Anyone tried speed reading?

Just curious if any of you have ever taken or ever thought about taking a speed reading class?

I've spent the last three months reading and re-reading the MS Press 70-270/271/272 and I'm more than a little sick of it by now. I'm sure those that have read these books can attest the often tedious nature of the writing ( I've become convinced you can't make this stuff "interesting" in print so it just is what it is ).

I found this interesting "webinar":

Free Speed Reading Course - Video Tutorials - Online Webinars | The Iris Organization

And there's also a couple of books on Amazon that seem promising. Just curious if any here has any experience w/ this at all?

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Comments

Kaminsky

For that kind of thing, Tony Buzan first got it going and you can get his books off Amazon. He was a tv presenter once asked to do a piece on different techniques people use for better memory and fast reading and he then quit, brought it all together initially with mind mapping and now he is a multimillionaire.

You can get up some pretty serious speeds with lots and lots of practice so much so you looking at a page for 2-3 seconds and taking it all in. The trick is retention and recall though. If you can crack that part of it as well, again with years of practice, you could pretty much skim through an entire certification book in a few hours. (I kid you not) Again, how much you can retain and recall is the trick.

Speed reading concepts come from the fact that your eyes are capable of so much more than just focussing on these words you are reading. Your eyes also take in everything around you but it's getting your brain to process more and more of what is right in front of you and what is slightly to the side.

Eventually, with years of practice, you just run your eyes down the centre of a page and you brain takes in the whole page.

It really does take years of constant practice though but it is a very well proven ability.

The same thing with increasing your memory and having a near perfect recall ability by using pictures, colours, sounds and smells which is what the human brain is perfectly attuned for rather than pages full of black text on white background or lists of things. Our brains arn't set up to learn like this. People use these techniques to get the whole audience to hold up a playing card and then say their name and something else and then the guy goes through them all one by one and tells them their name, etc acurately. Theres a whole world record memory thing about it.

I got a bit into it when I started university some 19 years ago. A friend of mine on the same course as me had a maths teacher as a mother who knew about this stuff and had been teaching him these techniques since he was just getting out of nappies. He was a seriously lazy git. Would never revise but paid attention in lectures. We had to practically drag him out of bed to go to his 3rd year exams on time and we feared the worst. He got the top marks for the whole course that year. Amazing.

19 years ago when I was going through it, one of the exercises was to remember a shopping list of 10 items.... here goes (19 years later)
Wine glasses, dental floss, tomatoes, silver spoon, bunch of roses, bananas, soap, hmm that's all. 70% after 19 years... not bad.

Knives Out

I was very lucky to have an English/literature teacher in high school for two years/four semesters that taught my class how to speed read - I try to keep on top of it, I read two novels within one day during my recent vacation time, had room for another but only bought two.

I also find it can be detrimental to me, I tend to leave a lot of tasks to last minute or day before just because I know how quickly I can read and absorb - so in a way, it contributes to my procrastination.

earweed

Used to. Just like any other skill you don't use you lose (or at least takes a while to regain).