Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words (10 page)

Watch students of martial arts, and you will often see them practicing their moves in slow motion. It doesn’t look very powerful because they are moving so slowly, but what they are doing is perfecting their form and improving their technique. They know that power comes more from technique than from physical force. This same principle of technique over force applies to reading.

Instead of the brute force method of simply trying to push yourself to read faster, real reading power can be achieved by concentrating on techniques to learn to read text as a flow of ideas rather than a string of words. It’s mastering this skill that gives power to your reading. If learning a physical skill like martial arts requires careful attention to technique, then it shouldn’t be surprising that this is also true of something as complex as reading.

Practice

"Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect."

—Vince Lombardi

Practice only creates
habits
, and these habits can be good, bad, or mediocre. Therefore, the type of practice you choose to engage in is much more important than the amount.

Consider the skill of typing as an example. When people first learn to type, they usually improve quickly until they can type without looking at the keys. But after learning to "touch-type," they soon reach a plateau. No matter how much more they practice, they still don’t type any faster. Even if they type every day for a living, all that practice doesn’t continue to result in faster and faster typing.

In the 1960s, psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner described the three stages of acquiring a new skill. The first phase is the "cognitive stage," wherein you consciously think about the task. The second phase is the "associative stage," wherein you improve your accuracy and efficiency and the task requires much less concentration. The third phase is the "autonomous stage," wherein you basically perform the skill automatically with barely any conscious effort at all.

This third stage is—of course—useful, because you can then pay more attention to
what
you are typing instead of how. All repetitive skills eventually reach the stage where you can free your mind to concentrate on other, more important things. This is true whether the skill is typing, driving, playing a sport… or reading.

But this final automatic stage can also be considered a plateau, because once you’re good enough to no longer think about a skill, the skill no longer improves.

Some people, however, manage to surpass this plateau—continuing to improve and becoming true experts in their skill. Somehow these people find a way to avoid the plateau; this “way” is the process of
deliberate practice
.

These top achievers use a strategy to consciously stay away from that third, "good enough" stage. This strategy consists of three elements:

1. Focusing on
   technique.
   
2. Keeping attention on the
   goal.
   
3. Getting constant
   feedback.
   

By following this strategy, they force themselves to stay in the first cognitive stage.

The secret to reaching higher levels of any skill involves retaining conscious control while practicing and staying out of autopilot mode. This is why consciously concentrating on technique is so much more effective than simply putting in more hours of practice.

Maintaining conscious control of your practice works in a similar way to how conceptual reading works. Just as your comprehension and speed improves by staying consciously mindful of the
concepts
you are reading, your reading skill improves by staying consciously mindful of
how
you are reading.

All this additional concentration may seem challenging, but think about what you’re doing—you are literally strengthening your brain. New discoveries about the neuroplasticity of the brain have demonstrated that the brain actually restructures itself to meet new cognitive demands. Training your brain to handle more information faster actually improves your brain’s ability to assimilate information.

If your improvement slows down or plateaus, realize it’s still all forward progress, and that the plateau is just something to pass through on the way to your goal.

Consistency

Practice is important, but if you want your mind to get the most return from your practice time, it helps to remember a few things about how the mind works. Memory storage is based on a web of neurons. Each new memory alters this web to leave what is called a memory trace. Each repetition of this memory further reinforces this trace, making it stronger and easier to access. These repetitions create long-lasting enhancements in the signal transmission capabilities between the neurons in this web. As a result, the more you practice a skill, the stronger your memory of that skill becomes.

Because repetition is such a powerful force in strengthening memories, consistency is an important component to learning any new skills. This is particularly true with reading, where you are trying to reprogram a very engrained habit which may be several years old. If you only work at it sporadically, your brain won’t know you’re serious and might try to ignore your attempts to change its way of thinking.

To maintain consistency, set a goal for yourself and plan the time period you will devote to practice; this will enable you to make use of the compounding effects of consistent practice.

You should also consider the length of time of each practice session and how far apart to space your practice. I discovered something unexpected when analyzing students’ metadata on ReadSpeeder. I found that speed improvement correlated more closely with words per day of practice, than with days per week. This seemed counter-intuitive, but by studying the millions of words read by thousands of students, I found that—on average—it turned out to actually be more productive to cram extra time into each practice than to practice more often. The results of this analysis showed a sixty-four percent correlation between reading improvement and minutes per day of practice, but no correlation (actually a negative 0.4% correlation) between successes and practice days per week.

On reflection, it seems this discovery might be in line with the latest science. According to Nassim Taleb’s book
Antifragile
, the fastest growth of any type, whether physical or mental, occurs when an organism is prompted to overcompensate for significant stressors; it could be that longer practice sessions create this productive stress.

This is interesting because cramming more practice into fewer sessions is the opposite of how people are generally taught to study. I can’t be sure this is what will work best for you, but these are the results I’ve found from other students, I’d at least like to offer the information for your consideration.

