neural urban renewal

I take a different route. For each day's walk, I go a different way. I go my own way, to paraphrase Fleetwood Mac. Sometimes spontaneous, other times quasi-premeditated. Best is when I embark on a different compass point from the day before. How long can I maintain this variation? The array of streets, avenues, places, drives, boulevards, circles, and lanes is finite. Both the thoroughfares and each day's combination, however haphazard, are finite. The possibilities are not endless, but are they inexhaustible, given the number of days and scenarios available to me? 

Walking out the door, I have a choice. Before walking out the door, I have a choice: Which door? Exiting the Harbor Street side, I obey the sidewalk invitation and refrain from walking on the grass, the grass cancering yellow on its verges. Or I walk out the basement door, near the playground on Emerson, climbing up its steps, a sheet of wind rippling me. Less often, I proceed out via the main lobby; less often in the Age of Coronavirus because of too many chances to encounter fellow residents and other humans, masked or unmasked. 

Which direction?

Toward Tipp Hill? Downtown by way of West Genesee? Downtown by West Fayette Street? Or toward Solvay, on Milton, toward the post office, the paperboard plant, 690, or steep hills hiding munificent mansions in a blue-collar, our-own-electricity town? Maybe industrial, treatment plant-bounded Hiawatha Boulevard slouching toward Destiny? Possibly toward Camillus, zigzagging into suburbia with its mulched gardens, 5 p.m. IPAs, and lace-curtain lonelinesses? 

I suppose I could inspect a map and plot out the precise scenarios left to me. I could chart all the itineraries untrammeled, navigable, and still available. That's not me. What a buzzkill that would be. Add this to your algorithm: Walking to the other side of the street (any street or part of a street) to break up the sequence, to foster the illusion of newness.

Is that it, is that why I insist on these new pathways?

Behold, I make all things new. (Book of Revelation)

Or is it something to do with rebooting, rewiring, overwriting, reframing, and recasting? 

History is a nightmare from which I am tring to awake. (James Joyce)

Don't stroke victims need to embark upon fresh nerve patterns, new neural pathways, to accomplish tasks formerly taken as a given?

Rinse, recalculate, recalibrate.

If it wasn't a stroke, what was the cerebral/spiritual upheaval? Where was (is) its seismic epicenter?  

We are told: Do not leave the teahouse by the same path upon which you entered it.

The journey of a thousand miles . . . . etc., etc., that cliche.

The road not taken?

Take them all. All of them. Individually and collectively.

Walk them all, every which way. And back again.

Then tell us about it.

 

inattentional blindness

I failed to see the gorilla. Even after I was warned. Did you see your gorilla? I looked again. No gorilla. Gone. Was that a fox? I think I saw a fox, furtive and sly and quick. I was too busy concentrating on the other thing so I missed the gorilla. It's not a bad thing. It happens. Don't judge me for it. Or yourself. I wasn't afraid of the gorilla. Don't go there. I just didn't see it, or him, or her. How was I to know? I was told to concentrate on the other thing, the task assigned, the job at hand. Wouldn't you? The gorilla was harmless, in view for nine seconds. I missed it. Right before my very own two eyes. My glasses are fine, thank you. You say you saw it; you saw the gorilla. Good for you. You think it's some kind of accomplishment? So you saw it. Did you give it a banana? How about the gorilla: did anyone bother to ask whether the gorilla saw me? Or whether the gorilla saw you? Us? Those are fair questions. Don't snigger. Go ask the gorilla. The fox, you say? Where did the fox come from? They said the fox was a surprise to everyone. Nobody expected the fox to saunter by, not even the Gorilla Masters. What's that, I'm making up the bit about the fox? How can you say that, how dare you say that? I saw the fox. For a full second or two. Strolling by like a foxy boulevardier. That fox.

