quote:
I have seen suggestions by Alexk and am amazed at how easily it comes to alexk.
I have seen the questions on the forum and am amazed how difficult it is for everyone.
Kidding 
I actually understand the difficulty and the whys people are experiencing difficulty. I often wish there was a one liner that could explain my method. If there is one it would be this...
With each book I couldn't care less if I activate the book successfully or not.
I know that sounds daft but I set the time of 20 minutes to do an activation pass to see what I can find. I just do it and see what happens. It's much the same attitude I had for regular reading... Just do the steps. Sure the steps are different with photoreading... the most important to me is "purpose" why do I want to spend even a few minutes of my life with this book?
Then I repeat as often as I need to get the book to gel for me. Usually that's when I find I am looking at the same information over and over again.
I have a purpose whenever I photoread and activate a book. I want to know something from that book/author and here is the next 'trick' when I found that and unless discover I have more questions I shelve the book, especially if it's one I now own. I don't need to consciously know everything and if I do I know which book I have to go back to. Why spend more of my time looking at stuff I don't need to know right now, when if I do need it it's still in the book for me to come back to?
When I post information from books on the forum, quoting from the book, it's because it took me 2 minutes to find the book and another 30 seconds to 2 minutes to find the page and yes I check in the index.
I've adapted to the information age as best I can. One thing I do know I don't want to remember or know everything from a book... I want to know where to find it. It does little good if you can "read" an entire page from your memory if you cannot direct the person to the source. I find it more useful to know 'where' I can find the information when I need it.
I fully activate books in heaps less time than it used to take me to regular read books and the thing I find most useful is the knowing where I can find the information again when it's on the tip of my tongue. I don't have to wait for my memory to give me all the details I can grab the book again and refresh.
Mind maps were definately a help in getting that act together. I discovered it wasn't how my mind map looked in the end that mattered it was the thoughts I put into writing something / drawing something / linking something on a piece of paper that aided the thinking process. Do I mind map every book? ... no. I still do for some of them especially when doing a syntopic reading process.
What I know most is that you simply need to trust... Trust that you're doing the steps right, trust that it will evolve for you, trust that your mind, like mine, is capable of doing it and you don't need to search for the results, Trust that the information you desire to find quickly in a book, can be found, trust that the questions you form.
Most of all accept that in the beginning getting through some books will take you 3 hours.
Here is a something I've discovered from my survey... Most people judge themselves to be average or moderately fast readers i.e. 180 to 400 words per minute. Yet when I asked these people how long it would take them to get through a 250 page book... they said 10 to 12 hours... so starting out even those books can take a beginning photoreader 3 hours to fully activate.
For the calulations: a 250 page book (if every page is full at approximately 350 words per page that would be 87500 words in total. If the book takes them 12 hours reading to complete their reading speed is 122 words per minute... well below average. If the book has only 75,000 words then reading speed is 104 words per minute. (These readers rated themselves average to moderately fast... food for thought)
So if activation is taking longer... that's 
On the spiral book you might want to try what I did for my binder... I lifted the pages with my right hand arching them slightly and with my left flipped the pages from the bottom. I avoided putting the pages right over the binder allowing them to curve over the rings instead. For spiral binding I found it useful to put something against the binding of approximately the same height this prevents the pages from doing the full ciruit but allows for consistent page turning for the bulk of the pages.
Alex