In the end, even though there are plenty of interesting theories and data on how to study, the best thing to do is to pay attention to what works for you. Pay attention to when and how you make the most progress, and then try to accommodate your own learning style.

Persistence

Homer
: Hey, how come you never play your guitar anymore?

Bart
: I’ll tell ya the truth, Dad. I wasn’t good at it right away, so I quit. I hope you’re not mad.

Homer
: [sweetly] Son, come here! Heh heh heh… [Bart sits on Homer’s knee] Of course I’m not mad. If something’s hard to do, then it’s not worth doing! You just stick that guitar in the closet next to your short-wave radio, your karate outfit, and your unicycle, and we’ll go inside and watch TV.

Obtaining a basic reading skill is a complex enough task on its own. Although achieving superior reading skills is even more difficult, the advantages are worth the effort. In the long run,
not
having good reading skills will end up costing you more than the effort needed to acquire them. Those without good reading skills are exiled to a land of ignorance—a boring wasteland, isolated from much of life’s fascinations and excitement.

So how can you persist with the necessary effort to expand this skill? When you work on any goal, your motivation is bound to rise and fall over time and change with your moods; sometimes you will feel motivated, and sometimes you won’t. But results don’t come from motivation—they come from
action
.

Sometimes, when you don’t feel like doing something that you know you should do, it helps if you fool yourself into taking action. Tell yourself that you are only going to practice for a few minutes, just enough to refresh your memory, and that if you feel like quitting after that, you’ll allow yourself to go ahead and quit. However, you’ll often find that once you overcome your initial desire to do nothing and instead get moving, the law of inertia works both ways; once a body (or a mind) is in motion, it tends to stay in motion. As a result, you may end up getting more done than you expected.

Patience

Although practice, consistency, and persistence are important ingredients for learning a skill, it can be a bitter mix without patience. Be patient with your progress. Allow time for your skills to develop. You may make great progress in the beginning when you first adopt this new perspective on reading, but don’t get impatient when you get stuck. If you never got stuck, then you were probably pursuing a goal that was too easy.

When you do get stuck, slow down and concentrate more on the meaning of what you’re reading. This change of speed can sometimes break you out of a rut, like rocking a car back and forth to get traction if you’re stuck in a mud hole. This comprehension traction is important, and although it sounds like a contradiction, it means you will sometimes have to slow down to go faster.

However, if you simply try to push your speed, you will make a lot of comprehension errors, and these errors will end up slowing your overall speed. But if you back off just a bit and concentrate on accuracy—that is, concentrate on the concepts and ideas—you will reconnect to the information, and your reading will start to flow more smoothly, resulting in the desired speed increase.

You will also notice that your speed can increase and decrease, from one day to the next—or even one minute to the next. Sometimes this is due to the changing difficulty of the material, but it can also be due to your changing mental states. It’s easy to slip out of “the zone” when you are distracted by other thoughts, and this makes it difficult to maintain a strong mental attachment to the material. Just be patient, put the book down, and attend to those other issues or distracting thoughts. Then, pick the book up again when you are ready for it.

Practice Exercise #5

With this exercise, be patient and concentrate on technique. If you are not seeing the ideas as you read, then you’re wasting your time. Take a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Clear your mind and get ready to start the next reading practice.

When you’re ready, begin reading the first thousand words of

Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island

Squire Trelawney,
Dr. Livesey,
and the rest
of these gentlemen
having asked me
to write down
the whole particulars
about Treasure Island,
from the beginning
to the end,
keeping nothing back
but the bearings
of the island,
and that only because
there is still treasure
not yet lifted,
I take up
my pen
in the year
of grace 17
and go back
to the time
when my father kept
the Admiral Benbow Inn
and the brown
old seaman
with the saber cut
first took up
his lodging
under our roof.

I remember him
as if
it were yesterday,
as he came plodding
to the inn door,
his sea-chest
following behind him
in a hand-barrow—
a tall,
strong,
heavy,
nut-brown man,
his tarry pigtail
falling
over the shoulder
of his soiled
blue coat,
his hands
ragged and scarred,
with black,
broken nails,
and the saber cut
across one cheek,
a dirty,
livid white.
I remember him looking
round the cover
and whistling to himself
as he did so,
and then breaking out
in that old sea-song
that he sang
so often afterwards:

“Fifteen men
on the
dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho,
and
a bottle of rum!”
in the high,
old tottering voice
that seemed to
have been tuned
and broken
at the capstan bars.
Then he rapped
on the door
with a bit
of stick
like a handspike
that he carried,
and when
my father appeared,
called roughly
for a glass
of rum.
This,
when it was
brought to him,
he drank slowly,
like a connoisseur,
lingering on the taste
and still looking
about him
at the cliffs
and up at
our signboard.