A Proposal for:

BE YOUR OWN EXPERT!

Are You Getting the Whole Picture?

by Rick Chafen

Synopsis

Aren't There Enough Experts in the World Already?

Comparative Analyses of Existing Books

About the Author:

Chapter Six: Turn Back The Tide! 

Appendix One: "AMPLIFIERS"

Appendix Two: BE YOUR OWN EXPERT!

Appendix Three: MISCELLANEOUS READINGS

CHAPTER FIVE--Channeling The Wandering Mind!

Synopsis

With information overload in every field racing upwards, readers need skills and strategies that will allow them the maximum benefit for the time they spend. In a world where everything is subject to constant change, only those experts who can keep abreast of change can continue to be considered "experts."

It is precisely because everything is subject to change that just "knowing" can never suffice. Far more critical to future experts will be the skills needed to quickly, accurately, and continuously assess new information to see if or how it changes the existing picture.

As many books as there are on being experts in every imaginable field, there's no general guide to the actual steps involved in becoming an expert.

Life Magazine reported "scientific breakthroughs" suggesting that brains can be trained in its Oct, 1994 cover article, "Brain Calisthenics." The author of Be Your Own Expert! had been training brains for many years before this article appeared. A 1983 TV feature called him a "lone prophet, crying in the wilderness."

The "Learning How to Learn" seminars which evolved into this book were designed to help people deal with ever-increasing amounts of information. Unfortunately, the message never reached the masses, who have a greater need than ever for the benefits this system provides. No longer "ahead of their time," these vital skills and strategies can now be brought to a public more able to appreciate and benefit from them.

For anyone who's ever read something unnecessary, or failed to read something critical, or anyone who's simply got a lot to learn, Be Your Own Expert! provides a systematic guide for turning mountains of information into usable knowledge.

The amazing thing is, it's not amazing at all!

Aren't There Enough Experts in the World Already?

Traditionally, publishers exerted both quality and editorial control over what was printed. As a result, some readers came to believe whatever was in print--whether it appeared in books, magazines, or newspapers.

These days, there are many other ways than through publishers to get things into print. Some parts of the Internet, for instance, require no editing or filtering at all. Which means that the world's information supply has grown polluted.

This in turn means that readers need to be more vigilant about what occupies their time. Be Your Own Expert! provides a comprehensive set of skills and concepts that have been proven effective in corporate settings for well over twenty years. These strategies allow readers to qualify and disqualify material--almost instantly--and to vary their approaches based on ever-changing informational needs and purposes.

Experts are specialists, and we rely on them to simplify our lives. No one wants the amateur mechanic, plumber, or builder, let alone neurosurgeon. An expert should be the sort of person who is known for keeping facts straight, and separate from opinions. An expert's esteem increases as others learn to trust the expert's judgment. No matter what kind of expert you'd like to be, there are sure to be lots of books available to absorb.

What is it that makes a person an expert? There's no officially recognized association of experts, there aren't any professional standards or opportunities for advancement, and there haven't been any books on becoming an expert. Until now.

Over the years, several clients have hired the author to appear to be an expert on subjects about which he knew nothing. The point of the book is that any reader so inclined could easily apply the same techniques and become an expert almost overnight.

Comparative Analyses of Existing Books

Writing the Natural Way, by Gabrielle Lusser Rico.

Specifically oriented toward writing, this book advocates a note-taking method the author calls "clustering" which, while based on some of the same premises as ThoughtTrax®, still serves a more narrowly-defined purpose. An excellent book for people who think they can't write, but might like to. Some activities might be uncomfortable for some readers--as their purpose is to put the reader in touch with long-forgotten memories and feelings.

The Right Brain, by Thomas R. Blakeslee.

A layman's discussion of the years of brain research, coupled with speculations and other viewpoints about that brain's potential. This book also contains an excellent bibliography, for anyone who's interested in the primary research data.

The Right-Brain Experience, by Marilee Zdenek.

More adventurous, but completely ignores reading and writing in right brain ways. It, too, involves numerous activities some readers could find unpleasant or unnecessary. It presents some innovative ways to access--and utilize--the right brain, and is essentially personal and experiential. A fairly large section of personal interviews with successes in several diverse fields contributes little.

Use Your Perfect Memory, all by Tony Buzan.

Use Both Sides of Your Brain is especially good, but the others are less useful. The Brain-User's Manual was nearly devoid of content, with substance far outpaced by blank forms. Tony Buzan is credited with having invented "Mind Maps," which certainly bear similarities to ThoughtTrax®, but even he overlooks many of the most useful applications.

Whole-Brain Thinking, by Jacquelyn Wonder and Priscilla Donovan.

This hardback book alleged to be the first practical book for business concerning brain research. But it's way off the mark, filled with examples that illustrate nothing, with tests with inconclusive results, with mistaken premises, and of very little practical merit.

