The Photoreading Whole Mind System

Rating:
Summary: Trust Me, It works!
Review: I was a bit skeptical myself when I first picked up this book, even though I am trained in NLP and know what the "other than consious mind" is capable of. I tried this system in good faith and have not been disappointed. In fact, I was delighted beyond my dreams. I recently finished a certification program which required thousands of pages of reading over six modules -- 6000 pages in total. I was able to finish a module a week, i.e. 1000 pages of material, digested and usable in only 3 days using this system. IT WORKS!!

If you are in law school, business school or other text-intensive program, I highly recommend that you at least check this system out for yourself. The time invested will more than triple itself in time saved, and the information will be available in ways you never imagined.

I cannot recommend this book and tape course highly enough.

Rating:
Summary: Crap
Review: This book and all the others that claim you can have a super memory or read zillion words per minute are absoulute crap, and if you buy into this, you're obviously a sucker for anything (I without a doubt was and may sound like a hypocrite). I suggest going to the library instead, and borrowing every type of book similar to this and trying it out. Then you'll know not to waste your hard earned $

Rating:
Summary: Great book!
Review: This book teaches a system for reading. Really has some nifty suggestions. I would often find that I could not see the forest for the trees after reading through all my books in a systematic way. NOW I am comfortable at skimming and diving into any chapter as I feel fit and I am able to tell what the book is about. Has done wonders in helping me read FASTER and DIFFERENTLY!.

Rating:
Summary: What a crock
Review: Its basically skimming. You can use this on magazines or newspapers, people do this anyways. Just because you can flip through a magazine in 5 or 10 mins doesn't mean you can read 25,000 wpm. If you think you're going to learn complex or detailed material or any academic material its bogus. This is a hoax, if it works you sure as hell won't learn to do it with this book anyway. If this actually worked I imagine the educators would jump all over this. The only one I see hyping this is Scheele.

Rating:
Summary: it really works
Review: Photoreading shows how to use your absorb information faster than normal reading. It worked for me.

Rating:
Summary: A Follow-Up Review to My Earlier One
Review: Okay, now I speak from a little more experience. I have been practicing "PhotoReading" regularly since writing the last review, and I can say with confidence that PHOTOREADING IS UTTER NONSENSE. The gimmick, that actual PhotoReading portion of the "whole mind system" is a brief, but utter waste of time.

Recognize that ALL these "accelerated learning" gurus HAVE to come up with some sort of gimmick to distinguish their brand of uselessness from all the others. PhotoReading is Scheele's gimmick. I tried his techniques in one of my graduate classes, and you simply don't get the detail from the text that he claims you do by PhotoReading, and "dipping and skimming."

No matter what these hucksters promise, there is simply no substitute for hard work.

Rating:
Summary: It's Voodoo
Review: I've been working at this "PhotoReading" think diligently now for several days. After I first looked at the book, I thought it was the most cockamamie thing I'd ever heard of, but then, perhaps more from hope than common sense, I began to change my mind. It seemed like there might be something to it...that, in theory, it *should* work. So I got the faith, so to speak, and plunged in.

The basics of PhotoReading are simple enough: you preview the text, page through the book rapidly, while maintaining an unfocused gaze at the pages (thus "nonconsciously," as the author puts it, photographing them), let it incubate for a while, then skim the book, and, if necessary, go back and speed read it. Very broadly, that's it.

Right there, it should be apparent that what is giving you a grasp of a text's contents--if anything is--are the repeated trips back into the text, not the hoodoo-ism of PhotoReading itself.

I've tried it. I have not received any benefit whatsoever from the PhotoReading itself, although, of course, repeated trips back to the text have been helpful.

One way the author is able to assert that you can read 25,000 words a minute is by, in fact, urging you NOT to read them. He maintains that only 4-11% of a text contains useful information. REALLY! I don't know what kinds of books he reads, but the books *I* read are hardly so much fluff!

The author seems to give himself a back door, too, in case you can't get PhotoReading to work for you. If PhotoReading doesn't work for you, it's because you care about the outcome. No kidding. In other words, for instance, graduate students who have a pile of books to cleave through should not worry about this...otherwise it won't work. That's like saying, "Don't think about a green banana"--the first thing you think about is a green banana. Of course people are going to be concerned about their mastery of a text...if they weren't, there would be no need for it, and the very people who MOST need to be able to PhotoRead will be least able to make it work.

