SubscribeJuly 20th, 2009
There is no colour in nature
“There is no color in nature…(only) wavelengths of light reflected from different surfaces.”
At the Safeway store in spring I jumped back to avoid a cart being run by a child who was not yet strong enough to control it. My backpack knocked over a potted plant. It fell and the pot and flower broke. It was a purple hyacinth. Around me the store was full of people. The rack of flowers was near the entrance and while I stood there, for the minute of time I held still, staring at the flower, the automatic doors swished open and closed, open and closed, people took full bags of groceries out and a young woman in her work uniform wrestled a line of eight or ten carts back into place.
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July 19th, 2009
Blindsight
One would think the primary visual cortex is needed to see, but apparently not. Despite being blind because of damage to the primary visual cortex, a person is still able to perceive light well enough through other areas of the brain, that when prompted to “guess” where an unseen object is, patients (human and monkey) are able to grasp the object, shaping their hand to the appropriate contours prior to touching the object or knowing what it is. This is called blindsight.
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July 18th, 2009
I dream of ATP
I dream of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Not often nor in any great detail, ATP (a high energy macromolecule essential to every living thing on the planet because it is our “energy currency”) winds its way through my dreams like a three-stranded woven cord, sometimes just itself on a dark background of a nearly empty dream and sometimes it comes across the stage of a dream in progress, taking the shape of something else. Last time it was a large black cat, a panther I suppose, from its size and disposition. When something like that happens, some intrusion of image or content, I stop staring at the dream unfolding and I look in surprise—this time at the molecule/cat unwinding itself across the field of my dream vision. I know in the dream it is ATP and at the same time it is a cat and the surprise of that wakes me in the dream to the fact that I am dreaming.
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July 12th, 2009
The wonderful thing about experience
I have always thought that the wonderful thing about experience is that it can never be false. What I decide the experience means can be false, what actions I take based on the experience can be helpful or harmful, but experience itself simply happens. For example, it is not the experience of rage or fear that is the problem, it is what is done or not done, what meaning is attached to the experience that causes the problems. Usually, of course, ascribing meaning to experience happens before we actually think. We hear a voice in our head and assume that it is, for example, either schizophrenia or some sort of other-worldly message. Most often we simply accept the story that traditionally goes with a specific set of events. We go further. We equate the story to the event, assessing and locking reality into place in a way that affects our capacity to perceive.
Storying for humans is a feed-back loop between the outer and inner worlds of lived experience. We hear a voice in our head, and it is not just an experience that could have several different stories attached, we become, in our own mind, the story that is being told, and then we judge ourselves by its rules. We forget that it is just a story. We forget that story works more like a verb than a noun. We get caught up in the nounness of the world; we have an experience of voices, we attach to the experience what we have been told it means, we judge ourselves by the story, and in that moment we have gone from a being experiencing to either a schizophrenic or a divine messenger.