Brain Power, by Karl Albrecht.

This one focuses only on enhancing left-brain processes, and therefore doesn't go nearly as far as it could.

A Whack on the Side of the Head, by Roger Von Oech.

This is a nice introductory book on stimulating creativity. It's based upon proper premises, it presents valid information, it's fun to interact with and it doesn't duplicate anything of Be Your Own Expert!

Plume and Penguin publishers currently have two of the perennial Tony Buzan titles and these two books that would appeal to the same audience: 7 Kinds of Smart, by Thomas Armstrong and Smart for Life, by Chavetz.

W.H. Freeman's current titles Ideal Problem Solver and Teaching Thinking Skills: Theory and Practice seem to be in the same ballpark. The Teaching thinking skills book, however, is an academic/scholarly overview of methods used in formal education.

Both The Artist's Way and Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain by Tarcher Books probably have the same kind of audience as that foreseen for Be Your Own Expert!

Old standbys like Jim Adams' Conceptual Blockbusting, Harry Lorayne's How To Develop a Super-Power Memory and The Memory Book and Higbee's Your Memory: How It Works and How To Use It continue to be reissued and re-stocked, illustrating an on-going desire on the part of the book-buying public to improve specific skills.

The scope of Be Your Own Expert! combines the essence of most of these specialized approaches into a powerful synthesis. How we learn something will affect how we remember it. By focusing more attention during the act of learning, that information makes more of an impression, making it easier to process as a memory.

Books on improving memory, reading, study skills and that mysterious-sounding brainpower have been dotting the shelves of "self-improvement" for years. While only a few books have attempted them all, it is through combining them that readers will finally be able to effectively use them all.

Be Your Own Expert! presents these and several other phases of the learning process as an integrated system readers can easily put into practice for their own needs and purposes.

With more information than ever now available, and its rate of increase still increasing out of control, readers need a system they can use to turn all of that information into knowledge.

Not just a system invented on the spot--but one that's been evolving while at the same time being proven effective for many years. The techniques of this book were developed as a result of seminars conducted primarily as a part of management development or training in many corporate clients. The seminars were conducted across the country, in many different industries, to people of widely-varying educational and professional backgrounds, so the author could see that his system had almost-universal appeal.

About the Author:

When a high school student in the middle 1960s, Rick Chafen was given two clear choices for his immediate future--he could go to college, or Viet Nam. Choosing to do his battles with books, he started college and the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course at the same time. In 1969, while still an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, he became the youngest certified teacher in the EWRD organization. Even while working full-time with the Evelyn Wood office, his reading skills allowed him to take 17 hours of independent study in a semester with 16 hours of class work. In the 2½ years he spent in college, he finished majors in English Literature and Geography, as well as a minor in History.

Almost immediately after finishing with college in 1970, he became the director of the EWRD operations in Kansas City. Soon he was a regional director, training their teachers in several states.

In the early 1970s he individualized the content and delivery of the program. This work with countless individuals allowed the educational philosopher in him to emerge, realizing that what we do with information after getting it is as important as the rate at which we gathered it. Reading is just one of several ways we gather information, and since learning to read more rapidly ignores other skills that are equally vital in the learning and communicating processes, speed reading is doomed.

By 1973, he had developed a comprehensive approach to the entire learning process, and offered it to the EWRD management. After the proposal was turned down, he found it impossible to teach "mere" speed reading, and became self-employed, offering in-house programs spanning eight weeks. Between 1973 and 1977, the length of the program shrank, while the content kept expanding. All-day Total Learning Seminars were introduced in 1977, and have continued into the 1990s.

In early 1974, United Telecommunications became his first corporate client. That company, now called Sprint, remained a client for twenty years. Other prestigious clients who had in-house programs for years include TWA, Marion Laboratories, AMOCO, Butler Manufacturing Company, Farmland Industries, and Hallmark Cards, where his seminars were considered "Essential!"

Amid his illustrious professional career is this irony: While he never signed up for the Army, it became his biggest client in the 1980s, with him delivering seminars in 18 states. His program's unique, yet vital blend of memory and notetaking with reading, studying, and communicating skills led to the Pentagon issuing a "Sole Source" Certification.

In 1983, the author collaborated with a neuropsychologist to create "Brain Training." This was an adaptation of his all-day seminar especially designed for the needs of people who had survived serious neurological injuries.

While improvements in medical technology meant that more people survived aneurysms, strokes, lesions, and other trauma, the author's concepts and skills proved extremely effective for re-training the damaged brain.

The author has written, narrated and produced training videos, both for his proprietary information and for clients on commission. Besides being a guest expert on various television programs, the author has twice been the subject of in-depth features. One, about the seminars in 1983, suggested the author was "a lone prophet, crying in the wilderness."

