Reading faster and more efficiently[ part 2]

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 Taking care of your eyes

You do not read with eyes at all, but with your mind. Your eyes are only a vehicle of transmission. They flash the visual impulses that your brain interprets and your mind reacts to. Eyes are amazing; light enters your eyes through the lens which focus it onto the retina. The retina has about 15, 00, 00,000 (15 crore) separate light receivers. These light receivers process lakhs and lakhs of light energy particles per second.

Caring for your eyes

Here are some simple beneficial hints to help relax your eyes when studying or concentrating.

1)   Light

Daylight is the best for you eyes. When there is not enough sun light use comfortable bright light.

2)   Breathing

When we concentrate, we tend to hold our breath or we stop breathing for a short period. This creates tension in our eyes and our bodies. When you study or concentrate, make sure that your breathing is relaxed, deep and rhythmic.

3)   Blinking

We naturally close and open our eyes and it is called “blinking”. Like breathing, we tend to stop blinking when concentrating. So make sure that you blink when you concentrate. Also occasionally, look away and blink a few times to relax your eyes.

4)   Palming

Whenever your eyes are doing a reasonable amount of work, give them regular small rests by closing your eyes and cupping them in your hands. This is best done by placing the base of hand on the forehead. The hand should not touch the eye but simply form a little dome over it. During this rest period it is useful to imagine pure black, as this also gives the mind a rest from visual processing.



Experience your mind power as a magnet
Your mind is capable of getting exactly what it wants. Many psychologists have called the brain a “goal seeking mechanism”. From now on, have a purpose in mind when ever you read anything. When you have a specific goal, your mind will find it.
Reading eye movements
When asked to show with their forefingers the movement and speed of their eyes as they read most people move their fingers along in smooth lines from left to right, with a quick jump from the end of one line back to the beginning of the next. They normally take between a quarters to one second for each line.
Speeding up
  1.  Skipping back over words can be eliminated, as 90% of back skipping and regression is based on apprehension and is unnecessary of understanding. The 10% of words that do need to be reconsidered can be noted in mind map form or can be intelligently guessed, marked and looked up later.
  2. The time for each fixation can be reduced to approach the ¼ second minimum. The reader need not fear that this to short a time, for his eye is able to resist as many as five words in one hundredth of a second.
  3.  The size of a fixation can be expanded to take in as many as three to five words at a time.
Advantages of faster reading
  • We can read 6 words per fixation and make 4 fixations per second. That means we can read 24 words per second which means 1440 words per minute.
  • An advantage for the faster reading is that his eyes will be doing less physical work on each page. Rather than having as many as 500 fixations tightly focused per page does the slow reader, he will have as few as 100 fixations per page, each one of which is less muscularly fatiguing.
  • Another advantage is that the rhythm and flow of the faster reader will carry him comfortably through the meaning, whereas the sloe reader, because of his stopping and starting, jerky approach, will be far more likely to become bored, to lose concentration, to mentally drift away and to lose the meaning of what he is reading. 
Check the following link for part 1

 

 

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