10th Annual LA River Ride

never one to exclusion, or to define you.
not that there is such a thing.

but we live and we play with habits of want.
wanting more. wanting less. wanting solipsism.
these roiling currents of craving.

we move through moments, in reaction and action.
shift happens.

but just have a private moment, with that moment, for a moment.
apart from any nonmoments clamoring.

they don’t exist anyway.

sail your ship as Theseus. shift happens.
so weather all weather, all storms of wanting.
the nots, be others, and mores.

young sailors clutch and cry in pain.
old ones are at the rudder, but never there.

simply have a moment, with your moment, for a moment.
or the nonmoments may have you.

but good news – you don’t have a moment to lose.

Regardless of it’s lack of tangible benefits, we do a LOT of it. The average American watches around 3 hours a day. Heavy watchers trend above 8 hours a day.

This has a huge impact on our culture and us as individuals. First consider the marketing/socialization angle. As a nation, TV has defined our culture with increasing impact over the past 50 years. From products to politicians, it’s invented what matters to us as a nation. In today’s shift to things like TiVo and bittorrents, the overt marketing is stripped out, though of course, the non-overt comes through full strength as we watch the stories, the “information”, the values and experiences on the screen.

Unfortunately, it appears that we are pretty much built to be compelled by the television watching experience. Our brains respond preferentially to multi-modal integrated stimulus stream of a visual/auditory media. Arguably this is because a rich stream is closest to what we experience and interpret in real life. Because of this, functional brain nodes used to process reality and learn about it are activated by tv-watching. It’s not a complete activation, though, the way “reality” is – there is little action on the viewer’s part. TV watching is passive – it is difficult to do unless you are watching passively, and you immediately miss stuff when you start talking or attending to much else.

This immediate negative reinforcement when turning your attention away from TV is enough to train you to watch. When one considers all of the surrogate reality that we DO build into our memories and experience, the psychological impact may be significant. And then compound this with how we are trained to be passive in response to the “people” and relationships we are presented with, in their shiny, expensive, heartbreaking, sexy, and well-packaged forms. It’s almost addictive, in scale and impact in many many people’s lives.

That’s the bad news. The good, is that as insidious as Television has become, it doesn’t really have the true “withdrawal” symptoms of real addiction, when one stops. We will live, and probably relatively pain free, from not knowing what Jack Bauer, John Locke, or Kara Thrace, will be “doing” tomorrow.

All it takes to stop watching TV is a cognitive decision, and the act that follows.
Yes, all one has to do, is do something else.

I find I can stop if i put some music on. And then I can write, think, and even move, more easily than when getting bombarded by vibrant colors, explosions, sex, emotion, and product.

So, I’m making that decision here, publicly. A (quickly becoming) dear friend recently reminded me about how things in life can become “punctuation”. Things we do just to break our day up, displace our boredom, do “just because”. She mentioned how sex, food, etc., can become this. TV certainly is, for me. Time to eat? Grab food and play a show. Time to work? Open the document, and watch a show. Time to do anything? Well.. maybe I’ll just watch a show.

One of the mantras I try to live by is Intention, Not Momentum, so when I realized that TV had snuck in, and become only momentum, I knew I had to act. My TV watching habits vary, but have for too long peaked over the national average. Television gets in the way of life. It replaces MY life with another, constructed from electronic woodwives and will o wisps, one dimensional and illusory.

I want my time back, my MIND back. Television gets in the way.
It gets in the way of writing, of my reading and dreaming, of moving, of living.

To that end – I just deleted all the archived torrents, dvd rips, etc., that I had stored to watch. Any effort and time I’ve spent downloading / recording / watching TV programming has now come to an end.

One or two caveats – I won’t rule out TV under a couple of conditions. First – watching it with a friend here and there is fine, as long as I’m not sitting at my desk for hours zoning out. Second, going to the movies with friends is OK, too. Both of those are as much about friends as anything, and the media has a discrete start and end. It’s the habit I want to eliminate, as much as the media/content, but I – I do live in the world after all.

So – from here on, if I stumble and download something, or watch something that doesn’t involve hanging out with a friend or going on a date, etc., I’ll post it into Paradigm Pusher.

Wish me luck!

Let me know what you think I’m also trying to figure out a Ruby on Rails application framework to adopt into a Reverend Guitar Gallery, and that will be open to the public at large. Stay tuned for more details.