The author has also had a diverse and parallel career in many capacities in the music industry. He was writer, producer, and narrator of over 500 episodes of a weekly FM rock radio program, Her Majesty's Voice, between 1974 and 1987. In the 1990s, he co-founded an international record company--Voiceprint--and created a national touring network, organizing more than twenty coast_to_coast tours by obscure European rock artists.

Some of those experiences can help promotability--for the author is comfortable and articulate in any setting, unintimidated by microphones or cameras. He would be a tireless and passionate promoter, this book being like a child of his brain.

In addition to having numerous writings appear, he has been written about on a number of occasions, in both seminar and musical contexts. In 1983, the Kansas City Business Journal said that he was working in "really mind-boggling territory." But Variety had enthused in 1979 that "anyone could push back his limitations" using the very methods that are the essence of Be Your Own Expert!

Table Of Contents:

Preface: Get The Picture! .......Page 1

New ways to program your own brain.

Chapter One: "Getting" Things--

So That You Don't For-Get Them .......Page 15

Chapter Two: Hold That Thought! .......Page 26

Chapter Three: Putting Numbers in Their Places .......Page 40

Chapter Four: See What You Think! .......Page 51

Using paper as a mirror of thought with ThoughtTrax®.

Chapter Five: Channelling The Wandering Mind .......Page 119

Reading at the speed of thought.

Chapter Six: Turn Back The Tide! .......Page 141

Understand and manage more information,

More effectively, without feeling overwhelmed.

Appendix One: Amplifiers .......Page 161

Appendix Two: Be Your Own Expert! .......Page 175

Appendix Three: Miscellaneous Articles .......Page 199

Afterwords .......Page 218

The manuscript is 223 pages in length. Depending on how the diagrams are included, the bulk could increase by as much as a page for each of the 56 diagrams.

Preface: Get The Picture!

Your brain is not like a computer, but let's program it anyway! There must be some mental delinquents in there someplace--leftovers from your second-grade teacher or Grandmother. Comparing and contrasting brains and computers provides readers with new guidelines for de-bugging and re-programming the brain. Only the reader can use these programming commands, so they cannot be confused with brainwashing or mind control.

How the book evolved may well be an integral part in carrying the reader along with it. The preface establishes the narrative voice, the relationship between author and reader, and begins the journey. In a history of the concepts and the book, the preface summarizes the author's life-long involvement in developing learning skills--and more effective ways to deliver them.

Anticipating the questions that would likely form in readers' minds, the preface lets them see the bigger picture of how the author's introduction and the evolution of this book are intertwined. Whether it's his admissions of turning in history papers borrowed from older friends, or getting discovered writing book reports from one-page summaries, or even his having entered this profession to stay out of the Army, readers find it easy to relate to his experiences as a recipient and a product of public education.

This overview also establishes a critical distinction between skills and talents. The author grew up with neither skills nor talent, and developed the skills of Be Your Own Expert! as an adult. He is therefore more credible as a guide to this instruction. If he were merely talented, he would have nothing to teach. Since readers know right off that this expert wasn't born with an I.Q. of 6000, they find encouragement that their own skills can improve.

Chapter One: Getting Things, So That We Don't For-get Them

Have you ever gotten to the bottom of a page that you thought you were reading . . .

to discover that the words on that page didn't look familiar because your mind had been somewhere else? This illustrates that your brain is processing information faster than you're giving it information to process. For instance, you see the words, "The train . . . " and before your eyes can get to the next words in the phrase, your mind, (believing you've asked for the "Train" files), floods your attention with images and memories of trains.

By the time your eyes get to the third and fourth words of the phrase, "of thought," the ability to comprehend has already been seriously impaired. If it were a train of thought, you got off the track, while the train kept going. And, if someone were to ask what you were reading at that point, it's hard to say. You've only seen four words, but all of those other images interfere with comprehension.

A sweeping survey of memory and mental abilities, this chapter begins with a consideration of individual nerve cells and how thoughts soak in. This provokes a discussion of memory storage potentials and limitations which establishes the need for effective file design.

As the last link between the world that has led the reader to this book, and the new skills soon to be developed, this chapter ensures substantial change, rather than superficial ones. To that end, it presents a series of theories:

¬-about the neurological origins of "ruts";

¬-about concentration and its lack;

¬-about memory storage files and safe deposit vaults;

¬-about ways to stop information going in one ear and out the other;

¬-that memory is divided in phases of impression, recall, and recognition;

¬-about strengthening the quality of any impression;

¬-that the more you remember, the more you can remember.

¬-about how millions know "who invented the cotton gin," but little else about the person or the act.

Chapter Five: Channeling The Wandering Mind

Everyone admires Abraham Lincoln's reputation for becoming a lawyer by reading by candlelight. These days, thanks to the Internet, anyone who chooses can have access to just about any information that exists. But in spite of the incalculable explosion of ever-increasing information that will characterize the twentieth century, there have been no changes in how people absorb information. Most people still use reading and study skills comparable to those of Abraham Lincoln.

