Product Review:
The PhotoReading Personal Learning Course
Reviewed by M. Joyner
Product Reviewed: PhotoReading Personal Learning Course
Type: Self-teaching course for learning PhotoReading, a unique and highly effective speed reading method.
Price: $245.00
Notes: Highly recommended. Includes: eight course tapes, the PhotoReading Whole Mind System book, a helpful workbook, Learning to Learn by D. Trinidad Hunt, and a Memory Supercharger tape.
To Order: PhotoReadingThe average person reads at a rate of about 200-400 words per minute (WPM). When this average person reads, they sound out the individual words in their mind and process the information "vocally".
Most "speed reading" programs teach you to process this information at a faster rate. The main aim here is to break the "subvocalization" barrier: the maximum rate at which a person can read and still sound out the words individually. This barrier resides at about 500-800 words per minute.
So, with speed reading, you will still be processing individual words or lines of text, but you won’t be slowed down by the rate at which you can make the associated sounds in your mind.
What if I were to tell you that you could process pages of information at a time, not simply words or lines? How does 25,000 words per minute sound? Sound good? Then you might want to check out the PhotoReading Personal Learning Course.
The technique of PhotoReading was developed by Paul Scheele, CEO of Learning Strategies Corporation. The basic idea is based on the assertion that any information that is seen, while not necessarily processed consciously, is processed by the subconscious mind. Once this information is placed there it is simply a matter of "activating" that information, that is, making it available to your conscious mind.
So, sounds pretty, easy, huh? Just flip some pages in front of your eyes, bring it into conscious awareness and you’re good to go. Well, it’s not quite that simple.
The PhotoReading process involves several different steps. The basic step of the PhotoReading process entails easing yourself into a state of relaxed awareness, maintaining that state and then rhythmically and deliberately flipping the pages in front of your eyes. This is called the "PhotoReading step".
While this is touted as the most important step of the process, it is also the only step without some immediately noticeable benefit. It stands to reason, though since the information is allegedly processed subconsciously.
I was quite skeptical about the PhotoReading step at first. Mr. Scheele, foreseeing this, includes an exercise early on in the program that will make the honest skeptic give this concept a second look. It involves applying the PhotoReading step to the first portion of a dictionary. After doing so you are asked to think of a word that can be found in the portion that you Photo-read. Then you are to intuit which portion of an open page upon which it will be found (upper left, lower left, upper right, or lower right). And then there is the page itself (left or right).
So you think of a word, say "apple". You then try to imagine seeing the word in the dictionary in it’s relative location. Chance would dictate that you guess correctly only one in eight times (12.5%). On my first try I guessed correctly on 4 out of 10. Pretty good, I was intrigued. On a subsequent attempt I scored 5 out of 10.
My conditions are hardly clinical, and I’m not a professional researcher, but this was enough for me to get excited. The results were well above chance and were reproduced in the subsequent attempt.
That's good evidence. Evidence, mind you. Not proof.
Even if the PhotoReading step itself did not have any effect, the rest of the PhotoReading process certainly would. It is based on some of the soundest techniques of accelerated learning and comprehension.
In order to avoid spoiling the whole process I won’t get into the details of that here. All I will say is that the skills you develop will help you achieve success in any field. You will certainly learn how to process information faster.
In order to give the whole process an acid test, I PhotoRead a book that I was supposed to read and discuss with some associates of mine. I followed the steps strictly and quelled any desire to revert to traditional reading. The process, from start to finish, took me just over one hour total (spread over two days) to read a 400 page book.
The following day, when I went to my breakfast meeting to discuss the book, I wasn’t quite sure if I was ready to discuss the book or not. I had "activated" much of the content of the book, but I still wasn’t confident.
By the end of the meeting I was quite certain that my comprehension of the book was just as good as that of any of the folks who read the book using traditional means, if not better. As the meeting progressed more of the book came to my conscious awareness.
One of my associates talked about how he was up all night "speed reading" the book. I, fully rested, looked over at him. He looked pretty tired and jittery as he gulped down more coffee. I took another slug of orange juice and laughed quietly at the irony.
I would still be interested in seeing a study of the PhotoReading process where one group uses PhotoReading and the other uses the same process minus the PhotoReading step itself. I think this would be interesting to see how much of this comprehension is due to the preparation and activation steps and how much is due to the actual PhotoReading.
Regardless, the bottom line is that the process works. Don’t take my word for it, though. I highly recommend purchasing this system and trying it for yourself.
I intend to continue experimenting with PhotoReading for quite some time. It seems to be the soundest and most effective accelerated reading method out on the market.
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