Notes - private thoughts / ASMR / (final) Dead 20

         Almost noon local time. You completed your exercises again today. Carol is doing the wash. You have your pre-op appointment with Dr. Merling at eleven on 3 March and the operations on the following Monday.

         1156 hours. I can’t remember the name of the hospital – Saint something down near U.C. (west side) on the way to the Esquire Art Theatre. I think it is near or next to Hebrew Union.

         You thought about going down to Hebrew Union when they were displaying the Dead Sea Scrolls but you did not. Why? – Amorella

         I didn’t think Carol would want to go. I did consider it for a time but then other things got in the way and honestly, I forgot about it. Doug sent me a note a week or so ago showing me the scrolls are on display online for anyone who wants to view them, but I haven’t checked them out yet. I like to touch historic items when I can get away with it but I’m sure the scrolls were under glass, at least that is how it looked in the photo in the newspaper at the time.

         You linger. – Amorella

         1205 hours. Private thoughts.

         Post. - Amorella

         Very late afternoon. You had left over pizza for lunch and watched an old “Rake”. Then you got the car washed and cleaned it up yourself inside with the vacuum and out (wiping it clean and polishing the trim also inside and out. Then a couple of chores including getting your hair cut and now you are done for the day. – Amorella

         1724 hours. I am, at least as far as chores are concerned. Carol was rather shocked when I decided to get my hair cut and beard trimmed. Even Mary Ann was since it had only been six weeks. The day was just too pleasant not to clean the car, really clean it from the last couple of months of winter. There may be more snow and doubtless more rain but it is a good thing when the car is clean and it will be at least partly sunny again tomorrow. I haven’t done any proofing today, in fact I hardly thought about it at all until now.

         You were just checking BBC News and saw a reference to Autonomous sensory meridian response, something you had not heard of. Here is a selected editing of an article from Wikipedia. – Amorella

** **

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a neologism for a perceptual phenomenon characterized as a distinct, pleasurable tingling sensation in the head, scalp, back, or peripheral regions of the body in response to visual, auditory, olfactory, and/or cognitive stimuli. The nature and classification of the ASMR phenomenon is controversial. Tom Stafford, a professor at the University of Sheffield, says, "It might well be a real thing, but it's inherently difficult to research." . . . 

  

Scientific reactions

Steven Novella, Director of General Neurology at the Yale School of Medicine and active contributor to topics involving scientific skepticism, wrote in his online neuroscience blog about the lack of scientific investigation on ASMR, saying that functional magnetic resonance imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation technologies should be used to study the brains of people who experience ASMR in relation to people who do not experience ASMR. Novella discusses the concept of neurodiversity and mentions how the complexity of the human brain is due to developmental behaviors across the evolutionary time scale. He also suggests the possibility of ASMR being a type of pleasurable seizure or another way to activate the pleasure response.

Professor Tom Stafford, an expert in psychology and cognitive sciences from the University of Sheffield, was quoted in The Independent, saying,

It might well be a real thing, but it's inherently difficult to research. The inner experience is the point of a lot of psychological investigation, but when you've got something like this that you can't see or feel, and it doesn't happen for everyone, it falls into a blind spot. It's like synaesthesia – for years it was a myth, then in the 1990s people came up with a reliable way of measuring it.

According to neurologist Edward J. O'Connor in the Santa Monica College newspaper The Corsair, an obstacle to accurately researching the ASMR phenomenon is that there may be no single stimulus, which triggers ASMR for all individuals.

Sleep specialist Dr. Amer Khan of the Sutter Neuroscience Institute advised that using ASMR videos as a sleep aid may not be the best method for quality sleep and said they may become a habit similar to using a white noise machine or a baby using a pacifier for falling asleep.

Psychiatrist Dr. Michael Yasinski supports the legitimacy of ASMR and claims it is similar to meditation as individuals, through focus and relaxation, may shut down parts of the brain responsible for stress and anxiety.

There is a lack of scientific evidence that ASMR has any general benefits or harms. Any claimed benefits are based on anecdotes (personal accounts of individual perception), not on clinical trials that provide data from which general efficacy and safety can be shown.

Selected and edited from Wikipedia ASMR

** **

         1823 hours. Interesting. I will look into it more out of curiosity than anything else. Time for the news.

         You nuked leftover roast beef, carrots and half a baked potato for supper and found it as delicious as your first meal a few days ago. You watched NBC and ABC News as well as this last Monday’s “Intelligence”. You and Carol cleaned the living room, dining room and kitchen and well as you cleaned the litter as you do every day and Carol feeds the cats every day. Tomorrow you go to Delaware, first stopping by Polaris for lunch and shopping. You come home Sunday afternoon after Brennan’s second birthday party, this time at Chuckey Cheese in Dublin.