By way of further example: Our conventional definition of "context" is far too limited. We've been taught that a book is a context, but this chapter shows how a book--even one by an expert--is to that whole field of knowledge like a brushstroke is to a whole painting. By elevating our understanding of context, and elevating the number of brushstrokes we look at in order to "get the picture," we can better decide if the detail we're looking at, is part of what we're looking for.

Chapter Five begins with a comparison of two contradictory memory experts, each with books that have long been available in print. The first expert says that the most important step to improving your memory is to never take notes. The second expert says that the more you write down, the stronger your memory becomes. This leads to a discussion of what happens to what we read, and on to a new definition of comprehension itself.

This chapter then presents a puzzle for the reader, who must "select a neurosurgeon." The first neurosurgeon reads 100 words a minute at 100% comprehension, and the second reads 700 words a minute with only 70% comprehension. This puzzle provides a lively discussion, as the hidden advantages of the second are revealed.

This chapter goes on to examine how formal education stifled many people's reading and learning skills. Considering that, it's easy to see how frustrating it could be for individuals facing ever-increasing demands for those skills. In relating the history of "Speed-reading," the chapter also lays the foundation for, and establishes the practice of, using a "mechanical pacer." This, in turn, introduces the reader to an important aspect called "Not-reading."

Have you ever looked at a painting one brushstroke at a time?

Have you ever read any other way? Words and brushstrokes both communicate best in greater contexts. Get the Picture?

Chapter Six: Turn Back The Tide!

This is the chapter for people who need to digest 30 textbooks by Monday, 500 pages by tomorrow, or any other seemingly-monumental task. Basic reading activities quickly accelerate into a dramatically-transformed world that allows the reader to slow down to greatly-increased rates. One activity bears the title, "Making Things Better By Making Them Worse!"

This chapter is designed with one thought in mind--that this book can be packaged along with a companion audio cassette or CD. Practice activities can be perfectly timed for participation in that way, and the specific activity just mentioned requires massive audio distraction in order to work its full effect.

That brief plea aside, the chapter contains three distinct areas:

Reading skills;

Study Skills;

Qualifying and Disqualifying skills,

all culminating with the objective of Be Your Own Expert!

Appendix One: "AMPLIFIERS"

Amplifiers grew out of the author interacting with the material. The first 160 pages of this book (from the Preface through Chapter Six) are essentially one continuous narrative. Amplifiers are thoughts that illuminate concepts or skills at various points in the book, intended to avoid interrupting the progression of thoughts. At this moment, they are clustered as an appendix, but they could appear in several ways--as insets, as sidebars, as footnotes, or even as summaries. Their placement is sure to be an interesting question for a designer.

Appendix Two: BE YOUR OWN EXPERT!

This section contains the guidelines and instructions for a variety of activities designed to reinforce and solidify actual skill development.

Appendix Three: MISCELLANEOUS READINGS

These are magazine-length articles in which ThoughtTrax® activities can be done.

CHAPTER FIVE--Channeling The Wandering Mind!

I notice that some of you chose the bookstore instead of the cafeteria. And, some of you were still fascinated with your new-found interest in Memory, so you bought a book called "How To Develop A Super-Power Memory" by Harry Lorayne, "the man with the world's most phenomenal memory." You always believe in starting with the experts. But since you bought the last copy of this classic work on the subject, your neighbor could only find "Techniques For Efficient Remembering" by Laird and Laird.

Well, if you chose Harry, you'd encounter some advice like this pretty close to the beginning: "If you want to improve your memory, stop writing things down! Writing to improve your memory is like trying to learn to swim with lead weights attached to every limb--completely counterproductive! So, you think to yourself (or anyone who's listening) that you've noticed not remembering things that you had written down, so perhaps Harry's on to something here. Okay, so you try to stop writing things down, because every time pen reaches paper, a new tape is activated in the brain, thanks to Harry. This new tape says, "Never Take Notes."

In reality, you've probably been drawn to this theory because you were never very good at taking notes, and have always wished it would be abandoned as an activity.... But now, Harry's right there in your own brain, and you've turned over certain programming responsibilities to him. The fact that this happens every time we read too little is justification for more careful screening, but that won't make sense to you yet.

Sorry, we'll come to that point again at a more appropriate time. But, while Harry and his advice are still hammering their way around your brain, I'd like to share some words of wisdom from this second book, by the Lairds. They say, in effect, "Write everything down! The more you write down, the stronger your memory becomes!" Now, is Harry right and these people wrong? Are they right, and were we hasty to embrace Harry's point of view?

