I heard my brain singing

Just have to say - this blog has to be the best kept secret in the world. It's deliberate. I am not yet sure what purpose these blogs can serve...andhats offto all frequent bllog writers, I am finding my writing feet here. I can do comedy in shows and even write plays. writing in 'article' style is a new art to master.

My last visit with Dr P was last month. I have been kept busy with directing adn promotingmy next teaching show and writing enough material to do an hour-long sharing of the new show- in-development...

On the 26th Jun, Dr P ran a different programme or protocol to usual. The last time she ran it it was completely silent, she later told me. 

It started up and I was looking for the usual bar graphs or carpet/tapestry graph  and listening to the clunks and cheeps of the regular programmes.

Instead I heard choral harmonics.... something like the soundtrack of an art-science-fiction film (like the original Solaris). That is your brain said Dr P.

It's singing I said.

I guess there's a lot credit due the makers of the machinery....but this was beautiful...I wish I had taken more notes. The tones changed sounds, to that of violas, later muted brass and violin. Surges, pauses, crescendos. Different combinations of timbres came and went like beautiful clouds of colour.

I came away with a new awareness that inside my skull is this delicious twin halved, soft and elicate network of intricate and shifting connections. The beauty of those octopi or squid whose skins shimmers with changing light. The word Brain had aways shown me a graphic image before - a two-dimension and, profile view, in grey, black and white. It's an opal made of tissue and blood. It's delicate, it's creative it's forever in movement and it's alive.

bright brain underneath it all

Dr P lent me a gizmo called 'alphastim'. It stimulates the good alpha waves.
When we did the first protocol, she was thrilled at the improvement.  
Two sets of waves were at the new good level. A remarkable change from previously.
I have to admit I have been feeling calmer and calmer as I have been using it (once a day for 20mins each time), although it's always hard for me to tell what to credit with changes because I usually have about 3 new practices on the go at any one same time.
That morning, yesterday, Monday 14th I had woken up with a still, thoughtless brain. Smooth. Easy. What peace and joy. Also the night before, Sunday, I felt that 'I' had discovered the knack of calming my brain at night by choosing to be in my body as a preparation for sleep.


Well yesterday I had to pack up the cute little alphastim gadget and it's wires into its polystyrene pack and into it's cardboard box and take it back to Dr Parkinson.

Last night in bed my brain was hopping- having all sorts of ideas of the new order for the show I will be doing July 7th. I chose to go to body but it felt like a jangly buzz also. Missing the alphastim! I persisted and al least refused to get anxious about the sleeplessness. Eventually I slept.


I mentioned to Dr P on Monday that I noticed I am still having this problem: I want to say 16th July, for example, and what comes out of my mouth is 'the 6th February' - ie some other random date and month. I only realise when my listener repeats to em what I have said. 'That's the visual part of your brain said Dr P. We visualise the calendar or the activity or the word/concept before speaking it.


She moved the electrodes and replaced them on the left front side of my head. Some were also attached behind my ear.


The brain pattern still showed the improvement but there was a part of the pattern that Dr P said was 'out of order!' A vibration that should have read around 30 was off the scale at 100. Brain was trying to regulate and scoring well enough but then the level would shoot back up again. We did three new protocols like this. Vindicating to see that the problem has a visual representation in the various bar and line graphs that Dr P's computer throws up (and therefore a 'reality'). And of course gratifying that this might be fixable.

She also said you have a 'bright brain underneath it all'. Buried treasure. Might I become as genius as i would like? Bring it on!

I asked Dr P - how come I can (albeit with effort) member my lines in the show and she said that was a trained memory, with various stimulators eg sense memory involved.


It will be a remarkable thing if i can trust my memory - trust my spontaneous speaking to a new level.


While I was there Dr P asked how my tinnitus was and I said still there - but also noted that until she asked I had not been aware of it. Interesting. It does seem to be softer, too.

gap

Had a long gap between visits to Dr P. In December I managed to give myself three blows on the head, two of them on the one day.

Most recent stupid thing I did was to not remember the bus route I needed to take to get to an appointment.
A friend was here last night speaking of the theories of Kant and Lacan. I wonder if my brain could even hold that kind of knowledge, those kinds of distinctions.

Last session with Dr P, something interesting. 'Do you have allergies?' She said, looking at the screen. I mentioned that I had just been rehearsing in a very dusty room on the weekend up in Birmingham. She said: 'Yes, I can see.' The brain was all upset about it.
 

Dr P has given me a machine called AlphaStim to use for 20 minutes everyday for 2 months. To remove anxiety, apparently. Of which I had had a lot recently.

I hope it works.

another visit

Life is full and busy and it's been a while since my last visit to Dr P. 

