DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
The Reading Miracle
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Reading can open your mind to the world allowing you to learn about life and people and it allows you to keep your brain and memory sharp too. This episode welcomes two guests who share their story of a life transforming reading method, Craig Collins, CEO of The Universal Reading Method, and Dr Barry Schwartz who earned a PhD from New York University in Experimental Psychology (Neuroscience).. Together they discuss how this method allows those challenged with reading to overcome those challenges in two and a half hours. Please listen to find out more. Enjoy!
Links: https://universalreadingmethod.com/?ref=299
debbiewilliamspodcast.com
Welcome to Storytelling. Reading can open your mind to the world, allow you to learn about life and people, and allows you to keep your brain and memory sharp too. However, for some, reading is a challenge. Today I have the pleasure in welcoming two guests to share their story of a life-transforming reading method. Our first guest is Craig Collins, who grew up with this lecture in California. The report cards always stated that Craig was intelligent but living up to his potential. And special investigation agencies in the US and folders are studious of the universal read methods. And compliance old processed online reading schools that learned itself into confident and competent readers in two and a half hours of stuff to be involved in biomedical research, undergraduate and post-graduate and college administration. It's research involved in METS University of the Research Institute of Team Scientists. Please welcome Craig Collins and Dr. Barry Short. Craig and Barry, welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_00And good morning and thank you, Debbie. So nice to hear your voice and to be speaking to your audience today from San Diego, California. Both Barry and I are in California.
SPEAKER_02Thank you very much. Can you tell me about this amazing reading system that you have developed?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's an amazing story in a lot of ways. It was always an adventure in a lot of ways for me. My brother invented the universal reading method. He did so under a lot of pressure. He had graduated from the Pepperdine University and he had hadten straight A's. But he had taken his classes in an audio form, and they especially took care of him because he was dyslexic. So when he went to law school, they didn't take care of him the same way. And when he got in, he felt all those big words and he was going to quit. And he was really disappointed and he was crying. So he came home and went to bed, and the next morning he woke up and he sat down with a pen and a piece of paper and was kind of doodling, and then he began to write spontaneously, and he wrote out the entire universal reading method. And he had no idea what he was writing, but as it unveiled itself, he realized he could read it and he could read anything. So he went back to law school the next day and found that he didn't have any trouble reading the big words. And then he graduated several years later from law school at the top of his class, and they elected to use his notes to give to the substitute professors when they came in to handle the classes and to teach the classes. And then he decided, gee, I wonder if it would work with other people besides me. Like it's not just my own epiphany, but is it an epiphany that I could share? So he shared it with a class that he was teaching. He had a little school of preschool kids. I mean, this is four and five-year-old children. And so he taught them the reading method, and each one then became a reader. Then when he would have school, they would go to the library and pick out a book, and then they would bring it back and they would read it. And it didn't matter what age group it wasn't like it was a little kid's book. It could be on dinosaurs or science, anything they were interested in. So it was quite profound. And then I was introduced to it, and I did not know I was dyslexic. I was convinced I was stupid and dumb and lazy. And I really was very confident about being stupid and dumb and lazy. Then my brother taught me the reading method, and I found out that I always had difficulty reading and understanding things, and that I was at ADHD and a bunch of other things that interfered with my learning and my reading and comprehending. So I was quite amazed with that change that I experienced. It was a feeling of peacefulness within myself and a clarity and even almost like better sight. I got involved with him. He was quite shy and very injured from having been dyslexic all of his life. And even though he had learned to read, he still felt inferior to other people. He felt they were more educated than he. Anyway, we began to work together, and I was able to produce it online. And to my great joy, I had my brother learn his reading method online from the video that I produced. And he actually experienced some transformation in addition after he was exposed to our online universal reading method. So that's how it began. I mean, there's much more to the story, and I love your question.
SPEAKER_02That's quite a profound story in the sense that your brother was almost traumatized into setting up this system. How old were you when you realized that you had dyslexia and you could benefit from this system? And how did it make you feel?
