By reading Shakespeare – which has dramatic effect on human brain

They function to uphold social order and spread altruistic genes, according to evolutionary psychologists. While the romantic era helped us evolve into more virtuous beings, reading Shakespeare can boost our brainpower. Shakerspeare used a technique known as functional shift, which involves making an adjective or a noun into a verb. In The Winter’s Tale, heavy thoughts are said to ‘thick my blood’. Researchers at Liverpool University revealed this technique causes a spark in the brain activity, as we’re forced to understand what a word means before we comprehand the function of it within a sentence. Source University of Liverpool

The effect of functional shift on the brain. Credit: University of Liverpool

We’re presenting at ANLP Conference 13-15 November 2009, London
Sat 14 November 18.00 – 19.30 Top Ten Speed Reading Techniques

Learn the key techniques which turn ordinary readers into speed readers. Double your reading speed by the end of the workshop – and walk away with both the tools and the understanding to distil the knowledge and wisdom from the masters in less than a tenth of the time it would take with traditional reading. For more info on the ANLP Conference

It’s official: The iPhone is more popular than Amazon Kindle. And not just in the obvious categories like listening to music, surfing the net or the other applications where Kindle barely competes. Now, the iPhone is also muscling into Amazon’s home turf: reading ebooks.
Stanza, an ebook reading application offered in Apple’s iPhone App Store since July, has been downloaded more than 395,000 times and continues to be installed at an average rate of about 5,000 copies a day, according to Portland, Ore.-based Lexcycle, the three-person start-up that created the reading software.

iPhone eBook Reader App – Stanza

The future of speed reading e-books
Stanza, like Kindle, lets users download new content directly to their device. It has a snappy interface that allows readers to flip through a book simply by tapping the edges of the page and responds far faster than Kindle’s poky E-ink screen, which takes about a second to turn pages. And then there’s what some may call Stanza’s unfair advantage: the application is free, as are its many titles.

Download Stanza ebook reader for iPhone

We’ve received a question today – here it is with our answer

“Friends are like a book: they open up the whole world for us. But they can be divided into good and bad. The right sort can help you, but the bad sort will bring you a great deal of trouble and may even lead you down the wrong road. Being able to choose your friends wisely is extremely important.” Confucius as interpreted by Yu Dan, author of Confucius from the Heart

An NLP modelling project by Tom O’Connor – NLP TIMES (NLP Videos and Trainings)

NLP meta-programs are perceptions and mindsets and behavioural patterns that operate at an other-than-conscious level. Meta-programs are filters through which we perceive the world. An example is an old maxim is the glass half full or half empty. By understanding and appreciating other people’s models of the world that may differ dramatically from our own we can learn how to do things better.

NLP meta-modelling of speed reading

Modelling subject: Jan Cisek – Master Reader, PhotoReader, Speed Reader and Spd Rdr

1. Chunk Size: Global vs. Specific

Spd Rdng Student: Global
When spd rdng speed readers tend to go global and take in the big picture. The field of vision is broad and the area of focus tends to be on “Concepts” and “Ideas”, getting a Gestalt view. You sort for information at a global level. Global chunk style tends to lead to deductive processing and permits the speed reader to take large mental quick cuts through large volumes of information. There is quite a high level of generalisation. This differs significantly from a person who’s meta-program who is detail based. They will tend to focus on the low-level information, needing to acquire all the details and feel the need for multiple examples and overlapping of information before they feel they are comfortable with the material.

Continue reading →

Speed reading is about speed as much as about slow reading

With speed reading we create more time to reflect – our reflective intelligence is critical to learning and our moral standards. Read previous post.  In Praise of Slow – How a Worldwide Movement Is Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore one can learn the importance of taking time to reflect and slow down.

Both me and Nanette can read very fast when we need to. But we take time to read slowely – usually for pleasure. Novels, poetry, philosophy, etc lend themselves to reading slowely. Never before the balance between fast and slow was so important. Spd rdng is like driving a car – sometimes we use the first gear, sometimes the second, the third, the fourth, etc. Most people though read like they would read in the first gear. Speed reading is about changing your gears of reading depending on the context of your reading.

Can reflective intelligence survive in the fast media environment?

Following from the previous post about how the speed of Facebook and Tweeter are shaping our moral compass.

David Perkins (Harvard) thinks that reflective intelligence (RI) is the most important one to learn. It’s being aware of your learning and thinking habits and how to improve them. It’s thinking about thinking – meta-thinking.

What brings me most joy when learning? Why?
What do I not understand?
What can I do to understand better? (Ask a friend)
What is the biggest success / aha moment? Write it down & use symbols.
What works and does not work for me?
The moments of learning…

How to switch on your reflective intelligence?
1.    Notice what is working – write it down

2.    Be grateful – gratitude feedbacks to your subconscious mind what you want and what is important to you

3.   Get inspired and motivated by people’s aha! It stimulates your reflective intelligence and executive functioning. Revitalising. Strangely Twitter can be used to post those inspiring AHA! moments – follow us on http://twitter.com/Spdrdng

New research suggests that fast social portals can be damaging to us – especially young people who’s brains are still developing.

