Category Archives: perception

Human experience (2016)

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(December, 2016)

There are various parts of the brain that create our various senses of happiness, and all have been recorded in various ways many, many, many times. Neurologists have been able to stimulate them in order to create happiness for decades now. In fact, neuroscience, neurosurgery and nanotechnology are on the verge of giving us regular control over our own moods. Basically, any discussion of the human experience that does not see us as merely the outward manifestations of our brains is horseshit. (Not sure if I’d wholly agree with that conclusion now, but never mind.) You are what you think, even if you have no clue you are thinking it. When you realize how much of our mind isn’t in the brain at all, but in, say, the skin, gonads, or digestive tract, it gets even more depressing. We are only aware of what we consciously know, yet our consciousness is only a fraction of our brain, most of what the brain does we are completely unaware of…yet so much of what we do is because that unconcious part of our brain does it. What neurologists call the Four F’s–feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproduction–are overwhelmingly what concern us every day. And even when they do not concern us momentarily–like when we do accounting at the office, or watch golf on TV–any one of those four F’s can and will instantly distract us. We are those Four F’s, with a lot of intellectual frontal lobery out front making us think we are more than just hungry, angry, scared and horny animals.

Non-verbal communication (2017)

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But a worldview is exactly what Lakoff is talking about. “Ideas don’t float in the air, they live in your neuro-circuitry,” Lakoff said. Each time ideas in our neural circuits are activated, they get stronger. And over time, complexes of neural circuits create a frame through which we view the world. “The problem is, that frame is unconscious,” Lakoff said. “You aren’t aware of it because you don’t have access to your neural circuits.” So what happens when you hear facts that don’t fit in your worldview is that you can’t process them: you might ignore them, or reject or attack them, or literally not hear them….Progressives are still living in the world of Descartes and the Enlightenment, Lakoff said, a neat world governed by the rules of logic. Descartes said, “I think therefore I am,” but Lakoff claims that we are embodied beings and that 98 percent of thought is unconscious. Our thoughts are chemical in nature, and occur within the confines of a physical body: we are not 100 percent rational beings.

http://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/05/02/berkeley-author-george-lakoff-says-dont-underestimate-trump/

(Written in 2017, apparently, and forgotten.)

As George Lakoff says, very little of our thought is conscious. Indeed I’m not sure that it all even occurs in the brain at all (our skin and digestive tract can react to things without the brain ever being involved at all…you might be turned off by some dude because your epidermis once detected a clamminess in his fingers or not eat a food because your stomach once rejected it) which wasn’t thought but we’re making judgements based on sensory input that occurred in the nervous system outside the brain. And we don’t even know how the bacteria in our bodies drives our own behavior and choices…but they’re what provides our body odor and perhaps our pheromones (consider those implications….) And most of the way we communicate with and signal one another is done without speech and language. Trump said more to his voters with his half spoken sentences and physical cues than a progressive ever could with logic. Indeed logic was set upon by both Left and Right this year. And by the media as well, which was continuously seduced by visuals and slogans and interpreted logic as a sign of weakness. We don’t even know yet just how unconscious thought and social media work together, but there sure as hell is little thinking behind viral memes and yet by far the most successful and influential social media is memes. (Indeed, people respond viscerally if you criticize a meme.) And then there is this new phenomenon of memetic moments of late night comedy, a millionaire comic crying, that have incredible impact despite the fact that it is, after all, one of the super rich pretending to be one of us. In real life a crying millionaire would bring only scorn. On TV or watched over and over on YouTube, the tears become more genuine than real life.) Perhaps more than any other election, at least in modern times, 2016 was decided by non-verbal communication. Indeed, the two iconic images of the campaign were the headshots of Trump and Bernie, grimacing. This is ancient alpha male stuff. Trump’s was intentional–he practices those grimaces–and Bernie’s completely unintentional, but no matter. It’s not like we are responding logically to these images.

Ya know, advertising has been hip to this for decades. We do all sorts of things because advertising is so tuned in to neurology. Super Bowl Sunday is nothing but Madison Avenue figuring out how to get into your skull, plus a little football. Trump has a natural affinity for marketing and advertising. He knows what sells to a lot of people. That doesn’t mean he’s especially bright, but it does mean he’s not as dumb as a lot of much more intelligent people. Then again, those people believed what they were taught in philosophy class. Free will and logic. Thinking therefore being. The power of ideas. There’s a sucker graduating every minute. Including me, apparently, wasting time writing this when a simple meme would have worked so much better.

Losing my facial recognition skills

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Back in 2006 I lost my facial recognition skills. Suddenly most people were unrecognizable and the ones I recognized often looked very different. Eventually it mostly came back but there are people I used to see everyday that I still keep in contact with and I have no idea what they look like. Others I see pictures of and their pictures look different than I remember them. Typically everything looks the same but the face is not the face I thought they had. Voices are instantly recognizable though. If I hear the voice the face follows.

