Power of details

One of the things that limit our reading speed is the speed of creating markers. If we were required to create a marker per detail within a text, we would end up with a choice between 250wpm at 80% retention and 1000wpm at 20% retention. In fact, one of the reasons that other speedreading courses do not work is the fact that students do generate a marker per detail. Instead, we urge our students to generate ~2 markers per paragraph and ~5 details per marker. This way our students can read 1250wpm at 80% retention.

What are the details we generate per marker? First of all, we base all details on information readily available in the text either directly or contextually. We can generate color and size of the marker object according to (1) type of content: emotional/factual/innovative etc and (2) importance of the paragraph for us.  We can add texture according to materials mentioned in the text (money=metallic, energy=oily, document=paper etc). Then we add some sort of animation: pulsating, growing, shining, contracting etc according to the type of modifications the marker is subjected to. Next we choose if the marker should be of something new or something old, something familiar or exotic etc. All those things transform a generic marker into a specific one.

In fact, the process of adding details should be fast, intuitive and specific to the text we are reading. Consider the conversation below.

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SL:

Just to make sure I’m creating and linking my markers right, I’ll paste an excerpt from a book I’m currently reading

“Similar questions have been asked by visionaries throughout history, and many techniques have been developed to explore and develop our potentials. One of the most effective methods is also one of the most ancient—yoga.

The word yoga is a cognate of yoke, meaning “to combine, connect, or unify.” What is said to be unified is the personal self and the universal Self. This rarified state is a goal of nearly all esoteric practices. It is also known asachieving a state of illumination, or to be awakened or enlightened. The shift from everyday awareness to an ecstatic form of consciousness gives one direct access to knowledge of unmediated Reality.”

The bold and italicised phrases are what I’d consider important concepts. For example, for yoga, I conjure up an image of an old man wearing a white loincloth practising yoga underneath a tree. The word yoga is a cognate of yoke, which I imagine as an egg yoke. For the unification of the personal self and Universal self, I imagine the egg yoke transforming into a big silhouette of the old man. For illumination, I imagine the old man becomes a bright white light.

So to link these markers, I imagine the old man practising yoga underneath a tree, then, an egg yoke falls from the sky and transforms into a big silhouette of the old man who then lights up in a bright white light. Any suggestions to improve?

Lev Goldentouch:

ADD DETAILS

“Unity” – egg is a symbol of unity, see e.g. golden egg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahma

“throughout history/ancient” may be easily encorporated in man’s age

“Potential” is some sort of height at which the yoke is positiones

The sentence “The shift from everyday awareness to an ecstatic form of consciousness gives one direct access to knowledge of unmediated Reality.” is important and dense.

“The light causes the man to open eyes and his insight is like secondary explosion of light…”

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If we need more than 5 details, better add another marker. For example, we may need specific markers to encode people and dates. If inside a paragraph we need a name, date and place, we will need much more than 2 markers. Fortunately, markers for dates are easy to create after some practice with PAO technique. Markers for names and places are hard to create, but once we created them we can reuse them in all the text we read as some sort of dictionary. We do not need to recreate the name and place markers each time we see them, we just reuse readily available imagery. These additional markers need to connect to the current marker within some sort of linking system. Typically I just put stickers on the original paragraph’s marker and link the stickers to the auxiliary markers.

The links that we use to bind the markers may also hold additional information. We can imagine the links as some sort of physical strings holding metadata (color, strength, elasticity, new/old) and logical basis (what forces are applied on the string: pull/push, symmetric/asymmetric) of nature of the association. 

Advanced students can process some details in parallel,  further increasing the reading speed and comprehension.  For example, we can generate a compartment (with door) within the main marker and put within the compartment 4-5 auxiliary markers already available from the domain knowledge. These way we encode examples to some rule within the rule and without paying the penalty of creating extra markers.

When creating markers we are supposed to generate ~2 markers per paragraph, but our texts are much denser. What do we do? We add details and auxiliary markers!