Peak performance enhancement, remediation of damage, and resilience in learning and aging have always seemed to me to be promised by the advances we are making in understanding how the mind and the brain work. Medical “technology” has indeed made vast strides against the landscape of pathology and imbalance in the mind and brain, and techniques exist to change most symptoms, from surgical to pharmacological. Indeed, drugs exist for most presenting complaints.

Problems exists, however, in drug oriented models of disease. They often ignore prevention, since the treatments were developed by evaluating symptom change, and second, there is this gross assumption that if we have “too little” or “too much” of something in the brain/body then just give a drug to make more, or suppress something. Most psychostimulants, antidepressants, anxiolytics, etc, work this way. Push one neurotransmitter production up/down, or allow it to accumulate more/less in the synapse, etc. But you can never make “one” thing happen in an interconnected system, and often produce non-intuitive behavior in the system.

Nonlinearity and chaos:

The central problem here with most drugs is an assumption of linearity. The brain – especially in cortex where higher cognitive functions occur – is a massively interconnected feedback system of positive and (mostly) negative feedback loops, systems, and subsystems. Some examples are the thalamocortical – corticothalamic loops. Tied in with brainstem arousal (reticular) areas. And acting as a switchboard for all our senses (except smell) as well as providing feedback to the systems that handle our emotional (limbic), memory and learning (medial temporal), movement (basal ganglia) and basic drive (hypothalamic) systems. And each of these somewhat modular systems have an astonishingly large number of inputs from each other and cortical regions. And let’s not even get started on the somewhat decoupled machine of posture and movement that is the cerebellum, or “little brain”. The cerebellum receives 19 of the 20 million descending motor command fibers, by the way, and only 1 million actually leaves the brain and heads down to drive things. And it’s got over half the neurons in the brain packed into 10% of the total brain space. So.. wiring aside, it’s safe to assume that a lot of brain function is in state transitions, and that gets us into the realm of dynamics. Dynamical Systems are ones that have thresholds, tipping points, and states. They revolve and oscillate and trip wildly through chaotic conditions.
What do I mean by “chaos” here? Simply this. Given the limit of our ability to continuously sample to infinite precision, it’s impossible to predict the full state diagram of all variables at a future point in tim. Heady stuff. A more grounded example – the weather, as an analogy, since weather is a massively complex system of all sorts of variables and forces that all have some interaction on each other. If we could measure every single relevant event (or everything) happening in weather at any one momement ,we sill wouldn’t be able to predict what weather would be like in a week with any certainty, unless would could measure reality on to infinite precision. Any ANY variability in the “starting place” of our calculations would result in very different state in a week, through accumulated effects of that one tiny measurement difference.

I’m getting more in depth than needed here, and some of these ideas cannot be fully fleshed out without a lot more writing (and some math). Suffice it to say that I believe Neurofeedback (EEG Biofeedback, or HEG Biofeedback) to be an excellent way to encourage the brain to take up various shifts in dynamics and state, while drugs typically only drive (or overdrive) one or two variables in the brain-mind system, producing weird results on other systems. This approach of “pushing” stuff in the brain up or down why drugs work they way they do. They (often) effect a symptom, sure, but because of that they almost by definition cause side effects, stop working when you stop giving them, and have widely different efficacy on different people.

On Neurofeedback:

In contrast, EEG Biofeedback (for example) encourages the brain to produce different patterns of EEG. We do not have to assume that these are “good” patterns, and we “know what we are doing” when we train them. What do should understand, however, is that each person’s brain is an oscillating symphony of players, with that person as the only and best audience member. Whatever one tries to do to affect the symphony will have an effect on many parts of it. And, when training EEG via biofeedback, we are asking a few specific regions to do a few specific things, to exercise or shape it’s activity in certain ways (amplitude, frequency, or coherence/connectivity) of EEG parameters. Our brains are usually quite willing to try new things, and a central point of the biofeedback process is that the brain has to, and knows how to, make the requested change. They only “coersion” we are using is the stimulus of a sound, music, movie, vibration, etc., “reward”. Our brains LOVE stimulus, and we can simply encourage the brain to try new frequencies and parameters.

Again, biofeedback is a totally passive approach to intervening with our physiology. But our brains are pretty central physiology! So be careful. You will get non-intuitive results, and it will not work the same way on everyone. Being very aware of how it is affecting you is of prime importance. That, and correlative those reports with training protocols and assessing improvement is most of what a clinical/professional Neurofeedback practictioner will do for you in the NFB area. They will of course also provide clinical skills in their baliwick, be it psychology or clinical work, psychiatry, etc. You may benefit from working with a practitioner. Either way, it’s a good idea to keep a daily log while training.

