Head trauma

Shrapnel from an IED went rattling around his skull ..and for the next 12 hours Paul thought the enemy had captured him. He couldn’t recognize faces or uniforms ..orders sounded foreign ..and foreign sounded menacing. He had to be restrained to keep from picking up a rifle and shooting members of his own platoon. Stateside, his comprehension has returned but he gets lost mid-sentence while talking. He struggles to remember where he left off. When prompting doesn’t work, I tell him to take his time ..just keep talking ..even if it’s something different ..whatever comes up. He manages to tell me what’s happening: “The words coming out of my mouth aren’t matching the ones in my head.” Then he starts crying. Something that never happened back there. Now he says even AT&T commercials make him cry ..he doesn’t know why. “The civilian world is pretty fucking surreal” he says. I imagine two different narratives ..one playing inside his head and another playing on the outside. He was a high school honor student ..but the VA says he was bi-polar when he enlisted and wasn’t traumatized by combat. It’s a catch 22 ..except they’re saying is you have to be crazy to want get in as opposed to being sane if you want to get out. I documented his symptoms ..got statements from his family physician (who says he was never bi-polar) .. attached copies of his high school records and got him a disability designation that entitles him to see a VA psychiatrist.

Breakfast of champions

I reach for the orange juice while reading the paper .. the ring on my finger catches the lip of a coffee cup and starts a chain reaction that sends coffee splashing over books, papers, notebook PC, clothes and deck. In the wink of an eye, breakfast turns into chaos. I quickly save the notebook ..and laugh. Everything else is dispensable. I hose down one part of the deck, move to another location and resume as though nothing happened ..except I’m more fully in the present than before. Kind of like I’ve been put on alert. Allows me to see how ephemeral events really are. A lapse in conscious, followed by disaster .. gets absorbed much quicker out here than it does on my carpet indoors.

Applied neuroscience

Brain surgeon Wilder Penfield [link] found that whenever he tugged at one place in childhood memory, he pulled the rest of childhood experience with it. His patients would report : “I can hear the sound of my mother’s voice calling me for dinner ..I smell the scent of fresh baked bread like I did then ..I see my mother waiting for me on the porch .. I feel her warmth ..I actually feel like I did as a child right now.” Psychologists see the same thing going on with their clients while they’re talking about present-day relationships. For example, when they report talking to somebody who has a voice or manner similar to one of their parents ..it often triggers the feelings they experienced in the presence of that parent. Could be feelings of warmth and pleasure ..or feelings of intimidation and submission. They may pass through these states during the day without even knowing it. What they do remember, however, is a feeling that tells them whether or not they enjoy someone’s company.

My first boss, Tony, was a commanding presence. He looked like a mafia don ..with a deep baritone voice and a quick temper. He shouted at people a lot and often in a disparaging manner. He intimidated my colleagues, which made them cringe in his presence. For some reason his behavior didn’t bother me. I even got a chuckle out of them. I think I figured out why ..and I believe I owe it to Dr Penfield. Although my father didn’t live with us very long, what I remember about him most is that he was gentle and reasonable. He would explain things I did wrong and never scolded. I don’t have memories of growing up with a ‘bully’ like many of my colleagues. Consequently, Tony didn’t evoke the same feelings in me as he did in them. I always figured there was a method to his madness and he always treated me with civility, while my colleagues always felt like they were getting a whipping.

Baths

Last night at the baths some of us were complaining about how much we were paying for our children’s education. It’s somewhere in the vicinity of $10,000 a year, even at the state colleges. One woman told us about a program called the ‘Santa Barbara Fund’ that pays for tuition ..but it turns out you have to be like a 2nd generation Santa Barbara native. Someone else said that even with a 4.0 GPA ..it’s almost impossible to get in these days. I mentioned that a lot of students applying to UC can overcome a low GPA .. even poor SAT scores ..by writing a compelling essay. Something describing some kind of hardship they had to deal with while growing up. That made another guy laugh and say it’s hard to imagine what kind of hardship anyone would have growing up in Santa Barbara. My first thought was to tell him that he’d be surprised, but decided against it and instead I said “Hey, colleges reward creativity ..” which made everyone laugh and start making up stuff:

"Mom and I are living in a station wagon down by the lagoon .."
“I had to take care of my ailing aunt Edna after school ..”
“I immigrated from Peru with 12 brothers and sisters
..mom worked as a housekeeper to put us through school”
“My parents are hippies and don’t believe in traditional schooling
..I ran a food co-op growing up”
“My parents were killed in a fire somewhere on the 14th floor ..”

