Photoreading – Terribly Ineffective Speed Reading

PhotoReading is a little bit of a gray area in the world of speed reading. Is it an outright scam? Well, quite possibly, but there are still advocates and redeeming qualities to it. Is it a good tool for those of us in high school, college, etc.? No, probably not. Let’s take a look first at the pros and cons for us in school, then we’ll look at the scammy side of Photoreading, and finally at a better solution to incorporate photoreading into your speed reading routine without wasting time.

First off, straight to the down and dirty facts:

Learning Curve: Way more then other speed reading methods, Photoreading requires a large amount of training, exercises, and learning before you can even get to “photoreading” a book. If you get the “Classic” course, which by the way, costs $245, plan to spend about 10 hours going through the various course materials, doing the exercises, etc. If you get the Deluxe course, plan to spend double the money and at least another 4 hours on top of the Classic course, plus time to use the extra paraliminals.

Time Taken to Read: Plan to spend around 30-40 minutes for the “photoreading” part, depending on your experience level and length of the book. Then plan to spend another 40-3 hours for the “activating” part, depending on your experience level, length of the book, speed reading WPM, etc.

Understanding/Comprehension: Next to none for me personally. Although I haven’t photoread 500 books as advocates say that they have, I’ve read a good 15 at least, and never got any comprehension from the photoreading part. It almost all came to me during “activation”, where I pretty much just sped-read the entire book and mind mapped it.

Bottom Line: Don’t use Photoreading if you need to read a book in a day (they suggest waiting at LEAST one sleep cycle between photoreading and activation), and don’t use it if you need to comprehend the book, remember details, or anything like that. Basically, there is no reason that SchoolDestroyer.com users would want to use Photoreading.

Positive Things: Photoreading, during the course, DOES teach a good normal speed reading technique or two, and teaches mind mapping, a very effective notetaking process. It also does a very good job of teaching the correct mindset, but spends too much time there for it to be considered “efficient”.
Read on to see how to use basic Photoreading principles for EFFECTIVE studying!

Is Photoreading a Scam?

Depends on what you call a scam. It certainly does not live up to the promises made in the salesletter, it doesn’t work for a lot of people, and some even claim that it’s a copy off of the ZOB Speed Reading System. So it’s probably a scam. Let me give you some examples of RIDICULOUS claims made in the salesletter that the product does NOT live up to:

• We actually teach you to “mentally photograph” the printed page at 25,000 words per minute.
• You will even PhotoRead a dictionary, think of any word, and know where it is on the page!
• The PhotoReading technique is part of a greater system, called the PhotoReading whole mind system, which makes it very practical for every day use

(note that these are all copy/pasted).

SO HOW DO I USE PHOTOREADING PRINCIPLES FOR MY OWN GOOD?

Ahhh, here’s the juicy part of the post! The good stuff from Photoreading that we can extract and check out. First off, keep in mind these two principles that they teach:

1. Maintain an ideal state of mind for reading

2. Mindmap a book after you’re done reading it

You can easily apply both those techniques to your reading right away. If you’d like an abridged version of the actual “photoreading” process put to good use, in an effective and efficient reading system, check out [Reading Genius 2.0 by Ed Stracher]. In that course one of the steps you do when reading a book is “photocopy” it, which is essentially photoreading, except that it takes less then 2 minutes instead of spending 40 minutes on it. 2 minutes seems pretty efficient to me!

Otherwise, that’s it for this post on Photoreading, Sheele‘s speed reading solution that any schoolgoer should STAY AWAY from. But don’t fret, there are AMAZING speed reading solutions out there (including Reading Genius) that will make speed reading easy, fast, and effective for you (meaning comprehension!). We’ll talk about those pretty soon.