New Year – New You – new opportunities! Even in these times of financial turmoil, with the right tools you can make this your happiest year yet. Start 2010 off right by jump-starting your PROSPERITY (using speed reading techniques)!
We’re offering a special one-day course on achieving greater PROSPERITY in 2010. Application is restricted to people who have previously completed a PhotoReading/Speed Reading course. It gives you a unique opportunity to experience ‘group syntopic processing’ and synergistic collaborative learning from which, in just one day, we can all embody the wisdom from the top books to boost our prosperity and wealth. Take this opportunity to refresh your Spd Rdng skills at the same time!
DATE: 20th February 2010 (Saturday)
TIMES: 9.30am – 5.30pm
VENUE: North London N2
SPECIAL PRICE: £102 (limited places)
Booking and more info on this one of its kind Prosperity course

A study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology suggests that scribbling helps our overloaded brains to remember details. In this study people who were listening to a dull phone message while doodling were able to recall 29% more than the non-doodling group.

The days may be cold and short (with lots of snow), but new research states that colder months are good for your brain. A study form Tromso University in Norway found that people’s reaction times, memory and attention span all improve in the winter. Take advantage and catch up on your learning and reading…

Placing pupils in Dunce’s corner could breach a pupil’s human rights, say councils.

This has been used as a punishment in schools since Victorian times. But the original purpose behind ‘Dunces’ was to help pupils to learn better.

The dunce cap can help with concentration

In the 13th century, a Franciscan monk and philosopher and theologian of great repute, John Duns Scotus (from the village of Duns in Scotland), developed a ‘duns cap’ to be worn by children who needed something to help them focus. Detractors of Scotus made fun of the cap. Over time the ‘dunce’s cap’ came to be associated with ‘stupid’ children or someone who is slow at learning, and was eventually misunderstood and used to stigmatise and make fun of such children. Most recently, when Ron Davis was working with children diagnosed as dyslexic, he discovered that asking the children to concentrate on this point was enough to allow many of them to start reading (see his book ‘The Gift of Dyslexia’).

How do we know about this point?

First think about this question: What do the following have in common? Dunces, wizards, saints,  yogis. All (originally) knew the importance of focusing on a point above and behind the crown of the head in order to enhance their ability to concentrate and be fully aware. This point has been well known for many years. It is depicted as a halo in many pictures of Christian saints, yogis know it as the 8th chakra (which gives access to universal wisdom), and witches and wizards wore a hat which reminded them to focus on this point in order to enhance their magic powers.

In speed reading and photoreading this point of concentration is used to help to get into a better state for reading faster and understanding more. It also helps to open the peripheral vision which helps to see more text on a page.

Learn how to focus on the concentration point to double your reading rate

The speed of modern life is 2.3 words per second, or about 100,000 words a day. That is the verbiage bombarding the average (American) person in the 12 hours they are typically awake and ‘consuming’ information, according to a new study ‘How Much Information?’ by the University of California, San Diego.

The average American consumes 100,000 words, or about 34 gigabytes of information, every day

More great insights from the study:
– Americans read less print media as an overall percentage of their information consumption, but they’re actually reading more than ever in quantity.
– From 1980 to 2008, the number of bytes we consume has increased 6 percent each year. Over 28 years, that’s a 350 percent increase.
– Video game consumption saw the biggest leap in time spent. That’s not just video games as you know them, but also games on your phone and on social media sites such as Facebook.

Evolution of reading 1960-2008

The Global Language Monitor documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language the world over, with a particular emphasis upon Global English. For example, English passed the 1,000,000 threshold on June 10, 2009 at 10:22 am GMT. A US web monitoring firm has declared the millionth English word to be Web 2.0, a term for the latest generation of web products and services. English gains a new word every 98 minutes (or about 14.7 new words a day).
The Top Words of 2009
1. Twitter — The ability to encapsulate human thought in 140 characters
2. Obama — The word stem transforms into scores of new words like ObamaCare
3. H1N1 — The formal (and politically correct) name for Swine Flu
4. Stimulus — The $800 billion aid package meant to help mend the US economy
5. Vampire — Vampires are very much en vogue, now the symbol of unrequited love
6. 2.0 — The 2.0 suffix is attached to the next generation of everything
7. Deficit — Lessons from history are dire warnings here
8. Hadron — Ephemeral particles subject to collision in the Large Hadron Collider
9. Healthcare — The direction of which is the subject of intense debate in the US
10. Transparency — Elusive goal for which many 21st c. governments are striving

The Top Words of the Decade, as part of its annual global survey of the English language.
The Top Words were ‘Global Warming’, 9/11, and Obama followed by Bailout, Evacuee, and Derivative; Google, Surge, Chinglish, and Tsunami followed. “Climate Change” was the top phrase, while “Heroes” was the top name; bin-Laden was No. 2.

