People who find it easy to follow instructions, create a visual movie of themselves doing the task. This enables them to 'see' if more information is required before they begin. Immediate mental feedback creates a trial run which eliminates mistakes before they are made.
Ineffectual reading typically leaves out visually constructed imagery from the thought-stream. As a result the reader has a poor memory and poor contextual analysis skills. Without imagery to 'reality test one's comprehension, one may pass a totally anomalous word and fail to notice that it does not fit. Once the reader has a richly detailed internal picture, which includes colour, sound and movement, he will no longer be able to read past words and concepts that obviously do not make sense, because these will seem strange in the picture or movie that he has made. For example, a student reads: 'The child was made to do the maths problem in front of the class upon the skateboard.' From his prior picture of a classroom, the student will realise immediately that the word should be 'blackboard', instead of skateboard, and will self-edit the word.
One of the characteristics of visual storage is speed, so increasing the pace at which material is covered, with the assistance of speed-reading exercises, usually increases the powers of visualisation. Those students who can adapt to the visual mode of representation successfully are multi-sensory; however, there are some students who have difficulty. These are students who have failed to make the transition between an auditory mode of representation and a visual mode of representation. In normal development this transition occurs at about the age of ten. In the case of these students, retention can be so poor that one sentence later they are unable to remember what they have read. These students will attempt to retrieve the rote sound of words; they will try to store an auditory sequence of the word without transferring the words into pictures in their minds. A student with this problem will frequently state, 'I don't remember what it said.'
It is now known that reading involves both sides of the brain: the left side specialises in coding and decoding, the right side in synthesis of overall meaning. By using this as an operational definition, you can determine which side of a student's brain is deficient when diagnosing his reading ability, and it can be used to formulate a prescriptive plan of how to improve his reading. For example, when a student is able to code and pronounce words
disproportionately to his comprehension, his left brain is working in excess of his right brain.
The following technique addresses those students who fall in between the two extremes of the good visualiser and the student who has no visual capacity at all.
1. The first step is to check that you have the ability to picture in your mind's eye. Look at your desk and pretend that this desk is really your bedroom, and that you are on the ceiling, looking down at the four walls and everything contained inside. Mentally point to the wall where the bed is, the walls with windows, the door, the shelves, and so on. Do this exercise again with the layout of the whole house. This exercise will validate that you can make mental pictures of concrete objects, a right-brain skill.
2. Read a phrase or sentence out loud. The sentence is the easiest grammatical unit to use for this particular method. A sentence should be chosen that uses nouns that are concrete and action verbs, rather than abstract nouns and the verb 'to be', as these will prevent the use of right-brain picturing abilities.
As soon as you have stopped reading the sentence, close your eyes and picture in your mind what the sentence described. Notice the colour, size, shape, foreground, and distance of the picture in your mind. This will give you a further idea of your basic capacity to visualise. Used as a repetitive exercise, this will improve your visualisation.
3. Once you can form a reasonably good mental picture from a sentence you have just read, the next goal is to find how many pictures you can hold on to. Read out between 3 and 9 visualisable sentences. If you go beyond your capacity, you will lose the first and second picture. This will tell you your capacity for a sequence of separate pictures. Practice will improve this ability. People who find it easy to create pictures and take in large amounts of information have the facility to take information spread out over several pictures and sequence this information into a movie. when you can do this well, you will have a seemingly infinite memory capacity, taking advantage of the right brain's incredible powers (you will probably have noticed how much easier it is to remember peoples' faces than their names).
Those who have done little visualisation in the past, tend to make pictures which are sparse in detail and poor in quality. They may leave out submodalities, the major components of our senses. A partial list of submodalities follows, under the headings of three sensory systems (modalities):
Visual Auditory
shapes volume
colours pitch
black/white pace of speech movement number of sounds size location of sound perspective rhythm
Kinaesthetic
pressure
temperature
emotions
speed of movement
location of felt sensation texture
When reading a novel, many people fail to make adequate use of auditory imagery, even when they are good visualisers. If you use your auditory imagery to give all the 'he said ...' and 'she said ...' dialogue, then your memory of the story will be vastly improved. When you read a book and use all the forms of imagery, you will experience the story as a three-dimensional movie in stereophonic sound, with imagery of emotion and movement, touch, taste and even temperature. You will be totally at one with the book and your subsequent recall will be nearly perfect. You will hardly be aware of reading the words, unless there is a gross printing error.
It may be difficult to construct concrete images when reading abstract material such as philosophy. A student who has both high right-brain and left-brain capacity will tend to form abstract patterns, rather like modern art, to hang the words and pictures upon. Modern physics has little that can be visualised as concrete imagery, however, when a psychologist asked Einstein about his thinking processes, Einstein replied, 'I think in a combination of abstract visual patterns and muscular sensations; it is only later, when I wish to speak or write to another person, that I translate these thoughts into words.'