Forums IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ PhotoReading, Memory Optimizer PhotoReading Fraud ?

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3629

I will quote

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This reply was written by myself to discuss the topic of speed reading, and a product in particular called "photoreading". It claims that individuals can read up to 30,000 words a minute through using their unconscious. It is not possible and i have wrote why it is not in this reply.

I feel that it is beneficial for you guys to see since it is so heavily related to psychology, a simple search at google will bring up further information on so called speed reading.
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My reply to someone’s post who said it worked and he believes in it: different forum.

Photoread cannot work and i will tell you for the 50 millionth time why it cannot. The human brain consists of several regions, all of which are further divided into specific subdivisions that have the purpose to carry out mental tasks. The telencephalon, a subdivision of the prosencephalon, consists predominantly of the cerebral cortex.

The cerebral cortex is the place of the brain that deals with all the higher order cognitive tasks that make us humans. By this, I am referring to abstract reasoning abilities, ability to comprehend language, ability to articulate, ability to make rational decisions, understand situations, ability to distinguish between particular sensory inputs etc.

To further elucidate, the cerebral cortex is split up into lobes. The lobes are bilateral and can be seen on each hemisphere. The hemisphere is divided by a particular line known as the longitudinal fissure. The frontal lobe, which is situated at the front of the head, is primarily responsible for memory sequencing, reasoning abilities, motor movements, organisation and planning skills, speech comprehension and personality traits. The temporal lobes, which can be located at the left and right hemisphere laterals, are responsible for memory, speech articulation, emotion and hearing. The partial lobes, which are superior medial to the temporal lobes essentially, control things like spatial awareness, object recognition and sensory perception. And lastly, the occipital lobes, are located dorsal, or towards the back of the head. Its function is fundamentally to control vision and to enable us to see.

Conspicuously, the brain is mostly developed from before the birth to the preliminary stages of a baby’s life. It is these stages that are crucial in a baby’s development and they can be seen to influence an adult’s personality and mental abilities later on in life. Relating to the biology of the brain, genetic factors can of course be seen to play a big part on way an individual’s brain functions. For example, research shows that individuals from a social background that has largely been associated with education success, are likely to possess their families intellectual abilities through hereditary. Nevertheless, environmental factors can also have just as important effect on an individual’s brain development and functioning. For example, individuals who are from poorer social class backgrounds have been shown to increase their intellectual abilities and academic success when they where raised by a middle class family from birth. Consequently, this shows that the brain, with the right motivation and access to the educational materials can be conditioned to function more intelligently, if you like.

However, most functions of the brain are relatively consistent through life, and while they can be improved on, it is unlikely that you train them to be as powerful as you like. Now that you have the basics of the brain and its functioning let me get back to the speed reading question. So I have said that the brain can be shaped to function more intelligently with practice, and of course, with access to the right materials. But just how much can we increase on our genetically shaped neurological system? Recent research has revealed that the brain can actually reshape and structure itself. For example, research into brain damage patients has revealed that particular sections of the brain have replaced themselves over a period of time. This has led neuroscientists to conclude on unprecedented terms that the brain might actually be able to be changed a lot more than previously thought. In terms of the psychological aspect of increasing mental functions, it has been shown that individuals can increase their “IQ” through regular practice and through showing them alternative techniques to work out mental calculations etc.

But can we apply this trend to other mental abilities, such as reading? Of course you can. Reading is a skill that individuals can condition themselves to do faster. Techniques to do this, including frequently practising speed reading or just reading often. Or alternatively, using speed reading software or programs that offer techniques to shape the way the brain deals with large amounts of information in a short space of time. However, what you cannot do is expect to increase your reading to supernormal speeds. It is simple impossible and here is why. Speeding reading sites, such as photoreader, maintain that the reason why their programs are able to teach individuals to read extremely fast is because they use an alternative technique that more heavily relies on individuals using their subconscious. But just how true is this? It could not be more further from truth.

A comparatively similar assertion would be that humans can be trained to listen to several conversations at once. Of course it can be argued that it is POSSIBLE for the unconscious to comprehend such conversations. However, it is not possible for the conscious to comprehend such information in such a situation. Now the same principle can be applied to speed reading. It is not possible to simply take in large amounts of information and hope that your conscious can retrieve it. It is simple contrary to YEARS of research into attention. There are many theories of attention, including the Broadbent and Treisman’s models of it. The Broadbent theory of attention postulated that one’s ability to process information is restricted. It proposes that information from the senses is passed ‘in parallel’ to a short-term store. This acts like a sort of ‘buffer system’ and it preserves the information until it is able to be processed further. The information presented to the conscious (in this case the words from the text your reading) is then sent to a selective filter. The filter primarily functions on the basis of the information’s physical characteristics; hence it chooses one source for further analysis and discards any others. Subsequently, any information that is allowed past the filter comes to a limited capacity chancel. That could mean that any information we read is stored into the brain for further analysis. However, Broadbent’s theory goes on to maintain that the attention capacity is restricted and an overload of information will simply result in the information requiring longer to be processed. The other theories of attention are also very much against the idea of us being able to speed read at supernormal rates.

