Forums IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ PhotoReading, Memory Optimizer ALERT: Is Photo Reading Really For Me?

By "lazy_einstein"

I'm glad I didn't buy this book/system, here's why:
While looking for information on how I can improve my reading skills I stumbled across LSC's PhotoReading website and was truly amazed with their promises. Being able to read at least three times faster and that's just the beginning? Eventually being able to read 25,000 words per minute? WOW! In my naive mindet I got all excited and started thinking about all the books I wanted to read. The website included testimonials and claimed that "PhotoReading has appeared nationally on hundreds of radio shows, including network broadcasts, and many television shows."

The whole course costs approximately $250, now that's a lot of money! I decided to do some research first and see what other people had to say, interestingly the only credible study I could find was conducted by NASA, here's what their report said:

The results for all measures yielded no benefits of using the PhotoReading technique. The extremely rapid reading rates claimed by PhotoReaders were not observed; indeed, the reading rates were generally comparable to those for normal reading. Moreover, the PhotoReading expert generally showed an increase in reading time when using the PhotoReading technique in comparison to when using normal reading strategies to process text. This increase in reading time when PhotoReading was accompanied by a decrease in text comprehension.

If you already bought into the hype and don't believe me see for yourself, http://www.sti.nasa.gov/Pubs/star/star0003.pdf - it's on page 146. Apparently this program doesn't work after all. Not only that, like another reviewer on Amazon mentioned it seems like this book only gets extremely positive or negative reviews; I took the liberity to look at the profiles of people who wrote a positive review and it turns out that most of them reviewed many books similar to this (kudos to LSC's marketing department for reviewing their own books) and they all received 5 stars.

Don't buy into this new hype, it's nonsense. Anyone who looks at a book for a couple of minutes and reads the chapter headings will be able to tell you what the book is about, it doesn't take PhotoReading to do that! If you really feel a need to waste money I suggest you send it to me and I'll be more than glad to teach you something you already know and even come up with some fancy words like PhotoReading, you'll get your money's worth, I promise.

In reply to an earlier post on Feb 6, 2009 12:56 PM PST
Kyle says:
I just wanted to add that I read Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind book and he said that he went to a photoreading seminar while he was at university and that it seemed like a scam and that it did not teach anything real or more useful than you could get from basic skim reading.

Weekend Woodworker says:
Many of the reviewers are the friends of so called Self Help gurus or similars, who give 5 star reviews to each other's products to promote sale of their junk.

I've been working at this "PhotoReading" think diligently now for several days. After I first looked at the book, I thought it was the most cockamamie thing I'd ever heard of, but then, perhaps more from hope than common sense, I began to change my mind. It seemed like there might be something to it...that, in theory, it *should* work. So I got the faith, so to speak, and plunged in.
The basics of PhotoReading are simple enough: you preview the text, page through the book rapidly, while maintaining an unfocused gaze at the pages (thus "nonconsciously," as the author puts it, photographing them), let it incubate for a while, then skim the book, and, if necessary, go back and speed read it. Very broadly, that's it.

Right there, it should be apparent that what is giving you a grasp of a text's contents--if anything is--are the repeated trips back into the text, not the hoodoo-ism of PhotoReading itself.

I've tried it. I have not received any benefit whatsoever from the PhotoReading itself, although, of course, repeated trips back to the text have been helpful.

One way the author is able to assert that you can read 25,000 words a minute is by, in fact, urging you NOT to read them. He maintains that only 4-11% of a text contains useful information. REALLY! I don't know what kinds of books he reads, but the books *I* read are hardly so much fluff!

The author seems to give himself a back door, too, in case you can't get PhotoReading to work for you. If PhotoReading doesn't work for you, it's because you care about the outcome. No kidding. In other words, for instance, graduate students who have a pile of books to cleave through should not worry about this...otherwise it won't work. That's like saying, "Don't think about a green banana"--the first thing you think about is a green banana. Of course people are going to be concerned about their mastery of a text...if they weren't, there would be no need for it, and the very people who MOST need to be able to PhotoRead will be least able to make it work.

This is a slim paperback, and an overpriced one at that. There is a measure of slick, salesman-like smarminess to it, too. For instance, the back cover loudly proclaims, "Includes a free coupon for two powerful audio tapes, _Memory Supercharger_ and _Personal Genius_." Okay, cut to the coupon: Immediately, you see that, literally, the COUPON is free (as most in this world are), and that the tapes are FAR from free! Furthermore, throughout the book, and for 7 full pages at the end, Paul Scheele is peddling his other services.

All this notwithstanding, there is *some* useful information here. As an introduction to memory/learning techniques like Mind Mapping, it serves as an adequate introduction. PhotoReading is not any substitute, however, for true speed reading. I will continue to work at this, though, just in case...and if I change my mind about this technique, I will retract what I have said here with the same stridency with which I am offering it now.

Ebolamonkey says:
The books Paul Scheele intended for people to read are self-help books and more marketing gimmicks designed to keep you are sub-middleclass serf/slave so that the people who write those garbage books can become fat Capitalist pigs.

Any book that deals with Math can be excluded. That would be the entire Engineering, Physical Sciences, and many other fields today that are fundamental in driving today's latest technological developments.

If you want to be another snake-oil salesman then this is THE book you get and model after to swindle other people of their hard earned money.