Training – Logging and routines:

Your log will be your “chart”, and will help you keep track of what you are doing, distinguish protocols that work with ones that dont, and gauge overall success at meeting your training goals. You need training entries in your log, as well a report entries. training entries should have things like: Date, Protocol, Time, Observations (while training), and the report entries should be all about how have things changed since your last training session. Include some basic rating scales (on a scale of 1 to 5 how is my) for: Attention, Tiredness, Mood, Focus, Anxiety, and any other things you want to change. Do a report entry every day. You can train every day, but train at least 2 times a week. If you do the report in Excel or Numbers or some other spreadsheet, you can see your day to day trends in these different tracked “behavioral variables”.

So – neurofeedback is defined here as biofeedback (with a reward of a changing game, music, movie, animation etc.) that is driven by signals you pick up from your head, passively, with 3 (or 6) wires. It’s not a conscious “skill”, where you try to change something, instead you allow your brain to learn from the stimulus that is reflecting a previously unseen process to it. You simply shape the brain activity in the desired direction by setting the software to look cool when a couple parameters in your EEG go in the right direction. It’s not rocket science, and it works for all sorts of things, but it take repetition – prob 2-5 sessions before your brain starts “getting” it, and maybe another 10 seeing how one reacts to specific training protocols, and then another 5-10 to “set” the thing that worked. I have seen people show large and permanent improvements in 3 sessions, though, too – sometimes what you try first is exactly what your brain needs.

Technical skills and equipment costs:
There are a small number of things to learn, technically speaking, and you can do it yourself without too much fumbling. Hometraining equipment will run you around $1200 or so (plus you need a decently fast intel computer) and you can easily spend $3K on a basic system to do both EEG and HEG, multi channels, etc. Professional systems (in addition to professionals who use the “home” systems) start at around $5K and go up from there. Especially if you get equipment and software to do multi-channel EEG assessments. This is one good reason to go to a professional. Professionals are mostly clinical psychologists and LISCWs who have small clinics and offices. Fees range from $75-$150 for a session, and the cost of intake and assessments might run $300-$1000. Then you will need need 20-40 training sessions. Once you do the math, home training equipment is attractive. This is why I suggest that most people who are interested in neurofeedback training either get their assessment and treatment planning from a professional, or put on a hacker mindset and learn most of what you need to know on the internet. Another model for training that is growing is the “home trainer group”, where lots of people get and share equipment, help each other learn electrode placement, learn the software, share results, etc.

If you have 2 or more people who would like to train themselves, start a group! Your motivation will stay high, and your costs will be lower.

I’m realizing that this is getting long, and is straying from the promise I made to a few friends to tell them where to get this stuff.
So, without further ado, my recommended biofeedback resources for “home training”:

Equipment:

Pocket Neurobics for hardware and software, with a Pendant EEG or Pocket A3 as the hardware.
BioExplorer is the software, available there or from the manufacturer where you can get additional drivers and a wee bit of documentation, too.

You also need electrodes, prep, and paste – the PN site has “kits”, including all. Pendant EEG can do 2 channels of EEG (requiring 6 electrodes) and needs a PC running BioExplorer (in the kit), while the Pocket can do 2 channels of EEG as well as HEG (bloodflow training) but requires additional hardware sensors for the HEG. The Pocket is also a bit more complicated a device, but can be used standalone, without a PC. I’d suggest the Pendant EEG Kit, for ease of use and the ability to do it at home on a computer, or a Pocket EEG Kit if you think you might do it at home AND in the middle of the woods, in a hotel, etc., on your nice laptop.

Resources:
A couple of very good yahoo groups exist, including the Biofeeback one, and the Biofeedback Home Trainers one. These are both a mix of professionals and home trainers.

The community yahoo groups for Pocket Neurobics and BioExplorer might also be useful.

Here is a new book on EEG BF and ADHD, and another book i’ve heard good things about.

Most of my training was before both of these books though, so Im not intimately familiar with their content
I’m happy to talk more about this or answer questions if you have them, though a professional would be best to do an assessment, then probably try a handful of standard protocols,

That being said, to treat higher cognitive function in general, e.g. focus, attention, mood, relaxation, etc. there is one protocol that seems to work fairly well for many people (C4-A2 12-15Hz amplitude training). So getting some equipment, reading a couple of books/articles, setting up the software and finding what protocols work for you is a valid approach. That mostly what professionals do, anyway. It’s simply trying 5-10 protocols, keeping watch on 4-5 reactions after training, as well as running a little software and electrode pasting. It’s mostly about observing post-training, and keeping careful notes on what is working and what isn’t.

