Reading With the Right Brain: Read Faster by Reading Ideas Instead of Just Words (21 page)

Three great friends
I had
in Puddleby
in those days.
One was Joe,
the mussel-man,
who lived
in a tiny hut
by the edge
of the water
under the bridge.
This old man
was simply marvelous
at making things.
I never saw a man
so clever with his hands.
He used to mend
my toy ships for me,
which I sailed
upon the river;
he built windmills
out of packing-cases
and barrel-staves;
and he could make
the most wonderful kites
from old umbrellas.

Joe would sometimes
take me
in his mussel-boat,
and when the tide
was running out
we would paddle
down the river
as far as
the edge of the sea
to get mussels
and lobsters to sell.
And out there
on the cold
lonely marshes
we would see
wild geese flying,
and curlews
and redshanks
and many other
kinds of seabirds
that live
among the samphire
and the long grass
of the great salt fen.
And as we
crept up the river
in the evening,
when the tide had turned,
we would see
the lights on Kingsbridge
twinkle in the dusk,
reminding us of tea-time
and warm fires.

Another friend
I had
was Matthew Mugg,
the cat’s-meat-man.
He was
a funny old person
with a bad squint.
He looked rather awful
but he was really
quite nice
to talk to.
He knew everybody
in Puddleby;
and he knew
all the dogs
and all the cats.
In those times
being a cat’s-meat-man
was a regular business.
And you could see one
nearly any day
going through the streets
with a wooden tray
full of
pieces of meat
stuck on skewers
crying,
“Meat!
M-E-A-T!”
People paid him
to give this meat
to their cats and dogs
instead of
feeding them
on dog-biscuits
or the scraps
from the table.

I enjoyed going round
with old Matthew
and seeing
the cats and dogs
come running
to the garden-gates
whenever
they heard his call.
Sometimes
he let me
give the meat
to the animals myself;
and I thought this
was great fun.
He knew a lot
about dogs
and he would tell me
the names
of the different kinds
as we went
through the town.
He had several dogs
of his own;
one, a whippet,
was a very fast runner,
and Matthew
used to win prizes
with her
at the Saturday
coursing races;
another,
a terrier,
was a fine ratter.
The cat’s-meat-man
used to make a business
of rat-catching
for the millers
and farmers
as well as
his other trade
of selling
cat’s-meat.

My third great friend
was Luke the Hermit.
But of him
I will tell you
more later on.

I did not
go to school;
because my father
was not rich enough
to send me.
But I was extremely fond
of animals.
So I used to
spend my time
collecting birds’ eggs
and butterflies,
fishing in the river,
rambling through
the countryside
after blackberries
and mushrooms
and helping
the mussel-man
mend his nets.

Yes, it was
a very pleasant life
I lived
in those days long ago—
though of course
I did not
think so then.
I was
nine and a half
years old;
and,
like all boys,
I wanted to grow up—
not knowing
how well off
I was
with no cares
and nothing to worry me.
Always I longed
for the time
when I should be allowed to leave my father’s house, to take passage in one of those brave ships, to sail down the river through the misty marshes to the sea—out into the world to seek my fortune.

One early morning in the springtime, when I was wandering among the hills at the back of the town, I happened to come upon a hawk with a squirrel in its claws. It was standing on a rock and the squirrel was fighting very hard for its life. The hawk was so frightened when I came upon it suddenly like this, that it dropped the poor creature and flew away. I picked the squirrel up and found that two of its legs were badly hurt. So I carried it in my arms back to the town.

When I came to the bridge I went into the musselman’s hut and asked him if he could do anything for it. Joe put on his spectacles and examined it carefully. Then he shook his head.

“Yon crittur’s got a broken leg,” he said—“and another badly cut an’ all. I can mend you your boats, Tom, but I haven’t the tools nor the learning to make broken squirrel seaworthy. This is a job for a surgeon—and for a right smart one an’ all. There be only…

Chapter 12: Habits

Do you think bad habits are causing you to be a slow reader?

Do you think your reading would improve if you could stop those bad habits?

What are these habits?

• Subvocalizing?
  
• Regression?
  
• Mind-wandering?
  

Of course these things are
associated
with slow reading, but are they the
cause
?

Or are they just
symptoms
?

Subvocalizing

Subvocalizing is the internal speech that we often do when reading. Even when not making a sound, or even moving our lips, there is often a tendency to still at least say the words in our heads.

