a leisurely pace. PhotoReading is like pre-reading.
Since PhotoReading is not done with conscious mind we run into a couple of other stumbling blocks that hinder belief that the PhotoReading system works. I will continue on the subject in my next post.
© Alex K Viefhaus
Aug 28
Long before I learned PhotoReading I discovered the price of slow reading.
The saddest fathers day card I ever saw was created by a young girl in the first grade. She was diagnosed with ADD. The card answered the question, what is the first thing you think of when you think about your dad. She wrote, [...] [...more]
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Long before I learned PhotoReading I discovered the price of slow reading.
The saddest fathers day card I ever saw was created by a young girl in the first grade. She was diagnosed with ADD. The card answered the question, what is the first thing you think of when you think about your dad. She wrote, “My daddy is always busy reading.”
It was true. I too observed that he spent a lot of time reading and I asked him about it. He pointed out that in his field there is new information every week. He had to keep up,
He had a stack of magazines relating to his industry that were a year old when I saw them. He had asked me to store them temporarily when he separated and moved into a small unit.
I asked why he didn’t throw them out. They filled a 1 metre cubed storage container. When I finally did throw them out they filled two wheelie bins. Why didn’t he throw them out? He hadn’t read them yet and he never did read them before I dumped them in the bin. 
To me that was insane. I thought there was no way in the world that he’s going to read all them ever if he didn’t have the time yet then will he have because it was accumulating out of control. There will still be more each week and yet he was busy reading the other stuff. His technical books were like phone books.
He couldn’t even know if he was missing important stuff. Material he needed right now in his career. That’s why he kept those magazines in pristine condition to read ASAP. The problem he wasn’t getting his reading done and he was stressed by the idea he might be missing something important if he didn’t read all those pages.
At the time I didn’t know about PhotoReading and I know now that potentially he could have flipped those pages and recognised which articles were important to him and which he could ignore and dismiss the publication out of his life and reduce the physical and emotional reading clutter. He missed the important ones waiting for time to read the magazine because he never did get around to reading them.
With his traditional reading skill he had to read and re-read over and over to understand the material. He told me that he speed reads and yet he seemed to need to re-read the information over and over. I’ve had to sit and wait while he read something and even then I wondered isn’t there more to ones time and life than reading?
For a university educated individual surely he was taught a better more effective way of reading than what we were taught in primary school?
I often wondered how we made it through high school. I know most in my class never did the assigned reading yet they still passed high school.
How important is it to read every single word consciously like my friend did. And at what price?
My friend was good at his job and career but he lost as a father because he was always too busy reading for his work. The marriage broke down because he wasn’t a part of it. His reading was.
I discovered a better way to read. I enjoy my life and time and am an avid reader and learner. I became a PhotoReading instructor because I wanted to help people like my friend have more choices about their reading. Not everything you read is important. Use PhotoReading to help you decide what is.
© Alex K Viefhaus
Jul 07
Super short post.
You may have already heard the argument that sleep is good for learning and memory.
Here’s an article at Dumb Little Man’s blog 11 reasons why you need more sleep. Check it out
© AlexK Viefhaus July 2009
[...more]
Posted: under Uncategorized.
Super short post.
You may have already heard the argument that sleep is good for learning and memory.
Here’s an article at Dumb Little Man’s blog 11 reasons why you need more sleep. Check it out
© AlexK Viefhaus July 2009
Jun 08
Been busy the last couple of weeks developing an activation technique which I believe will help those who have trouble with comprehension. I’ve been working on this because so many students who participate in my class complain most of all of not being able to comprehend what they are reading. They struggle with this with [...] [...more]
Posted: under Persistence, PhotoRead, Photoreading, comprehension, reading.
Tags: Photoreading, reading comprehension, speed reading
Been busy the last couple of weeks developing an activation technique which I believe will help those who have trouble with comprehension. I’ve been working on this because so many students who participate in my class complain most of all of not being able to comprehend what they are reading. They struggle with this with traditional reading and hope that PhotoReading will help them.
It seems to me that many who look for ways to read faster with techniques like PhotoReading are hoping speed will help them comprehend what they are reading faster. Comprehension isn’t about reading it’s a way of thinking.
PhotoReading can and does help with comprehension however we still have the initial hurdle of activating enough. Too many give up before they are done. Those who have difficulty with comprehension stop the activation process way too soon. Usually on the first activation.
Since comprehension is a way of thinking, I’ve been working on a way to teach that way of thinking. I’ll hope to present it at my next PhotoReading class. I’ve been devising an activation process that I believe will help leverage comprehension. For now I simply refer to it as KL Activation. I am hoping that it will be the switch that gets them activating.
© Alex K Viefhaus June 2009
May 13
People have often asked me how do I know I’m in photofocus? `In the seminar I teach how to see the blip page. That is one of the ways to know you are in photofocus. However most people find it challenging and try too hard to get the blip page. They won’t trust the rest [...] [...more]
Posted: under Blip page, Mind Stuff, PhotoRead, Photoreading, confusion, photofocus, success.
Tags: Blip page, Photoreading
People have often asked me how do I know I’m in photofocus? `In the seminar I teach how to see the blip page. That is one of the ways to know you are in photofocus. However most people find it challenging and try too hard to get the blip page. They won’t trust the rest of the system until they get this right.
Hey you don’t need to see blip page. The imaginary X-technique works just as well and if you have vision in only one eye you won’t ever see the blip page. That doesn’t stop you from being a successful PhotoReader.
So how do I know when I’m in photofocus? As I’ve taught in my classes and explained on the forum to me it feels exactly like I’m day dreaming. I’m looking without looking through whatever is in front of me into space. Looking beyond. PhotoReading to me has always felt the same as daydreaming.
Of course daydreaming has always been associated with switching off. So I think many of my students were reluctant to try this. How can the mind take anything in while one is daydreaming. How do I know it’s being processed? How when daydreaming is switching off, lazy, non-functioning aspect of brain activity?
Well exciting news! What we’ve been taught as a truth has been proven wrong with fMRI. Daydreaming is active activity. It switches on the brains problem solving functions.
“Prof. Kalina Christoff, UBC Dept. of Psychology. "But this study shows our brains are very active when we daydream – much more active than when we focus on routine tasks."
…The study finds that the brain’s "executive network" – associated with high-level, complex problem-solving and including the lateral PFC and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex – also becomes activated when we daydream.
This is a surprising finding, that these two brain networks are activated in parallel," says Christoff. "Until now, scientists have thought they operated on an either-or basis – when one was activated, the other was thought to be dormant." The less subjects were aware that their mind was wandering, the more both networks were activated.
This for me is the most exciting evidence that we do gain something from the PhotoReading step. A step that to me always felt like I was switching on daydreaming. Now I know I’m switching on the brains problem solving network.
So if you want to get into photofocus, daydream. Because big stuff is happening while you daydream.
Source: University of British Columbia (2009, May 12). Brain’s Problem-solving Function At Work When We Daydream. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 13, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2009/05/090511180702.htm
© AlexK Viefhaus
It’s not mystical, It’s not magic. The system as a whole uses skills you naturally use everyday. If you are reading this you have the most important skill for PhotoReading mastery. You already know how to read. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow you naturally read it’s your ability to understand this at whatever your current speed of reading is.