Please feel free to post comments, and let me know your training experiences. I’ll be revising this article and writing more on chaos and mental health, neurofeedback, and referencing the current science on these topics in future posts.

That’s not as scary as it sounds, I promise. In fact, you may be so suitably impressed by the info in this blog post that you want to try them yourselves. Go right ahead; it’s a free country. But these series of posts on nootropics should not be interpreted or used as medical advice, and are simply intended to be informational. Any actions you take are your own responsibility, and I suggest consulting with your physician first. This becomes a very strong suggestion if you are taking any prescription meds. Also, this is a blog entry, so it’s a work in progress. I’ll be adding citations, editing content, and maybe even adding pictures as I have time, so your mileage may vary.

So exactly what are these “nootropics”? From the greek, we have noos (mind) and tropein (turn/bend). More plainly speaking, nootropics are “smart drugs” – brain-enhancing substances that improve cognition through various nutritive and/or drug-like effects.

Within peak performance, anti-senscence, medicine and psychology circles the term generally refers to substances that have few to no side effects and improve how the brain (typically the cortex) functions. Caffeine might be considered a nootropic, although it probably has too many side effects to truly be called one. Omega-3 fatty acids are probably a good example of a subtle nootropic. Substances like modafinil (Provigil) and either Adderal or methylphenidate (Ritalin) and it’s friends should probably not be termed nootropic. The psychostimulants carry some of the same cognitive, attentional, and learning and memory benefits as nootropics but often come with steep side effects, ranging from blood pressure and heart problems to maturational retardation or even sudden death. Various b-vitamin derivatives, plant substances, hormone/neurotransmitter-modifiers and some designer substances probably are. In contrast, these nootropics tend to increase oxygen absorption, support cellular metabolism, and/or increase and resupply specific neurotransmitters.
The nootropic I’d like to focus on is in a called called the “racetams”, which are cholinergic in nature. E.g. they replenish and likely increase tonic acetylcholine in the brain. One of the best known and earliest used ‘racetams is Piracetam, which raises actylcholine and appears to work synergistically with choline sources and precursors such as CDP-choline, Centrophenoxine, alpha-GPC… even eggs.

Piracetam been used worldwide for many years to treat symptoms of ADHD, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and myoclonic seizures, posture in elderly, mood, fatigue, and many other complaints. Like many nootropics, Piracetam is non-toxic even at extremely high levels. The LD-50 (the amount that produces 50% death in lab animals) could not be determined because it’s impossible to feed animals enough to produce toxicity. Among humans there is no known LD-50 for Piracetam, and dosages range from 800 mg to well upwards of 5 g per day. These amounts would be a very high dose for most other supplements and drugs.

If you try Piracetam you may have to monkey with dosage to get an effect, and many reports suggest that full effects don’t emerge until after consistent supplementation for 4-6 weeks. That makes sense too, as it takes about 6 weeks for the process of neurogenesis (new neurons and glia developing from neural stem cells), and there may be other factors at work involving reorganization of memory and attention systems under this tonic change in ACh. Also on the note of dosage, taking a choline precursor seems decrease the dosage necessary as well as address any mild side effects experiences (such as digestive discomfort or nausea, and sometimes lethargy) that may be caused by either a sudden increase in ACh or perhaps by simple gastrointestinal reaction to absorption of a new substance. I began by taking 1600mg of Piracetam and 200 of Centrophenoxine in the morning and evening (3200/400 total). I discovered the Centro (and CDP-choline) tend to keep me awake if i take them in the afternoon, so i dropped back to 3200/200 per day. For a week or two I also tried 6400/400 divided per day, but found i got “too alert” and if i didn’t eat properly i got blood-sugar drops and low-energy headaches. For the past 6 weeks, I’ve been taking 3200/200 per day, and it seems this is the “perfect” dose for me, as long as I don’t skip meals. I tried the larger dose both because some people report needing much more to “feel” anything, and other anecdotal reports suggest that a loading or “attack dose” when beginning Piracetam may hasten effects, but there isn’t really any evidence this is necessary.

In picking a choline source, I chose Centro because it’s relatively cheap, has a host of other nootropic resources suggesting it works well all on it’s own, and also seems to have anti-aging effects on the skin as well as brain cells. Since the brain and skin start off as the same layer developmentally (the ectoderm) it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that Centro (and perhaps Piractam) have been shown to reverse lipofuscion in both the brain and the skin. These are fatty acid tangles that build up in brain cells, as well as in the skin (e.g. age spots).