wait let me think

I look at the face. I can't remember the name that goes with it. This is frustrating. Annoying. I study the face. Try harder. No luck. It happens more and more. Old age. Or worse. Or it happens to everybody now and then. But I know that I know the name. To rewind, I know that I know the face, from somewhere. Not just the name. At one time the name was married to the face in my consciousness. So this is not a case of prosopagnosia, which I blogged about years ago. That's when you can't recognize a familiar face, often because of brain damage. This isn't that. I'll call this nomenprosopagnosia. That's a half-witted attempt to coin a useful word for this, based solely on my knowledge of nomen, the Latin word for name. See, four years of Latin is paying off. One of the reasons this annoys me is social. I do not want the embarrassment of asking someone their name if I clearly should know it. Save me from the possibility it's someone I know extremely well, say, a relative. I understand this can happen in high-stress situations, especially at introduction time. That's normal. The fear of that very forgetfulness happening heightens the pressure and the stress -- and the likelihood of a socially fatal error. Spread the net wider and you have a name-pool of friends and colleagues or former friends and former colleagues (some intimate) stretching all the way to mere acquaintances. I am willing to bet that this last category, mere acquaintance, is the most common breeding ground for this nomenloss, this nomenfright. Call it nomenamnesia. A memory trick often works for me. It's alphabetical. A. No, it's not Andrew or Amanda. B. Nope. Not Beth or Bob or Brenda or Billy. etc. Do the same with C, D, et cetera. You might get lucky early in the game. You might say to yourself, "E. Emily! Yes, that's it!" Why does that work? Or how? Do neuroscientists know? Sometimes, though, that little trick doesn't work, not even after you've gone through the alphabet, perhaps twice. And then you're back to Square One. No-Nomenland.

'you don't understand'

I'm afraid I don't understand you (or you, either) and I dare say no one understands another. Not completely, not inside the skin, within the neural system, not entirely. Doesn't neuroscience confirm this more and more with every study? (I don't know. You tell me.) What I mean is, "what I want you to understand is," we think (enough with the italics already!) we know what another person feels and thinks. We claim we understand the other person's perspective. We feel we share a perception. We say this especially for those who are related to us by blood (parents and children and siblings and so forth). We say this about those we love. Or hate. Therapist and patient claim it. Business partners. Clients and associates. Intimate friends. Lovers. But it's silly, really, to think two infinitely different universes of experience can somehow overlap or merge or align perfectly. It's absurd to imagine that the river of solipsism can be so fordable. These are not cynical assertions. True, when we have glimpses of this "understanding" of another, they are rewarding, even exhilarating. There are such moments, or we at least perceive them as moments of shared illumination. Wonderful. I celebrate that, I salute it. And isn't this what art, music, literature, poetry, ballet, painting, sculpture, film, even sports do? Yes. But these are fleeting glimpses, glimpses we are thrilled by. We are grateful for such moments. But they are rare, in my view; if not rare, not commonplace. I suppose there is no way to prove or disprove this conclusively. But I posit that "you don't understand" is the norm among humans, except perhaps for conjoined twins. Hence, the study of semantics, semiotics, diplomacy, sociology, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology, et cetera ad nauseam ad infinitum. Mirabile dictu. Mirabile visu.

think feel see

"The wise reject what they think, not what they see."
-- Huang-Po

But who said I am wise or aspire to be or that I think or even see? I get it, what you are saying, H-P. Or at least I think I have the willingness to be willing to get what you're saying, or said, or wrote in masterful brushstrokes of calligraphy, maybe hundreds of years ago. (Who are you, H-P?)

Thinking? What is it? In Descartes' Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio makes the case that neurologically speaking thinking is not divorced from thinking; we can't think without the feeling supplied in all those neurons that make up the central nervous system; the popularly believed thinking vs. feeling dichotomy does not exist in anatomy, in our biology.

But I get, or seek to get, what you're getting at, H-P.

See things for what they are feel the world for what it tastes touch the tongue of reality's open secrets lick the corners of the cosmos on the blade of grass smell the earwax of my dumb questions.

