Chaosadelt,

Although I thought the original posts were pretty funny, I like the direction the conversation is taking now. Thank you. It seems more productive to discuss things from the perspective of the brain. Unlike Marty, I don't believe that Paul and Pete have maliciously set out to defraud people. They want our money but that's good old fashioned capitalism.

Though I do believe in subconscious, this statement is not necessarily true. Our minds are attracted to the unexpected (sounds, visual, taste, etc). We also have a survival mechanism it seems. Dodging a ball in your peripheral vision might be a result of these two things.

You're quite right. It isn't necessarily true. But it might be. As far as the attraction and the survival mechanism, they are still processes carried out by our subconscious. There is a rapid ability to absorb, analyze, and respond to input that isn't necessarily at the center of our field of vision.


There is a few things wrong with this reasoning in regards to the article. Your eyes have more sensors going closer to the middle. That is why when we want to focus on something, we focus so that something goes to the middle of your vision so you can see it the clearest. If you seen something just on the edge of your vision (that ball you were dodging for instance). Did you see it's details or just a flash?

It's true that the detail slacks off as we move away from the center (although I recently read that there is actually a "doughnut" of focus where our vision is the most detailed and that you should consider looking at things with a slightly oblique angle). However, how much detail do you really need to effectively read text? Your brain is able to fill in missing gaps in letters, missing words, etc. I'm much better at deciphering a bad fax than my OCR software will ever be.

From the article "With George McConkie, now at the University of Illinois, Rayner measured the perceptual span of readers by replacing most of the words on a video screen with nonsense strings of letters. Wherever the eye was pointing, a small patch of screen would have the correct letters, but everywhere else they would be jumbled." And the participants did not notice!

Again, I'm sure this is true. It proves the limits of our direct focus. It does not invalidate the possibility that our brains are absorbing and processing more than we're getting. It comes down to focus and filtering. I believe that our subconscious does a great deal of filtering to protect us from information overload. That doesn't mean that the info isn't there and accessible. It just means that isn't where we put our attention. Isn't it possible that our brain processes a great deal of this stuff but only serves up what it thinks we need? Of course, this mechanism isn't always perfect. Sometimes it fails to serve up what we need but I think the reason for that is often more related to the WAY it was stored than to whether or not it WAS stored.

If you're willing to take the step that your brain absorbs more and processes more than you know, then the question becomes, "how do I recover some of that information?" This is what the activation step seeks to do. It certainly isn't perfect because you haven't made the rich connections to the material that you might if you were reading the information in the standard way. But it can be done. My experience with PhotoReading a novel showed me this.

This is where intuition comes in and I'm beginning to believe that this is a skill that can be developed. To my way of thinking, intuition isn't some sort of sixth sense in the "ESP" mode. I think it is a signal that our subconscious has processed information and determined it is useful, but it doesn't always have a clear mechanism for delivering it to us. Sometimes it gives it to us as an image. Sometimes as a sound. Sometimes as a feeling. It uses whatever mechanism it can at the time. The task for us is to notice these signals and most of us don't. As I've worked on this, I have noticed that these signals come and are useful during the PR process. The trick is noticing them.

Just some thoughts...

[This message has been edited by mgrego2 (edited March 21, 2001).]