These are the wrong questions. We should be asking questions like "Can we know anything?" Well, my thinking about these two opposing sources goes like this: the fact that they offer contradictory advice is what makes them compatible to us. If we know both approaches, his and theirs, then we can choose for ourselves according to the situation and needs at the moment. And these two writers are by no means the only writers within the same area of thinking. We'll return to this flowery notion after a little visit to Vincent Van Gogh, a few pages further at this point.

You've been measured against 100% comprehension for so long that you've probably never questioned whether 100% comprehension even exists, and if it did, what it would be like. Our next line of inquiry concerns comprehension itself--the nature of it, how to increase it, how to turn it into memories, and how it might be possible to measure it. I'll hope that we can arrive at a new definition of comprehension along the way.

But whether 100% comprehension exists or not, we can represent 100% of what we actually get from the time we spend reading.

In this diagram, the largest rectangle represents exactly this. You've read a book, spending a great deal of time, reading slowly and carefully. So, the results of your long efforts at the moment you finish the book will fit into the largest rectangle. Moving to the right, we imagine the passage of time ravaging your recall. Before long, rather less than you thought you'd put in seems to have stayed. Eventually, you end up with a piece of mental microfilm, filed away somewhere in the cold storage vaults of your memory. Now, I see your head nodding, acknowledging that you don't really know what happens to what you read.

Where does it go, exactly? Now, I'm also certain that you wouldn't choose this method of gathering and remembering information if you had a choice. You do, of course, have a choice, but your school teachers didn't want you to know it because they didn't know it.... And it wasn't until "this morning" that we even had a nice neat rectangle onto which we could project and organize all that was coming in. So, up until this morning, and perhaps even a little bit further, as you've been trying to read, your eyes see a few words, but your mind immediately goes off on its own train of thought. Unfortunately, little bits of what you're reading tend to stay associated with the vivid images wafting through your mind.

Whether you've ever taken something called Speed Reading or not, you're probably familiar with tests that appear to measure comprehension. You know, where you read a few paragraphs, and then answer questions about the passage, and your performance on the test is said to equal the percentage of comprehension. I have a problem accepting that notion, especially because there could have been 20 other questions on which your score might have been very different. So, there may not be an accurate way to test comprehension, because of many variables, which will affect your performance, but won't be on a test measuring it.

So, let's think about some of the variables:

- Your needs. Why are you reading this material?

- Your purposes. What do you have to do with the information you gather from this material?

- Your background, and the

- Background assumed. These are very different. I have no background in chemistry, so if I ever have to read chemistry, I'd better start with something that's been written for a person who doesn't know the stuff yet, rather than a journal for Chemical engineers.

Comprehension will be affected by

- Your interest. Speed will also be affected, but perhaps not in ways you might suspect. Sometimes when I get interested, I speed up; sometimes when I get interested, I slow down, but I can't explain this to you yet. And finally, a whole range of:

- Physical factors will affect comprehension – how your head is, how the chair is; how the light is; how the typeface is; how the audio or visuo distraction level in the room is; how your stomach is; and no doubt many others – again, the point is that there's no effective way to measure the influence of all of these factors.

Comprehension tests may also confuse "Comprehension" with "Recall." Comprehension is a process that occurs while reading; recall is remembering what you have read.

So, if we are developing a new definition of comprehension, I'd go for something really simple, like "meeting your needs and purposes." In this way, the better you know what your needs and purposes are, the more easily you'll know when you're meeting them. And, when your needs and purposes for the material are satisfied, you're comprehending, and you'll know it.

But, before we move on, there's another important consideration for comprehension. It goes like this:

Reader A went to the same school as I did and reads:

100 words a minute and gets 100% comprehension. (I know, I just tried to convince you that there's no such thing as 100%, and now, here I am, using as an example somebody who gets 100%. What gives?) Meanwhile, reader B comes into the scenario as a person who reads 1000 words a minute and gets 70% comprehension. Now, how would you go about determining which of them is more effective? Whose skills would you like for your own? Let's give each of these people something to read that they need to know on your behalf. These two readers are neuro-surgeons. They went to the same medical school, they have the same number of years' practice, and we know there can't be a correlation between reading skill and surgical skill, yet you can't find anything else to compare them on, and you need a neuro-surgeon. Which one do you select, and why?

Let's extend this view of their situations:

Reader A 100 wpm 100% comp 100 wpm

This third column represents the actual rate of comprehension. This is the number of words being comprehended in a minute. Now, here are the particulars on

Reader B 1000 wpm 70% comp 700 wpm, comprehensive reading speed.

Did you select Reader A because you wanted to be certain that somebody who operates on your brain gets 100%? If so, it'll be my responsibility to show you the merits of Reader B's plight – that of apparently missing 30% of everything read.

