Information overload. The world is changing rapidly. New innovations are taking place in every job, every educational system and all aspects of our healthcare system. How do we keep up with this steady stream of information that is required for us to keep pace with the rapidly changing society? We have books to read, reports to read, and classes to attend. How do we keep up with the demand on our time and mental resources? If you have ever watched a child who is a poor reader spending three minutes just trying to read a paragraph, you will understand how painful keeping up can be. When the first word is read on the paragraph after three minutes the child would have forgotten what the first word even was. By the time that he was finished he probably cannot even remember what the paragraph was about. Even if you are reading 500-600 words a minute, this is incredibly slow and it will take you forever to gather all of this information is required for you to keep pace with today’s changing times. 

The only way that you can keep up with this information is for you to increase your reading speed. Just as a child that is only able to read ten words a minute is able to increase their reading speed with much practice and a lot of patience on the part of the teacher, you also can increase your reading speed to 1000-4000 words per minute. This would mean that you would be able to read an average size book in less than an hour. Many people say that this is impossible. However your brain can take in 700 pieces of information a minute. You can read 700 letters, 700 sentences, 700 paragraphs, or 700 pages. We normally do not read individual letters or individual words. What we read is a combination of letters or a combination of words that signal a complete thought or idea to our brain. A paragraph is described as a complete thought.

If you are able to read a paragraph at a single glance, then a whole page would just take four to six seconds to read. Studies have found that the faster that you read, the better your retention you have of the material. This is because in order to read at this speed you must eliminate other thoughts and other distractions that are going on in your head. This helps you to focus on what you are reading and not the squirrel that is outside in the tree. 

In order to increase your ability to read faster, you will need to be able to shut out or exclude outside noise. This is what meditation/mindfulness is all about. It is very difficult for the Human Brain to multitask. If you are trying to write a romantic novel while calculating the square root 5,000,328 in your head, this may not work out very well. If you focus on one task at a time, you will be able to deal with it easier.Try rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time as you are reading, and this will be difficult as your brain cannot multitask.  In order to read faster you will need to limit your physical movements in order to focus on what you are reading. 

When you sit down to read, make sure to remove all distractions. Make sure that you are sitting comfortably, and adjust the area so you can focus. You can place your hand on your throat or your lips to make sure that you are not silently forming the words as you read. If you need help to insure that your tongue doesn’t move, put your finger in your mouth (please wash it first). By placing the front tip of the tongue between the teeth and the roof of the mouth, this also will help keep the tongue still. Any physical movement will slow your reading process down. This is why an electronic computer can process information a lot faster than a mechanical computer. Its because it has fewer moving parts. 

All forms of communication require that we turn ideas and thoughts into pictures. This is why a picture is worth a thousand words. As we are reading we want to turn these words that are in front of our eyes into a picture. When we read the word apple, you should visualize an apple in your brain. You should not be trying to pronounce the word in your language, you should just see pictures. Your focus should be on these pictures. We are training the eyes to see the words so our mind can paint the story. These pictures will tell us a story, the same way a comic strip will put all of the pictures together to give us a story. Seeing words and verbalizing them in our head will only slow us down. Just as swimming through molasses will be a lot slower than swimming through a pool of fresh water. Visualizing what we are reading will drastically increase the amount of information that we can take in.

Never go back when reading because you missed a word or a point, only go forward. Going backward is like a young boy going to school walking ten feet forward and eleven feet back picking up rocks or bottle caps that he thought may have been arrowheads. If you miss an idea, discipline yourself to go back and start the chapter over. This will help you to be more diligent and alert to what you are reading. If you are told that somewhere in town a suitcase with a million dollars in it has been stashed, and the first person that finds it get’s to keep the cash, you would not let yourself be distracted by a coffee break, a hamburger, or a squirrel. You would rapidly scan every possible location and then move onto the next location. When you are reading you will need to be scanning and looking for valuable pieces of information as you would be looking for the suitcase. You cannot afford to miss these important pieces of information, so you will need to keep yourself focused, and to understand why you are reading the information. 

Everything does not need to be read fast. If you want to read poetry, something that catches your heart, or sonnets, and savor the sound of the words, and the rhythm that they have, then you can take all of the time in the world. Popular songs and tunes contain only two or three lines and a chorus that is repeated over and over again. These can take anywhere from two to ten minutes, and we find them quite enjoyable. This is different than us reading information to gather more information. The speed at which you read is more important when you are trying to take in and process more information. Also if you need to do a refresher course on what you have learned, being able to read several thousand words a minute will help you get back to a current state of mind. 

One of the best ways to start the exercise is to find some speed reading apps for your smartphone, tablet, or computer. Some have more features, some have less, some are expensive. They all basically do the same thing. Find the one that fits your personality that you enjoy playing with. You can spend ten minutes with these or you can spend ten hours. This is up to you. Not everyone needs to read at the same speed or at the same level. There are many paths on The Road to Kaivala!