Let’s look at it from the neurological side of the argument. Reading is a task that involves many functions of the brain working collectively. Firstly, you have the retinas receiving the sensory input and sending information to the thalamus, which in turn, sends the signals to the occipital lobe for analysis. The occipital lobe then sends the information to the temporal lobe, specifically the Wernicke language comprehension area, where it is then understood and then sent to the Broca area, which allows us to subvocalise the text that we are reading. In the process, of reading it also invokes many things like past memories, emotion, our current knowledge of the subject etc. These are functions that quite frankly, cannot be speeded up to suit ourselves. The brain is not built for it, and even if the unconscious can store mass amounts of information, the conscious certainly cannot retrieve it.

If speed reading programs such as photoreading where deemed well-founded and indeed able to work as suggested, then every school and university system in the world would be using. The reading skills of teenagers now a day are constantly under scrutiny, with politicians and the media saying that the new generation of individuals are being failed by the school system. Furthermore, there have been countless media stories about how children in today’s society lack proficient reading skills and how a lot of people fail university because of impoverished reading skills, despite having academic ability. Therefore, if you can read 100 times faster than the national average through a speed reading program, then academics everywhere would of course implement it into there teaching schedules. It would be a revolution and within months the whole world would be introduced to it. It would be the dream of a top market-force company to get the patent rights for it. Just think of the money they would make. They would have the rights to sell it to every educational system in the world, which would make billions. It is not likely that they would turn down the offer to buy it, is it?

Alternatively, think of speed reading and the process of reading fast, well according to photoreading’s way of reading fast. Specifically, the information is sent to the unconscious at super rates and then we retrieve it. Wonderful. Now, if this was true then it would also be a revolution for things like hyponosis and other psychological therapies. If we can subliminally take in information of such gross proportions we read at mass speeds, then we can apply the same method to other situation. For example, we would be able to see more clearly, we would be able to use our memory to unprecedented levels. You could use the same method to access past memories and then retrieve them into the unconscious. Why not? It is theoretically possible, if speed reading is using the same method.

To further go on, an individuals reading speed is predominantly determined by the type of article that they are reading. If an individual is reading an article on say, advanced biology, and has no previous knowledge of the specific field of it, he of course has to slow down and perhaps ready very slow, and go back over what he has read. You cannot simple read at phenomenal rates and comprehend everything you are analysing.

In terms of you postulating that you have tried it, and it was successful, then my explanation is that you either experienced some effects of the procedure they use. Or more likely, you experienced a placebo effect. Specifically, you empathically thought that the program was well-founded, due to the marketing you read about it. Supposedly Dr’s and Lawyer’s writing about it, claiming they are reading 30000 words a minute etc. Fair enough, you believed it and your brain was conditioned to believe that it was possible, through using this software. Therefore, this bears the necessary ingredients required for the placebo effect to work. It could be that you subliminally encouraged your neurons and brain functions to work quicker as they were tricked into believing they were being trained to. It is neurologically possible. Indeed, individuals who are in pain, or experiencing mental disorders such as depression, are sometimes giving placebo drugs. The very fact that they believe they are being helped, tricks their mind into believing that the help will work. In fact, it’s proving to work in 35% of the cases of individuals giving the drug. The sample principle, I believe, could be applied to other non-medical matters. Whether this is speed reading, or jogging while drinking lucozade.

In conclusion, speed reading is not possible because of several factors, including it is contrary to psychological knowledge of attention; it is contrary to the way that the neurological system works. Indeed, reading is not just about comprehending information; it also uncontrollable invokes the activation of other parts of the brain, such as memory and emotion. And these cannot be speeded up to work at your own pace. You cannot experience emotion and comprehend language as fast as you like. You can read faster, of courses, with practice, but you get to a certain limit where you cannot go faster.

incidentally, my reading speed is 600 WPM and around about 60-70% comprehension and this is considerable faster than most of my educated peers, but if visual speed reading was possible allowing you to read 10 times fast that then dont u think the whole world would be using it. it would be invention of the century, and would have the potential to make billions."