To illustrate all of this, let's give each of them the latest journal of NeuroSurgery, and a 1,000-word article on a new development. By definition, reader A will spend 10 minutes reading those 1,000 words, and by the same definition, Reader B would spend 1 minute reading those same 1,000 words. So, if we give them this new article, and check in one minute later to see how they're doing, here's what we'd find:

Reader A has a complete grasp of the first tenth, and Reader B has gotten 70% of the whole. I hope you don't mind if I mix my metaphors for a moment – but if reader B can go from 0 to 70 in one minute, what do you suppose might happen were he to spend another minute in the same material?

The mathematicians have always told me that he would get 70% of the missing 30 on the second time through; 70% of 30 is 21%, added to the 70 already gotten means that after two minutes in the material, Reader B has 91% of the whole; meanwhile, Reader A has now amassed 100% of the first 200 words, with still no practical idea of where it's going.

If reader B spends a further minute, then 70% of the still-missing 9% would be 6.3%, for a three-minute total of 97.3%, and a bonus seven minutes available for scanning other materials and increasing his knowledge substantially over Reader A, who's still got 70% of the article to get through the first time, and his attention may well be wandering by now.

If that's not convincing, then consider this: Reader B can do something that Reader A cannot do – slow down. If the third column, Comprehensive Reading Speed, represents the ideal speed for this person in this type of material at this point in time. So, if Reader B were to slow down to the speed of the rate of comprehension – if the speed is suddenly reduced to 700 wpm, then what happens to the comprehension? It goes up, of course! In fact, mathematically, it goes up to 100. So, Reader/neurosurgeon B has the flexibility to adjust speed up or down according to myriad factors that change with every source. Reader B can read and understand 700 words a minute, whether reading 700 words a minute, 1000 words a minute, or somewhere in between.

And that is the precise flexibility I promise you'll have before we're through. [Well, I'd promise it if we were in a seminar together – but you and this book are still unproven entities for me. Perhaps I'd better not promise – but I'm confident you'll be able to experience the benefits of these and higher speeds, if you stay with us and play along with activities every chance you get.] (As long as you pretend I'm standing over you in some menacing fashion, encouraging your focused attention....)

Since we're going to be talking about, and hopefully changing your reading skills, we should begin with a consideration of how we first learned how to read. While there are now quite a few different methods in widespread use, for decades the debates wound around between sight reading and phonics, or the phonetic approach that teaches the sounds letters make. One method would have us look at a picture with a word beneath, and a teacher who'd say, "Boys and girls, when you see this word, say 'train,'" and they all do and the teacher begins to think that teaching is working. When in fact this isn't a method at all, but rather an objective. I mean that we all need to be able to recognize words without having to sound them out, but without some understanding of the connections between letters and their respective sounds, no learning of new words can occur. So, while I still object to this objective being used as a method, it continues in widespread usage.

Learning the sounds that letters make in their various combinations is at the basis of phonics, which gives the student skills to unlock words the first time they're encountered. A reader armed with a good grasp of phonics can easily tell the difference between train and trail and trait, but it could be tricky for a less experienced sight reader....

Yes, it gets tedious going t-r-a-i-n,[that's tt-rr-aa-ih-nn] over and over, faster and faster, until it comes out sounding like train. But the process can serve you well for the rest of your life.

However, whichever method was in use at the school or schools where you learned to read, the same bad habits still developed. That's because the following process probably occurred. The teacher would show a word so you could see it, and the teacher would want to know that you could read that word, so you would have to say it so the teacher could hear it and thereby acknowledge that you know it. So, in other words, the process of reading appeared to go from our eyes

to our mouth

to our ears and finally

to our brain.

The teacher said that we should see the word and

say it so the teacher could

hear it, thereby acknowledging that we know it.

Having been packed off by parents who told us to pay attention to the teacher, we decided that maybe this was the way reading worked.

Second grade teachers came along and said, "Boys and girls, you're big second graders now – don't read the words out loud anymore – just move your lips."

Third grade teachers (well, alright, my 3rd-grade teacher!) said, "Boys and girls, now that you're in third grade, I don't want to see you reading with your lips – I want you to read with your mind, and just hear the words in your head." I remember that advice particularly because it was the last advice I ever got.

Reading instruction begins in the first grade, but is finished by the fourth grade.

By this time the focus changes from them teaching us how to read, to telling us what to read. Read, for instance, these two chapters of history before Friday, because we're going to have a test. Or, "Leave your neighbor alone! I told you this was a time for reading."

So, while reading instruction stops at the fourth grade, reading continues, and continues to increase in several ways:

- in Volume – there's more of it;

- in Variety – there are more types of it; and,

- in Vocabulary - it continues to occur at higher and higher levels.

This creates an ever-widening gap between the level of skills we were taught, and the level of material we're expected to respond to with those skills.  That's what gets so frustrating. For me, I could think perfectly well at those levels, but if you put a book in my hands, I was suddenly out of my league.