Around this time I had to say goodnight and leave ..and had to laugh. Nobody noticed ..I could still hear them making up stories while I was walking away.

Sirens of Titan

Is it a coincidence that the Cassini space probe inexplicably stopped sending images as it was about to fly by Titan, one of the moons of Saturn? Titan is known to harbour conditions necessary for life. Another place considered to be a likely candidate for extraterrestrial life is Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. However, the canyons of Europa have eluded attempts at observation as well [link]. Early radio astronomers claim to have received signals, leaking from Titan, that suggest the presence of an extraterrestrial species. However, they are trapped and shielded from detection by parasitic aliens from another galaxy ..aliens who have been exploiting Titan’s resources for eons [link]. This explains why conditions there have deteriorated to an almost “pre-biotic” state. The result has been a sort of reverse-geo-evolution. In it’s day, Titan could have been just as hospitable a place as Earth is today.

Local buzz

Got a buzz with smokers at the high school stadium this evening – after completing my workout. Two teenagers big enough to be football players ..but probably weren’t. I could tell by their friendliness and total lack of defensiveness that they weren’t gang bangers. They laughed when they saw how long I would hold the smoke in. You don’t have to do that anymore. I have smoked with gang members before .. often enough that they recognize and trust me. They call me the hippie pot smoker ..and go “Hey, tell us some more of that weird-ass, trippy shit.” I figure if they’re going to get high ..they might as well know something about it. I am afraid that one day I'll run into a group of paranoid gang bangers ..which I have, come to think of it. It’s a forested area and I sometimes don’t see them until I run into them. As much as I might think it’s disarming to stop and share a smoke. They might think it wasn’t such a good idea to give that old guy a buzz. After I leave, they may go “..hey, wasn’t that the narc who took out Emilio ..?” ..and decide it might be safer if they took me out. I guess that makes me sound kinda’ paranoid too.

Narrative space

Proceedings from the Symposium on Extraterrestrial Psychology

Dr. Latimer: Language is nothing more than a stream of symbols that signify nothing until we recognize something we have either seen or heard before and can find it's meaning stored in our mental dictionary. In a plurality of worlds, without a storehouse of shared experience, efforts at communication would be an exercise in indecipherable gestures. Verbal communication is the manipulation of symbols to which meaning is assigned by culture. An important point to keep in mind my friends is that the events experienced by members of a culture over time are what make up the narrative thread of that culture.

Dr. Zhavern: When we look into space, we don’t see things as they are. What we see is a narrative thread winding it’s way through the cosmos ..a cosmos that may be shared by narratives other than our own. However, to it’s participants ..each narrative looks like the only cosmic game in town. Like language, we skew space to resemble something we’ve either seen, or heard before. It’s the only way we can come to grips with it.

Dr. Orloff: I think human consciousness is a fragmented and unstable process. It creates rapid models of factual and counterfactual worlds inside the brain for things it cannot observe ..but only infer. The brain keeps track of these different versions until only those that contribute to narrative coherence receive sufficient signal strength to survive while those leading nowhere dissolve into noise ..and disappear into non-narrative space .. all in an instance.

Dr. Pangloss: I think consciousness is made up of searchlights, projected from different mental versions of the world we create. They eventually converge to form concentric circles in the brain that illuminate the focal points that contribute most to narrative events, and fade rapidly at the periphery with fewer contributing points until things go black somewhere around the edges of non-narrative space.

My feeble brain ( hasn’t got a clue ): Are you saying that the narrative threads of extraterrestrials aren’t likely to uncoil very closely to ours ..(?)