A new kind of R&B: Rhythm and Brainhacking

Scott Adams, the creator of the famous Dilbert comic strip, has his voice back.

To explain:

As regular readers of my blog know, I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down in some people, usually after you strain your voice during a bout with allergies (in my case) or some other sort of normal laryngitis….

My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I’m no brain surgeon.

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

My brain remapped.

My speech returned.

This is very cool, obviously on a personal level for Adams, but also it is very philosophically interesting to me.

One of my favorite philosophers, Suzanne Langer, theorized that the mind — more specifically, human consciousness (as differentiated from non-intellectual animal consciousness) — evolved because of rhythm. The repetitive patterns that we feel in rhythm (think drumming) tend to jumpstart our brain to higher levels of consciousness.

Sounds about right to me….

the view from on high….

I haven’t updated in a while. This seems to be a recurring theme on this blog lately. And that’s fine; this blog is what it is and my writing attention has been elsewhere both on my Everyday Systems log and in my other writing projects.

I’ve been to the top of 3 different mountains in the past couple-three weeks; first I took my sister, my niece, and my daughter to the top of Cadillac Mountain, which is one of my absolute favorite views in the entire world. It was a beautiful day, and the drive to the top of the mountain was uneventful.

Then later in the week, I took my daughter and a friend of hers to the much smaller and less-spectacularly-located Bradbury Mountain in Pownal, Maine, about a half-hour drive from Portland. This one does require a climb to the top, and while I was huffing and puffing to the top, it wasn’t what I would call overly strenuous. It was fun, though.

Earlier this week, I went camping with my daughter to Camden Hills State Park; we had a wonderful time and saw a pretty spectacular full moon rise over Penobscot Bay from the top of Mount Battie. I learned that there are only 2 places on the entire Eastern seaboard where the mountains meet the sea in this way; Camden is one of them, the other is Mt Desert Island. And truly, these two views are amazing. While a much smaller mountain (800 feet high), the view from Mount Battie is equally spectacular, with the port town of Camden just below.

I think from now on when I am playing “tour guide” I will have to include a trip to the top of Mount Battie as well as Cadillac Mountain.

The moonrise on top of Mount Battie was especially poignant for my daughter and I, as earlier that day we had learned that a dear friend of ours who was 4 months pregnant had lost her baby. I wrote a poem about the experience, and I may post it here.

The War on Nature

Apparently the Duluth city government are nothing more than UnAmuriCon Damnable Hippie Drug Abusing Terrorists, Every Last One Of Them, And They Should Be Sentenced To Years In Prison Because They Are Criminals, And Not Even Sick.

Or something.

Another possibility, of course, is that Duluth has a courageous and skillful prankster on its hands.

Either way, it proves the utter futility of outlawing certain plants.

y’know, I really love living in Maine…

… and for a variety of reasons. The sky in Maine is wondrous; a rich shade of deep blue on clear summer days, yet invitingly close at night (the moon and stars seem closer somehow); the beaches, sand and rocky, connect one with the salt-water blood of the earth in a compelling way; the mountains rise majestically from the pine forests; the people are generally friendly and laid back, and will cut you a lot of slack if you’re a freak like me.

But mostly, I think it’s the foul-smelling, raging evil mutant wolf-beasts from hell that make me feel so at home here.

Just sayin’.

EDIT: this story is still growing….

Balance, and writing

I’m trying to get my legs under me again, in a metaphorical sense. It seems as if my center — that sense of stability I experience when I am grounded — is shifting again. I feel off-balance too much of the time.

I saw the nearly-full moonrise tonight, a beautiful, huge, round eye looking down at me from just above the downtown Portland skyline. I walked home from work and went around the Back Bay. Every time I was given a choice in terms of which way to walk, I followed the moon. She always leads the way well.

I’ve started writing again. The idea that’s been brewing in my head for years now, a large writing project exploring the intersection of paganism with history, politics, metaphysics, and theology is starting to take shape. I’m using a really cool TiddlyWiki page as my nonlinear notebook, as a place to scribble down ideas, useful quotes from sources (think notecards), and do outlines, all from one central location accessible to me from anywhere online.

I think my rediscovery of balance is definitely going to have to include writing.

PCLinuxOS rocks

I say it again, as much as I want to like ubuntu — and I do like them/it for many reasons — PCLinuxOS is pretty hard to argue with. It Just Works(tm), it works elegantly, and there is a TON of software in their repositories.

So once again, we have a desktop machine that can play DVDs, play my music collection, with a bunch of cool 3D games for my daughter.

Geekery can be fun, if a bit expensive at times….

Geekery

Well, I’m finally getting around to rebuilding the desktop computer. Only took six weeks…. :-/

I had really wanted to install Ubuntu Linux, mostly because they really seem to get what free software is all about. I want to like it, and indeed I use this distribution on my laptop.

But the new release, Dapper Drake, has a bug that prevents it from seeing all the partitions on my 2 hard drives. This, like, sucks. And stuff.

So I put in my LiveCD of PCLinuxOS that I had lying around, and sure enough it works flawlessly on this new hardware. I’m currently listening to headphones of Radiohead playing through amaroK through the LiveCD; this means that PCLinuxOS Just Works(tm). It sees the soundcards, the harddrives, and everything works fine out of the box.

So I’m presently downloading a version of PCLinuxOS that has the nVidia drivers already built-in for my nice videocard, it’s 61% done. Once it’s fully downloaded, I’ll verify the integrity of the disk, burn it, and run it on the desktop.

So hopefully soon this happy new machine will be running PCLinuxOS….

creativity

Well I seem to be snapping myself out of the funk I was in via brute force. For the most part I’ve been eating better and exercising more, which always helps.

In addition, my creativity has been increased; I now have acoustic guitar tracks recorded for 9 of the 11 songs going on the Freakwitch album, so things are moving forward there. We also have a gig coming up next weekend, which helps.

I’ve also been playing with a ccTiddly, which is like an online version of a TiddlyWiki that I can update from any computer… cool.

Not much else to report… life continues pretty much as normal, busy busy busy.

Oh, it looks like my sister and my niece will be visiting Maine for the first time about a month from now… very excited about that. Maine is awesome, and I can’t wait to show her around a bit.

Fire in the sky

Today on Boing Boing I saw this photo:

It’s a photo from Los Angeles, taken in the middle of the night in 1955. As you can see, the light is quite bright for the middle of the night. The cause? The US government was conducting nuclear test explosions in Nevada, probably at least 200 miles away. These photos, which are contained at the LA Public Library photo database, show clearly that the night sky was lit up to daylight levels.

Very interesting that this comes up in the wake of North Korea’s recent missile testing. The present US government is up in arms (ha) about this, when North Korea is just doing something that the US government did many times over, 50 years ago. And North Korea aren’t even exploding nuclear warheads on their own soil.

Funny what retrospect will do to you. Nowadays, anyone paying attention would be horrified if the US government were exploding nukes in Nevada. But at the time, it was seen as a necessary thing. It makes me wonder what the present US government is doing that will be seen in a similar way 50 years hence….