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#39234 11/01/03 04:42 PM
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i haven't been on the forum in a few months; busy living and photoreading. i wanted to share an experience i had this summer:
a stranger saw me doing a syntopic photoread at a park and challenged me to read a novel at the bookstore. we went to a nearby bookstore and i PR’ed a book of his choice. as soon as i completed it, he started asking me detailed questions right off the bat about it (he had a copy) such as 'finish this line: blahblahblahblah...' of course i told him that i'd have to activate the book to give him his answers. he seemed to take offense to this idea and i think he thinks i'm a fraud and PR is a bunch of bullsh#$.

i said all that to say this: photoreading is called photoreading for a reason. let me explain photography to you. a photographer wants to capture a visual image so they use their camera to do so. but once the image is captured, they still have to develop their film, which takes time. you can stare at a roll of film all day but you won't see any of the pictures until you develop your roll. similarly, once the pictures developed, you'll remember the details rather vividly but you won't memorize every little molecule of each picture. that's what photo albums and visual files are created for. every photographer has a portfolio of their previous work to refer to at any time. photoreading works the same. your camera is your brain. your developing room is your activation passwork. your pictures are your mindmaps, you keep your maps in binders which serve as portfolios to return to at any time.

now I’d like to stop right here and offer you a warning: if you think photoreading is going to be one of those Matrix-like devices that instantly downloads the world's data into your brain and that your PR course will enable you to memorize a book just by touching its cover or quickly flipping a couple of pages, YOU ARE WRONG. I hate to disappoint you but must tell you the truth. if you want the system to do its job, you are going to have to WORK. you are going to have to STUDY. that's where i run into problems like the one i had with that gentleman above. he thought that PR was an easy way to avoid working and/or would justify his habit of procrastination. i have found myself in hot water by putting forth the idea of study around people who actively sought to avoid it but i believe in my heart that nothing worth having is gained without some form of effort. PR takes effort and time; that's what turned the stranger who challenged me off. he thought that the selling point (read at 25,000 words per minute!!!) was all there was to the system and was disappointed in the drudgery of actual study.

personally i wish LSC's advertisers would change their pitch to include activation as a selling point; it brings a sense of realism and practicality to the photoreading sales pitch. but what do i know? i'm just a data entry operator. i do know this much: some people nowadays are far too impressed with the idea of effortless gain which insults those who reap rewards by diligently applying themselves to achieving their goals. you must apply yourself to achieve anything valuable and that includes learning.

having said that, i also don't believe in taking the long road when there is a short one available. there isn't enough time in the day to do everything the long way. photoreading is the difference between working hard and working smart. once you understand and apply the principles of activation and mindmapping, you develop your maps as little or as much as you want. this fine tuning is a written variation of the NLP concept of submodalities where you fine tune the information you want on different comprehension levels. once you've mapped your ideas, you'll find you easily recall the information in detail. however, the complications of life will absorb your conscious mind as days go by so the finest of the fine points may be lost over time if you don’t review (this happens in your normal way of study as well). if for whatever reason you need it, review your mindmaps instead of rereading the books (which a regular reader would do). the more you read your maps (which are one page simple), the more you understand the book. how cool is that? in addition, you can always add new levels of detail to your map if you reread the book and find detail levels you previously missed because mindmaps are expandable. you may even combine different maps into metamaps if you so wish because mindmaps are also highly flexible.