So, what about the effects? On taking it for the first day, and for every day there after for at least a week, I experienced a “windshield wiper” effect, where my attention seemed both dramatically sharper and more relaxed. In fact my visual acuity seemed to be better, although that is probably a cortical (or simply cognitive) and not a retinal/eye effect of initial transduction. This became less obvious after a week or so, especially after I dropped the dose back to to 3200/200 daily. Essentially, however, Piracetam produces a state in me that is remarkably like taking Adderal (10mg a day) or dextroamphetamine, or even the right amount of coffee, but without any of the “stimulant” specific effects. E.g. no jitters, no appetite suppression, no nervousness or fidgeting, no loud voice, no bursts of aimless energy. It really does seem like the perfect “ADHD drug” to me, although of course, YMMV. I also find it has a slight relaxing (aniolytic) effect on me, without feeling the least sedating. It also improves my guitar playing (a bit – with regards to creativity mostly) and my african drumming (more than a bit – mostly in coordination and the ability to perceive time. I’m a much better drummer than guitar player – I bet that has something to do with it).

Suggested contraindications are hard to find, but if you are taking something else that is cholinergic be sure to speak to your doctor.

Sources for Piracetam and Centrophenoxine are abundant, but it is used much more in Europe and many other regions of the world compared to the US. It’s not a regulated substance in the US, however, and while it’s not something you can grab from places like GNC or CVS yet, you can get it from Amazon.com, for instance. I get mine from a place called Relentless Improvement. I do this because they keep 3-rd party purity certification on hand, and sell prepackaged capsules as opposed to only powder. Buying bulk powder from someplace (on Amazon.com for insatance) is certainly the cheapest way to go, but the stuff tastes horrible, so only go this route if you plan on masking it in workout shakes or capping a mix of powder yourself.

Many other sources of information abound on Piracetam, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nootropic is a good place to start.

Please let me know if you try Piracetam, and what your experiences are. Feel free to simply post your experiences in comments on this blog entry.

i remained a Mac guy even through years of working in the software industry, and worked with every system under the sun. for a while i maintained a cross platform porting farm for a database & middleware company, and worked with everything from Solaris and NT on Alpha chips to A/IX. every type of chip, and every platform, and still whichever mac i was on made me happiest.

it wasn’t so much about the fact that my Macs didn’t get viruses.
or that they were really fast. or incredibly stable (at least as of Mac OS X).

i’ve been a Mac guy for a while. even before it made sense. i bought them when they cost 2X as much as a PC and gave you only a marginally better experience. and then OS X happened, and the value of “the computer” started growing exponentially. now it was UNIX. whoa nelly.

i also used to be the guy that would take my Mac apart into it’s constituent components. yeah, no surprise there. so i’ve upgraded (almost always without dire consequences) every Mac i’ve had, even when the effort it took was decidedly un-user-friendly.

and i’ve bought Macs even when they weren’t more stylish than anything else.
i mean, come on. a beige box? ya, that’s better than a grey box.

but then came the Intel Macs.
wha? my Macs are now cheaper than the competition, configured similarly?
hm, and still generally a bit faster, as Apple designs well, controls they hardware quite well, and specs components near the top of the curve.

and ya, unix. no viruses. check.

and the design now? whoa nelly.
my MacBook is black. and it’s plastic. so it doesn’t get dented or have it’s paint scratched off. and have you SEEN that new MacBook Air? the damn thing’ll slide under a door. if you are into that sort of thing.

hmm, upgrades and peripherals?

Apple’s keeping a good fast connection into the machine, somehow, even if continuing to pare down what those thing are. and still evolving, adopting things like Xpress card slots for the Pros. i can live with firewire, usb 2, and a bunch of other stuff in my MacBook. that and an Apogee Duet and i’m laying down tracks with my Reverend guitars (www.reverendguitars.com).

but man i need a lot of RAM. and i wouldn’t mind having a huge hard drive, either.

i have been running with 2gigs of RAM, on a 2.0 ghz MacBook. but i run VMWare or Parallels occasionally. sometimes i try to do signal processing work in one of those with 2gigs of ram on my Macbook. eh… not pleasant. Bootcamp is NICE though. Sure is amazing for all of us old geeks who ran VPC waaaaay back when, just to get access to some choice piece of software. that kinda ended with Mac OS X though; most software was soon available for the Mac.

