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Speed Reading Rules

Are you interested in getting more smarts, personal growth, and persuading others? The most original research appears in the journal of Psychological Science. No gimmicks or complicated rigmarole, just baby-easy strategies to produce behaviors that improve your memory and learning skills permanently.

Here's a quote from American psychiatrist (M.D.) Milton H. Erickson.

All your life you have been learning things, transferring that knowledge to your
unconconscious, and using, automatically, the end results of the learning.

Procedural Memory

Driving your car, using your word processor and swimming are all sequential (series organizations), step-by-step procedures. Remember back when you learned
to drive your first car, it was hard and complicated (in-the-beginning) to put it all together, right?

Now you do not even think about driving, you operate your car on autopilot,
with an automatic flow from start-driving-stop. Sure, repetition turned driving, typing, and surfing the computer into a habit.

The fancy word is Habituation meaning after you consciously learned how to drive, it was saved onto your brain's hard drive for long-term memory. You adapted (it is called Adaptation) procedural processes like driving and tying your shoe laces so well, your brain runs software programs, and avoids consciously thinking about all the separate steps involved.

Smart Alecks Only

The three main steps your brain uses to save new procedural skills are:

a) cerebellum
b) basal ganglia (nuclei)
c) ocularmotor skills

Once your neurons create the circuitry for a new skill, your brain stops thinking (cognitive processing) about the steps and goes robotic. The purpose is not to use
up your available broadband (bits of information per second) for knowledge or
skills already on disk. Yes, just like a computer.

Hand Movements Create New Ideas

Gestures are a serious form of communication and direction giving. Get this - gestures are exclusively a right-hemispheric system, based on spatial processing (movements) and pattern recognition, symbols decoded by your brain. Gestures empower your thinking and feeling like high-octane fuel. When you use certain hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language, you add emphasis to your actions and memory. So what?

This gesture research was done at the University of Chicago, published in the journal of Psychological Science, March 6, 2009 by lead author- professor Susan Goldin-Meadow; it impacts how we teach mathematics and communicate with
each other.

This is the first scientific research to show the importance of Motor learning -
(use of gestures) even in non-motor tasks. It goes further and indicates, new knowledge is enhanced by telling the learner how to make gestures with their hands.

Okay, what really happens is the gestures activate and integrate your right-brain (hemisphere) into the learning process, instead of exclusively depending on your language center (left-brain).

Math

Briefly, 128 fourth-grade kids were given math problems to solve. The first group
was trained by the teacher's words alone. The second group, with the same words,
plus hand gestures, and the third group was given the right language and gestures,
but focusing attention on the wrong numbers in the problem.

The group with the right gestures solved more problems on the given test, than the
other two test groups. The gestures grouped the test information; it helped create a
brand new concept in cognitive processing (learning).

The winning gesture group extracted important knowledge from their own hand
movements. Conclusion: gestures greatly influence the learning and memory processes in our brain.

Nodding and Shaking Your Head

When you are attempting to persuade, convince, or influence another to accept your
ideas or products, your use of nodding in confirmation, or shaking your three-pound coconut in denial, are subliminal (below the threshold of consciousness) emotional displays of emphasis.

It even works to support your own self-confidence - meaning when you add these
head gestures (the nod or shake) to your own words, your body and brain (nervous system, brainstem, and basal ganglia nuclei) trigger your memory and emotions.

The result of the nodding or shaking gestures integrate your left and right hemispheres (cerebral cortex) in support, instead of exclusively using your left-hemisphere.

Mudras

For thousands of years the Hindus have used hand gestures to implement behaviors
and improve functions. Here are five that we have tested with high school students and executives. We suggest you do a mind experiment for yourself.

1. Bear-Claw: use the first-joint fingers of the left-hand (palm inward), to grab the first-joint fingers of the right-hand, with your left palm facing your body. Goal: take a deep diaphragmatic breath, and slowly exhale the air while pulling the left hand against the force of the right hand.

Why? This isometric exercise stimulates the heart and focuses concentration.

2. Both hands: the tips of your thumbs touch the tips of both your index fingers.
Why? Simulates knowledge and abilities.

3. Both hands: the first joint of the index fingers is bent under the first joint of
your of your thumbs. Why? Activates knowledge acquisition.

4. Both hands: the tips of the little (pinkie) fingers touch the tip of the thumbs.
Why? Improve communication skills and intuition.

5. Both hands: the tips of the Ring fingers touch the tips of your thumbs.
Why? Increase energy (oxygen and glucose).

For those who are interested in how the use of these Mudras (gestures) activate
your brain and body for improved knowledge and memory skills - ask us how.

Endwords:

We suggest, in these economic times having a major competitive advantage -
reading and remember three books, articles and reports in the time your peers
can hardly finish one - improves your personal productivity. Ask us how.

Speed Reading Rules

copyright © 2009
H. Bernard Wechsler
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