Life in Motala

This fall my brain has been squirting out stress hormones at an alarming rate. My muscles are tired from trying to cope with it all. My arms shake, I burst into tears often and my blood pressure hits the floor. Noise is really difficult at the moment, especially cloppity ladies heels. Trying to keep a clear head through it is a great challenge. I can reduce it somewhat if I lift weights so that my muscles can burn it faster, but I have to be careful not to exercise too much, because then they get over-tired and it gets worse. I can only speculate, but I think the massive stress is due to grief and having 8-hour days. Grief needs space and time and I don’t have that, so my body is doing the slow version, struggling to do what has to be done, alongside what needs to be done.

On a completely other note, one pet peeve I have is the lack of cultural-neutral scientists. The latest idiocy I read about was research in kissing. According to the research the point of kissing is that men and women boost their immune systems by doing it. Adult kissing is a modern behaviour. Men and women líving as couples is a modern idea.

Kissing, like so many social behaviours, originates in the realm of child-care. The exchange that starts in the womb and carries on through breastfeeding, continues in kissing. It is not just about the immune system, it is about getting food and triggering protective behaviour in the adult. Adult primates kiss each other after aggression, behaviour often called appeasment - a fancy word for role-playing I’m-a-harmless-baby, which hopefully triggers a I-will-protect-you response.

On my father’s side of the family, who lived more or less the same way since Viking times until two generations ago, kissing was something that only happened in private and adults kissed very seldom. Small children got tita or tuta - words for kissing and rubbing noses. Rubbing noses is something that has really fallen out of fashion. It is a shame, because it is really nice.

Jane Goodall kissing a primate. Please "love" me! Great body language.

If we are given the Western baby treatment, and separated from our mothers at birth, one part of our brain becomes convinced that life is elsewhere. Despite this, every now and then I get to feel complete. Those moments in time sing with a resonance that humble my darting thoughts on other days, when I think a project or a smart idea or any other search for ‘paradise’, is going to make an emotional difference. 

When I am not in the happy place of zero (mind)contact with the past and future, I think about how we interpret ourselves. Sensations and emotions arise, and we struggle to label them according to what we have learned. Our culture teaches us a lot of unproductive and stupid ways of interpreting ourselves, so the word struggle really fits.

I used to think positive thinking was sort of lame because emotions don’t originate in the conscious mind. But digging deeper I see that it might help by stopping you from making things worse than they are. The reason for this is that people often think they are worse off than they really are, i.e. they have negative interpretations of their emotions.

If you want to try positive thinking, a big tip is DON’T USE PRONOUNS. Your brain doesn’t understand them. Don’t say stuff like "I am a secure and happy person" while looking in the mirror. You lost your brain’s interest with the first word. Instead say "Excited" in a clear voice when you want to re-interpret jumpy emotions or "Run" when you find yourself losing your cool. Your brain won’t get that you are the one who is doing the talking, and it will be thrilled at some guidance that is aligned to what is really going on.

A big problem here though is Freud. (You often hear that the biggest opposition to a biological view of humans is religion, but I think Mr Vienna with the notebook might be a much bigger problem.) When my thoughts make a negative interpretation of my emotions I often find Freud’s pandora box in the background. His concepts like ’drives’ are pretty scary.

Thank goodness for the moments of eternity, of feeling at one with the world.

Last Monday I had my strabismus operation which went really well. My eye is still really sore. It is weird looking in the mirror because it looks like my whole eyeball has been moved sideways.

I have mostly been taking it easy, but on Friday we did some rock painting with one of Ingrid’s friends. I love rock painting. Some researchers claim we feel a special affinity for rock because of the way our brains operate. Maybe that is true?

The last few years my vision has gotten worse. I kept changing glasses but nothing helped. I found a tool so you can make a picture to show other people what you see, here is what it haqs been like for me to read signs. The eyes see perfectly but the left and right image don’t emerge into one, so everything is blurry:

A month ago I saw an eye specialist and since then I have been wearing a clear patch with prisms over one of my eyes (stuck onto my glasses) which makes my vision more clear. WOW the world looks so different! Mostly it looks a lot more stable and reliable. And a lot wider! I am scheduled to have my eye operated on later on.

Here is me in my new t-shirt with the artwork of Mike Biskup. I really like his art, it is so full of the joy of doodling, the joy of life!

I just signed up for some university courses in the fall. One of them is pre-historic archeology. I am looking forward to it! On the subject of doodling, here is a picture of some pre-historic doodling (borrowed here). There are a lot of ideas on why people made these marks. I think a big part of it was about experiencing the joy in motion that characterizes doodling (also called ‘aimless scribbling’). Kids use their fingers to doodle on all sorts of surfaces. I suspect that doodling is anything but aimless.

I saw a tv-show a few weeks ago about how some tribal people from Papau New Guinea reacted when they were brought to England to see how Westerners live. One interesting bit was when a family showed them around their home and they came into their young son’s bedroom. "Your son has to sleep alone?" one man from PNG asked. He couldn’t believe it, he was deeply shocked. In his tribe children always sleep with their mother "until 15-16 years old". (This might make the kids sound wimpy, but tribal boys hunt crocodiles from an early age.) Here is a picture of one of Ingrid’s friends sleeping over. Because Ingrid likes to sleep in my room her friend slept there too. I can see how they both enjoy having me watching out for them.

This last weekend we had friends visiting again. It was hot so we mostly hung out at MSS. Lucky (who also likes being with someone all the time) had a good snooze with the mom. He knows that my friends are his friends.

Here is a picture of me hallucinating entoptic patterns. To do the same all you have to do is lie down and press firmly on your closed eyelids. (If that doesn’t work, look into a light source for a moment and then press.) There are many different kinds of patterns. I see a checkerboard pattern that spirals into a white spot and it feels like I am "moving into the light". The bright circle of light gets larger and larger and I "fall in", then the pattern changes. If I open my eyes after seeing entoptic patterns for some time they are superimposed on reality around me. I see all sorts of cool things then.

Hallucination is one theory behind phenomena like seeing fairies or chrystal gazing. I am reading about it as a source of inspiration for cave art. On a slightly different topic - here you can see the effects of pesticide on children’s ability to draw