SPEAKER_00Well, I was about 50 years old. I could read and I was functioning, and I had done some very outstanding problem solving as a young man. I was a private investigator, consultant to major law firms and several government entities, investigative entities. I realized I had a certain special quality and ability to problem solve that superseded other people's ability, including the lawyers who were very well educated. They just didn't see the big picture as quickly as I did. The reading method added to me, like I didn't, I haven't lost my ability to evaluate and to investigate and to see the big picture, but now I can take in more data and accurately take in data and any speed that does be quicker or slow, but I everything, the comprehension comes immediately, and then I retain it. And before I was kind of jumping from spot to spot, and then I'd have to go back and review, and there was a lot more work involved. It's been a profound transformation for me. And the big transformation, though, for me is it touches my heart when I'm able to help someone else experience that for themselves. Especially, I mean, the last week a 70-year-old guy I went to high school with contacted me and heard about me, and within two and a half hours of our course, he called me back and he read to me from C.S. Lewis. And prior to that, he was really challenged with reading. It touches my heart to watch him go through a transformation, and he's 70 years old. He's now a different person.
SPEAKER_02Have you noticed a trend with illiteracy, especially amongst adults?
SPEAKER_00I reviewed a study that was done in the United States where they stated that there were 90 million adults reading at a fourth grade level. I was quite amazed because that meant I wasn't the only one. I mean, sincerely, when you have this issue, you do feel very uh unusual and isolated, and you're made to believe that you are very weird and unusual. You're not normal.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think there's more and more psychology has shown that there are different talents in intelligent creatures, human and non-human. The ability to understand emotions and anticipate situations is a kind of intelligence that is completely separate from the ability to read and understand conceptual material. And uh your dog knows when you're sick, but it doesn't read the medical manual to find out. So intelligence comes with different facets on this crystal that everybody has. And the difference instead of having an epidemic of illiteracy, the illiteracy is simply a lack of gaining a skill, and it turns out that the skill can be gained, and it can be gained rapidly. But since people don't understand that, they conclude that it's an epidemic.
SPEAKER_02How is it possible that people can go through an education system and not come out of it the other side with the skills to be able to read?
SPEAKER_01If we taught walking the way we teach reading, everyone would be on crutches. We needed to find a system, and there are several discoveries that have led up to this, notably Maria Mondatori, where you can have natural conditions that are arranged cleverly by an adult so that potential reader encounters skills and participates actively. Those are the secrets, and then they sort of explode into reading. It's quite a sudden gain in performance. And this has been overlooked by the educational establishment partly because they like to see overcoming dyslexia the way they see uh losing weight. You measure yourself on a scale like every morning and you might lose a couple ounces, and you it's very gradual. And brains are not gradual things, the sudden insight is very important to both to development, recovery, and skill learning at all points of your life. That's a biological fact that the educational establishment, with its bias towards behaviorism, has overlooked. In a way, they don't see the sudden miracle of growth because it's not continuously measurable, and you can't send a report to somebody with all a lot of impressive numbers on it. But the stuff that's happening inside the mind is very profound and could be surprisingly sudden.
SPEAKER_02That's really interesting, particularly, you know, like you say, people learning different ways, but there isn't one way to actually learn how to read or do certain tasks. What would you say are the key elements of the reading system that works?
SPEAKER_01I will point to two things and I'll let uh Craig expand on the experience of it. But there are two very important things you must do. First of all, you don't overwhelm the person with too many concepts and principles and objects of learning. We've known for many years that the limit of the amount of sudden immediate learning that you can do, the things you can juggle in your mind without losing distraction, is about seven plus or minus two is a magic number. It's a famous finding. That's why your your phone number is seven digits long and your license plate is unlimited length, etc. etc. Those things you can keep in mind. And if you can reduce your lesson to something within seven units, you can be sure that stuff isn't falling by the wayside making your time. The second thing is you need to participate voluntarily and compare your production of speech or your production of artistry or whatever you're doing. It could be a tennis forehand. You have to compare what you voluntarily initiate with what you're being taught. And then that feedback loop can stimulate learning. Those two things have to be obeyed and constantly interrupt the process for testing or for any other kind of distraction that interrupts the natural flow. So those two things, a limited number of objects of learning that are both limited and relevant. That's the the discovery that they made, Craig and his brother. And the other thing is this voluntary action feedback loop. You can't just simply be uh sitting there listening to a lecture.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so the person has to want to learn for themselves.
