mgrego2:
Your most recent post has sent me momentarily down a strange and twisted path. I went looking for my copy of Aldous Huxley's "The Doors of Perception." Didn't find the book, but I found the text online.
Huxley: "We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies - all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. "
The theme of Huxley's essay is, of course, his experiments with mescalin. Not my recommendation and not important, just mind the quote. Since reading is half of the communication process in this case, I think it's an interesting observation.
http://www.mescaline.com/huxley.htm
[Hold that thought.]
Then, I dug into a tape I'd made of some TV I was watching recently--not because of the program, but because of a commercial. It's my current favorite and one of my top, all-time best. If you want "pragmatic," commercials are it. They've got one simple job to do: sell.
Anyway, this is a Reebok commercial that's currently on here in the US (at least). The theme is "Defy Tradition. . .Convention. . .Whatever." I suppose they're trying to build market share or something silly like that. It's the presentation that's killer--must be a hundred jump shots! I just went through this frame-by-frame (thanks, Sony) and--although I've seen it dozens of times--I never picked up on even half the shots!
My wife watched it and said, "They blew up a shoe!" Of course they did, but I first noticed the woman sitting on the business end of a copier. My favorite shot is the kid who jumps over a moving car head on. There's also the Tennis Twins, a tropical soccer game in a downpour, a Sumo wrestler attempting gymnastics, a person releasing dogs from cages, an executive being hit with a pie, a man who cheats the electric chair--it goes on!
This is just a 30-second spot! Unless you slow it down and take it a frame at a time, you miss most of it. Even after watching it through several times that way, I couldn't consciously pick up all the shots at normal speed.
It begs the question, why? Why did they spend the obvious time, effort, and money to produce something you can't really watch?
In my opinion, the answer to that is a powerful endorsement of the mechanism behind photoreading. As I said, advertisers are pragmatic--they do what works. And they test. Especially before a national campaign with a prime time schedule.
So maybe your intuition--the link to your "other than conscious mind," can be coaxed as you say Laura Day suggests. Maybe, too, it can be slammed, shaken, bludgeoned, and dragged into the light of day--pressed into service by sheer sensory overload. Pushed, prodded, demanded, squeezed, dazed, and confused.
Maybe, as we go forward trying to wring a common experience from this solitude, these "insulated ecstacies," we should just agree on one thing.
Whatever works. 
--George