Let's be brutally self-revelatory for a moment. In the fourth grade, I was tested, and I was found to have 7th grade reading skills. It was ninth grade before I was again tested, and I was again found to have 7th grade reading skills. Now, they'd been fine in the fourth grade, but they weren't much good for the ninth grade. Even more interesting is the fact that a full five years passed with absolutely no progress. To me, that underscores the need to revamp formal education and the thinking surrounding it....

But next, let's look at the adult who's been passed through a system like this model:

No one's ever been able to tell me how fast we think, but rest assured, it's quite fast. However fast it is, there's also a slow speed, and the slow drops just low enough to reach the upper end of this chart. This is the rate of self-talk, very engaging stuff, but one of those thoughts reminds you to pick up that book and start reading.

And so, hands clasped tightly, you begin reading word by word, staring at the pages hoping that somehow meaning will come.... But the fact that you've begun to read doesn't in any way slow down the rate at which your mind is racing along, so the huge gap between is what I call the space for distraction.

If your brain is processing 1100 things a minute, and only 150 or so are the words you're reading, well, then it's easy to see why the words get lost in the imagery of the brain. Remember the train? Your conscious mind, driving your eyes at your reading speed, encounters the words "The train," but before your eyes can get to the next words, it's too late – they race through the rockies, and scan all manner of train trivia before getting to the words that complete the phrase, "The Train Of Her Dress."

So, I'm suggesting an extension of the process that we originally used to learn to recognize a group of letters as an individual word, so that we can recognize a group of words as a phrase. As a phrase with more meaning than any of its component parts, and with fewer opportunities to get off the track.

By compressing the time it takes us to get from the beginning of the phrase to the end, then the quality of impression made is higher, and we don't have to interfere with distractions....

To increase reading effectiveness, we must narrow this gap between the rate at which information is being processed and the rate we're giving our mind information to be processed. The choices may well be slowing down the rate of thinking, or speeding up the rate of reading. Which would you prefer? Now, finally, let's consider this marvelous painting by Vincent Van Gogh:

I'm sure you recognize this – the original hangs in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, but I really enjoy this reproduction.

I tend to get slightly overdramatic at this point in a seminar, so I'll need a bit more from you and your imagination just now. When looking at a painting like this, isn't there, after all, only one way to do so: one brushstroke at a time (I'm up at the board, nose to the "painting"...), if you miss a brushstroke, go back, and if you get to the end of the painting and can still remember how it began, you're ready to move along the wall to the next painting.

I've never seen me do this, but I've no doubt done it thousands of times in my lifetime. I suppose it must be slightly humorous to see. Perhaps someone'll videotape me some day.... But there's a real significance to the example, as well. While we may never have looked at a painting brushstroke by brushstroke, we've never read any other way.

What do we do with a painting? Stand back, see it as a whole, and then, with increasing interest in the whole, we can pay increasing attention to the details that make it up, but to start at the level of the details means you will never "Get The Picture!"

Looking at a painting brushstroke by brushstroke makes no more sense than trying to read one word at a time, when it's the only approach you have.... I'm going to show you how to "get the picture" of what you're going to read, before you read, so you can use the picture as a guide through the details. The better you understand the whole, the more easily you'll be able to determine if the detail you're looking at is part of what you're looking for – if so, how to deal with it, and if not, how to deal with it.

The conceptual elevation I promised for after Van Gogh is simply this: Imagine that the painting now represents the entire field of, say, Memory Improvement. And every brushstroke represents an entire work on the subject, many by different authors. And, each new author comes to the painting and leaves new brushstrokes in the ever-expanding painting. So, quite simply, as the number of sources within the field increases, so does the responsibility to see some of them – if only to verify that you still "get the picture!" But, some sources may be changing the very nature of the field....

It could also be that as the total number of sources within a field increases, the relative importance of individual sources decreases, or at least is called into question.

These days, with far more available information than any time in history, conventional reading skills are desperately outdated. Now, as I try and put a short history of speed reading into perspective, we'll press on, actually building new skills.

I'm sure you've gathered by now that I believe we as a society have really missed the boat when it comes to these skills – we all should have grown up knowing and using all of this stuff – there's nothing restrictive or exclusive about any of it. But where could we have started?

Let's imagine Christopher Columbus going off to their majesties Ferdinand and Isabella, saying, "Hey, I understand you're sending some ships off to a new world. Well, let's include some printing presses and bring knowledge to the new Spanish and Portuguese citizens." This would have been interpreted as treason in those times; Columbus would likely have been imprisoned in a dungeon for uttering such blasphemous thoughts. For it was only by keeping the citizenry from knowledge that Church and State kept their power. So, the suggestion would not have been well received.

Fast forward a few centuries, and let's sit in on a cabinet meeting with Abraham Lincoln. "Mr. President, everyone admires the way you became an attorney by reading by candlelight, but let's face facts – we're moving to the twentieth century and we need to prepare the American people with some powerful learning skills." Abe wouldn't have bought. He couldn't have comprehended what would happen in this century.