SPEAKER_01You know, think of a baby babbling. And and they're compar what they're doing, as the scientists have found out, is comparing what they're producing out of their mouth with what they're hearing from adults and closing the gap. And once they do, it's uh the magic happens.
SPEAKER_02This system works in two and a half hours. Can you explain that?
SPEAKER_01Well, in principle, it works in two and a half hours. I mean, I wouldn't have predicted it, but having observed it, I think it conforms to the necessity of a manageable number of things to learn plus the voluntary action. And so this voluntary action feedback loop, as I call it, is very motivating because you're starting to master something on a subconscious, automatic, easy level. It's not a constant effort to understand, it's just it's like the pleasure of exercise.
SPEAKER_00Well, the other part of it, too, Debbie, is that when someone is learning our reading method in two and a half hours, it's fun. They've never ever, with the word reading, had an experience where they didn't fail. And when they're learning our reading method, they can't fail. There's no failing. And the other big deal is that after an hour, we require each student to take a walk. And during that walk, they consolidate the information they learned in the first hour, and then they then come back and get to review that information again, and then go forward to the exceptional sounds and to reading 475 multisyllable words from the GED. It's a profound experience, but easy, and the person is happy with it, and it sometimes or oftentimes stimulates part of the brain that they can actually feel, and they'll put their hands to their head and scratch their head, and they'll comment like a young man in Hawaii did, that his head felt fizzy, fizzy inside, and he was scratching his head. This young man had gone through many different, probably every reading method that exists, including being moved from Hawaii to Washington, the state of Washington, to participate in a month-long seminar on reading. And when he came to me, he couldn't read at all. And when we finished, he really enjoyed, and I enjoyed listening to him read from the book Hawaii by James Minchner. And then, of course, the big question I had about him would be okay, so he could be a monkey and he could be reading, and he could be speaking, but does he understand what he's talking about or reading? And so I asked him, and he said, Well, to me it's really obvious why the Hawaiians don't like the Holys here on Hawaii if they were treated that way by the Mormon missionaries. So he got it.
SPEAKER_02So last year there you were working on your reading system, and then tragedy struck.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Yes, I had a stroke in the 15th of June 2020, and I had successfully worked with people with strokes before I had my stroke, and I had seen them become speakers uh immediately in two and a half hours. So I knew that that happened. I worked with people with Alzheimer's syndrome, and one lady was completely asleep, and I had seen her become wide awake and alert and be able to talk to me and come out of her Alzheimer's syndrome after I shared the reading method with her at her feet in a coma. So I knew that it had a great impact on the brain. So I fed the universal reading method in the car on the way to the hospital, and I couldn't say it out loud when I began, but I knew it so I could speak to myself without making a sound. And then as I got close to the hospital, I was able to say the reading method out loud, and my friends driving the car knew the reading method. They went both of them were dyslexic, so they had done the program. So they laughed at me. And they could hear me saying it over and over again. When I walked into the emergency room because of the challenges with the pandemic, I had to walk in by myself. So I walked in and the person at the desk said, Well, you know, hello, and what brings you to the emergency room? I looked pretty normal. And they I said, Well, I woke up this morning and I couldn't talk. So the guy smiled at me and said, But you're talking now. I said, Well, I don't really talk this way. Uh, it sounds different to me, but something serious has happened, and I'm I'm I know that I'm in trouble. So they put me in a room and they they took my blood pressure, or my blood pressure was 220 over 125, which means I have about five minutes more or I'm going to die. So they immediately throw me on a gurney and they hook me up into an IV and give me drugs to bring my blood pressure down, and then they take me for a CAT scan. Now, this is very, very significant. I have a CAT scan, I look at the CAT scan, and I see a volcano of blood in the middle of my brain. And every phrase that the blood drops, I was told, means I will have injury to my brain. So the doctor comes in while I'm watching the cat skin, and when it ends, he says, Craig, we understand you had very high blood pressure. You are overweight, not extremely overweight, but enough to challenge your body. And you've had a brain bleed, and wherever the blood dropped, you should have damage. So we understand what happened to you. What we don't understand is why you can talk. You shouldn't be able to talk. And the other is why you're not paralyzed, and there's no part of you that's paralyzed. You have some some weakness and problems, but you're not injured as much as what the CAT scan would have revealed. And so I I said, Well, we will talk about that later because it I did something that's somewhat profound. What I had done was the reading method, and I continue to use it. Right now, I'm speaking on this podcast from a different part of my brain than I ever spoke from before I had the stroke. And when we teach someone, we bypass the part of the brain. Like we didn't have an impact on the part of the brain that had Alzheimer's with Mamie, the 94-year-old woman who came out of her coma with us. We bypassed it and we activated a dormant part of the brain.