‘If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states and that would have implications for your morality,’ said researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, from the University of Southern California. Brain imaging tests showed that humans can respond in fractions of a second to signs of physical pain in others; but admiration and compassion – two of the social emotions which define humanity – take much longer. Digital media may direct users away from traditional avenues for learning about humanity, such as literature or face-to-face interactions, Ms Immordino-Yang added. ‘When it comes to emotion, because these systems are inherently slow, perhaps all we can say is, not so fast,’ said Antonio Damasio, who led the research. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, who led the research said: “What I’m more worried about is what is happening in the abrupt juxtapositions that you find, for example, in the news. He said the research was vital because admiration, “gives us a yardstick for what to reward in a culture, and for what to look for and try to inspire”. Mr Damasio said that Barack Obama, who was inspired by his father, showed how admiration could drive a person onto great things, adding: “We actually separate the good from the bad in great part thanks to the feeling of admiration. It’s a deep physiological reaction that’s very important to define our humanity.”

Is it possible to read faster with increased comprehension?

It may seem counter-intuitive but reading faster equates with comprehending more. In fact, individuals who read at slower rates are likely to comprehend less. It makes sense when you realise that the more information your mind has the more it will comprehend. Our advice is always to read faster in order to understand more. The brain-friendly way to more understanding is to get the big picture of the subject first. Reading faster, reading more will give you a bigger picture.

Did you know? In the world of information overload – just a few more facts – watch this video clip

20 years ago 80% of knowledge resided within the books. Now it’s only 20% because the world is changing ever faster. We need to be open to new and unknown connections with people and content.

The people of India love spending their time with a book in their hands. Such are the results of a survey conducted by the public research agency NOP World Culture Score. On average they spend 11 hours reading every week. The world average for book reading is – according to the survey – 6.5 hours. And Poles much the average ideally, putting them in 13th place. We’re behind the Chinese (8 hours), the Czechs (7.4 hours) and the French (6.9 hours), but then the Americans are way behind us (23rd place – or 5.7 hours), as are the Brits (5.3 hours, given 26th place). The Koreans read the least (3.1 hours)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY

How to get higher degree faster – start earlier

The notion of commencing university education at school was born out of his own precocious boyhood in the United States. “When I was at school academics from the University of California at Berkeley came and taught me some classes in speed reading,” he explains in his quiet drawl. However, since they had no way of imparting an entire degree to a child Kelley went to university early, at 15.

The idea is the brainchild of Paul Kelley, Monkseaton’s American headmaster, who just loves to push the boundaries. “If every school were to make this available, think how much money each student would save by not having to go to a university – and they’d get a step ahead in the jobs market. After all, you are at a huge advantage if you have an honours degree when your peers only have A-levels,” he says.

Read more: The free degrees – A trio of pioneers have undertaken university studies – without debt and while still at school

WEIRD: Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, But the wrod as a wlohe. And you touhhgt taht sepllnig was iprmoetnt!

In the same way you don’t need to read every word in a sentence to get the message.

In the end, quality tells. People may have bought The Da Vinci Code in its millions but, when asked to name the most precious book they have read, they relegated it to 42nd place and chose Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

In the poll for World Book Day today, the highest-ranking contemporary adult fiction novel is Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, which came only 17th. Read more on this

Speed up your reading with iPhone

Reading on the iPhone can be quicker because the screen guides the eyes better. Also with the ease of scrolling and the smaller article sizes on many web pages – all means that information can be processed a lot quicker than by previous means.

Going night after night without sleep makes us absent minded, and now we may know why

Going night after night without sleep makes us absent-minded, and now we may know why. In rats, sleep deprivation causes stress hormones to accumulate in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which in turn stunts the growth of cells that lay down new memories.

“This decrease in neuron production coincided with an increase in the major rodent stress hormone, corticosterone,” says Elizabeth Gould, head of the team at Princeton University that made the discovery. When Gould stopped production of the hormone in rats by removing their adrenal glands, the animals carried on producing new neurons as normal despite being deprived of sleep (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0608644103).

“We concluded that sleep deprivation decreases neurogenesis by elevating stress hormones,” says Gould. The results tally with earlier studies showing that sleep-deprived people are worse at remembering how to do newly learned tasks than they are normally. “We know that sleep deprivation is stressful, and that it impairs certain types of learning and memory,” she says.