Allow me to share with you your mistake. You are obviously misinformed and do not know how Photoreading works.
Your mistake is you are confusing photoreading with reading. When a person photoreads they are exposing the book or text to the other than conscious mind which is more powerful than the conscious mind. the conscious mind can only attend to 6 to 7 or 8 bits of information at same time. The other than conscious mind can attend to 20,000 bits of information at the same time.When people are photoreading they are using the other than conscious mind which can attend to 20,000 bits of information at the same time. After photoreading they have little if any conscious awareness of the information they have photoread. They get the information consciously by activation techniques.

400,500, or 800 years ago if you told people that people would invent a rocketship that would take men to the moon and that men would walk on the moon they would have thought you to be insane or crazy.If you told them that nuclear powered submarines would be created that could go underwater and travel around the world many months with not even coming up they would think you to be insane. If you told them that a machine would be sent from earth to another planet called mars and that the machine would send back pictures from mars to earth showing scientists what the machine had found they would think you are crazy or insane. If you told them that airplanes would be invented that would take people thousands of miles in hours in what used to take many months they would believe you to be insane.

A Photoreader photoread a volume of United States patent law as it was projected page by page on a television screen at 30 pages a second approximately 690,000 words a minute.Afterwards this Photoreader scored 75 percent comprehension. He drew approximations of 6 patent illustrations and correctly identified their numeric sequence.He did this in front of a group of college professors. Do you think they believed then? No they did not believed and I can tell you this; Photoreading will never work for some people because they have programmed their brain to say no this cannot possibly work and you know what? Their brain says you are right that cannot possibly work and their brain does what they tell it to do. So if you can your brain there is no way this can work your brain will say ok it will not work. Some skepticism if very healthy but when you close your mind and are not open to other possiabilities you put yourself in the position to lose tremendous opportunities.

Photoread4me

the things is I want to give this a shot but articles like these are discouraging.

Then Again when I hear from u,gives me some faith , will defintely be giving photoreadnig a shot but after 2 months

As of now (again a little confused) ,I have both WinWenger-Einstien Factor and the Genius Code , Do u think it's a good choice to finish Einstien Factor ,practise ImageStreaming for a month or two and then go for photoreading or Genius code ?

quote:

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Photoreading will never work for some people because they have programmed their brain to say no this cannot possibly work and you know what? Their brain says you are right that cannot possibly work and their brain does what they tell it to do.

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Exactly, spot on Photoread4me.

Personally, photoreading just suits me.It made total sense to me, the first time I heard about it, then looked into it more.

I'm just relentless you know.I just PR, activate so much stuff, and learn so much.
Totally relentless, and committed, and purposeful.

Oh, I get bored of sayign this, but will for those who haven't read it before:

Just do it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

To the poster of that post:

Do you really think you're going to get anywhere when you've not even done any research at all into the actual system?

You fire off all these tidbits about how the brain works, and you seem to be fairly intelligent in your expansiveness of vocabulary, but when it comes down to figuring out the practicality of using the system's method, how well surveying of information or material in general can be effective, or even just considering the possibility that it is not a neurological process so much as it is a mental, mind oriented one.

Do you want someone to prove you wrong?

I mean, really - why go to all the effort?

-youngprer

[This message has been edited by youngprer (edited January 08, 2005).]

Too many assumptions are made, and that's not necessarily expansive vocab or research. I know the basis of all of the arguements, and I'm in a basic high school psychology class.

For one "partial lobes" is misspelled it should be "parietal".

"it is unlikely that you train them to be as powerful as you like."

Power isn't defined, and theoretically, you don't have to train your mind to photoread, it should be a natural ability.

"Speeding reading sites, such as photoreader, maintain that the reason why their programs are able to teach individuals to read extremely fast is because they use an alternative technique that more heavily relies on individuals using their subconscious"

Preconscious and subconscious. The preconscious allows you to retrieve information more easily than the subconscious. For example, remembering what you had for lunch today would be preconscious, unless you were currently thinking about it, and then it would be conscious. Subconscious would be much harder to retrieve.

"It proposes that information from the senses is passed ‘in parallel’ to a short-term store."

This is assuming the information is being perceived in the conscious mind. When it's being perceived by the preconscious processor or subconscious, there isn't immediate analyzation, it's just perceived. Analyzation would occur only after activation, because it's brought to the conscious mind to be analyzed. You might also assume that if the information wasn't analyzed, it would make an affect on the subconscious mind direct. This is called direct learning, sound familiar? Unless your mind is conditioned to reject certain information, than it would pass through the conscious mind's radar. Some people think this could be a good or a bad thing.