It was a while a go so I'm looking at random notes I scrawled in my journal. My High Beta is till high. Still some 'jangling' as Dr P says. 'The brain has pushed up the alpha', she said at one point  and something like brain function is 'compromised', strangely, I like that word, but that my 'neurones are so much better' and 'we strengthen.' The excess of theta has dropped, mercifully. Although I meditated for 22 years or so, desperately trying to up the old theta (among other things) it's not good when you have it going on in the wrong time and place, makes you zoned out, de-focused, harder to concentrate.

I had noticed a decrease in my tinnitus after the last visit - but it's up again. I am a bit concerned that we are focusing on the Tinnitus when really I can live with that, and  I'd rather be smarter. Dr P says that the work we are doing will be fixing the brain in general. Good.

I do notice I am making less mistakes on my invoices and lesss dazzled when looking at tables eg timetables.

My watch (dropped it on a hard surface a while back) is doign something stupid - it looks find for a god part of the hour , then the small hand gets ahead of itself and it looks like tit's a whole hour later than it is. This got really interesting when I was on a short holiday in Europe with the one-hour time change already...

on my lust for self-improvement

I laugh to think that I have my father to thank for my devotion to self-improvement, because my father was a steadfast non-improver and hater of change in general. He was fixed in his ways ever since I knew him and allowed himself to become ever more fixed, incurious and unquestioning as time went on.

But it just so happens that I first met the literature of self-improvement on our family bookshelves. I am not at all sure that Dad actually read a single volume. Or even a chapter. He did have a hypnosis relaxation record he used to lie on the lounge room floor and listen to, though. The LP had a black and white cover with a giant scary spiral (Hitchcock's Vertigo no doubt helped with that) and the record label's grainy logo of the Sphinx added an extra gloomy mysteriousness to it.
But over on the bookshelf was Dale Carnegie's classic 'How to Win Friends etc' and a book by a man who was an exponent on multi-tasking one's way to achievement and success. He had his family learn foreign languages as they brushed their teeth, and such like. I have pieced for myself a story of why and how these books got there. My Dad worked as a Singer Sewing machine sales repairman. He saw his job as an excuse to drive around the vast dusty suburban roads of Brisbane and the flat Redland Bay Area between brief visits to women needing their machines repairing. I think his boss must have tried to get a more pro-active attitude out of his employee - and possibly a few more working hours to boot. It wasn't a position he held down for long. Dad wasn't really cut out for sustained regular employment.

My father had nervous problems. Official diagnosis: 'nerves'. This was said dismissively to my poor young country-girl mother (so she told me) when she had followed Dad's panicked demands for a doctor to be sent out in the middle of the night (yes those were the days when you could call a doctor out to your home and they would actually come). I think she also once used the phrase 'anxiety neurosis' or some thing like that.

It was an interesting environment to grow up in. Dad ran our family, well his moods did, managed by my mother. And my mother told me stuff about my father. My early life was curtailed by my father. 'Play quietly in your room and don't disturb your father'. Mum told me she had schooled me with this. Told me when I was about 30. I was surprised, I thought I had chosen to tinker in my room with tiny dolls and packs of cards (as I couldn't play card games due to lack of playing partners and as no one had even taught me solitaire, I used the face cards instead as characters in my story scenarios). Mum had another story that I used to stand in front of the mirror for hours talking to myself. I was always a bit embarrassed by this - did it mean I was vain? I realized eventually that I must have been profoundly lonely. But it's like the fish looking for the ocean 'you're in it!' it doesn't need identifying, it's invisible and impalpable, it's just ...existence.

When I was 7 about to become 8. The family took a 4 day car journey to teh Queensland outback. The last three of those days I experienced travel sickness to the point of nausea and remember standing by the roadside, voiding my foodless stomach of the very last of its stock of bile and then my very recently swallowed saliva, while my father loomed over me bellowing 'it's all in the mind!' Which is ironic and un-compassionate of him as that's exactly where all his problems were. 

When I was 17, I once had to cancel a driving lesson at my father's request so I could hold his hand as he lay on the floor and moaned. 'If only a man had a broken arm, he could understand!' He couldn't understand and it's probably fair to say he refused to understand. The fact that he mentioned understanding was startling to me as I was required not to understand, required not even to be aware of Dad's 'nerves'. I had been briefed by mum never to mention it. And yet, regrettably, here I was on this day, having to be sudden witness to non-existent thing. He wanted to hold my hand. I felt trapped. Before you think me heartless, a little back story - once when I was three he had made me sit on his stomach (while the morbid baritone drone of the Hypnosis record relentlessly intoned) because he had a stomach upset. (Yes, I have been through this with my therapist.) You see, Dad's ideal child was an inanimate one. 'Children should be seen and not heard' was declaimed often. Clearly 'children are also a handy alternative to a hot water bottle' was another of his deeply cherished beliefs.


