Hi, I'm new to PhotoReading and this forum. This thread caught my eye. I have to ask ruthless--what have you read exactly about PhotoReading? Is it just stuff from the website? Have you read the book?
I might have an advantage in accepting PhotoReading quickly (I only started reading the book this past week) because I've done a lot of studying on learning and the brain. It makes total sense to me that the right-side of the brain, which deals mainly with whole picture kind of things and images, can do this. It is the left side of the brain (mainly) that picks out the details.
When you ask about remembering all the words in a dictionary, you are thinking only about conscious details. That's not what PhotoReading is about. It isn't about memorizing the details--that's a conscious, left-brained activity.
What I find so interesting about PhotoReading and why I'm starting to use it is that it incorporates the use of both the big picture work and the details--you preview the book, which is part details and part big picture, then you PhotoRead, which is big picture, then you postview, which is taking that big picture and adding in some details and thinking (that conscious element). You sleep on it, then you go back, taking the impressions you got from your PhotoReading and picking out specific details of interest to deepen your knowledge or understanding. A variety of activities are encouraged to do this.
Incidentally, I did very well in school and naturally used a number of the strategies that make up PhotoReading--although not the actual PhotoReading step: preview, flip through for the parts you want to know more about, take notes of some sort of what you actually remember, flip through again, etc. (Although, now that I think of it, just flipping through a textbook, which I often did, may have been the equivalent of the PhotoReading step!)
Ruthless, you asked how the brain can grasp so much so quickly. Our brains are grasping things all the time that we aren't even aware of. Patterns of speech get learned without conscious development, just from hearing something often. You might see a painting out of the corner of your eye somewhere but take no conscious notice of it; some time later, you might see the painting and go, "I've seen this before. Where did I see it?" I don't consciously think about the sound of the engine in my car when I'm driving, yet the sound tells my brain about how fast I'm going and I non-consciously monitor my speed that way.
There are all kinds of examples in real life where the non-conscious part of our brains is absorbing information without us even being aware of it. We would go insane, and would be stupid, if we had to consciously set out to learn and process everything.
Why don't you just give it a shot? Read the book the way it says to and start applying it to other books. What have you got to lose? Which leads to another question: your first post asked about how many people have been helped by PhotoReading and you mentioned that you'd tried MindMapping. What is is that you are hoping to gain?