the PR system is so subtle that you don't realize how much it's worked for you until much later. at this point i have been PRing for 2 years and even though i don't feel as if i've maxed my potential, i recently noticed there were only 2 books i am currently reading, both of which i have heavily marked up and mindmapped. before i bought my PR course, my bedside would have easily had a good dozen books or more and none of them would have been read past the second chapter. furthermore, the biggest breakthroughs in my reading have happened with the stuff I DON’T read. here are times now when i read the cover blurb on a book and put it down because that book is a waste of my time. there are times when i start to PR a book and then go 'nah, don't need to finish this' and start activating a chapter or two. i've had times where i look at the table of contents, flip to one chapter, read one paragraph at normal speed, and i'm done with it. sometimes all it takes is an index scan to find the keywords. for novels and prose, my understanding of the essay form and layout has helped me quickly gain vital information in books that lack a table of contents or comprehensive index; in those cases i skim and dip the first/last sentences in each paragraph and usually rapidread the opening/closing chapters. in the past i'd start every book at the beginning and underline most of what i read because i'd try to memorize everything. i'd also end up slowing my reading to a snail's pace to glean more information because finding things i didn't know and putting it all into context was like pulling teeth for me, a long laborious process. now i know i don't have to do all of that. my purpose dictates how much time I spend with any book. i understand that if you are a student (i’m not) your purpose is dictated for you by the course outlines but if you take a little time before you study to do full previews of your course curriculum, you’ll find you can map a lot of your learning material’s basic concepts without reading anything more than the course outline in your coursebook and the table of contents in each of your textbooks. this especially applies to the ‘hard’ courses like math, computer sciences, science, logic, etc. because scientific texts tend to be very logically laid out in their contents sections.

but i digress. back to the point.

if you feel the activations you do aren't sufficient for your undestanding, or there is something in the text you need to gel, or if you want to read to let the text wash over you, there is rapidreading which is another adventure in and of itself

for those of you who are already good photoreaders, you're probably like 'duh no sh!t sherlock. i already knew that.' yes you did. remember the other people in this world who are still new to this and don't understand its inner workings yet. pass over what i said and leave this to them.

for those of you still struggling with your photoreading, i'd suggest to spend much time on creating your reading purpose and also to spend much time activating. for students, i know the purpose of reading seems obvious but milton model questioning applies to this stage of photoreading. eg. your purpose might start out being ‘my teacher/parents want me to read this so i can pass the exam’ but your real purpose may be ‘i’d like to learn this material in order to better prepare myself to pursue a career in blahblahblah’ which you can then chunk up or down as you wish to find your ultimate purpose for being here and doing this. the PR step is the selling point of this course but carefully defining your purpose and proper activations are what make PR work for you.

if you still have further questions then check the archives of this forum or ask the knowledgeable posters such as youngprer and alexk. they have helped myself and many when we have found ourselves in stuck states. i can tell you that the solutions to your problems are usually very simple because i have been there myself and made it through, so persevere.

[This message has been edited by x (edited November 01, 2003).]






#39235 11/01/03 05:38 PM
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i would also like to address the posts that MarkP4 had on this site. i know that he had trouble with his PR course and i used to ask myself many times why this was so. since then i figured out what his frustration with the PR system was. he chunked the information the wrong way in his activations.

let me explain: chunking is an NLP concept of putting information together on different levels. to chunk up is to make information more general and to chunk down is to make it more specific. Paul designed the PR system so that you start your activation with a top chunk general overview and use milton model questioning to chunk down and find the details. it seems that MarkP4 ignored the general levels of information because 'everyone knows that already' and instead went directly into the most obscure levels of mapping to build the big picture from the bottom up, which leads to undue stress and confusion because it's like looking at a map from ground level. if you really want to find your way on a map, you need the distance of being able to see generalities and then move into specific detail and he wasn't doing that. needless to say, he wasn’t playing with the system and he definitely was NOT having fun with it.

i wish he’d stuck around long enough for me to give him an explanation for his frustrations but I myself didn’t discover the concept until late this summer and by the time i came back here, Mark was gone. he was frustrated by his seeming inability to 'get it.'

Paul's system of chunking down from a general view is important because it teaches us the importance of context. since PR starts off with a base of generalities on which to build detail and requires chunking down instead of chunking up which is how he thinks and studies, he lost faith in PR and left. he didn't have someone explain this concept to him. what a shame. i think he'd have been a very good photoreader and he'd have helped a lot of novices who came on board after him.

again, for those of you who have problems activating, understand that chunking down allows you to terrace your learning process while retaining the larger purpose. it's like driving stick shift, you get to put yourself into different gears depending on the speed you want in addition to learning at different levels of understanding.

