Forty years ago I did an effective reading course at the YMCA, commonly known as speed reading. This was a hard-tested perception changing discipline which was created for officers in the military and eventually shared with the public. It changed my life. Effective reading is not about skipping words or textual lines, but it is about widening the capture in each eye movement, about anticipating human sentence patterns and predicting forms of speech in lines of text, and so taking in blocks of meaning as formed up in phrases and sentences rather than in mere words. Words are the gravel and aggregate - the metal of that significant road - that phrases of meaning make mileposts of. Reading capacity and understanding increases manyfold after such mind and eye training. So, since then, I well know that we all too often have lazy defaults in our seeing, slothful patterns of perception. We all to easily fall into effective blindness, to unobservant ways, to fogged and steaming romanticisms of what we encounter. We all too easily accept fudged ways of seeing. With profound insight Charles Péguy says we need to see what we see. Because deceit is often easier that seeing truly. Seeing truly requires mental discipline. Seeing truly and naming what it is we see requires not just the mental discipline of interpretation, but the mental discipline of articulance. It requires shining a light for greater understanding In that spirit I post the wonderful John Berger, with his insightful challenges about how we see, here, it is about art, but it has wider application... This. the first of four Episodes, dates from about the same era as my YMCA reading course. https://youtube/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:45:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015