0.2 – the time in seconds taken by the brain to identify a written word.

With online ordering, high-street chain discounts, (Borders closing down), recession – the future of traditional bookshops doesn’t look great. But according to The Bookseller there is a rise of the boutique bookshops. 34 new independent bookshops were open in the UK this year. In one bookshop in Notting Hill coffee is served in china cups and literary-inspired perfumes are sold with the Austen and Tolken. Down the road, Cinephilia West has a screening room, while Phaidon’s pop-up bookshop in Piccadilly is coffee-table-book nirvana. New bread of bookshops offering everything from cosy reading room to home-made biscuits. This is a return of book-buying as an enchanting experience.

The right diet can help with learning

Happy foods for boosting memory, learning power and concentration are bananas (excellent source of starchy carbohydrate, which encourages production of the ‘happy hormone’ serotonin), green vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage, spinach and nuts and seeds (great source of magnesium, which helps the body to make serotonin). Other serotonin producing foods are sardines, foie gras and cottage cheese. Of course, chocolate is the one snack that everyone knows instinctively will give them a lift. Chocolate, especially the dark, good quality organic variety, contains high quantities of phenols, antioxidants that boost mood, and N-acylethanoloamine chemicals, which stimulate the brain to release endorphins. But chocolate is fattening, so the key is to have a piece or tow, not a whole bar. Maintaining hydration is crucial to ensure an even mood. Even small decreases  in hydration levels can leave your feeling grumpy. Keep water to hand to top up fluids regularly. Based on research published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (BJP) last week.

Call it the Doom learning effect. Volunteers who played the shoot ’em up video game dreamed about monsters and guns. Such reveries have now been found to predict higher scores the following day, backing the idea that dreams function to consolidate learning.  Read more on the role of sleep in learning

1. The CIA Factbook
This offshoot of the American intelligence agency’s site gives a detailed overview of every country. It also provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities.

2. Biography.com
The website of the Biography Channel is an excellent place to gen up on historical figures and celebrities, while its “Dead Or Not” game shows that beyond a necessary obsession with factual accuracy it has a fun side, too.

3. Onelook.com
Type in a word or phrase and OneLook will offer a quick definition and link to reputable online sources, such as the Cambridge and Hutchinson dictionaries. Wildcard searches, meanwhile – where you need only key in a few words from a word – make it invaluable for Scrabble players and crossword solvers.

4. Onlineconversion.com
Sorted by more than 30 categories, from astronomical units to viscosity, this converts one unit of measurement to another. Google can do something similar – type “20kg in ounces” into the search box, for example -but this site is far more comprehensive.

5. 1911encyclopedia.org
The full 1911 version of the Encyclopaedia-Britannica is now online. Particularly interesting are the accounts of historical figures written while they were alive.

6. Britannica.com
Online access to the modern Britannica costs £49.95 a year, but that compares with £450 for the full set of 32 volumes. More comprehensive than Wikipedia, it also features thousands of audio and video clips.

7. About.com
About was set up in 1996 and can now call on a network of more than 750 experts to answer users’ questions. More than 60m people visit the site each month looking for help on pretty much anything.

8. Specialissues.com/lol
A collection of links to lists that have appeared somewhere in the world’s press. If you need to know the planet’s most valuable 15 football teams, head there.

9. Lii.org
The Librarians’ Internet Index is a US organisation with a collection of links to ‘websites you can trust’. The history and politics ones are a little US-centric, arts and science links are more comprehensive.

10. www.WhatsOnWhen.com
This lists upcoming event from all over the world. Search by date, destination, type of event, keyword or a combination of them all, and maybe discover that your trip to Tahiti coincides with its annual Tarantino week.

It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launched at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait. It offers the best of both worlds: the virtually unlimited choice of books on the Internet and the traditional book format. In short, ATM for books.

