Here are my thoughts. There are two types of activation; manual and spontaneous. Win is in favor of "Socratizing" yourself and everyone around you. Good plan. It pulls information and exformation into the spotlight of conscious awareness.

But if you think there is a "purist" form of activation, I don't think you fully get what Win and I are saying.

Look at your feet, the space they cover of the ground. Then look at the ground extending all around. That's the difference between the conscious and nonconscious resources of mind.

When activating you have to run around to notice what happened in the nonconscious when exposed to the information. That's why it's called "ACTIV-ation" not Passiv-ation.

How many ways can you become active? In the course we suggest only twenty or so, but you are not limited in how many ways you can trigger connections. For example, one can PhotoRead and drop into the imagestream. Better yet, before PhotoReading, notice a predictive image, then PhotoRead and compare the internal image. That should give you all the direction you need to pursue.


"Dr. Wenger thinks that, first of all, the previewing step should be skipped to keep the PR'ing clean, without any conscious run-through before hand."

I agree and we teach Postviewing for that reason.

"He also thinks that freenoting and fast imagestreaming are the best activation techniques because they really bring information to conscious awareness, and aid your understanding, thus really activating the material."

I know he does. Try teaching that to a group of lawyers and medical doctors sometime...

I don't disagree that they are excellent activation techniques, and most people are still stuck on the idea that they need to know what is in the book. Until the paradigm changes, nothing changes.

"The PRWMS activation techniques, he says are not real activation, but rather just another way to enter information into your mind. "

Or as Gerald Edelman says, a way to put "re-entrant stimuli" past the neural sheets that just finished organizing the patterns from the text you PhotoRead. In other words, notice what happens when you re-open the text. The key is in the noticing, not in the text. It's a paradigm thing again.

"The next thing he suggests is that the freenoting (or fast imagestreaming, or "guest lecture" [speaking as fast as you can without stopping about something, like freenoting]) be done immediately after PR'ing because otherwise the brain sorts out the information and leaves it to rot, basically "

Not exactly. As with Postviewing, this is a doorway into further activation. Talk with professional writers. Any author will tell you that the best time to access the info is after the brain has had time to sort through it. Trust the brain.

"The Freenoting and guest lecturer work great because it sucks the information from your brain like a vaccuum, the faster you go, the more you get."

True. Pole-bridging and feeding the loop are well described in his books. We use imagestreaming and over-the-wall during our seminars.

Keep playing with the techniques. Invent more. Let the forum know what you find out.