         2114 hours. I will work on Dead 20.

         2121 hours. I completed the work but I am not sure of the meaning of Bracc’s being in the story other than it is an entanglement.

         Is that not reason enough. – Amorella

         Then I should add something to this effect.

        How about what you concluded last night. I have a place for it. – Amorella

         Another surprise. Good. Let’s put it in. (2124)

         2147 hours. I have it if acceptable.

         Add and post. No more tonight. – Amorella

         Should I further edit?

         Let it be done. – Amorella

***

(final) The Dead 20 ©2014, rho GMG.One

            Merlyn awoke standing amongst the white foxglove and red poppy just east of the stage ruins. His eyes focused first on his mind's pillar, the giant Oak and on to the boulder and beyond to his hut. His eyes slowly moved to beyond the hut, the heather, the narrow woods and they rested on six tall blades of grass by the river. Six, he thought.

            A billiard table rose from a short muscled contraction in a long fingered oak root pointing his way. In a brief uncommon blink the oak tabletop stood beside; felted green from side to side to side to side. Empty it is, concluded Merlyn, but for a solid green ball number 6 directly in front of the far left corner pocket. With no cue ball present his curiosity swept onto the flat green and he merging lightning quick curiosity rose on the far cue spot as a solid yellow 1 ball, equally sized and equally weighted with the nearby solid green.

            I am drawn into the 1 ball on the far cue spot. I must have scratched the cue ball but it doesn't appear pocketed. I am ready for almost anything but losing my Vivian to her dusty bones in the material world.

            "You have only my soul to hold onto, Merlyn," coached Vivian from afar.

            "The soul is a mystery," he grumbled. "I have only heart and mind to grasp you with."

            "Not enough to hold in reason alone," set the soft leather tip to kiss the yellow to move leisurely towards the green 6. Close enough for a conversation on the elementary rules between two unlike souls closeting to fellow Druids heartsanminds. "I am the one, Merlyn. Who might you be?"

            "Bracc's ancient ghost, cornered, green with envy, and ready for the pocket."

            "The cue's been scratched."           

            "I am stuck still, and in all honesty embarrassed I died in a resort of trickery, to convince the base, the living, that I could speak to the Dead."

            "But you are the Dead speaking in this, my fabled mind, Bracc."

            "Such is your flat humor of last resort. Alas, I am done in."

            "You are on not in Bracc. There is no trickery here."

            "I am but a poor soul caught, trapped, holed up by a pocket."

            Merlyn quick-wittedly remarked, "The economics of the soul have nothing to do with pockets of poverty, I assure you my fellow shaman. You need to turn about like those other once racked fellows similarly endowed round. The green is but a painting, man."

            Bracc responded, "As is your yellow, Merlyn."

            Merlyn shifted his thought, "Two solids and a scratched cue, do you see meaning in it?"

            "My wonder is why I am here at all."

            "I dreamt you, Bracc; rather Grandma brought you up."

            "As a lesson?"

            "I thought so, but you are here as a cross-segmentation in dreamland."

            Bracc whispered, "The faeries have captured us both?"

            "No faeries, here, Bracc, unless you find faeryland in your soul."

            "They are in me mind and heart but not me soul."

            "How do you know this?" asked Merlyn in surprise.

            "Because faeries came about after creation not before," replied Bracc earnestly. "Tricks came after."

            I thought hearts did the traveling, surmised Merlyn. There is more to a soul than armor. "What do you know of the soul, Bracc?"

            Merlyn is asking a once-misguided shaman about the soul?  How can this be? "I know it is lonely, Merlyn," rolled from heartanmind. "I do not know this, I know next to nothing, Merlyn."

            "Whose voice was it then?"

            "My own. I know it is not from heartanmind, and that is as honest an answer as I can give." Bracc paused. "I have learned to be an honest man since my capture."

            "Who captured you?" asked Merlyn.

            "I do not know. I found myself in a sealed solid walled place. It had a door."

            "Did you not try it?"

            "Not for several thousand years I reckoned, but when I did it opened and I was freed. I do not know who held me or freed me, but it happened just as speaking to you has happened. Avalon is an enchanted place just like the living said. I have learned that also. I am learning many things even now."

            "Your heartanmind is learning?" asked Merlyn.

            "I would say the soul teaches. That is how it seems but I do not know,” declared Bracc without a word.

            Bracc is in an entanglement as I am in an entanglement. Heartanmind dances within the Living and the Dead. If matter can be in a bit quantum entanglement then what of me being of no matter at all?

            “The soul, Merlyn,” whispered Vivian, “You cannot forget the teacher.”

***

            Now it is better. Let it be. – Post. - Amorella