Do we read less in recession? Publishing has suffered in the downturn, though not as much as one might think. In fact, over the past eight years, the umber of books bought in the UK has risen by nearly 50 per cent to just under 240 million. Adult non-fiction – now makes up 40 per cent of the sales, eclipsing fiction, which accounts for just 30 per cent (the remaining 30 per cent is accounted for by children’s books). In the graphic below, each full-sized book represents about 225,000 books purchased, meaning that in 2007 – our tallest shelf – the nation bought just under 23 million books across the genres selected. Some of the trends are clear. Su Doku – in “Puzzles” – catapults into the mainstream in 2005. Celebrity chefs continue their rise. Biographies and autobiographies spike in 2006, mostly because a lot of high-profile names among them Gordon Ramsey, Sharon Osbourne and Steven Gerrard – had books published. Then there are the small victories, such as Does Anything Eat Wasps?, a compendium of New Scientist columns, which in 2006 almost single-handedly increased sales of popular science books by 50 per cent.

Reading trends 2001-2008 – sales of books in the UK

On the shelf statistics: of the 40m titles in US libraries about 8m are out of copyright and 32m are still covered in copyright. Of these 32m, about 7m-9m are in print and 23m-25m are out of print. Of the23m-25m out-of-print titles still covered by copyright, about 2.5m-5m are ‘orphan works’ (copyright holders cannot be traced). Google wants to digitalise all books. Why?  Read the full article in FT online

When we read books, our brains process the written information as if we were participating in or observing the scene for real. “Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that when we read a story and really understand it, we create a mental simulation of the events described by the story.” says Professor Jeffrey Zacks, director of the Dynamic Cognitive Laboratory at Washington University in St Louis. Read more about this study

Getting into a good state for speed reading is essential. Having a relaxed, alert, questioning, purposeful mind is the ideal state for reading if you want to understand and remember information. Many of the other speed reading techniques that we teach are also designed to get your mind and body in an optimal state for reading. The latest research backing up relaxation as the key to learning comes from Goldsmiths College in London and the Austrian Academy of Science where they studied the brain rhythms of 25 volunteers  while they were asked to solve verbal problems. Those who displayed higher alpha brain waves – associated with a relaxed brain – were more likely to find the correct solution to the problem. Download our 37 speed reading techniques now

Nanette’s Spd Rdng answer: We do a two-day course without software and people walk away on the Sunday evening being able to do everything. (It’s better to learn in an intensive burst.) You don’t need to practise the techniques – you just need to do them. The more you do them in the course of your normal reading, the better you get. Everyone we’ve had on Spd Rdng courses (which include photoreading, speed reading and additional strategies using an accelerated learning approach so it’s all easy to learn) in the last three years has at least doubled their reading speed in those two days – and has loads of additional techniques which save much more time (typically getting info 10 times faster than before).

You can get a free download of the 37 techniques we teach (or contact me for more info) from our Spd Rdng website https://spdrdng.com

Nanette’s Spd Rdng answer: Lots of the Spd Rdng techniques that we teach are about getting information, but you can also read novels faster – and ‘get it’! Most people read as if they’re driving a car in first gear all the time. Much better to be able to vary the speed at which you read – so if you enjoy reading slowly, you’ll be able to do that too. Go for it – it’s fun to be able to do it – and it certainly beats getting dragged down by those piles of books, reports and journals that sit there making you feel guilty.

Nanette’s Spd Rdng answer: Learn speed reading as well. Speed reading is about reading traditionally but faster. And in addition to both photoreading and speed reading, it makes sense to have (conscious, easy) strategies for remembering what you read, strategies for evaluating books, knowing WHY you’re reading, getting an overview of a subject before going into detail, etc.

Nanette’s Spd Rdng answer: No. But you need to understand what it can and can’t do.

Nanette’s Spd Rdng answer: Yes. But do speed reading as well. Oddly enough, reading faster helps comprehension, because you’ve got more information more quickly for the brain to make sense of. Spd Rdng courses teach photoreading, speed reading and additional techniques to speed up access to information, memory and comprehension.

Just answered some questions on yahoo – thought I’d share them here.

Is photoreading a scam?

Nanette’s Spd Rdng answer: No. The non-conscious mind takes in all the information – but you don’t know it consciously, so it doesn’t feel as if you’ve learnt anything. Also, although the info goes straight to your long-term memory, it is only activated by need (need determined by your non-conscious mind, not your conscious mind – the bit that likes to think it’s on control). It therefore works best if you do in together with some conscious (eg speed reading) techniques.