Hello! As an experiment I bought the photoreading book about 5 days ago. A couple of days ago I PhotoRead (I see you prefer to capitalize that) five or six books, or maybe seven. Just tonight I activated four of them. I made nice maps covering my questions well, I'm not tired from my efforts, and I feel confident that I derived a great deal of value from the books I activated. My questions were not keyed to very precise needs I have, but rather took the form of finding out, with growing curiosity, what the author was getting at, what the author's real argument was, and how the main points were derived and supported. In other words, I allowed the books to give me my "interest", but my curiosity was real. I think during my activation I did not continuously maintain the relaxed alertness, because sometimes I disagreed rather a lot with what authors were saying: but I returned promptly to state as soon as I could. I also tended to work staight through in one session lasting about an hour per book rather than breaking up the work in shorter segments. Another deviation: I didn't realize that the postview came immediately after the PhotoReading; when I PR'd I simply affirmed the passage of the information and rested a few moments before PR'ing another. So, the method seems even rather resilient to beginner error. It was a quite different experience from my usual process with books, which involves more wrestling, more flipping about the pages, less usable notes, and less value derived from the whole book. So I am confident that the method is working for me, despite my imperfect application of some of its details. This reading experience is smooth and complete. Faster too -- I surely spend more than 90 minutes total with a book in my traditional fashion.
As a mild test of the PhotoPeading facet of the overall process, several times in two or three books I paused and made myself examine passages I had felt inclined to go past, i.e. not "dip into" during the super read. It turned out that those sections indeed contained nothing that really helped my quest. And I went past them at a higher rate than my previous speed-read-seeking strategy, and I think, in fact, that I "knew" that they weren't going to help.
So, many thanks. I think I will now be more productive with books!
[This message has been edited by Carl Reimann (edited August 15, 2005).]
