Abstract Ideas

The same is possible with abstract ideas (which are also often highly complex and multidimensional),though it takes practice because there are no definite "images" to fall back on. In somecases, especially when the thought involved is quite complex, removing the verbal component not only speeds up the thinking process, but can even lead to intuitive leaps that verbal thinking might have prevented.

Consider the way in which you are reading this text. Most people think that they read the way young children do – either letter-by-letter, or at best word-by-word. The truth is, we do not read letter-by-letter or word-by-word.

Instead, we are fixing our eyes onblock of words. Notice the way your eye muscles actually move when reading a printed text. Try tomove your eyes to the next block of words, and go on.

Effectively you are not reading words, but blocks of words at a time.

The period of time during which the eye rests on one word is called affixation. You may also notice that you don't always proceed from one block of words to the next. Sometimes, you may move back to a preceding block of words if you are unsure about something or if you don’t understand what it meant. These disruptions to the forward flow of reading are called skipbacks. Only speed readers have been trained to create mini eye movements, while the rest of us readwith micro eye-movements. The former produces speed reading because they engage the peripheral visionto chunk words simultaneously, not just one-word at a time; while the latter is automatic, and keep adjusting our eyes to place the words we read on our foveal centralis, the sharpest focusing area of our retina.