SECTION 7: READ WITH YOUR EYES, NOT WITH YOUR INNER VOICE BECOME A SUPERLEARNER SECTION REVIEW SECTION 7 LECTURES ● How To Properly Test Your Comprehension Without Fooling Yourself ● How Most People Read: Subvocalization ● Saccades: Using Your Eyes As Effectively As Possible ● Improving Your Eye Span: Wider Saccades ● Final Thoughts On Saccades SECTION 7 SUMMARY SECTION 7: READ WITH YOUR EYES, NOT WITH YOUR INNER VOICE 2 KEY DEFINITIONS FROM SECTION 7 Subvocalization → When you say the words in your head while reading Saccades → The sharp, precise jumps that our eyes make when we shift our visual focus from one thing to another Fixation → The point between two saccades where the eye is stationary and focused Saccadic Blindness → When the brain selectively blocks visual processing during eye movements in such a way that neither the motion of the eye (and subsequent motion blur of the image) nor the gap in visual perception is noticeable SECTION 7 SUMMARY SECTION 7: READ WITH YOUR EYES, NOT WITH YOUR INNER VOICE 3 HOW TO PROPERLY TEST YOUR COMPREHENSION WITHOUT FOOLING YOURSELF ● It’s surprisingly easy to fool yourself into thinking that you remember everything, but often times, the brain is tricking us — it’s mistaking familiarity with actual retention ● Here’s an exercise that we recommend for periodically testing yourself and your comprehension: ○ After pre-reading and speed-reading a section of text, take a moment to jot down everything you remember on paper or a text document, and then compare your notes side by side with the text that you read. ● Doing this will keep you honest and shut down your confirmation bias, and you can learn a lot from the details you neglected or remembered incorrectly. ○ By doing this, you can determine if, for example, you need to pay a little more attention to names, or dates, or anything else. ○ Any time you miss a pertinent detail or concept, you should ask yourself why it happened. ■ Is it in the very beginning or the end of the text, where you might have been eager to start or finish and you lost focus? ■ Do you have a bias towards certain types of information? ■ Do you think that there were too many details in the text? ● Not all details are pertinent, and you should be able to differentiate which information is throwaway, and which information should be remembered ● If you added information that wasn’t there to begin with, ask yourself: why? ● You don’t need to quiz yourself every time you read, but you should try to do this exercise as often as possible. SECTION 7 SUMMARY SECTION 7: READ WITH YOUR EYES, NOT WITH YOUR INNER VOICE 4 HOW MOST PEOPLE READ: SUBVOCALIZATION ● When most people read, they actually hear the words in their mental voice, aka subvocalization. ○ We associate the words we see not with the meaning or content directly, but with the sounds they make in our mind and then, we translate those sounds into meaning or content. ○ By subvocalizing in this way, you’re taking high quality visual information and symbols in the form of written words, and you're degrading the quality or bandwidth. ● Subvocalizing readers can attain is about 250 words a minute (WPM). Speed reading starts at about 450 WPM ● When you lean on subvocalization during reading, you'll be more easily distracted, and you'll have lower comprehension and retention because you’re trying to perform the encoding, the storage and retrieval processes all at once. ● In speed-reading we use a more efficient process for absorbing the visual information by suppressing the inner voice ● Overview of how we’re going to learn to read differently: ○ First, we will absorb and encode information using saccades. ○ Next we’ll train our minds to quickly and automatically store information into our short term memory, and to prime it for long term memory using emotionally significant markers. ○ Last, we take periodic pauses at the end of pages or chapters and perform retrieval. Retrieval, or playing back the markers and reviewing them, moves information into the long term memory, and to maintain it while it’s there. ● By breaking this process apart into three separate steps, our entire learning and reading process becomes both more efficient, and more effective. SECTION 7 SUMMARY SECTION 7: READ WITH YOUR EYES, NOT WITH YOUR INNER VOICE 5 SACCADES: USING YOUR EYES AS EFFECTIVELY AS POSSIBLE ● Imagine two or three separate columns on the page, and train your eyes to jump between those columns ● Our eyes are actually incapable of making smooth, gradual movements unless they’re tracking a moving object. ● Saccades → The sharp, precise jumps that our eyes make when we shift our visual focus from one thing to another ● Fixation → The point between two saccades where the eye is stationary and focused ○ Average readers do 10 to 20 small saccades per line of text — one saccade and one fixation per word ● Saccadic Blindness → When the brain selectively blocks visual processing during eye movements in such a way that neither the motion of the eye (and subsequent motion blur of the image) nor the gap in visual perception is noticeable ○ In other words, you can’t process any information while your eyes are in motion. ● To minimize saccadic blindness, speed readers minimize the number of fixations per line to between two and three in a normal book, or four to five in a full width webpage. ○ This means making only 1 or 2 saccades per line on an average paperback book, or 3 to 4 on a full width webpage. ● Think in advance, during pre-reading, how many saccades will be necessary to efficiently cover the page SECTION 7 SUMMARY SECTION 7: READ WITH YOUR EYES, NOT WITH YOUR INNER VOICE 6 IMPROVING YOUR EYE SPAN: WIDER SACCADES ● One of the best ways to exceed the 450 word per minute limit is to improve your focal eye span. ○ We can train the eye to have a wider fixation to catch more words on the periphery of our fixations ○ If you improve your eye span you'll have to make fewer saccades on the average page, and you have better coverage and overlap on the fixations that you do make. ● The main way of doing this is to use something called Schultz Tables, which help improve your peripheral vision. FINAL THOUGHTS ON SACCADES ● Critical mistake that many people make: starting a saccade on the first word, and ending them on the last word of a line ○ Doing this causes you to waste precious eye span on either side on white space. ● Start saccades one or two words in and end them one or two words in ○ So if you imagine your three columns, you're actually starting in the middle of each of the three columns ○ This way, you have to make fewer saccades, and you'll notice that you're getting the information in much quicker. ● This skill of minimizing saccades was applicable to lots of situations in which I need to rapidly find something in a visual horizon, like finding products on the supermarket shelf or friends in the crowd at the beach SECTION 7 SUMMARY SECTION 7: READ WITH YOUR EYES, NOT WITH YOUR INNER VOICE 7 KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM SECTION 7 ● To properly test your comprehension, take a moment to jot down everything you remember on paper or a text document after pre-reading and speed-reading a section of text. Then, compare your notes side by side with the text that you read. ● Most people read with subvocalization, where they actually hear the words in their mental voice as they read. This limits people to reading at 250 words a minute. ● To read more effectively, we use saccades by imagining two or three separate columns on the page, and training our eyes to jump between those columns. ● We can use Schultz Tables to improve your focal eye span, which can help us exceed 450 WPM ● Make sure to start saccades one or two words in and end them one or two words in