Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words Read Online Free PDF Page A

your eyes faster
    But these haven’t worked.
    They might have temporarily increased your words per minute as you pushed yourself to read faster, but this increase was probably accompanied by a loss of comprehension. What good is that? If you read twice as fast but only understand half as much, you haven’t gained a thing.
    So, what can you do? How can you read faster and also maintain comprehension?
    Sometimes the easiest way to find the solution to a problem is to make sure you are asking the right question to begin with. The right question can often be found by carefully determining what the real goal is.
    What do you really want?
    What you really want is to be able to pick up a book and understand what the author is saying in the least amount of time.
    The key word is “understand.” You are not just trying to finish the book faster; you are trying to collect ideas , to collect experiences , and to collect information and knowledge .
    So the real question is…
    “How can you comprehend faster?”
    The answer to this question is what makes Reading with the Right Brain different. This book is based on the principle that comprehension must come first , and therefore, using your right conceptual brain is key. The point of reading is to comprehend meaning, and the old methods that push you to see more words per minute miss that important point.
    This book aims at a very specific target—the real act of reading. It is not about pre-reading, memorizing, or study habits. Instead, this book focuses specifically on what happens between the time the text enters your eyes as an image and when the information assimilates into your brain as knowledge.
    Other skills—such as previewing, asking yourself questions, mind mapping, etc.—might be useful, but none of these are really about reading ; they are about everything around reading. If you want to know more about these peripheral skills, there are abundant resources already available.
    Reading with the Right Brain is specifically about how to increase the speed of transferring ideas from the text to your brain. It focuses on how to read across each line of text, lock on to the information, and comprehend and assimilate this information into knowledge.
    This book is NOT about pushing your reading speed, widening your eye-span, or suppressing bad reading habits. It is not another book of speed reading tips, tricks and “secrets.” This book IS about learning to pay more attention to your reading.
    Rather than eye exercises, this book focuses on exercising your mental processing, because reading is essentially a mental activity, not a visual one. Therefore the instructions and exercises in this book are intended to strengthen your powers of concentration and focus.
    The techniques and practice exercises in this book will show you how to read faster by comprehending faster. The way you’ll do this is by learning to conceptualize your reading.
    What is conceptualizing?
    Read the phrase, “ the big black dog ” and concentrate on imagining what this group of words means. Imagine a big black dog, but don’t only think of an image; think of what a big black dog means to you . Is it friendly? Is it scary? Is it beautiful? Is it smart? Do you remember any big black dogs?
    Exactly what you imagine is not important—whatever pops into your head is OK; what is important is that what comes into your head is an idea , that you instantly imagine the meaning of the phrase. This is thinking conceptually .
    This visual and conceptual concentration causes information to be passed to the right side of your brain, the side that specializes in the conceptual nature of ideas. It also connects the information to all the attributes—both visual and abstract—you associate this information with to create a larger, more complete idea of what the information means. The end result is a big-picture idea, the real essence of what the information means to you.
    The right hemisphere of your brain has