The Speed Reading Course
By Peter Shepherd
Introduction
We all learn to read at school, after a fashion. But for most of us, this is not an
optimal use of our brain power. In this course you will learn to better use the
left brain's focused attention combined with the right brain's peripheral
attention, in close harmony. Good communication between the brain
hemispheres is a pre-requisite for creative thinking and also a sense of wellbeing,
where thoughts and feelings are integrated.
As you probably expect, this course will also teach you to read much faster and
at the same time, to remember more of what you have read. These are
obviously great advantages.
There is another major benefit. Most of us, as we read, 'speak' the words in our
heads. It is this subvocalisation that holds back fast reading and it is
unnecessary. It is possible to have an inner speech, a kind of 'thought
awareness,' that isn't linked to the tongue, mouth and vocal chord muscles, and
this is much faster and more fluent. Cutting out the identification of
vocalisation and the stream of thought gives a surprising by-product. Many of
us think that our constant subvocalised 'speaking voice' is who we are. Finding
out that you can think and be aware without a vocal stream of words, opens up
your consciousness to the usually unrecognised domain of intuition and
spiritual awareness. You'll have a better sense of who you really are. Try it and
see!
The Definition of Reading
Reading may be defined as an individual's total inter-relationship with
symbolic information. Reading is a communication process requiring a series
of skills. As such reading is a thinking process rather than an exercise in eye
movements. Effective reading requires a logical sequence of thinking or
thought patterns, and these thought patterns require practice to set them into the
mind. They may be broken down into the following seven basic processes:
1. Recognition: the reader's knowledge of the alphabetic symbols.
2. Assimilation: the physical process of perception and scanning.
3. Intra-integration: basic understanding derived from the reading material
itself, with minimum dependence on past experience, other than a
knowledge of grammar and vocabulary.
4. Extra-integration: analysis, criticism, appreciation, selection & rejection.
These are all activities which require the reader to bring his past
experience to bear on the task.
5. Retention: this is the capacity to store the information in memory.
6. Recall: the ability to recover the information from memory storage.