When it was really bad I used all kinds of things to recognize people. Hats were handy. As long as they wore the same hat. Beards the same. Height was great. Really tall guys were instantly recognizable. Really little people too. Height doesn’t change. But some jerk went on a diet, lost his double chin and left me clueless. A lady I knew got a breast job and I didn’t recognize her.

The weirdest thing about suddenly losing your facial recognition is that you don’t see the right things when you look at someone. You’re missing all the expressions and signals we use when talking to each other. You’re talking to someone and you see all these details of their skin, tiny little flaws, wrinkles, the shape of their face, it’s like looking at a painting. People look older. You’ll hear their voice behind you, turn around and they’re ten years older than they looked before. It’s as if the first impression their face made on you a decade before is locked into your facial recognition memory. Weirder still is that you think about this as they’re talking to you. It could be very disorienting, but you just deal with it or hide in your room.

It’s mostly repaired itself now. Though if we’ve only met a couple times there’s a good chance I won’t recognize you. I’ve gotten really good at faking my way through it. In a crowded situation it can get pretty dicey. I can tell if we’ve talked before and just hope someone says your name. But still there are inevitably moments when someone starts talking to me and I inadvertently diss them because I have no idea we’ve met before.

Oh….On the morning that I woke up with no facial recognition—it was an epilepsy thing, seizure activity burning its way through my temporal lobe—there was an all hands meeting at work. Hundreds of people milling around and nearly all of them as featureless as mannequins. It was pretty damn funny. Well, maybe not at the time.

It’s always interesting, epilepsy.

Stickyphobia

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So sitting on the couch goofing around on the iPhone I suddenly realized I had jelly on my hand. And my arm. Both arms. Both hands. Sticky strawberry jam. I’d had a couple crackers with jam for dessert and apparently some had slipped from the Akmak and dolloped onto my shirt.

Panic. I leaped to my feet, ran into the kitchen, removed the radioactive shirt, rolled it into a ball with the jelly inside and dropped it into the washer. Then I returned to the kitchen sink with the hot water on full blast and lathered soap all over my hands, scrubbing furiously, then up and down both arms, then my torso where the stickiness theoretically could’ve come into contact with my bare skin. Finally, scrubbed like a surgeon, I dried off and put on a clean shirt. I could still feel the tackiness, the hint if stickiness all over, on me, on everything. Hallucinating stickiness. Me, still this huge giant deep voiced dude at 62, completely losing it because of maybe a quarter of a tea spoon of strawberry preserves on my shirt.

Some things don’t change. To think I had believed I’d gotten beyond all of this. I’d made progress. I stay clear of maple syrup but I use honey. I wash the outside of the jar and thoroughly wash my hands afterward, and if–horror!–a drop of honey (or jelly) gets on my shirt it goes immediately into the washing machine, but I do use honey. Just not those hideous squeeze bottles. I won’t go near them. They shouldn’t even be legal.

It’s a phobia, yes. I guess everyone’s allowed one without necessarily being a nut and this is mine. And though it is as stupid as any phobia at least it’s sanitary, and easy to conceal. People think I just don’t like pancakes, though actually I love pancakes. I had some a couple years ago, feeling like a person with a fear of heights going skydiving. What a rush.

But as delicious as they were I just hate the stickiness of the syrup even more. Tactile trumps taste every time. Touch came before taste. I doubt critters in the Pre-Cambrian were savoring the flavors of the stromatolites they munching. They could feel them, though. My hypersensitivity to stickiness is evolutionary atavism, touch over taste, reeling from the icky like some vastly ancient invertebrate. It’s in my DNA. Or so I told myself in one night of overthinking. Though I don’t think I believed it. This is a fucked up Homo sapien sapien thing. Maybe one of Richard Dawkin’s memes. As our frontal lobes got bigger and bigger all sorts of ridiculous things get blown way out of proportion. Breast size. Religion. Cats. Stickiness. Though that’s still a rare one. Otherwise everyone would be as terrified of maple syrup as we are of spiders. Though I’m not scared of spiders, actually.

It does have a name, this stickyphobia, but it’s impossible to say and utterly unspellable and refers mainly to the fear of having peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth, which is just stupid. How can anyone be scared of peanut butter? It’s like being scared of clowns. Get over it. And no, I don’t want to go to IHOP. Not until they steam clean the place. And stop selling pancakes.