Derk-Jan Dijk of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, says the results are the first to provide a plausible mechanism explaining how a lack of sleep damages memory. “It points to the importance of sleep in the right hormonal conditions,” says Dijk. “These are altered if you sleep at the wrong time of day, or if you are stressed generally,” he says. The results explain how shift work might damage memory by producing “a different hormonal milieu”.
“The results are the first to provide a plausible mechanism explaining how a lack of sleep damages memory”

However, Tarja Porkka-Heiskanen of the University of Helsinki in Finland says that may be going too far, as the 72 hours of sleep deprivation experienced by the rats is exceptionally long, equivalent to several days in humans. Sleep deprivation can damage memory, but only “in extreme cases”, she believes.
Source: NewScientist

Do you want to feel better or change your mood? Do you want to feel more energetic? Read faster!

Speed reading and photoreading is the answer. Research done in Princeton University (Emily Pronin – read the ABSTRACT below) suggests that people who speed up their thinking with timed activities such as reading fast a piece of text that scrolled quickly – felt happier and more powerful, creative and energetic. Read more on this research (Psychology Today)

Manic Thinking Independent Effects of Thought Speed and Thought Content on Mood by Emily Pronin ( Princeton University) and Daniel M. Wegner (Harvard University)
“ABSTRACT—This experiment found that the speed of thought affects mood. Thought speed was manipulated via participants’ paced reading of statements designed to induce either an elated or a depressed mood. Participants not only experienced more positive mood in response to elation than in response to depression statements, but also experienced an independent increase in positive mood when they had been thinking fast rather than slow—for both elation and depression statements. This effect of thought speed extended beyond mood to other experiences often associated with mania (i.e., feelings of power, feelings of creativity, a heightened sense of energy, and inflated self-esteem or grandiosity).” Download the paper

5 of the top 10 books sold in Japan in 2007 began life as cellphone novels – books typed in text-speak and then posted online.

In Japan, a new literary genre has taken off. It’s called keitai shosetsu, or the mobile-phone novel.

These short books are written by text message and posted on the web. The stories have taken a particular form; most are written by and for young women and are about difficult subjects such as pregnancy and abortion.

These novels are hugely popular. Maho i-Land, Japan’s largest mobile-phone novel site, contains more than one million titles. The site is visited 3.5 billion times a month.

Publishers have caught on, and text-created books top many Japanese bestseller lists. Love Sky by Mika, and its sequel, have together sold 2.6 million copies. Many titles are filmed or made into manga cartoons.

Critics argue that predictive text makes the books repetitive, but the cellular age has turned Japan into a land of quietly tapping thumbs and wild imaginations.

Download free ebooks for your mobile phone

In case you were worried that the abbreviations commonly used in text messages might be hurting the nation’s (or your child’s) literacy – you can relax. Apparently it’s doing the opposite.

The more children send texts using abbrvtns, the better their reading ability! Apparently with all the texting, children are reading much more these days, and playing with the language is an important part of learning how it works.
We teach both that reading more (of anything) will improve your reading – and that it’s important to get the message from what you read rather than concentrating on the individual letters (or even the individual words). And it’s no coincidence that we called our book ‘Spd Rdng’!

By the way, have you already seen the following on the internet?

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. And you touhhgt taht sepllnig was iprmoetnt!

Further info in the New Scientist 22 Feb 2009 reporting on research ‘Exploring the relationship between children’s knowledge of text message abbreviations and school literacy outcomes’ by Plester, Beverly1; Wood, Clare1; Joshi, Puja1, published by the British Psychological Society in British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Volume 27, Number 1,March 2009

Remembering what you read is as important as taking in the information.

On our speedreading/photoreading courses we have been teaching that linking specific ideas/words to gestures can help you remember them – something that can be particularly useful for actors.

Now, Dr Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago, has done some research into hand movements which seems to prove that if you make appropriate hand movements, it can help you think.

And since the beginning of good memory is how you ‘lay down’ the information in the first place, it obviously makes sense to gesture as you speak the information you want to remember (see technique number 22 in our forthcoming book ‘Spd Rdng – get up to speed with your reading’).

Does that mean that Italians – famous for their extravagant gesturing – think and remember better than the rest of us?
Check out the report in The Economist, 19 Feb 2009 for more information.

The PM launches the National Year of Reading 2008

Read more about the National Year of Reading. Download PowerPoint presentation on the National Year of Reading.

Look out for us in the Guinness Book of Records – Spd Rdng: The Speed Reading Bible
We’re sending our book Spd Rdng Bible to the Guinness Book of Records to be included for having the longest subtitle! Which is: “Learn speed reading techniques and habits with proven results for you to apply immediately to any reading material (books, reports, journals, manuals, textbooks, online texts, ebooks, etc) so you can read more, more quickly, more effectively, whether you are a professional, an entrepreneur, a student or teacher, a home educator, or simply interested in your own learning and personal development, in any subject (including business, medicine, law, IT, acting and languages), by showing you, among other things, how to use your eyes more efficiently, remember more, access your learning intelligence, focus on your purpose, take meaning from the minimum of input, find the hot spots of information you need, and put it into practice, with the result that you free up time and save money as you become more successful in business and life.”