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

no verbal understanding. It can connect words with ideas, but it doesn’t think in words. It does, however, have the powerful ability to imagine whole, complex ideas at once. This is how the right brain gives you clearer and faster comprehension, by processing information in larger and more meaningful chunks.

    So far, this has been a basic introduction to conceptualizing, and there will be more discussion later about how to conceptualize different types of information. For now, realize that in order to conceptualize ideas, you’ll need to be able to read whole phrases at a time, because there is seldom enough information in individual words to form meaningful mental concepts.
    A short group of words, in the form of a meaningful phrase, can describe a complete, stand-alone idea. Phrases may be only a few words long, but together these few words can represent distinct pieces of information which can be easily imagined as whole units of meaning.
    These meaningful pieces of text could be called “phrases,” “word-groups,” “clauses,” “units of meaning,” or “thought-units.” But regardless of the label, they consist of any groups of words which represent whole ideasyou can visualize or conceptualize.
    Reading whole ideas increases your reading speed in two ways:
Concentrating on the bigger picture results in processing more meaningful information.
Taking in more words at a time results in reading more words per minute.
    Reading whole phrases is like taking larger strides when you run. Switching from walking to running doesn’t mean just moving your legs faster, but also lengthening your stride, thereby covering more distance with each step. This is basically how conceptualizing helps you read and comprehend faster, by letting you see a bigger picture and taking in larger blocks of information at a time.
    In normal, unaided text, you have to perform both parts of this skill on your own. You have to concentrate on finding the meaningful word-groups, and at the same time, focus on the larger meaning of those word-groups. Trying to learn both parts of this skill together can be mentally overwhelming. It can be difficult to focus on meanings and concepts at the same time you are trying to select the meaningful word-groups.
    But the formatted text in the exercises in this book will eliminate the work of finding phrases, allowing you to concentrate more attention on imagining the larger concepts. This makes it easy to practice reading in larger concepts. Then once you become familiar and comfortable with processing information in larger chunks, you will be able to pick out the phrases automatically on your own in normal, unformatted text.
    Don’t confuse reading thought-units with the more common advice to make fewer eye-stops per line. Reading meaningful phrases is very different than simply trying to read in groups of some arbitrary number of words at a time. Instead, it is actively seeking conceptual units of information. In fact, it is this proactive, searching frame of mind which will make these word-groups automatically appear to you. This is because when you are aware that the information is in larger blocks of text, those blocks will become easier to recognize. Sentences are not smooth, consistent flows of evenly distributed information; they are more like clumps of ideas. Knowing this, and looking for these clumps, is what helps you see them.
    As an example, consider this sentence:
    It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
    This should not be viewed as just a string of words, “ It—was—a—bright—cold—day—in—April, ” with each word adding just one more additional piece of information.
    The sentence is actually better understood as clumps of ideas, “ It was—a bright cold day—in April ,” where each clump adds a specific and meaningful block of information to the sentence.
    The exercises in this book identify these blocks of information for you. After