On this exquisitely uncomfortable occasion (hand, not hot water bottle) the sound track was provided by the radio which rode the airwaves always. It was interminably tuned to his favoured jabbering, MOR station. (Actually more lowest common denominator, than MOR, but let's not dwell). The radio was playing a merry American tune 'There's such a lot of living to do!' I sat there, desolate that my lesson had been cancelled, afraid at what this state of my father's meant or would lead to and feeling - how can I put this? - in a dull panic of claustrophobia and aversion, combined with a prayerfulness that Dad be deaf to the song that was playing so that he not notice the hideous irony of it all.

There's music to play
Places to go, people to see!
Everything for you and me!

Life's a ball
If only you know it
And it's all just waiting for you
You're alive,
So come on and show it
There's such a lot of livin' to do

My father wasn't the most aware of men, or so I felt, so I was hopeful. 

And that was when he said, with a sentimental-to-melodramatic cadence: 'Ah, Peta, It doesn't feel like there's a lot of livin' to do.' which capped it all off nicely. I was left me to wrestle down yet a billowing cloud of sickly absurdity while I simultaneously entertained the somehow horrific concept that I might be expected to comfort him in some way.

And people wonder where my sense of absurd dark humour comes from.

new brain

There was a wonderful Python sketch where some 'Gumbys' in their corner-tied pocket hankies gurned 'new brain', or so I remember.

I watched Limitless the other night on DVD.

I so want to have that level of smartness - the 

drug usage and violent drug barons I can do without but I so want the smarts.

Anyway - here's my update.

I was weirdly disappointed that in our recent session we were focusing on the tinnitus - though I'd love to be free of it, of course! - because I am so invested in being cleverer. I asked Dr P and she seemed to agree with me saying - well if we fix this we are helping the brain overall, aren't we? She seemed to say yes but she could have been humoring me.

However - here's a cautious thought. I feel a tad smarter. I am sitting doing thing on the computer and my memory as I go about my email tasks seems better - I make fewer mistakes with numbers. I feel less fog. I can look at the top title bar of a document with more ease - that seemed to be too effortful in the past - hence me gettign into a muddle with which document I was working on - relying on a motor skill memory (when had I last clicked from doc to doc) rather than simply looking! How bizarre. How wonderful.

Also exciting news...if the volume indicator on my TV is accurate (variables, variables, subjectivity)  I seem to be hearing  better!

FANTASTIC.

I have always suspected that it's the high frequency sounds of my tinnitus that are obstructing me hearing consonants so clearly. At the hospital ( I must write about my Tinnitus Therapy session) they have told me I have lost upper range hearing - I don't like to take it on. Glasses one can accept, but the hearing aid is far from a fashion accessory at the moment. Even if my hearing is slightly impaired, I'm sure that the tinnitus lowering will be good news for me.

It's rather exciting.

If I were to rate my tinnitus - I might say 25% in right ear (it's actually seems  hard to gauge each ear level - my access to right hear hearing is impeded by the sounds in my left) and 65% in left. Which is a big reduction. Yes, it really is.
Miracles may be possible. 
Or rather, Science works.
I'm cautious of course, 
but a tad excited.

tackling the tinitus

I've been working hard and away for a bit. Recently visited Dr Parkinson for another session of Brainwork. Four Protocols all on the central strip of the brain.

Dr P asked which side the tinnitus was worse on. Usually the left, I said.

We worked with the first three protocols. I scored pretty well compared to the sluggishness of the fist attempt at these trainings last visit. In Bar form you could see a healthy and satisfactory ( to Dr P) downward trend.

And in the format where tit looks like a multicoloured carpet being woven before your eyes, it was all looking very smooth and coherent indeed - apart from on sudden spike that mystified the Doctor.

Then the final area - the electrodes had been moved over to the right side for the last two. One still remaining glued to the bone behind my left ear (with the milky gel product Dr P was finding it hard to deal with on this warmish day). 'That one monitors your heart. The heart sends a much stronger charge than the brain (I'd heard this in personal development contexts and here was this scientist verifying it!), so we gather that data and subtract it from the brain data.'

This last reading was crazy - very incoherent. Dr P was surprised. I was scoring ok, about 200-odd by the end of the session, but everytime my synapses hit the targets, they jumped back to their scrambled default. 'This proves that your brain agrees with you - the right side monitors the left ear - the tinnitus will seem worse in your left ear.'

The carpet graph looked very jangled, a weaving machine gone wrong. I thought about the jangled nerves I had when my neighbours played techno - the way my skin prickled and I walked about the flat as if on knives - the time I first manifested tinnitus, a whole 13 years ago.

A bit of me is afraid that the tinnitus will go - strange to admit, I know but it's a real sensation, it's like: miracles will be possible, world-view overturned, scary!

But of course I'd love to hear quiet again.

Sitting typing this today - right ear much quieter. left ear still audible, perhaps more like 7 than the 8 I gave it in the consulting room on Tuesday.