Originally posted by elgan_5:
1) Is photoreading less enjoyable compared to normal reading?
not at all. in fact it's more enjoyable because you have a clear overview of the material before you start studying it, not after. that makes all the difference. it's like seeing the forest and the trees instead of choosing one or the other.

2) Are you able to make the same literary connections with your material with photoreading? Not being able to break down sentences word by word must have its disadvantages.
with pr, you break the ideas down, not the sentences per se. once you get into sr/dipping and rapidreading, you do break down words, and they're the right ones

3) Activation just seems too long, and has never seemed to work for me. I have only attempted to activate a half dozen or so, and I still get nothing.
i had this problem myself, so this is what i did:
i took a bunch of books and mmapped them 2 ways without pr'ing them. i call them the toc map, and the index map. toc map is mapping the table of contents. take the most important word (usually a noun) in each chapter heading and underline it. most books have around 12 chapters, so that's 12 words. then turn to the index and find all the keywords with the most page explanations and underline those too. write these down. all this takes roughly 10 minutes if you're slow like me. if you're fast you can do it in around 3 minutes. as an added step, you could take the toc keywords and try to figure out which index keywords go best with which toc keywords, in other words figure out which chapter each idea is described in. all of this without even reading the book. it's surprising that you can do this with some books without even looking at the introduction!
a full activation operates on the same principle, except you do it on deeper levels, for each book section (group of chapters that go together), then each chapter individually, and if you really want to get into it, then each subsection of the chapter and even individual paragraphs.

Could someone describe what it feels like durring spontaneous activation?
never had that happen to me. i wish it would...

i like to discuss books in great details... similies, metaphors, allusions, themes, motifs, etc. I was just wondering if it is possible to get the same out of something like, say, Shakespeare.
you can! paul suggests for fiction where you want to get a general overall understanding that you do a pr followed with a rapidread. for something with as many levels of meaning as shakespeare i'd do 2 rapidreads but that's because i like to take my time my rapidread through ayn rand's the fountainhead is taking forever but that's what i want, the totality of the experience. you're allowed to regular read in pr it's a very flexible system!