mgrego2 has some powerful points. Kudos!
The apparent contradiction also comes as the cause-effect Newtonian mind tries to apply old-paradigm rules to a quantum Einsteinian universe.
Is PhotoReading a process of downloading information into the brain, or a process of exposing external information to a neural network that already contains everything including the patterns stored in the text?
If I show you a landscape and say "beautiful, isn't it?" you could say, "hmmm, yeah." You have had the entire experience landscape right?
But then I say, "hey, let's go study that hillside over there...there are 13 herbal species I want you to see, and by the way, it is also the site of an ancient city." How you look at the details of the landscape becomes completely different. Did you have the entire experience originally? I say yes, but not at a conscious level.
Your job, the job of your conscious mind, is to learn how to observe what the mind already processed.
Now bring in a book. Expose your neural network to it. Your brain processes visual input at 10,000,000 bits/sec (yes even the degraded images). Your conscious mind get 40 bits/sec. Then you go to your neural network, (your inner mind, your preconscious processor, your hidden observer, your paraconscious) and you say, "show me what I need to carry consciously that will give me the biggest payoff. Here's my purpose, what do I need to know?" At that point you activate, you gather CONSCIOUSLY the what the NONCONSCIOUS guides you to. By the end of your activation you have 4-11% of the text. And that is connected to all the rest of it.
When you meet someone at a party, you might choose you say, "So, please, tell me your name again and a story to go with it so that I'll remember it forever." We call that activation. You might be thinking that activation is memory...remembering what you PhotoRead. I have never thought so. Vera says, there is no such thing as memory. Construction and reconstruction.
PhotoReading was the exposure, the entering into the landscape, the immersion in the patterns of text, the prepping of the neural circuitry to give you what you need. Activation is the construction for later conscious memory. Spontaneous activation is the conscious hook up to what you already know, triggered by a spontaneous examination of a portion of your pre-existent memory web. WHen it happens you will almost always wonder how you knew it. Welcome to the quantum universe.
