Acquiring New Proficiencies through PhotoReading

by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Winsights No. 100 (November/December 2007)

Book art ©2007 Jupiterimages Corporation

When it comes to information resources, our wonderful age of the Internet has given us Google. Need I say more?

Well, yes, I do need to say more, because in addition to the current jungle-full of information resources both old and new, I experienced a new resource in August 2007, at a remarkable conference on PhotoReading.

PhotoReading, as some of you know, was developed in 1985 by Paul Scheele, and it enables many of its practitioners to absorb information at rates and speeds well above 25,000 words per minute. Many authorities still reject the feat as preposterous and neurophysiologically impossible, closing their eyes and shrugging away the many demonstrations of comprehension of such PhotoRead contents by Pete Bissonette and others. At the 2007 conference, I found myself coming close to the level of performance of Pete Bissonette, along with about half of my ninety-five fellow attendees!

If you get the chance to learn PhotoReading, take it. If you get the chance to learn the newer technique of energy-orienting on a book, or on a stack of books, to find the pages where your key information is, take it. Especially, if you get the chance to be at a function where you can learn and practice Syntopicon reading.

I’ll have to let Learning Strategies Corporation, directly or through PhotoReading, describe most of Syntopicon to you. One aspect of Syntopicon is your PhotoReading through whole stacks of books with your intentions centered on one theme, or one question or problem. You find entire expertises welling into your mind and capabilities.

I had known of, and occasionally practiced a little of, PhotoReading over the past decade. Attending this PhotoReading conference made this a wholly different experience and technology. I have long been fairly quick at picking most things up, but this blew me away.

This experience was modeled on the frequent occasions when Pete Bissonette and others have been demonstrating PhotoReading — and immediate full comprehension of the contents of that PhotoReading — on television, usually in the format of a half-hour talk show.

So, with a bit of skeptical quirk to my lips, I set to PhotoReading one of the texts made available there, which happened to be a book on a very non-standard therapeutic system and program, attempting to master its contents within thirty minutes and then to answer questions about it from other participants at my table.

Much to my surprise, I fully understood the theory behind the method, and the bases for that theory, within something like eight minutes, and in detail the various practices and techniques in another eight to ten. By the end of the thirty minutes, I felt I could coach, or perform therapy on, a client or patient using that new method as well as could anyone who had been extensively trained in it.

Two days later, with a quick glance at my notes necessitated by my having done the same thing again with another non-standard therapy text and program to make sure I kept the practices of one sorted from those of the other, that confidence of such proficiency in that method was still with me.

The next day, I did indeed do that same thing again with another non-standard therapy system and text, with pretty much the same results. And people all around me were getting similar results.

No, I have no desire nor intention or expectation of doing either those or any other therapies; I’m way too happy with doing what I’m doing. But I’m seriously toying with the notion of investing a half hour to an hour — somehow to force the time from my overloaded schedule — to acquiring one or more competencies per week, from field to field to field.

A Ph.D. now, finally I think I’m ready to start college now! If I gave my professors a hard time before, methinks I could make it a bit more interesting for them now!!!….. Seriously, this amazingly easy route to acquiring new proficiencies is something to consider, whether or not you are presently involved with education or training.

And if we succeed, either on our own or with partners, in getting our own educational project going, whether an enrichment project, a remedial project, our own school, or even Renaissance University, two features found within it will include:

  1. PhotoReading, to acquire a substantial background from literature like that which used to accompany degree programs in Arts and Sciences. And, most definitely,
  2. Syntopicon PhotoReading, centered on each major theme or topic in each course, throughout much or most of the curriculum.

(To see other unique educational features intended for schools or educational programs created by Project Renaissance, please read the Prospectus.)

When you compare what you can do with PhotoReading’s 30-minute-proficiency format, with Syntopicon and other PhotoReading features — when you compare these things with the alternatives, these also make things enormously easier and more effective.

Most important, such resources bring within your immediate reach the capability and competence for almost any situation. You no longer have to write off entire sectors of life possibility as being something you can never experience because you haven’t the ability to handle them. There’s a lot of stuff you no longer have to put up with:  you can change situations, and you can change situations for the better.