When I photoread, my usual method is photoflipping several times, reducing the total photoreading time to probably about a minute.
Today I think I noticed for the first time in about a year, that although my first is relatively easy to do without getting sidetracked, that my second pass and other passes usually screw me up a little because my eye tends to catch certain words.
I made the connection to this time I was doing the photoreading step for a book that my brother bought. I did my first pass, then in the middle of the next couple passes (PRing) my brother said, "Oh come on, you're not really reading that fast."
I thought to myself, "No, this is just the PRing step; in a minute, I'll start activating" but more in my head was, "Oh, shut up." And THEN, almost involuntarily, my purpose was, "Shut this kid up and do something to make him feel stupid."
So in the middle of the next couple passes I let my eyes shoot to certain words on different pages, picking up names, locations, and small events. This is all happening in the middle of me photoflipping, which, as some of you know, takes about 5 seconds to get from the front to back of a novel.
After about 4 passes of this (roughly 30 seconds), I said, "No, I still have to do the main activation step...right now I'm just gathering small details, like I know the main characters are Tom, Matt, Jill, and Jack, I know they start off as childhood friends, become soldiers, get that armor, then Jack dies, and I think I saw some part where Matt kills some guys trying to pick on him."
Now, this is basically ALL I knew at this point; I just said it in a way to make him think there was more, and I just didn't want to go through everything. But he's all like, "DEAR GOD. TEACH ME HOW YOU DO THAT!"
After that, I actually thought to myself, "Hey, that actually WAS kind of neat."
My hypothesis is that if I practice enough I can combine the photoreading step with a LOT of passes, and incorporate trigger words and really fast dipping within those passes, I could possibly know a great deal of the book in about 20 minutes.
Right now I think this would only apply to novels, and I'm not sure how great picking up literary devices or themes would be, but I'll give a shot throughout the course of the week and let you know how it turns out.
Any feedback or thoughts would be helpful.
-Ramon http://razor.ramon.com