Articles on PhotoReading
The History of PhotoReading
How it works, and what you can specifically expect to get from the program
by Pete Bissonette
President
By definition, PhotoReading is "mentally photographing" the printed page at rates exceeding 25,000 words a minute which is about a flip per second. As you go through the program, you'll settle into a pace that is comfortable for you. Some will be doing two flips per second, and some will be doing just one flip per second. It does not make any difference as long as you are comfortable. Comfort is key throughout the whole PhotoReading program.
As you learn the techniques, if something doesn't sit right with you, make adjustments. We are not teaching you the only way to PhotoRead. We are teaching you a way we have discovered works for most people. If something is not right for you, change it until you are comfortable with it.
It is important to realize from the beginning that the PhotoReading process bypasses the conscious mind and sends the information to storage bins in the nonconscious. This means that when you are PhotoReading you will have little or no conscious knowledge of the materials. It is all there some place, but consciously you may not know it. Don't worry, as long as you can "activate" it to the conscious mind so that you can use the information however you use information. We will be soon talking about ways to gain access to the information.
The missing link has only recently been discovered
The concept of "mentally photographing" printed materials has been around since the beginning of the last century. The problem was that only a small percentage of the population could do it, and they didn't know how to teach it to any one else. That's where Learning Strategies Corporation came in.
In 1985, at the challenge of IDS/American Express, Paul Scheele, a co-founder of Learning Strategies Corporation, studied people who could do this—input information and then gain access to it. Using his expertise in neuro-linguistic programming—which we'll talk about later—he determined how people could do this, and he developed a program to teach everyone to get the same results. In January 1986 the first classes were presented to the public. In March 1986 the first classes were presented in a Fortune 500 company. In May 1986 Learning Strategies Corporation became licensed as a Private Vocational School by the Minnesota Department of Education. The course is now taught around the world and is available through a self-study program.
You have already demonstrated that you can PhotoRead
With PhotoReading we get into the 90% part of the brain that Einstein said we do not tap. He said we do not even use 10 percent of our brain's power. Peter Russell who wrote The Brain Book said, 10 percent? We do not even use one tenth of 1 percent. So there is a lot of natural, brain power that we do not even use: 90-99%. And that's what we begin to tap into with PhotoReading.
When we teach you to PhotoRead, we don't teach you to do something you don't already know how to do. It is natural. It is not like learning how to hit a baseball with a bat—that takes coordination and practice, and some people just can't do it.
PhotoReading, on the other hand, is natural. You have already proven you can do it because as a child the only way you could have learned your primary language in such a short time was to absorb it...to get your whole brain and your body involved in learning. That's how you learned to walk, and that's how you learned to recognize mommy and daddy.
When you started school you learned a new way of learning: a left-brain method of inputting information one word at a time, rehearsing it, and hoping that something gets stored. By the time you reached adolescence, you lost track of that natural ability to absorb information.
In the PhotoReading class we say, "Hey, you've got this ability," we point you in the right direction, we give you what amounts to a machete, kind of teach you how to swing it, and say, "Go to it." You start swinging away, cutting back overgrowth from years of inactivity, until you have your first experience PhotoReading your first book.
And then the more you use the techniques, the more you swing away, the more the overgrowth will fall away, and the more access you will have to this natural ability to absorb information.
That's not to say that the left-brain method of learning is not valuable, because it is. That is how you learn to recognize that squiggly lines on the page are letters, that the letters spell a word, and that the word has meaning. But did you know that it only takes your brain four milliseconds to pull up the meaning once you see the word. Yet, we waste more than four milliseconds per word just moving our eyes across the page.
We say, use the left-brain method of learning to learn the language and then use the more powerful right brain, nonconscious, method to process the language.
Your conscious mind is very limited in its capabilities
PhotoReading works because it bypasses the conscious mind. You see, the conscious mind can only handle seven pieces of information at a time—plus or minus two. This is why telephone numbers are seven digits long—that's all you can easily hold in your conscious mind.
This is why we'll get to the bottom of the page and not remember what we just read: the phone is ringing, someone is talking, we're
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