Forums IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ PhotoReading, Memory Optimizer Guys please post to TailetheWise---

All you smart people out there please explain to T-Wise how it is that the brain is able to understand the words even though the book is upside down and blurry w/ the blip page.

Thanks!

I'm thinking also of the story about the man w/ the stroke who couldn't read and then after PhRing for a while, was able to read again.

Oh, I understand how it could work if the text was upside down...I just dont see how it could take a grey blob and back it into it's original shape.

okay, have you ever been sitting in the backseat of a car, staring out the window at the window looking at the clouds? And your dad passes the exit and is totally oblivious to that and you say 'Hey dad, I think we passed the exit' and you dont remember ever actually reading the sign or what not....?

what?!

am i going to have to go find this info or not?

i want exact stuff...technical stuff...life from Colin Rose stuff and Buzan stuff from Use Both Sides of Your Brain.

This may not be what you're looking for, but there is a fairly good example when you look at people who have had corpus collosum separation. The collosum is primarily used in correlating information between the hemispheres of the brain, and when people have severe forms of epilepsy, these pathways are severed to prevent the caotic seizures that come from inappropriate communication between the hemispheres(rarely done any more).

Studys that have been conducted on such people by presenting a word in say the left visual field and a picture in the right visual field have shown that an non-consciously perceived stimulus is still actually perceived at another level and can even dominate the processing pathways. Say the word "cake" was presented in the left visual field and a picture of a dog was shown to the right visual field. Then, the person was asked to state what the picture was. In the particular film I saw, way back in undergrad, the person would have then have this unreasonable (to them) urge to respond with "cake." Excuse me for the poor explanation. It really has been about ten years or more since I saw this film and my memory has not exactly improved with age.

My point with this is that, as I understand it, the garbled blob that you actually see before your eyes is your brains way of real-time interpretation of what is being presented to it by eyes that are normally converging on an object to get binacular vision. However, with photoreading, the divergent gaze does not provide overlapping images, even though both eyes are actually perceiving the exact same words and images. Because the brain can't make real sense of the image, it just blends everything and takes it out of meaningful cognition, which is the goal of photoreading. You're not supposed to be cognizant of what your mind is absorbing, which cognition would only interfere with the preconscious processing of the information.

Just like the person with a separated collosum, the information is getting in at a preconscious or precognitive level (meaning "before atively thinking about something," not precognition like ESP), but is just as viable, or even more so than the information that is cogitative (how's that for vocabulary!). In other words, the person hadn't though on the word "cake" when the picture of a dog was shown in the opposite visual field, however, "cake" was the dominant piece of information that was presented as the answer the question about what was being perceived. I hope I didn't just hopelessly confuse the issue.

My point in all of this is simply that the mind is very capable of sorting through wads of extraneous information and making sense of it, whether that sense is something we can readily, consciously think about, or if it simply "becomes" part of our thoughts in a preconscious or precognitive way. I hope this makes a little sense.

Bill

Would one then still have to keep the page at a distance where one would be able to see the print clearly if one were regular reading? Say for people who wear glasses, does it matter if while PRing without glasses the book is held at a distance where you cannot actually see the words clearly when not in photofocus, since we can't and are not supposed to read the print anyway?

We tend to read print at different distances anyway... eg driving...being creatures of habit a comfortable distance would remain 18 inches. There are occasion where there are specific physical limitations but the individual is the best judge of that... thats why it pays to experiment with glasses on and off.

Aim for comfort.. turning pages etc. and then see if your comprehension improves or worsens. It also pays to consider if you intend to superread and dip if guided to do so by your intuition.

Alex

Thanks everyone

What i was thinking of is on p.45 of the PhRing book & in other books i have.

Basically it has to do w/ the retina which has rods and cones. The cones are used for hard focus and the conscious mind. Each cone is connected to the brain.

Then there are the rods. These are used for peripheral knowledge. There are several 100 rods connected to one nerve. In photo focus, it is the rods we are using. Since there are several hundred of them attached to each rod, more info is then connected or inputed to the brain.

The cones are something like perceptual defenses in that they filter info. The rods do not filter the info & therefore more, much more info is then connected to the brain.

So our retinas are connected to the brain by its rods & cones. Thing is i forget if there are several hundred rods connected to each nerve or if there are several nerves connected to each rod.... oh well, it was very late when i looked it up.

Main point is that they are connected to the brain. Maybe the reason our eyes seem so beautiful and bright is because they are connected to the brain. The brain's beauty is reflected in the beauty of our eyes

As for rods being for "peripheral knowledge," though they are certainly the only perceptual cells in the periphery of our vision. Rods are everywhere on the retina with the exception of the fovea centralis, which essentially means "the central point of focus." The fovea is only populated with cones, which are responsible for color vision, and actually transmit far more information per cell, because there is only one cone per nerve, no competition. That's why we can see things so clearly, assuming our lenses focus the outside world properly on the fovea. The reason we can adjust to light down to the level of only a few lumens (light quanta) is because we have so many rods attached to so few nerves that the information can summated and amplified. This would be a better explanation for how PR works, because it is the rods that are gathering the information that is not focussed centrally, therefore all of that similar input can be summated and amplified to give an even more powerful signal to the brain, even though the brain is expecting the information to come through the front door and not the side windows.

If anybody (i.e., Dana, Paul or Pete especially) has more scientific information regarding just how PR works, I would be very interested in seeing it.

Bill

Wonderful, Bill, thanks a bunch