"Firstly, you have the retinas receiving the sensory input and sending information to the thalamus, which in turn, sends the signals to the occipital lobe for analysis. The occipital lobe then sends the information to the temporal lobe, specifically the Wernicke language comprehension area, where it is then understood and then sent to the Broca area, which allows us to subvocalise the text that we are reading. In the process, of reading it also invokes many things like past memories, emotion, our current knowledge of the subject etc. These are functions that quite frankly, cannot be speeded up to suit ourselves."

There are many things within your peripheral vision that invoke memory and emotion, but you aren't always aware of it, does that make sense? Also, perceiving information subliminally, would skip the analyzation phase, as far as the conscious mind is concerned, anyway.

"Specifically, the information is sent to the unconscious at super rates and then we retrieve it. Wonderful. Now, if this was true then it would also be a revolution for things like hyponosis and other psychological therapies."

It's the preconscious processor, and the subconscious. And most of this paragraph,in the other parts, attempts to explain the reasoning and motives of developing photoreading. And it's definitely just an attempt.

"You cannot simple read at phenomenal rates and comprehend everything you are analysing"

It's not analyzed or comprehended at the moment you are photoreading it. That's done later on a conscious level during activation.

A placebo effect doesn't seem to explain this. 200 WPM is about average. How could a placebo effect cause a change from 200 WPM to 30,000 WPM? And actually it's 25,000 + which means up into the 100,000s usually, or higher. If that were true, I think what would be the most powerful placebo known to man. This also fails to explain the statistic of 90% success with photoreading.

This guy also goes on to brag about his current reading speed, and makes more assumptions.

This is just like any other idea presented in science. The idea is scrutinized, ridiculed, discreditted, and eventually accepted as common knowledge.

Alas The PhotoReading step is not Reading therefore all known data pertaining to Speed Reading does not fit PhotoReading. You are correct that no one can read at speeds greater than 600 wpm a calculator will prove that if you take the 7 plus or minus 2 bits of information per second.

Look instead at research that all leaning is 90% non-consious. That is what PhotoReading takes advantage of. Pawel Lewicki research is an interesting place to start. He found that not only does learning take place non consciously. Consciously we are unable to explain how we suddenly understand something that only moments before we didn't know.

The biggest mistake we make when reading is to start too early with analyical reading. We expect to know everything with one pass through the book. As Mortimer J. Alder and Charles Van Doren in the book "How to Read a Book", pointed out. Analytical reading is the last stage of reading not the first. Comprehension should be built with more than one reading.

Alex

[This message has been edited by Alex K. Viefhaus (edited January 09, 2005).]

I have only one thing to say. IT WORKS. I don't know all the details of why it works, but I am always glad there are "educated people" who can never be wrong that will keep photoreaders in an elite category.

Thanks for the fun
Fritz

Hello Pakiyabhai
I used to think like you did and I had research , like you, to prove to my Anthony Robbins coach, that PHOTOREADING can not possibly work. I kept equating it to speedreading and my coach kept correcting me, as all the previous people on this post keep "correcting" you.

Photoreading is different from "reading" or "speedreading". YOur mind is photographing the images and/or absorbing them through various sensory modalities that we have limited understanding of. We are using the rods of the eyes, more than the cones, and the rods process information very differently than the cones.

I know I am comprehending materials and reading more books per week, than ever before in my life, using PR. I began it out of desperation to try and pass a hopeless certification test at age 51!! I had only one month to study years of post gradute materials. Not only did I pass the tes, but my score was astounding!! One month earlier than the actual test date, I was failing the practice tests badly !

PR really works and I have been using it ever since, on many other subjects. That is all I can say. Your research is good, but it applies to reading with central cone reading vision and not to peripheral rod
photographic vision. The purpose of PR is to take in the material. The modalities that process what is "photographed" are located in the brain, as well as other parts of the body, from what I have been learning.
The processing is very different.

I am a beginner at this, but my research seems to lead towards what everyone else in this post is saying and I was once a big Doubting Thomas of this system.

Eh.

I think it's good the pakiyabhai is taking different perspectives and pieces of information into account. As long as you experiment and keep your mind and options open, what does it hurt?

Skeptics can be more open minded than true-believers because they are looking for evidence either way and aren't asleep because they haven't been hypnotized into believing unquestioningly that something works.

And here I am talking about someone who is questioning, critical, and observant, not out to disprove or prove anything.

[This message has been edited by babayada (edited January 13, 2005).]