A few years ago I attended, after much deliberation, a course on photo reading. This is a technique designed to speed up your ability to read books, magazines and papers much faster than you currently can. As a minimum it will double your reading speed, beyond that it could speed your ability to read and retain information up to 100 fold. Sounds totally bonkers, and I have to admit I was very sceptical. These days I am regularly asked by folks interested in taking a photo reading course, is it for real, does it work, and did I actually learn how to do it. I thought I would write this blog to answer those questions permanently, but also now that I am 3 years into using it I think I feel I have an understanding of how it works.

Is Photo Reading Fact or Fiction ?

When I first heard about it I immediately dismissed it as complete cobblers, and even those people that said that they had been on the course and could do it, I wrote them off as simply a case of the emperors new clothes. You've paid several hundred pounds to go on the training course, you'll look a propoer charlie if you say it didn't work. Whilst the idea of being able to increase the rate at which I can intake written material appealed to me hugely as being deeply interested in Computers and Software systems there is no shortage of reading material, I continued to plod on in the same old fashioned way. 

A business networking invitation came through to me one day that included a free seminar introduction to Photo Reading with Clare Whiston. I figured if it was free It wouldn't do any harm to take a look. Clare took the group through what the course was about and also did a couple of exercises. One of the exercises compared two sentences of about 80 letters, one was just mumbo jumbo, the other said something like "The horses race with coats in the winter, except when the ground is frozen". Each sentence was flashed on the power point screen for about a quarter of a second. The first mumbo jumbo was shown and no one in the room recognised anything, then the second was shown and many of us in the room, me included, were able to read the whole sentence. Well that demonstrated to me that certainly the mind was much much quicker than the eye, and so I thought to myself "Hmm , maybe there is something in this. If I could do that with my technical reference books in my library it could be a really useful tool"

I decided to sign up for the course and contacted Clare to arrange it, and we met later that month with a small group to go through the 2 days of training. I decided that my approach would be simply to dispell any preconceived notions and adopt the training with an open mind, applying the techniques by rote and see what happened.  Well sure enough at the end of the 2 days, I had got the better part of it and was able to apply what I had learned. Now I have to say at this point it worked for me because I simply followed the system to the later doing every aspect of what I had been taught. Repeating the process each time I wanted to get a book into my head fast.

"Yes Photo Reading is a legitimate reading technique"

The answer to the question is yes Photo Reading is a legitimate reading technique that really does work. I would also state here that now that I have been doing it a while, I no longer go through the routine in with the same discipline. These days I can pick up any book I like, and Photo Read it, Read it in the old fashioned way or a mixture. I choose the technique that I'm going to use according to my need or desire.

OK So How does it work ?

Well for the official answer on that you need to speak to a professional Photo Reading Trainer such as Clare Whiston. However, here's the Rick Timmis thinking on it.

Photo Reading is like watching Rolf Harris paint a picture, or perhaps like looking at where you live on Google Earth. You start off with a general overview of the book, seeing its entire contents but only in very blocky resolution. Perhaps you know the covers, and Chapter headings, then you extract all the core sub sections for each chapter, followed by the key paragraghs. Following this you then go away for at least 24 hrs leaving the book alone. When you return and begin to activate the material you use a peice of paper and pencil to create a mind map. This is the process where the zooming in happens, and as you do it the contents and material within the book becomes comprehensible in your own mind. Now when you want to photoread a book really fast (like my Tweet the other day, where I read 395 pages in 20 minutes) you have to know what your purpose is, what;s the objective your after. I came back to my latest book "Version Control with Subversion" and spent 1 hour with it, pencil in hand and mapping as I went. At the end of that process I'd got everything I was looking to achieve in my head, plus a bunch of other stuff I wasn't expecting (more on that below). So thats 395 pages of factual technical information consumed in 1hr 20 minutes. I have no idea how that rates against your reading rate, but its incredible compared to what I used to be capable of using the techniques that I got taught in school.

Being hit with the Unexpected

As I mentioned in the paragraph above, you also find that in your mind there are plenty of unanswered questions lurking around. I often find that when photo reading my technical computer reference books I will get knocked off track as something I was looking for an answer to which was unresolved will suddenly get cleared up. When this happens it validates the whole photo reading process, because it shows that, there in the text are  the answers that I needed. The difficulty for me had always been being able to get through those type of books (lets face it, even for a hard core geek like me, bashing away at reference books with anywhere from 400 - 800 pages is a killer) Now with photo reading I can crunch through those books, and pop them back on my library shelf. The biggest benefit however, is that with every book I photoread it gets imprinted in my head, so I always know which book has got what information in it, and I know where to look when I want the word for word detail.

Where is it not useful ?

The only time I don;t find photo reading useful is when I want to treat reading like a conversation with friends. i,e when I am reading the latest copy of Linux Format, or Admin Magazine. In this case the reading is for pleasure and having the material unroll before me like walking along on a new deep pile carpet, leading me on journey. The same is true when reading a novel. In these cases the traditional techniques that I learnt at school serve me better.