SPEAKER_01When Greg and I met about 10 years ago, he described this learning method and he said he was looking for a neuroscientist. So I happened to be a neuroscientist, and the first thing I wanted to do was see this thing in action. Sure enough, I did on several occasions. Older people, younger people, guy who had partially recovered from a stroke. Nate Lewis, his recovery was really remarkable because it influences his confidence and even his walking ability. I had worked with brain mapping, and we had done work on neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to rechannel its lines of communication. It's almost like the brain responds like a repair crew. When a road gets washed out, they quickly build another road, and that road expands with the more amount of traffic it gets maintained and improved. And that can be done quite quickly. And we've mapped this on the brain of various people who are recovering from injury. We published a paper in Nature based on amputees who had relocated sensation from the missing limb to part of the face. It was a phantom limb. And it was a referred sensation where part of the face got mapped onto the missing hand and the missing arm. And when we did the brain mapping, we saw physically for the first time, this is back in the early 90s, thorough remapping of the brain. This has been uh really now become part of the psychology literature and literature both of recovery. But when I first met Craig, I suddenly realized that since this is true, it's a true thing, that we're looking at plasticity on the basis of a positive learning experience, and that we could probably succeed in mapping. And we've arranged a study at UCSD to use a mapping system, and their radiology department has one of these instruments that's an updated version of the one I used to use in doing the work on amputees, and we're going to reproduce the result with people who have suddenly learned to read.
SPEAKER_00When I first met Barry, Debbie, it was very significant. I had traveled for almost three years all over the United States, up into Canada, across the pond to the UK, and Ireland, Scotland, and then back to Hawaii and San Francisco and all over, and in search of people who I really wanted, I was skeptical. Understand it's very, very something to be skeptical of when people make a statement, and I was making a statement, my brother made a statement, that we could change the experience that people had with reading in only two and a half hours. I watched it happen over and over. Everybody, everybody changed, everybody transformed in some way, no matter what age they were, no matter what language they spoke, no matter where they were from. Everyone became an English reader and speaker and had comprehension. I mean, I I came back and I found Barry and I was so pleased to meet him because he understood immediately what was going on. He knows what neuroplasticity is. I didn't have any idea about even the word neuroplasticity until I met Barry, and but I can see it actively being created in each person that we share the reading method with.
SPEAKER_01People are being subjected to reading methods and learning methods that don't work. So that someone who has supposedly 12 years of schooling really has one year of schooling that they've repeated 11 times. So if people are using methods to try to force feed someone to learn to read and it's not working, and they don't adjust their teaching method, it raises the question who's the one with the learning disability?
SPEAKER_00Yes, and the whole idea and concept of evidence-based, the result of teaching people with the quote-unquote evidence-based reading method, is that in the UK there are 35 million people who are reading at a fourth grade level. In the US, 90 million adults. So there's something definitely wrong with requiring people to be an evidence-based reading method. And that's why I went out looking for the evidence and got it.
SPEAKER_01What's called evidence-based really depends on how much evidence is being included and how much evidence is being ignored. And so to say it's evidence-based when you're looking in one place, but the learning is actually involved in another place and you're not looking at it, that's a false claim of being evidence-based.
SPEAKER_02Craig and Barry, thank you very much for sharing your story.
SPEAKER_00Debbie, thank you so much for having us on. I hope somebody out there hears our story and is motivated to contact us.
SPEAKER_02If you would like to find out more about the universal reading method, then please visit the website universalreadingmethod.com or follow the link in the show notes.