This is a slim paperback, and an overpriced one at that. There is a measure of slick, salesman-like smarminess to it, too. For instance, the back cover loudly proclaims, "Includes a free coupon for two powerful audio tapes, _Memory Supercharger_ and _Personal Genius_." Okay, cut to the coupon: Immediately, you see that, literally, the COUPON is free (as most in this world are), and that the tapes are FAR from free! Furthermore, throughout the book, and for 7 full pages at the end, Paul Scheele is peddling his other services.

All this notwithstanding, there is *some* useful information here. As an introduction to memory/learning techniques like Mind Mapping, it serves as an adequate introduction. PhotoReading is not any substitute, however, for true speed reading. I will continue to work at this, though, just in case...and if I change my mind about this technique, I will retract what I have said here with the same stridency with which I am offering it now.

Rating:
Summary: Hmmmmmm, a curious book
Review: Very interesting debate this one, so I'm sitting on the fence with 3 stars.

First, may I just point out that two of the other reviews on this book were written by "[e-mail]"

Why you're writing two reviews I do not know. You also say that you bought the book "yesterday" in the review dated 12/2/99 and "four days ago" dated 18/2/99. Telling porkies are we?

Anyway. The book. I only bought it a few days ago and, as such, have not tried photoreading a great deal. However, I do know a reasonable amount as concerns the mind, and I am slightly sceptical.

In my opinion, photoreading is not a reading system within itself. Instead, it appears to recipricate the function of "previewing" and "scanning/skimming" from speed reading. I do not believe that simply photoreading a book and then asking yourself questions about said book will result in a detailed knowledge of the book.

If it does work then it is probably best used as an enhanced previewing method to be carried out before speed reading the book. Because photoreading alone cannot be enough to understand a book well (without techniques mentioned within such as activation and super reading [come on Scheele, just call it speed reading]), the authors claims that one can read a book at speeds of at least 25,000 words per minute are wrong. Perhaps one may photoread a book at that speed; I do not believe that it is the same as reading the book at that speed.

The book's layout and presentation could be better and the ambiguous examples that the author quotes as success stories are hardly convincing: 'a college proffesor photoread a book before he went to bed and dreamt the speech he needed to give the next day'. Things are not always clearly explained and the concepts themselves are vague.

All in all, it's an interesting book and I would buy it again to satisfy my curiosity. If I learn to photoread, I'll write another review for you all and proclaim the book as a 5 star wonder. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I would far more strongly recommend Tony Buzan's "The Speed Reading Book": a very well laid out, nicely thought out book with lots of explanation (ones which make sense though) and excercises. It's not only a great reading aid (easily the best I know of) but a fascinating book too. THAT is a 5 star book.

Rating:
Summary: Worth every penny!
Review: I read this book with an open mind, and the techniques are working. And if they can work for me, they can work for anyone. If you're having trouble, just contact [e-mail] , they'll help you out. I also reccomend Paraliminal Tapes, which you can learn about ...

Rating:
Summary: Good Study Skills. Not sure about the "photo" part.
Review: This book definantly tells you how to have some good study / reading skills. Essentially, it tells you to do stuff that I believe most people do when they actually like a book and are excited about reading it. For instance, you read the back cover, the leaflet, and perhaps the table of contents and even the introduction. Then if you are really excited to get started you may even skim the first couple of paragraphs and key charts / pictures in each chapter. Some people do all this without even leaving the bookstore! This strategy makes the concepts more familiar. Familiarity breeds liking. Liking breeds motivation, comfort and fun. This is the ideal learning state. However, NONE OF THIS IS ANY NEW NEWS. The crux of the system is the photoreading part. And I have NO IDEA IF IT WORKS OR NOT. I'd really like to believe it does, but I have my doubts. How can you learn something when your eyes are not even focused? Paul says to look at the "shape of the text," "by pretending your focus point is behind the book. However, this makes the text quite blurry. I find it very unlikely that you could assimilate information that you aren't even focused on. I think the standard example to counter this would be "You are at a party, talking to one of your friends, and not paying attention to other conversations. All of a sudden you hear your name being mentioned from across the room, and your brain alerts you to this being important, even though you weren't 'conscious' of paying attention." Fine, except that I think the equivalent example in reading would be if you turned to a page where the text WAS ALL OF A SUDDEN IN HUGE FONT AND ALL CAPS. Then you pay attention and absorb. Otherwise your brain skips over it as 'unimportant' and you don't absorb. Anyway, if I ever figure out the photo part, I will write another review for 5 stars. If someone wants to let me know what I'm doing wrong, please e-mail me at: [e-mail]