Here is an interesting question for you….

Which does the reading - the eye or the brain?

I am not sure whether this is another one of those chicken or egg questions but it is something worth exploring if you are interested in learning how to read faster and absorb more.

You see the answer of course is that they are both involved in the process. 

You can't read something without seeing it (unless of course you are reading braille) and certainly there is no point in running your eyes across a page of words if your brain is going to be doing something else.

But have you ever experienced reading a page of text, maybe in a newspaper or perhaps a novel, and you get to the bottom of the page and you can't remember a thing about what you have just read?

I expect you have because I have yet to meet anyone who has not encountered that phenomenom.

So what has happened?

Well your eyes have been involved in the process (mechanically looking at each word - that's how we we taught to read of course) but for some reason the brain has not kicked in.

There are a variety of reasons that could be the cause…distractions, other things on our mind, what we are reading is boring etc but if we just isolate it to the reading process, you will find it is because you are reading too slowly.

Your amazing brain is capable of taking in massive amounts of information, processing it, analysing it, organising it, making decisions and acting on it in fractions of a second, often without us even realising it.

So when you read in the conventional manner just like we were taught to do in class, probably at a rate of about 250-350 words per minute (this range is based on tests I have done with hundreds of people attending my speed reading workshop), you are providing data to your supercomputer brain at a very slow rate indeed.

So in the eons between each word you read, the brain has time to go off and do something else before the next word comes along.

Often though, this is far more interesting that what you are reading and so explains why mechanically you have "read" with your eyes but because the brain has been elsewhere, you can't remember a thing about it.

So if you want to read faster and absorb more, you must learn to engage more of your brain in the process.

How do we do that?

Well by learning to read effectively…that's how.