Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words (16 page)

It chanced on
one of these rambles
that their way
led them down
a by-street
in a busy quarter
of London.
The street was small
and what is called quiet,
but it drove
a thriving trade
on the week-days.
The inhabitants
were all doing well,
it seemed,
and all emulously hoping
to do better still,
and laying out
the surplus
of their gains
in coquetry;
so that the shop fronts
stood along
that thoroughfare
with an air
of invitation,
like rows
of smiling saleswomen.
Even on Sunday,
when it veiled
its more florid charms
and lay comparatively
empty of passage,
the street shone out
in contrast
to its dingy
neighborhood,
like a fire
in a forest;
and with
its freshly painted
shutters,
well-polished brasses,
and general cleanliness
and gaiety of note,
instantly caught
and pleased the eye
of the passenger.

Two doors
from one corner,
on the left hand
going east,
the line was broken
by the entry
of a court;
and just at that point,
a certain
sinister block
of building
thrust forward
its gable
on the street.
It was two stories high;
showed no window,
nothing but a door
on the lower story
and a blind forehead
of discolored wall
on the upper;
and bore
in every feature,
the marks of prolonged
and sordid negligence.
The door,
which was equipped with
neither bell nor knocker,
was blistered
and distained.
Tramps slouched
into the recess
and struck matches
on the panels;
children kept shop
upon the steps;
the schoolboy
had tried his knife
on the moldings;
and for close on
a generation,
no one had appeared
to drive away
these random visitors
or to repair
their ravages.

Mr. Enfield
and the lawyer
were on the other side
of the by-street;
but when they came
abreast of the entry,
the former
lifted up his
cane
and pointed.

“Did you ever remark
that door?”
he asked;
and when his companion
had replied
in the affirmative,
“It is connected
in my mind,”
added he,
“with a very odd story.”

“Indeed?”
said Mr. Utterson,
with a slight change
of voice,
“and what was that?”

“Well,
it was this way,”
returned Mr. Enfield:
“I was coming home from some place at the end of the world, about three o’clock of a black winter morning, and my way lay through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps. Street after street; and all the folks asleep—street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church—till at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the sight of a policeman. All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut. I gave a view-halloa, took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group about the screaming…

Chapter 9: Reading with the Brain

We now know a little about the physical processes the brain uses to accomplish the task of reading, but how can we make the most of this ability? What mental processes should we be using to best convert text into knowledge? Where’s the “User’s Guide” for this reading machine?

As you have probably noticed, there is already plenty of advice available on reading techniques.

In fact, having so much advice can make it difficult to decide which advice is excellent and which is nonsense. Our previous discussion of how we process text, however, may help you determine which methods makes more sense.

The last chapter primarily dealt with how the brain converts printed text into words, but this chapter will concentrate on how these words are turned into meaning. We will cover how words are turned into the thoughts they came from, and how language becomes ideas. We will also look closer at how the right brain can enhance this ability.

Perceptual and Conceptual Processing

Once text enters your brain, it is processed in two stages: perceptual and conceptual.

The first processing stage is perceptual; this is when you see text and recognize the characters and words. As amazing as this ability is, it is actually the simpler and faster of the two stages.

Of course the whole reading process seems incredibly fast when you consider the complexity involved, but the second stage, the conceptual stage, is by far the slower of the two. A whole phrase of text can be perceived in about 1/25th of a second. That’s very fast—around seven times faster than you can blink!

That means a group of words can be flashed on a screen so fast as to be almost invisible, but you can still perceive the whole phrase. However, conceptualizing the meaning of that phrase takes considerably longer.

To understand how much longer it takes to actually read and understand text, consider that even reading at a rapid six hundred words per minute is equivalent to spending an entire half a second on each phrase. In other words, the
thinking
part of reading takes over ten times longer than the
seeing
part.

