Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words by David Butler Page B

idea playback. To handle the more extensive and sophisticated information today, we’ll need to trade in listening to that old-time radio and switch over to watching a new HD flat screen.

    In other words, this is not your parents’ reading. If reading and writing has changed so much in the past, it would be incredibly vain of us to think that we, today, were the intended final receivers of this skill. Likewise, it would be shameful to think we were the first who could not improve it.
    Practice Exercise #7
    Remember, if you find yourself slipping into old reading habits as you practice, just stop a moment and then continue by concentrating more on meaning. As you continue, go as slowly as you need to until you can really get a grasp on the information. Take your time; you’re creating something new. This whole human ability to read may still be on the ground floor, and you are experimenting with using other parts of your brain to discover a better way of extracting meaning from text.
    And if it seems sometimes like you’re not quite sure how to conceptualize the ideas you are reading, and you feel like you’re not quite getting it, imagine how earlier readers felt when they first tried reading in their heads. That probably felt pretty strange too, and I’m sure they often felt impelled to start reading aloud again as they were used to doing. No reading advancements would have occurred if people weren’t willing to try something new, so read with an open mind, so you too can be part of this advancement.
    Just as with your previous six exercises, see each word-group in a single glance, imagine the meaning of each thought-unit, concentrate on pushing your comprehension instead of your speed, and be patient and focus on the ideas.
    When you’re ready, begin reading the first thousand words of
    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
     
    “TOM!”
    No answer.
    “TOM!”
    No answer.
    “What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!”
    No answer.
    The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked THROUGH them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for “style,” not service— she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:
    “Well, I lay if I get hold of you I’ll—”
    She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.
    “I never did see the beat of that boy!”
    She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and “jimpson” weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance and shouted:
    “Y-o-u-u TOM!”
    There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight.
    “There! I might ‘a’ thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What IS that truck?”
    “I don’t know, Aunt.”
    “Well, I know. It’s jam— that’s what it is. Forty times I’ve said if you didn’t let that jam alone I’d skin you. Hand me that switch.”
    The switch hovered in the air— the peril was desperate—
    “My! Look behind you, Aunt!”
    The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled on the instant, scrambled up the high board-fence, and disappeared over it.
    His Aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle laugh.
    “Hang the boy, can’t I never learn anything? Ain’t he played me tricks enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old