But why do we subvocalize? Is it really true that it’s just a habit we picked up in third grade when our teachers asked us to read aloud? Maybe it started out that way, but I’m sure there are plenty of habits from third grade we, thankfully, no longer have. So why would we still have this one?

First of all, subvocalizing is only a symptom of poor comprehension, but it also develops into a habit. It’s more than just a habit though; we hang on to subvocalization because it’s a
useful
habit! This is because it’s an effective way of
increasing comprehension
. When something is difficult to understand, it can be a big help to verbalize it internally—or even out loud. This verbalizing accomplishes two things:

1. The additional sensation of sound makes information stick in our minds better.
   
2. Verbalizing automatically adds intonations that divide information into meaningful packets.
   

Both of these are very helpful for improving comprehension.

The additional sensation of sound (even internally) makes a stronger impression on our conscious mind and short-term memory. Our conscious mind pays more attention when it hears something, and spoken words also seem to stick around longer in our short-term memory.

Sounding out text also helps you listen for subtle changes in pitch that we normally use in speech. When we speak, we involuntarily add vocal inflections to our words. Changes in pitch are automatically used to indicate where each segment of thought begins. These intonations are done so naturally that we are usually unaware of them—they just happen as we speak sentences the way we think they
ought
to sound.

As an example, verbalize the following sentence:

Listen carefully—to the first word—of each phrase.

This is not the only way you could divide this sentence, but however you divide it, you will verbally indicate where you want each phrase to begin, by slightly lowering your pitch on the first word of the phrase. Lowering your pitch does not mean speaking more quietly or with less stress, but simply dropping your pitch to a lower note.

On a musical scale, the intonation would rise and fall something like this:

The lower tone of the underlined words indicates to the listener that this is the beginning of a new piece of information, a new thought-unit. These audio clues are obviously not available in text, so we have a tendency to verbalize to ourselves when we read so that we can then listen for them. This process helps us break sentences into bite-size, meaningful phrases, to make the sentences easier to understand.

So subvocalizing is actually a tool, more than a habit. Or in this case, since it also slows us down, this tool could be considered more of a crutch.

But you’ll find the more you visualize and focus on the real meaning of what you read, the less you will want to subvocalize. You won’t even have to try not to—you just won’t need it. It’s hard to know for sure if subvocalizing completely goes away or if you just don’t notice it anymore, but you’ll begin ignoring sounds and even words. They will be banished as irrelevant thoughts. The sounds will fade away, the words will become invisible, and you will only be aware of ideas and concepts.

Of course, verbalizing will still remain an occasional part of your reading—in some reading more than others. For example, verbalizing is always useful when learning new words. When you first learned to read, all the words were new, but of course you are no longer just recognizing words—you’re now recognizing
ideas
.

Regression

Regression is simply going back and rereading. There are two types of regression:

1. Backward saccades
   
2. Mind-wandering
   

Saccades are just eye movements. The eyes do not move smoothly over text, but in imperceptibly quick little jerking motions. These are saccades. A backward saccade is when the eyes, which normally move from left to right, jump back to the left again. With an average reader, about one out of four saccades is a jump backward. It’s an automatic response to try to make more sense of a current piece of text by jumping back to reconnect it within the context of prior text.

The second type of regression is when you go back even further, several words or sentences. You do this because you either didn’t clearly understand something, or your mind temporarily found something more interesting to think about, or you just noticed the text was no longer registering—your mind “blanked out.” When this happens, you need to go back far enough to pick up the thread of the topic again.

You can’t just blame your disobedient mind for regression. Maybe your mind had nothing to do and simply got bored. Your mind is made for thinking; it’s all it does. If you give it nonsense, something it doesn’t understand, or something repetitive or boring, it will likely look for something else to think about.

If you are reading with poor comprehension, you simply can’t expect your mind to continue paying attention. If your reading is all sound and no content, what can you expect? Who could pay attention to “blah, blah, blah” without falling asleep or wandering off?

Just like verbalizing, both types of regression are also only symptoms. Regression is no more a habit than bending down to pick up a dropped wallet. You bend down and pick up the wallet only because you previously dropped it. Rather than trying to break the “habit” of bending down, you would try to stop dropping the wallet in the first place.

To stop regressing, you must stop your reason for doing it. And what causes regression is reading without comprehension. Regression will stop automatically when you conceptually understand the ideas and make meaningful connections to the information you are reading.