[This message has been edited by x (edited November 01, 2003).]






#39236 11/02/03 03:20 AM
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Hey X,

One quick question:
What is milton model questioning?

-Patrick






#39237 11/02/03 05:11 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by Patrick10979:
Hey X,

One quick question:
What is milton model questioning?

-Patrick


I'm not exactly sure what he's referring to, because I haven't had much opportunity on exploring NLP texts, but it obviously has something to do with Milton Erikson, no?


And X -
That's a very good post. It's true that the advertising for PhotoReading can be misleading, but to tell the truth - it's the appeal of a page per second that hooked me onto PR when I saw Pete on that infomercial and wondering like a child at Christmas, could this be? What at first was likely a hope in aiding a habit of procrastination turned into a marvelous journey to the inner workings of myself, my mind, and of course - knowledge of all kinds.

I don't think that WORK, especially when it's capitalized like that, is really the right word to describe activation and other more effortful steps in the PRWMS. I think that it's the opposite. I think the most significant thing about PhotoReading and its pitch is that it offers something extraordinary, astonishing, and dazzling that's REAL. PhotoReading, at least in my experience, is a living testament to the limitless capacity and enormous potential of the human mind.

Think of all the things that Learning Strategies is telling you that you can have with PhotoReading. It's not just telling you that your workload pile reading is going to fade away into nothing as you whiz through it, it's also telling you about how you now have a key to learning and knowing anything you imagined, within a decently short amount of time.

When you were a little kid, didn't you ever want to build your own spaceship, or design your own batmobile? Didn't you want to create. Adults might have told you that your imagination can take you to those places, but then as an adult you kind of look into those dreams and they often times remain dreams. However, if you could get the chance to learn about that stuff you never knew when you were a kid to create those things for real, wouldn't you take that chance?

Astronomy, physics, chemistry, engineering. Don't even take it that seriously. If you learn chemistry for no other reason than to blow some stuff up(be careful), then I say to heck with it! Learn it!! If you learn physics for no other reason than the faint hope of maybe someday creating warp drive like on Star Trek, who cares if it's childish or way far out there?? Who knows if you could really stumble onto something wonderful? You never know until you get out there and try, and you can have time to do it with a method like PhotoReading.

For me, that's become my experience. It's like this huge awakening of - "hey, I really can do all that stuff I wanted to do when I was a kid!" The main thing about it is time. We all don't really have that much time, and that's an unfortunate thing in some ways, ergo it makes the time we do have all the more valuable.

I remember when I first learned PhotoReading, and was demonstrating it to my friends and family. One of my friends had me do a few "one-pagers" where I'd PhotoRead two different pages, and he'd ask me questions about one of them. What is so hilarious is I'd get the questions right, but I never knew what I was talking about. My inner mind did, but consciously - it felt like I was making it all up. Still, my friend would look at me in shock and then tell me it was right with a glimmer in his eyes.

"Whoa, really?" I'd ask him. He'd then hold the book in front of me and point to the spot where the answer was, and I'd taken it, right there from the words in black & white.

Or I remember some of the times I've played the Dictionary game competitively against a couple of my friends. Some days are better than others, but it always astounded the both of us when we'd get so many of the word locations correct.

Then there's the memories of spontaneous activation which, are only the times I remember it happening consciously. It likely happened many, many times without me even realizing it. Sponteanous activation occurs a lot more, it seems, when you practice as much as you can.

A lot of my thinking feels turned into sort of semi-Image Streaming. Kind of like the images and feelings are there, but without me spending the time to interpret it from externally hearing it.

The next time you're activating something, and doing mind maps, and drawing pictures, or writing things down about whatever you're reading - see if you can't do something with it. You'd be amazed at the ideas you get from just having the intention to explore possibilities.

Of course, that's just me, I could be wrong.









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