Time

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Man, I have no sense of time anymore…hour, day, date, even month sometimes, it is just gone. Just flowing along in the eternal present. I walk outside and everybody’s on a schedule, tied down tightly by 60’s–seconds and minutes, you get the idea–and dozens and two dozens and sevens and thirty or thirty ones. All these numbers you guys live in. I don’t. Years of epilepsy took care of that a long time ago (while her’s disappeared in a few endless minutes coding blue). It’s like I look out the picture window at another universe full of math and inside the two of us flow along in the present, segmented only by our circadian rhythms. I look at the fish tank with the two surviving fish (you might recall their killing spree) and I’m like them. They do their thing, having a ball–if there’s such a thing as a happy fish, it’s a zebra danio–their tiny striped lives managed only by watery circadian rhythms. They swim madly about, from impulse to impulse, and I write, mostly, and wonder where the time literally went, because it’s gone.

Bliss

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I have a pretty good idea of the time. Our internal clocks are very, very ancient and keep us aware of about when it is in the day. And we have calendars all over the house and if I look at them I can see the month. But man, my natural state is to have no idea what day of the week it is, or the date of the month. The calendars don’t help. The one I am looking at right now has a mother bear and three baby bears and beneath them thirty one days, each day a perfect little square. I don’t think I am supposed to see the days as perfect little squares. They are supposed to be numbered concepts. But the concepts seem to be missing and I have to keep asking my wife what day it is or what the date is. It’s kind of blissful, actually, this timelessness, but I’ve never been a fan of bliss. I was never a bliss kind of guy. So it’s a struggle not to disappear into this blissful pit, this little brain damaged heaven up here in the hills of Silver Lake. It’s not a battle I am winning. The timeless bliss is unrelenting, like a tide that comes in and never goes out again. And to think there are people who do yoga with goats to get where I am.

Sunglasses after dark

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My latest hobby seems to be looking online for pictures of people I used to know to remember what they looked like. The good thing is they now look like I remember them. But back in 2006 my epilepsy began acting up something fierce and I woke up one morning with my facial recognition zapped away. Think they call that prosopagnosia? Some unpronounceable Greek word anyway. Even faces I knew extremely well looked alien to me, and I could walk right up to people I’d known for years and seen every day and not recognize them till they spoke. I remember looking up people’s pictures–on what I don’t know, this was before Facebook–and they looked so different. Of course, if I tried to see in my mind’s eye how I remembered them there would be a fleeting mental image that would immediately dissolve into nothing. Literally dissolve. There’d be a half second glimpse of their face and then it would just granulate into pixels and then blackness. It was a trip. For the first couple years I was always startled at how different you all looked. Even my wife. And when I spoke to you I’d find my gaze looking at things you never normally notice. Without the usual focus, my eyes would wander as if I were studying a portrait, I’d see your skin–amazing the pores we have–and hair, and facial structure. Ears. Wrinkles. Shaving scars. It was incredibly distracting.

For a while I couldn’t recognize profiles at all, even my brother’s. Some pretty funny shit went down, all of it embarrassing. Not so funny, though, was how suddenly I couldn’t read people. Talk about unnerving. I’d be talking to someone and have no idea how they were reacting. I could not tell if I was bothering them, or boring them, or what. Inevitably, I began avoiding people. Eventually I learned to visually recognize you all in other ways, by your voices, body language, whatever, and I did eventually manage to begin reading you all again, though nowhere nearly as well as I once had. It is funny when you go from being very adept at something to instantly being lousy at it. After a couple years I just got used to it. Though I still avoid people more than I did before. It’s inevitable. As a species we read each others’ faces so well. Indeed, we impart more information with facial expressions than we do speaking. Lose that skill and you’re a little fucked. And mine was a relatively mild case. I wasn’t completely face blind. Some people are.

But now my mind’s eye images seems to match your looks. That’s a relief. Even pictures of people I haven’t seen in years match my memory of them. It’s a significant recovery. I’ve long dreaded a repeat of my bad epilepsy year of 2006, because among other things I didn’t want to go though that prosopagnosia bullshit again. It was really inconvenient. Crippling even. And it was also embarrassing. I took to wearing shades because I realized that people could tell I wasn’t looking at what people normally look at when they are talking to you. Mainly the eyes, I think. You can tell when some idiot is looking at your hair or chin or ears when you are trying to talk to him. So shades helped.

Although there was a downside to wearing shades. Like the time I was walking into work and found myself behind a lady I didn’t recognize. Must be a new employee, I figured. I caught her profile as she slipped in the door ahead of me. Didn’t know who she was, but she was definitely hot. Safely behind my shades I was checking her out. I was forty nine years old and safely behind my sunglasses acting like a high school kid. I watched her walk ahead of me, her hips sliding this way, then that, like dancing a slow salsa. That’s America to me, I thought to myself. What it meant I do not know but I distinctly remember thinking that to myself because suddenly the lady in front of me stopped and turned around. What are you looking at, she asked. I knew that voice instantly. It was the lady I’d worked with for a decade. Probably my closest friend in the whole building. We talked every single day. We’d sat next to each other for years. She was gorgeous, sure, but I had never ogled her once. I worked with her. She was a friend. There are rules about those things.

