Photoreading - Why It Doesn't Work

Well you've heard enough of me bragging about my experience with the photoreading system, so here are some pointers on why it doesn't work.

Before you photoread you give yourself affirmations which are said to 'help the text go into your inner mind'. Examples of these are 'As I photoread my concentration is absolute' and 'All that I photoread will go into my inner mind  ... etc'. Before you say these you go into a state of relaxed alertness where saying these 'affirmations' makes you believe the system works and that you are getting results. It's a hypnotic suggestion! This means that you will only notice and remember the successful parts of your reading, e.g. when you don't remember where the word is on the page, you are told not to worry and you completely forget about it. Belief is another complicated thing which I won't go into on this post.

The creator of the system, Paul Scheele did some EEG (a scan which measure brain signals) scans on people who were photoreading and compared them to scans from people who were reading normally. Unsurprisingly normal readers had much more brain activity to photoreaders. This is because you are relaxed and calm during photoreading which turns off brain activity. Basically when reading normally many through processes are at work, which provides better comprehension and memory of what you have read. 

If you have tried photoreading you will know that you can't really connect with a book the same way you do with normal reading. During normal reading you imagination thrives giving you an image in your head or affecting emotions. This creates neural connections in your mind and allows you to recall that book when you start to think about it. With photoreading these neural connections (if they are even created) in you inner mind don't have these links. This means to benefit at all you have to go back to the book to do some normal reading to obtain any comprehension. This makes photoreading a complete waste of time which if you are unlucky enough to have been caught up in the system you will have spent more time on a book learning much less. I remember when I first photoread a book I had spent 20 minutes photoreading and had learnt about two things from the book. What a waste of time.

Photoreading - A Scam

When I first found out about photoreading I believed that the system would solve all of my reading problems. I was informed that this revolutionary system would allow you to read at 25,000 wpm (words per minute) and allow you to recall the information easily. I was particularly interested in using this as a revision tool since it would only take moments to go through content and recall it during a test! I'm afraid to say that this system isn't all that it sounds which I'll explain later. 

The system works as follows:

• Preview - looking at the blurb of a book, table of contents, and index to find out what the book is about.
  
• Photoread - using a method to flash each page in front of your eyes while not trying to read or remember what you see.
  
• Activate - get the information that you need from your inner mind.
  
• Rapid Read - go back through the book and get any additional information you require.
  

This process seemed fairly straightforward and looked a genuine approach for reading books. I learnt the system using the personal learning course and when using it I felt that it really worked and that I felt the benefits! The problem was that even thought I felt I was drastically improving my reading, the results were rubbish. To be honest the system is just a long way to look something up in a book. When you have finished photoreading you think of what you want to find out and then go slowly through each page letting you subconscious mind lead you to the answer. 

One of the exercises in the course is photoreading a dictionary. After that you think of a word and image where it is placed on the page. I did a tally of the words I got right and wrong. Even though about 80% were wrong I was told that I had achieved something and that really my wrong answers was all part of the process. I put up with this for a while but eventually I had to convince myself that it was all bollocks. I saw a video of Derren Brown doing this dictionary trick but in his book 'Tricks of the Mind' he dismisses photoreading as 'horseshit'. A report done for NASA (http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20000011599_2000009345.pdf) concluded that the system provided no advantage over normal reading and in some of their tests the photoreaders had a significant lack of comprehension compared to normal readers. 

So why does photoreading not work? More in the next post.