Video introduction to speed reading - the very first steps in speed reading in the middle ages
Speed reading video - the first ever speed reading coaching video
Watch this funny video of the first ever course in speed reading and problems with the introduction of an incunabulum [in-kyoo-NAB-yuh-luhm] - a book printed during the infancy of printing, especially one produced before 1501.
Reading reduces stress.
Just 6 minutes of reading a book reduces stress by 68%.
A study at the University of Sussex last year indicated that reading for even just six minutes reduced stress levels in study subjects by 68%. Reading was the most prefered method for reducing stress when compared to other typical stress reducing activities like listening to music or going for a walk. Losing yourself in a book causes all of your muscles, including the heart, to relax.
Listening to music reduced the levels by 61%, having a cup of tea or coffee lowered them by 54% and taking a walk by 42%. Playing video games brought them down by 21% from their highest level but still left the volunteers with heart rates above their starting point. Dr Lewis, cognitive neuropsychologist said: “Losing yourself in a book is the ultimate relaxation. This is particularly poignant in uncertain economic times when we are all craving a certain amount of escapism. It really doesn’t matter what book you read, by losing yourself in a thoroughly engrossing book you can escape from the worries and stresses of the everyday world and spend a while exploring the domain of the author’s imagination. This is more than merely a distraction but an active engaging of the imagination as the words on the printed page stimulate your creativity and cause you to enter what is essentially an altered state of consciousness.”
If you can’t get into a story in just six minutes to achieve relaxation? Make sure to keep a book with you at your work desk, on a trip or best on your iPod or iPhone. Just read a chapter while waiting for the kettle to boil or while waiting in a queue.
Soon librarians, like doctors will be prescribing a good book alongside exercise and a healthy diet.
Interactive books - the future of publishing now
There are at the moment four interactive book formats on the market. Here are the examples:
Slice (free) Penguin’s wetellstories.co.uk plays with narrative forms and is a pointer to the sort of books apps to come. slice is made up of a blog by a young girl (in reality, novelist Toby Litt), with councurrent entries by her parents as well as messages on Twitter. Be sure to click on them in the right order.
Fighting Fantasy (£1.79 each) These role-playing books, first published in 1982, are being turned into iPhone apps. The gameplay is unaltered: construct a character by rolling dice, then pick your way through a quest, turn by turn. Search for Fighting Fantasy in the iTunes App Store.
Dr Seuss’ ABC (£1.79) The 1963 chldren’s primer is also an iPhone app. Listen to the narration as the text light up. The American accent grates, however - especially when you come to the letter ‘zee’.
The Death of Bunny Munro (£9.99) Move over, audiobooks - here’s the videobook. This iPhone features footage of Nick Cave, the musician and author, reading his story aloud, complete with mood-setting music. But at nearly 1GB in size, you might need to delete some of his albums to make room for it. Try a free taster of The Death of Bunny Munro as the iPhone app
Prosperity for you in 2010 (with speed reading)
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
Scribble while learning - it will help you to remember
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.
Winter is good for learning
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…
Dunce’s corner banned - but how did it all start? What’s the origin of the dunce cap?
So 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 pupil to learn better.
The dunce cap can help with concentration
In the 13th century, a Franciscan monk and philosopher, John Duns Scotus, 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, 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.
100,000 words we encounter every day - evolution of reading
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 words that tell the story how we live - top words of the decade
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.
Reading Trends: Micro-summaries of books
Shortage of reading time sparks a trend of micro-summaries for people who don’t have time even to read regular summaries. I guess 24o characters could suffice to summaries almost anything as Twitter made it possible. Originally, started by Woody Allen’s famous quote “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It involves Russia.”
A few tongue-in-cheek macro-summaries of feel-good books:
>1 How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie: Simile. Listen. Look interested. Remember people’s names. Repeat.
>2 The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle: Stop thinking about the past, stop anticipating the future. In fact, stop thinking. Now.
>3 Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson: Because they keep moving the cheese, you really need to be ready for the cheese to move. Got it?
>4 Outliers: The Story Of Success by Malcolm Gladwell: Get born at the right moment, at the right place, to the right family and then still you have to work really hard. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell is number 6 on The 100 Best Books of the Decade according to The Times
Book summary of ‘Thin slicing’ of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers: The Story of Success