But unfortunately I hadn’t recognized her by her profile and besides I hadn’t been looking at her face anyway. Suddenly I felt so stupid, like a forty nine year old man caught acting like a high school kid. I’d never been so busted in my life, not even as a teenaged high school kid. But she was also one of the very few people at work who knew about my sudden face blindness. I spluttered an apology that I hadn’t recognized her. I know you didn’t, she said, that’s why you were checking out my ass. The epilepsy had also rendered me with one hell of a stutter, and thoroughly flustered I stammered something inane. You idiot, she said, take off those stupid sunglasses, you’re inside. I shoved them in my pocket. You’re blushing, she said, and cackling a pinay laugh went up the stairs to her desk. Aren’t you coming she asked. I said I’ll take the elevator. My knee, I said. My knee was fine. I just needed a few minutes alone to stop blushing. Sometimes it takes minutes. And then sometimes it takes forever. On my way to the lobby I stopped by the restroom and splashed my face with cold water. It didn’t help. I made my way to the elevator. Just as the doors were closing someone yelled hold that elevator! Half a dozen women got on, still feeling their two martini lunch. I knew all of them. Why are you blushing? the loudest of them asked. What did you do? They started snickering. He probably got busted checking out some babe’s ass! Instantly I flushed crimson again, and you’d think it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. How do women know these things? I tried to say something and stammered.

Mortified, I made a mental note that sunglasses and epilepsy don’t mix.

Living timelessly

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Man, not only do I keep forgetting what day of the week it is, I can never remember the day of the month, and sometimes what month it is, and even season. But I’ve been adjusting. I have a calendar right by my desk in the office here that I stare at every once in a while, which helps a little. At least it’s more decipherable than the Aztec one on the wall above it. But lately I’ve been losing track of time a lot. Like every day. Like maybe more often than not. I sort of exist clocklessly. All the clocks in our place are off by several minutes, none the same as the other. I just noticed this. None of them are synched up. There were two clocks in the kitchen and they were eight minutes apart, and neither were correct. All of our clocks used to be exactly on time. Now which ever clock we happen to be looking at, that is the time until we look at another clock and it becomes the time. I just noticed that my pocket watch doesn’t work at all. I can’t remember the last time I ever looked at it. I lost my cell phone so don’t have that as a time piece either. My internal clock seems utterly random. I’m living timelessly.

I’m sure we each several internal clocks, our body and brain probably have all kinds of ways of measuring time. But the conscious perception of time’s passing, that seems to be missing. Which isn’t actually a problem on my own. In here, in the house, time goes whichever way it does. Doesn’t matter too much. But out there, with all you people and your clocks and schedules and timetables and deadlines and office hours, that’s increasingly the challenge. I used to be one of you, too. A busy, hectic schedule, timed to the minute. Now I pass through time like I’m in another multiverse, ethereal and time free, while yours passes through mine measured right down to the second. We talk, we interact, we hug, we kiss, we shake hands, we laugh at the same jokes, whatever, and we then part again, you in the tightly measured real world and me in my world of words and perceptions. I remember being one of you guys. I just can’t remember how.

4 F’s

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[Not sure when this was written, sometime in the twenty teens.]

Actually, there are various parts of the brain that create our various senses of happiness, and all have been recorded in various ways many, many, many times. Neurologists have been able to stimulate them in order to create happiness for decades now. In fact, neuroscience, neurosurgery and nanotechnology are on the verge of giving us regular control over our own moods. Basically, any discussion of the human experience that does not see us as merely the outward manifestations of our brains is horseshit. You are what you think, even if you have no clue you are thinking it. When you realize how much of our mind isn’t in the brain at all, but in, say, the skin, gonads, or digestive tract, it gets even more depressing. We are only aware of what we consciously know, yet our consciousness is only a fraction of our brain, most of what the brain does we are completely unaware of…yet so much of what we do is because that unconcious part of our brain does it. What neurologists call the Four F’s–feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproduction–are overwhelmingly what concern us every day. And even when they do not concern us momentarily–like when we do accounting at the office, or watch golf on TV–any one of those four F’s can and will instantly distract us. We are those Four F’s, with a lot of intellectual frontal lobery out front making us think we are more than just hungry, angry, scared and horny animals.

Hypnagogia

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Door bell rings. I’m on the couch. I’ll get it, I say, and sit up. I’m on the couch. Everything is on, TV, lights, computer. The door bell rings again, and again, but we don’t have a doorbell. I switch off the TV. Silence. I turn off the lights. Darkness. I turn off the computer.