Looking for an insight – try speed reading

I’m celebrating an anniversary this evening. Not a birthday, it’s a day of acquaintance with a skill I owe the biggest part of unexpectedly pleasant meetings. 35 years ago, there was a first time when I heard about people who could “swallow” books completely. On the reading technique lessons the teacher said that the speed of 100 words per minute would have seemed ridiculous to them.

After school, puffing hard, I barely reached 130% of the standard and run to the library next morning. The polite lady told me that Lenin (it was in USSR) could read “diagonally”, then quoting large blocks and paragraphs. His text receptivity was considered phenomenal.

The second news concerned Stalin: contemporaries attributed to him a regular consumption of a several books with a declared rate of 500 pages per day. Reading fluently became an obsessive dream. The fever started, and reviews and favorites thoughts in notes were born.

One by one, books “fell”: “Amphibian Man” by Alexander Belyaev, “The Mysterious Island” by Jules Verne, “The Two Captains” by Veniamin Kaverin. Then Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles”, Harry Harrison’s “The Stainless Steel Rat” and Jack London’s “Martin Eden”. The hero sailor became for me the idol of self-development.

Six months later, contrary to expectations, despite hundred thousand viewed words the reading technique improved negligibly. Severe disappointment born a passion to win. Grubbing the literature led to Nicolas Grollier de Servière, who invented a machine for accelerating the text perception in 17th century.

He replaced blades of a water mill’s wheel l into shelfs for folios. I didn’t have the same, but I built my own “reading machine” of two straightedges and a backless stool. It became easier for eyes, speeded up the flipping, but even that didn’t help – I still wanted to sit or lie down.

Stumbled upon a description of Hitler’s style: he worked with books early morning and before bedtime. I was looking for facts to enhance evidential speeches’ base. Could call to mind and pronounce the quote with pathos. Read Schopenhauer avidly. The despised tyrant was added to the idol’s image. If he could, then I cope.

The last straw was the fact about Honore de Balzac who consumed 200 pages per 30 minutes. It was an equivalent to multiplying by zero–I was 12 times slower than a man who lived a century and a half ago. It became obvious that resourcefulness wasn’t enough and had to be supplemented with works of pioneers.

The ocean of books brought to the shore of knowledge the shadow of Louis-Émile Javal, a famous ophthalmologist and member of the French parliament. He modified a process of writing for blind, invented a tandem bicycle, advocated Esperanto, was fond of graphology, handwriting and propagandize long eye fixation on lines.

In childhood we are taught to read by syllables. Growing up, but the habit doesn’t let go–still jump on the text through 3-4 symbols. Exercises on Schulte tables reduce the number of visual fields to 2 per line. A reading technique with a tachistoscope has been known for more than 80 years when fragments of text are projected for short time.

Lots of programs for computers, smartphones and readers use tachistoscopy as the basic method for acceleration of reading rate. It’s worth recalling to Evelyn Wood, who discovered advantages of “dynamic” or zigzag viewing by brushing a dirt of the blurred page.

It was emerged that the brain can assemble words, which has been read in the opposite direction. Thus, it became popular to read the odd lines to the right, even to the left. Further searches led me to understanding of the texts’ friability. Pages contain abundance of words with no meaning and. It’s a “garbage”.

On the one hand, attempts to squeeze out the water lead to overly thick text. It’s said: “Want to drink immediately”. On the other hand, knowing the basic of speed-reading it’s possible to create soft lines, which lie on reader’s soul. Layout of books and formatting of articles are significant.

I love the format of “Alpina Publisher”–books seem to be created for speed reading. They’re easy to view both hardcover and electronic versions. Papers don’t “play page fields” when scrolling on gadget. But most news sites are impossible to be read neither fast or slow.

The most frequent questions from slow eye-running people are:

• Is the pleasure lost with a sprint through it?

• But what about enjoying the artistry of writing?

• Does anything remain in the memory?

It’s boring for the brain to crawl along the lines at a school speed. It’s forced to have fun with uncontrollable thoughts. When it’s interested in, you must reread the text. Just feed your brain with lines at the speed of thoughts and you do not want to go to the cinema. Imagination draws better than studios.

Over 18 thousand books, there are written reviews of 400 symbols for each of them. 47 notebooks in a cage were turned into Instagram, with 4 book covers posted before the start of sales every week. Increased the daily rate to 400 pages per hour, and master 8-10 books per week.

When the time comes–quotes come back easily and effortlessly, because speed reading is a working out. Imagine, sketch viewed lines and display them by the internal projector on the canvas of consciousness. The most important metric of reading is a memorization coefficient.

When passed the exam, read 12.000 symbols per minute, but out of 10 questions answered only 8. It was counted as 9.600. I realized immediately, that it’s more profitable to read slower but attentively. This is the answer to the question, do hurrying readers remember the content. Then there were a speed accounting, speed talking, blind typing. I’ll write about it too.

Somehow, in the bazaar in Iraq drew attention–merchants leave books for the night without any supervision. I received the answer: “Robbers don’t read, readers don’t rob”.

Source: New Retail

Translation: Maxim Sukhorukov