1. Warm-up exercise for Soft-Focusing:
a) First use your left hand, and then your right hand, to make Air (imaginary), Infinity Symbols six inches wide in space. Time spent: sixty seconds.
b) Now close your eyes and mentally visualize the production of a narrow infinity symbol moving down a lined page. Time spent: sixty seconds.
c) Notice that your eye movement patterns go from left to right and from right to right.
left in your field of vision.
d) Grab your RasterMaster or Pen and practice going down a page, one sentence width, using the Z for Zorro strategy. Time spent: sixty seconds.
A soft approach consists of three elements:
One, focus your eyes on the top half of the letters of the words in each sentence. It’s easier on the retina and increases reading speed by up to 35%.
Second, look indirectly at the words of the sentences, as if your eyes were binoculars; Caracoleros focus on one word at a time, as if their eyes were reading sentences through a microscope.
Third, mentally divide (separate) each sentence into three clauses of about three words each. Now use your RasterMaster or Pen to underline each sentence in three plots of approximately three words each. keep practicing
Triple the sentences on two pages.
a tough approach
To really understand Soft-Focus is to compare it to Hard-Focus. When we read one word at a time, watch TV, play video games, and use our word processor, we engage our narrow vision called Hard-Focus.
It is also called Tunnel-Vision, like a horse with blinders, used to eliminate what is left back and right back. When we communicate, we focus on the eyes of the other party in the conversation.
Hard-focus is seeing in a narrow spectrum, while Soft-Focus relaxes the muscles of our eyes and those of our face, neck and shoulders. Remember that snailing uses a Hard-Focus, and speed reading requires a Soft-Focus.
Minion with your Pacer: Practicing your Pacer strategies changes the way your brain works when reading.
Reprogramming your brain (through daily practice) causes comprehension structures to widen from one word wide to six words wide. Allows you to permanently triple your reading speed.
a) Your Pacer undermines the regressions’ snailing strategies, losing its place on the page and rereading sentences up to ten times per page.
b) Reduces subvocalization (mentally listening to each word), while reading by up to 66%; improve memory about 50%.
c) The Pacer causes your eyes to break up (group) the words in sentences, instead of focusing on one word at a time. Speed is improved by up to 33% when fragmenting with Soft-Focus, when constantly using Peripheral-Vision.
d) Vestibulo-Ocular-Reflex (fresh search tracking), is to move the eyes and head to obtain the clearest and sharpest vision.
e) Help your eye focus on the upper half of the letters in words, using soft focus.
f) Don’t worry about following the laser trace or the underlined movements of the pen or cursor because the eye follows a moving object. He’s on autopilot with peripheral vision.
g) It is instinctive (wired) that our eyes are motion detectors and it makes our reading speed up. His eyes play the game of catching up with the tracking marks of his RasterMaster, Pen, and Cursor.
Key Point: Your moving hand automatically manipulates the Pacer to move approximately 2.5 times faster than normal (random eye movements).
h) Practice pacing twice as fast as you can mentally – echo the words on the page. At 650 words per minute, subvocalization is not silenced, but is reduced by up to 66% because you cannot speak more than a maximum of 200 words per minute.
final words
Some students believe that these warm-up exercises are a waste of time.
First, they are required for only 21 days, after that, your eye movement patterns go into autopilot like habits.
Second, remember that you have programmed yourself to move in a snail’s fashion through daily reinforcement; it uses only about six degrees of its one hundred and twenty degrees of available field of view.
Snailing uses six degrees to read one word at a time, while Speed Reading uses up to thirty-six degrees, roughly six words in each chunk. If you choose to have a competitive advantage over your peers and live in the Fast-Lane in your career, we recommend that you possess the ability to read three books, articles and reports in the time that others can barely complete one.
With use, you will find your comfort zone with a speed reading strategy. Remember, speed reading uses all of the left-brain reading skills we call snailing, plus right-brain speed reading strategies. It is not about doing without horizontal linear reading, it is combined with vertical visual techniques called speed reading.
Practice is your secret weapon: use it or lose it. Every time you break a sentence into three parts, you’re creating an engram (memory trace), which excites your speed-reading neuropaths. After 21 days, you build a long-term habit and speed reading becomes your norm, and snailing is out of date.
You don’t become a fast reader by thinking about it or just mastering the scientific and technical details. It is not an intellectual exercise, any more than you can learn to drive a car by reading a book.
How do you reach speed reading nirvana? Practice, more practice, and then the Aha moment of personal insight has done it for 2 million more people.