Limitless

Jim Qwik talks about how we can harness the full potential of our brain and start to remove the many limits we have unconsciously imposed on ourselves. How to we learn to learn better and much more efficiently? How to take decisions faster and better? How to think and fundamentally change the way we solve problems? Amazing, isn’t it? And yet he has grounded all these phenomenal possibilities in a set of simple and practical changes we can implement easily. As for me, I discovered I am well on my way to speed reading already! Following Jim’s way of testing my reading speed, I found I can read up to 350 words per minute!

There are so many nuggets in this book that one byte size blog cannot do justice to it. So for today, I want to talk about two things: How reading makes your brain limitless and how to read more.

How Reading Makes Your Brain Limitless

• Reading kicks your brain into gear – When you read, you’re using many of your brain’s functions at once – vision, language and associative learning.
• Reading improves your memory – In a study conducted by Dr. Robert S Wilson at Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, reading was shown to have a meaningful effect on memory decline.
• Reading improves your focus – When we read, we inevitably focus on one thing, unlike browsing the internet and constantly checking our phones.
• Reading improves your vocabulary – The more you read, the more you are exposed to an expanded range of language and the use of that language in a variety of contexts.
• Reading improves your imagination – it prompts you to think creatively and imagine possibilities.
• Reading improves understanding – Reading exposes you to lives you’d never known before, experiences you’d never imagines, and modes of thinking far different from your own.

So, how to read more and fast? A really useful skill to develop is speed reading. It can save you hours of time and effectively double your reading, but also increase the retention of what you read. Not so sure about this last one? How can reading fast improve the retention? Isn’t it counter intuitive? Hmm… I thought so too until I read the reasons:

• When you read fast, you have to focus more on what you are reading. When you read slow, it does not engage your brain as much and it inevitably drifts – resulting in less focus and remembering less of what you read. Try it and reflect on what you have read recently and how much you remember.
• Another thing that happens when we read is that your mind is “saying” each word as you read. This effectively slows the reading process. We don’t really need to say each word as we read. This is likely our conditioning from when we first learned to read. But is we try to visualize what we are reading instead of mentally “saying” the words, we will not only be able to read much faster, but also retain it better. Our brain works much faster than our ability to speak and is also more stimulated by visuals.

I would love to hear what your own reading experiences have been and if trying these have changed your reading experience.