PARTICIPANTES

How does the eye know what to focus on next? It doesn’t, but it is directed by the brain which does know. The brain not only receives what you consciously "see,”

but also subconsciously receives what is outside the immediate area of focus. With this information, the brain determines what to focus on next. This is how you can react to something coming into your field of vision before you actually focus on and consciously see it. Many people have flinched from a ball, rock, or other projectile coming from outside their normal field of vision and have been saved from harm by this mechanism. You see at both levels.

As you read, the brain determines what you need to see next in order to continue your understanding. Using this information, it then directs your eyes to the next piece of data you need, and so you advance step-by-step. This same process is utilized whether you are sweeping your eyes across the horizon, a room or a sentence.

These mechanisms are entirely automatic and below your level of conscious control.

Consciously, you pick the goal. You decide what you want to see, read and understand, and the brain automatically carries out a fantastic number of steps to achieve this goal.

But, this isn’t all there is to your perception. The focusing and moving of your eyes are just a start. You end up seeing a single picture, but it is made up of several parts.

There are more than six neural interchanges between the eye and the brain.

Between the retina and the optic nerve alone there is a great transformation. The data from 127 million cells must be compressed into one million nerve pathways. This information, now condensed to less than 1/100th of what it was, is transmitted along the optic nerve to the brain. Finally, all of the information is subconsciously pieced together to form the single picture that you consciously see.

How this picture is integrated and how you "see" it mentally is still a mystery to the scientific world, but bits and pieces of the process are understood. Most functions of the left side of the body — left hand, left foot, etc. — are controlled by the right side of the brain, or the right hemisphere. The other side of the body, the right side, is controlled by the left side of the brain. Thus, if a person suffers a stroke and the left side of the body is paralyzed, it is because the other side of the brain, the right hemisphere, has been damaged.

Brain-Vision Interaction

Information from the left side of each eye goes to the left hemisphere.

Thus, it "sees" the right visual field and controls the right side of the body. The opposite occurs for the other side.

Vision is different, however. It is not a simple crossover. The right sides of the images from both eyes go to the brain’s right hemisphere. The left sides of the images from both eyes go to the left hemisphere. These sides or hemispheres can function independently, but all this information is integrated somehow (possibly through the connecting corpus callosum) so that we "see" a single picture. No one yet knows exactly how this is done or how the information from both hemispheres is collated and integrated, but it appears to be different than many other brain-body control functions.

Then there is another factor: time. We already know it takes approximately 1/4 of a second for an image to register on the retina. This image will fade or "decay" in 1/2 to 1 second if nothing else comes into the eye. You can see this for yourself by staring at something, then closing your eyes and watching the image fade away. But "seeing"

is more than just having the image focus on the retina. The information must then be carried to the brain, registered and grasped or processed. This is called your short-term memory.

It takes approximately 1/4 of a second for a complete short-term memory cycle to occur. During this brief time, the information comes into your short-term memory, registers, then fades out. As it fades, the brain gets ready to accept more data, and the process repeats itself. The process works similarly for things that you hear, touch, etc.

This process of "seeing" is a complex one. It takes place through the integrated combination of conscious and subconscious perception. There are hundreds of steps in the process and billions of cells involved. It is difficult to isolate and work on an individual step in the process, because all the parts of the process must function together for words to be perceived and read.

Some courses try to isolate and work on individual parts of the perception process. We shall look at them, their techniques and machines in the next chapter. But, no matter what methods are used to increase reading speed, some data indicate there is an upper limit.

55 Calculating the time for the image to register, the number of words clearly seen, the time for the eyes to move to a new fixation point, and so on, various experts have concluded that the upper limit to reading speed is about 900 words per minute.

Anything faster than this means that you must skip some words; it is "skimming" for the key words or main ideas or "scanning" for answers to specific questions. Since you do not have time to see each word clearly above 900 wpm, and if reading is defined as seeing and registering each word clearly, you cannot "read" faster than this.

However, since this is about 4 times faster than the average reader reads, it allows a great deal of room for improvement. In certain types of material that are simple or familiar to the reader, it may be possible to go even faster. To skim faster is not too difficult, but to read faster is exceptional. Even so, 900 wpm is 2 to 4 pages per minute in most books. Not a bad rate for an "average" reader.

There is much skepticism in the academic community concerning claims of speedreading courses which advertise that their students end up reading thousands or tens of thousands of words per minute. Later we shall see a possible explanation for how some people might be able to do this, but studies show that such claims are outside the range of average readers. There appears to be an upper limit for most people and the 900 wpm plateau seems to be it. You may be one of the exceptions, but even if you are not, a speed of 900 wpm would put you among the world’s fastest readers.

This discussion of perception is here for more than just to have you practice reading for comprehension. Now you can see how many things have to happen before you can even perceive words, much less read and understand them. Reading starts as perception, but ends up as thought, and you cannot read faster than you can think. Not only does the information have to come in and be registered, but it must be digested and assimilated to be understood. This is an individual matter. Each individual has his own rate and upper limit for thinking and reading.

Looking at how high this upper limit is, you might well wonder why people read so slowly. We’ve discussed this briefly, but now let’s examine it in more detail.

Chapter 13