back from the tanget. i needed more RAM, and a 120gb drive wasn’t cutting it (with 15 for Win XP, to do my signal processing). i kept finding myself with a few gigs of space left, and shuffling things to backup because of space (as opposed to prudent forethought) can be annoying after a few months.

so hmm.. how easy is it to upgrade to more RAM and a larger disk?
quick check on OWC’s website (macsales.com) and a not painful $250 spent.

three days pass…

oh! it’s here!
now, i’ve done this thing before. you just have to move everything you have on a smaller disk, to a larger disk. the smaller disk is in the machine, and may as well be the only machine you have handy. hm.

easy as pie.
quick recipe for those of you who want to make this upgrade dish:

1. get a larger drive than you have (and with as large a cache as possible). get someone to help you (like OWC) if you don’t know which drive to choose, or don’t feel like googling for reviews on the different models (hint).
2. get more RAM. see above, re selection. OWC has a nice “upgrade finder” for you. just select your Mac and you get all the right choices laid out. then it’s just math.
3. get external enclosure that matches the internal drive (SATA in this case) that will give you USB or Firewire or both (your choice, it’s about math again).
4. download Carbon Copy Cloner. www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html it’s free, but pay the guy, why don’t you?
5. put larger new drive into enclosure. clone little drive to big drive. it took me 5 hours.
6. turn MacBook over, remove battery. a coin works best.
7. remove a couple of phillips screws (size 0 – go to Radio Shack and get the right tools for $10, ya cheapskate).
8. flip level on any of the RAM slots you wanna change chips out of. change chips, seat firmly with thumbs once placed.
9. flip the white tab up and pull. drive comes out on sled, no wires. remove existing drive (meaning remove 4 little Torx #8 screws), and replace with bigger drive
10. put little drive in external enclosure you thoughtfully bought for it.
11. boot new system.
12. use Bootcamp assistant to setup a new partition for Windows, if you like
13. start the Windows install, and choose FAT32 as the filesystem type.
14. after the installer copies everything over, force power down when it tries to reboot (hold power key down)
15. option-Boot so you can choose which operating system to start up, and start Mac OS X.
16. open bootcamp partition, drag everything there into the trash. empty trash.
17. plug little drive (in it’s enclosure) into machine.
18. drag files from little drive’s bootcamp partition to the now empty bootcamp partition, in the following order: tldr, NTDETECT.COM, boot.ini, and PAGEFILE.SYS first, then everything else.
19. boot at will into either Mac OS X or Windows.

back to our narrative.

not much more to say except that the machine SCREAMS and i can do anything i want with it now. for those keeping score, it’s got 3GB of RAM now and 320GB drive (which is effectively 300, once translated from marketing speak). an extra 2gb chip, the drive, and an enclosure for a few dollars more’n two-fitty.

haven’t found anything in my optimal workflow that the machine stutters on. and that includes doing multi-channel signal processing and visual display on a 21.5 inch monitor plugged into it, while running ODE simulation software, all the time fetching mail, working on a Word doc, and surfing in both Safari and Firefox (firefox is set to use my university proxy, for Pubmed.org and such). it’s now faster and more responsive than the MacBook Pro of similar (base) specs.

well, that was a bit of a rant. hope you liked it.

then another part.
in an act of rampant ventrilloquism
added, “tomorrow.”

i refocused on the words and kept reading. suddenly it was total nonsense!
what is this? these words make no sense!

when i focused on a word, i realized i was seeing words like ‘what’ instead of “where”. or i’d see “think” for “though”.
if i just tried to read automatically hovever, it was like i was aphasic. a jumble of barely understood words, with most of them wrong.

when peering closely at one word, i realized that i had a blind spot just to the right of foveation. or not exactly a blind spot, but an area where i just couldn’t see the letters on the page. if i slowly tracked my eyes from word to word i could still read, but it was laborious, and almost felt like i wasn’t really reading at all, or using some other part of my brain that doesn’t normally read.

i realized that trying to read while automatically scanning, even when slowly, i couldn’t perceive enough of each word to correctly identify it. i had been substituting in words based on length, shape, and beginning characters – i couldn’t tell at first, so my experience was as if aphasic.

upon wakening, i could read again. no visual problems, but nausea and headache all day. post migraneous release.
all i can think at this point is that what i experienced was just a premigraneous aura … but instead of sparkles it was somehow invisibile. a distortion of perception that didn’t appear to be a distortion.