It has been said, "you need a meeting." A meeting of mind and matter, not mind over matter; a marriage of true minds and emotions, not divorced or legally separated from out there or in here, from the business of is-ness.

Something like that, but not quite, H-P. Calling H-P.

as if, or not

I'm scratching my head over the term "anosognosia," not as if I could pronounce it.

But, yes, denial or unawareness of a disability.

Or denial or unawareness of problems, or tragedy.

Yes, I can see where it's pandemic.

This from the Times:

ERROL MORRIS: Yes. Maybe it’s an effective strategy for dealing with life. Not dealing with it.

David Dunning, in his book “Self-Insight,” calls the Dunning-Kruger Effect “the anosognosia of everyday life.”[10] When I first heard the word “anosognosia,” I had to look it up. Here’s one definition:

Anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability. [11]

Dunning‘s juxtaposition of anosognosia with everyday life is a surprising and suggestive turn of phrase. After all, anosognosia comes originally from the world of neurology and is the name of a specific neurological disorder.

When people use the phrase, "it's a disease of denial," I think: doesn't everyone do that with every disease, and with death, to some extent?

Just thought I'd share this.

Cheers.

Kinesthetic Melody

Ran across this term in a story in the NY Times, about a woman who used to get seizures, never got them while running, but through a brain operation loses track of place and time. Her neuropsychologist says she runs according to a

kinesthetic melody.

I like that.

Good name for a band.

Or a religion, or afterlife, or this life, or intuitiveness, or synchronicity in work or play, or harmony (not the dot com one), or art, or music, et cetera, ad infinitum.

"Age quod agis," as Father Birge so wisely intoned when we were seminarians (and we hooted and hollered until he closed the door to our classroom). Little did we know.

I added "kinesthetic melody" to my list at Wordie.org.

Lobal Warming

I was waiting for my gastronomic Santa Fe salad to be prepared (just for me, because they had run out) at the mall food court. As I was leaning back against the counter, surveying the grand expanse of boulevardiers en shoppant, my meditation was interrupted by two young customers, ordering their own repasts.

One of these two females (discretion and the prevailing ethical winds prevent me from estimating the age range of said imaginary characters encountered by an imaginary pseudonymous blogger, but suffice it to say that Vladimir Nabokov was a novelist and lepidopterist, whose own imagination allowed the wings of his fantasies to brush against unconventional nets regarding these matters) suddenly turns to me, stares at me, sighs, and sweatily says, "I'm so hot!"

(Did I mention the ample display of human flesh, the twin peaks of June in the cold heart of November? Did I forget to sing the glories of Grand Tetons cleaving to ancient concupiscence?)

The mind is a funny thing. I'm reading a lot about neurons and dendrites and stuff in a book by author and fellow blogger Jonah Lehrer. The fascinating book is titled "Proust Was a Neuroscientist." Lehrer's book cites works like Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat."

The mind, especially the erotically inclined comic mind or the comically inclined erotic mind, would have found it so easy to say, "Yes, you are" and politely smiled, if that is remotely possible.

In the space of milliseconds, nanoseconds, the mind races through the menu of myriad responses, verbal or otherwise, available to it. Alas, the dendritic firings/misfirings and molecular exchanges are set in genomic motion before my creation, ordered up in a gastronomic soup of RNA, DNA, and YIKES!

So often in my life the wrong words have slipped out even as the Strict Catholic Command Center shouted, "DON'T SAY IT DON'T SAY IT DON'T!"

With a straight line like hers, what wisecracker could resist saying, "Yes, you are"?

"Hot? Been to the gym?" I feebly mumbled.

I didn't quite get her reply. Seeing her chuckle, rather than watching her summon security, was relief enough.

Then her plastic didn't work.

I didn't even offer to buy dinner for her.

See? All that lobal warming stuff is just a myth.