BB,
My first thought is... suck a nut.

My second is.. I understand your skepticism, but you can get farther with people if you are less caustic.

My third thought is.. I've actually been wondering exactly what you posted.

I mean, just how many people out there HAVE experienced spontaneous activation? Certainly no one on this DB. That is something that's been bugging me for a while. Other than Peter and Paul, who can REALLY photoread at 25000wpm and KNOW what they've seen right after? Pete, I think we're going to need a response on this one. How many out there can photoread at or near on your level?

On the mystical side, I've gotten some emotional feelings here and there, once and a while a flash of recall, quite a few times when I knew EXACTLY where to find information, and I ALWAYS feel as if I've read the material before if I wait at least a sleep cycle.

Once, I got perfect recall of DeBono's Thinking Course in my dreams on the first go. ..but then I forgot it all when I woke up, heh.

Then once I photoread the f uck out of Suze Orman's The Courage to Be Rich.. at least 500 times over the course of two weeks. Nothing. At least until I started to read it. I timed myself at 15 seconds a page with PERFECT comprehension. Not bad, not bad. But how practical are experiences like this?

They're nice. They're cute. They're fun to talk about and even more fun to experience.

..but the thought has recently come to me: ...who cares? This all seems to be just the frosting on the cake. A fun, enjoyable toy to play with... almost a pasttime.

As Paul says in the book, Spontaneous Activation is the pie-in-the-sky and unnecessary to reap benefits form the system.

I've noticed but ONE solid, hardcore, pragmatic benefit from the *photoreading step* in the past 5 months: If I photoread a book with proper brainwave entrainment, then sleep, then the next day when I speed read I have the 'qualitative' / 'unprovable' feeling that I've read the material before. This allows me to blast through 'filler' more easily.

I read some heavy crap too. This semester it's all the ancient chinese philosophers, a seminar on the history of nukes, a psych course on media influence, and a western civ enlightenment philosophy class. I'm a yale student and you can come by if you like. Though, there's not much to see, except me reading at about 30-45 seconds a page instead of 60-90.

But that single benefit is certainly worth it to me given that I have to read probably ... god, at least six hundred pages a week.

btw, where in the Balkans are you from? I spent a couple weeks over the summer in Croatia and Slovenia...had a blast in Dubrovnik and Split, though it was quite hot. Also, my brother is a balkan's specialist--an analyst for the department of defense.

Brian