But what has happened is that the total amount of information that had accumulated in the history of civilization up to 1900 had doubled by 1950; doubled again by 1975; doubled again by 1985; and, no one's been able to count since then, but the rate at which available information is increasing is still increasing, across society, yet, where are our skills? In this same period of incredible expansion of available information, what's happened to our skills for accessing all of that information? Nothing!

We still have Abraham Lincoln's reading skills, as a society; we still have Christopher Columbus' reading skills, and a vastly different world in which to apply them. This observation seems to make me seem radical to some conventional thinkers. But conventional thinking needs to be radicalized.

In this century, we find the actual origins of speed reading during World War II. Fighter pilot and air corps cadet training both included activities designed to increase visual acuity. The outline of a certain aircraft as seen from a 5 mile distance would be flashed onto a screen for a tiny fraction of a second, with the responsibility being to determine whether this plane was friendly or not. Pretty heavy consequences for the trainees, yet vital work, obviously.

Well, there were reading researchers at the University of Delaware at the same time, who noticed similarities between the visual skills used in these fighter pilot training activities and the visual skills used by people who'd been identified as "naturally fast readers." Evelyn Wood was among them – she was a real person, unlike Betty Crocker!

With the close of WWII, and the advent of the Cold War, we got the first commercially-available speed reading program in the late 1940s, brought to the marketplace by the Book-Of-The-Month Club. When you ordered their self-paced, speed-reading program, what you got was a rather silly set of plastic contraptions including a clip, a knob, which was connected by a rubber band to a lever which would move down a guide at the side of the page. So, you'd clip it on, wind it up, and as the rubber band unwound, it would cause the lever to go clicking merrily down the page, and if your eyes kept up with it, you might see a few words along the way. Then, at the bottom of the page, you had to unclip, change pages, and go through the whole process again. Yes, it was tedious.

The pilot/reading skills comparisons also led to the development of the tachistoscope, which was sort of a modified slide projector which would project an ever-widening set of numbers, letters, words, and phrases onto the screen, and terrible eyestrain could result from the rapid-fire, staccato flashing, and, if any skills were developed, they seemed to be dependent upon the machine and didn't transfer to any real reading activity. Besides, people complained that they couldn't use their own material.

Enter the mechanical pacers. These were cumbersome machines which were designed to provide a light-guide for the eyes. You would put your book in the machine and a beam of light one line wide and one line high would begin moving at a pre-set rate down the page.

So, at the bottom of each page, You had to remove the book, and re-insert it on the next page, where the light would continue treating every line, every word as if it were of equal value. And, that is clearly one of the major drawbacks. I believe that all material is unique, and therefore requires a unique approach, but as we're only taught one way to read, we naturally end up assuming that it is a case of "one size fits all...."

There is ample evidence to support my determination to have some sort of mechanical interface between the eyes and the material being read. We'll certainly try and accomplish this, but with none of the inherent disadvantages of the truly mechanical approach. For our purposes, the role of the "Pacer" will be played by your own hand, finger, or pencil or pen.... One of these elements will be present in all of your reading, serving as a guide through the details, and an incentive to keep going, rather than going back, or staying stuck in a rut.

But to get you oriented properly, there's an important phase between reading as you have all your life and reading the way I'd like to see you do – this intermediate step is called "Not-reading!" Now, Not-reading occurs by very different rules than "Reading." You can best understand this by starting off with the book you'd like to be reading upside down. Yes, turn the book upside down, and begin moving your "pacer" (Remember – it's a finger or a pen or something...) under the lines. Move from left to right, and then from top to bottom, as if you were following the sentences.

In other words, move your pacer just as you would move your eyes, even though the words are all upside down! This will guarantee that you are "not-reading." And, since you're not reading, you have nothing to lose, so you can keep going faster and faster. The primary purpose for this brief introduction is for your eyes to get used to seeing your hand on the page, after a lifetime of keeping your hand involved only in book holding and page turning. This is a far more demanding and rewarding process for your hand.... When the novelty has apparently worn off, and no bad habits have developed, then we can begin to turn our attention to reading with the pacer. (Bad habits include moving your head instead of your eyes. The muscles that control the lateral movement of your eyes are the smallest group of muscles in the body, yet, what do we do when we want to look to one side? We turn our whole head!)

It's also a good idea to use as little of your pacing arm as possible. Fingers from side to side are the best, and wrists are fine, but the pacing should not stem from either the elbows or the shoulders – this makes too much rigidity, both physically and psychologically, and the pacer needs to be easy to move quickly....) If we're having to think about how to move the pacer, these thoughts are taking away from our focus on concentration.

If you still feel a little awkward, stay at it – don't bother feeling foolish, and come back here for some real reading practice as soon as you're ready.