First: PhotoFocus. It occurred to me when developing the PhotoReading process that the literature on Preconscious Processing (ref. N.F. Dixon) was compelling. The question remained, how do we cause something that is consciously available to enter the brain without conscious interference?
I happened to be toying with Betty Edwards' work "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" when I figured that her "R-Mode" way of seeing for art purposes may well be applied when looking at a book and that might do the trick. It worked perfectly for me...allowing me to enter the R-mode with written materials. My wife made the parallel to the divergent gaze with the "cocktail weenie" effect, so we had a quick way of helping anyone achieve the benefit of entering R-mode at will.
At the time, there was a craze for random-dot stereograms which also made a perfect parallel case for how the brain processes what the conscious mind cannot see when in convergent or hard focus.
The next connection was to the work of the Embudo NLP Center and their Nightwalking course...leading to further long-standing evidence of "second-sight" and processing nonconsciously by shifting one's focal point of attention.
If you trace the same references, the evidence should mount in favor of PhotoFocus for you as well. I tried to describe it in the PhotoReading book. You might re-read that section.
But you might ask yourself if your question is about nonconscious processing of information or about PhotoFocus. Because if the nonconscious acquisition of information is your issue, check out The User Illusion by Tor Norretranders, specifically the chapter called The Bomb of Psychology.
The second point to consider is that the value of entering PhotoFocus is immediately recongizable on an EEG. We use the IBVA (Interactive Brainwave Visual Analyzer) to study the effects of PhotoFocus and PhotoReading. We (LSC PhotoReading instructors) often bring it a long as a demo during our teaching of the course.
Entering PhotoFocus has an immediate effect of creating a brainwave signature characterized by higher amplitude waves in both Low Beta and High Theta simultaneously. Curiously, ALPHA is NOT very active. In fact, it seems remarkably supressed. That makes sense in that our goal is not to connect the conscious and nonconscious during PhotoReading, but to route information directly into the nonconscious. Alpha is known to mediate between the two. We see Alpha show up in activation, and in more elevated amplitudes than with regular reading.
But the MOST exciting thing is to see how quickly the brain signature appears when simply entering PhotoFocus. It is that state of the eyes that seems to create an instantaneous neurological cascade in favor of this new type of information processing.
In summary, not only is PhotoFocus important, it seems to be THE stimulus that triggers everything useful about the PhotoReading whole mind system...a true step into a new paradigm of information processing. Keep testing it for yourself until you are satisfied.