This huge difference between the time it takes to perceive text and the time it takes to conceptually process it should make it abundantly clear why speed reading has nothing to do with
seeing
text faster, but everything to do with
thinking
faster. Speed reading is really speed thinking.

That’s why it is pointless to push the speed of seeing text, regardless if it’s with eye exercises or by following a pacer. Eyes are not cameras. The “camera” is the whole brain, and the eyes are only the lens of this camera. The eyes are an important component, but useless without the complex mechanisms required for processing and saving information.

Reading is a complex process involving various operations. The whole process takes visual input, converts it to lines and shapes, then to letters and words, to language, and then to data. It next filters and sorts this data into information, and then finally saves it as useful knowledge. The entire process involves several simultaneous and integrated tasks, working together to generate new thoughts and memories.

These thoughts and memories are the final result and sole purpose of all this work; a process which allows you to categorize, organize, store, and recall what you have read. As you can see, the end result of a system like this is knowledge, not memorization. This means the purpose of reading is
not
to remember words, but to assimilate
ideas
.

The purpose of conceptually understanding information is to make the information
useful
. The brain is a predicting and planning machine, and it uses categorizations and connections of stored information to accomplish those tasks.

Episodic and Semantic Information

There are two types of information: episodic and semantic.

Episodic information is located in time and space. These are concrete things—things that are in the real world and can be observed.

Semantic information is outside of time and space. These are abstract things—things you can only understand as conceptual ideas and things that can only be represented as categories and connections.

Consider the sentence, “He was running faster than ever.” “He was running” is episodic information, and “faster than ever” is semantic. The first phrase is a concrete image. The second phrase is an abstract idea.

When conceptualizing what you read, episodic information is somewhat faster and easier to imagine than semantic information, as it is easier to think of real world things than abstract ideas. Without any visual image, semantic information requires more imagination and mental effort to process.

But although the processing of semantic information takes more effort, it is one of the abilities which make us uniquely human—and it beats the opposable thumbs, hands down! Chimps, for example, cannot effectively process semantic information, meaning they have very little ability to reason about unobservable things. But semantically thinking humans can understand how the past affects the present and then how to use this understanding to plan for the future.

Consciousness

Once data is processed into conceptual ideas, it is presented to the conscious mind. Here the data is quickly filtered by tuning out what is not important, and amplifying what is. This is also where you become aware of the data as information.

Although the conscious portion of the brain is small, it acts as the boss, delegating tasks and receiving reports from all the subconscious areas. As information streams through the conscious mind, it is temporarily placed in the short-term working memory, where it is analyzed, combined, compared, and evaluated. Although the short- term memory can’t hold many items or hold them for long—since each conscious item can be immensely complex—it can still handle a large amount of information. Because it takes about the same amount of effort to process a large concept as it does an individual word, concentrating on reading for ideas can maximize the processing speed.

Another way consciousness maximizes its efficiency is by filtering out anything it thinks is irrelevant, enabling it to concentrate more time and energy on what matters most. You could think of this as a secretary going through and prioritizing the incoming mail. Not everything that comes in escapes the wastebasket, but the most important items go to the top of the inbox.

The result of this filtering is that you won’t remember everything you read—and you wouldn’t want to; that’s not how the brain is supposed to work. The brain is more like an index than a book. Its job is not to simply record its experiences, but to organize and make sense of them.

Memory

After the data has been filtered and evaluated, the information is stored in the long-term memory. This information is not stored in one place, but distributed throughout a network of associated attributes. Each of these attributes is like a tag associated with the information and represents a quality or characteristic inherent in that information.

Instead of being stored as intact bundles, this information is saved as a set of related attributes. Each piece of information is not stored as a separate block somewhere in the brain, but as a complex web of connections to all associated information. In this way, we store memories of what information actually means to us. The result is that unlike a computer, we don’t store “data"—we store knowledge. In other words, we don’t store the exact information or experience, but instead store the conceptual
idea
of that information.