Sometimes I feel feverish and my head explodes with ideas but it can be messy like any explosion. There is no order to the ideas and they rub against each other creating friction and sparks and uncomfortable feelings. I have a wonderful set of magnetic poetry words which I keep on the metal door of the cupboard in my studio and fiddle about with.
It’s a fun diversion but is limited because all you have to
draw on is the limits of the box of words. There must be a certain algorithm to
illustrate the number of combinations that can be made and I am being a bit
lame in suggesting I have exhausted the possibilities but that is not the
problem. Our brains have an insatiable desire for novelty and I feel I have
exhausted the novelty of the toy. The internet can be the same if you use it in
the same way each day.
When I used to teach, my favourite resources were
dictionaries, phone books, street directories and atlases. Google Earth is
exciting and a valuable addition but it doesn’t lend itself to the same type of
search. Google maps is limited by your search entry or the size of the page. The
hard copy books could create curiosity and word trails. A random opening of a
page of each book could lead to a search by chance and a rubbing together of
completely unrelated ideas. For this reason I love the craziness of the book of
answers. You have to have a question first and randomly open the book to find
out if it will come to pass. A bit like the yes no oracle toy that was popular in the 90s.
I like to start an adventure
with chance. I am lucky that I have a head that retains odd ideas for a very
long time but it is extremely poor at retaining any number facts. I am happy to
be astounded by number facts and I understand them but cannot recall the truth
of any of them in retelling a story that has excited me, which must be a great source
of frustration to listeners. It also draws scepticism from my audience because
I cannot nail a fact at will with a magical number. My greatest skill is in
combining one idea with another. It’s good to know your strengths even if it
has taken a long time to work that out and even if there doesn’t seem to be a
current application for such talent.
I have been noticing a lot recently in my reading about
electrical enhancement for the brain and that application of small amounts of
charge to the brain can accelerate thinking. http://theweek.com/article/index/226196/how-electrical-brain-stimulation-can-change-the-way-we-think It can actually turn off the inner critical voice which fills us with self doubt by muting some synapses for the briefest moments making them more receptive to clearer thinking.
I also read recently of an older theory (like 4 years old!) that the human consciousness is just a magnetic field. That would explain ear worms, memes, zeitgeist and crowd control to me. Having had and lost a friend many years ago to depression for which she was unsuccessfully given convulsive electro therapy treatment and having lived near power lines that kept me in a constant fear of electric magnetic radiation, fiddling about with electricity and brains seems to be a dangerous and emotional field. Maybe you could change a person’s make up by changing their electrical levels. Chocolate does it for me! Too much and I am completely overcharged and unable to rest.
I also read recently of an older theory (like 4 years old!) that the human consciousness is just a magnetic field. That would explain ear worms, memes, zeitgeist and crowd control to me. Having had and lost a friend many years ago to depression for which she was unsuccessfully given convulsive electro therapy treatment and having lived near power lines that kept me in a constant fear of electric magnetic radiation, fiddling about with electricity and brains seems to be a dangerous and emotional field. Maybe you could change a person’s make up by changing their electrical levels. Chocolate does it for me! Too much and I am completely overcharged and unable to rest.
I have just listened to the books and music program on RadioNational and the discussion of a book called Lexicon by Max Barry which is all
about the magical power of words and recruiting poets to control people’s
minds. Max Barry had previously studied Marketing and Advertising so he knows
about manipulating brains with words and ideas.
There is an interesting experiment which has come under
different names, one being Takeluma, in which people were tested to see which
line shape matched their interpretation of two different words. One was a
prickly line and the other a rounded sinuous wave.
The prickly line matched the
word that had an" ick" sound and the sinuous wave matched the "oum" sound. Maybe words
are magnetic or electrically charged in the way they are spoken and that is why
they stick in your head or are able to move you to tears in certain
combination. In cultures where there are words used differently by gender role
I wonder if there is a different power in the words. In cultures where only men
speak publicly does that limit the electrical balance of the brain and thus
influence behaviour of the dominant gender?
Alfred Tomatis researched the frequency of sound and the
influence it had on the smallest muscle in our body called the stapedius. It is
the tiny little muscle that works the hammer and anvil in our inner ear. Not
only does it respond to frequency of sound, it is also influenced by emotions,
say through involuntary clamping of jaws or tensing of neck muscles and in turn
influences physical balance and perception. Each cultural language has a
different frequency and the amount of exercise the stapedius gets in listening
to a variety of sound in turn enables the ear to hear more acutely, and the
brain to flexibly perceive more things. This is the triggering theory behind Mozart learning.
American language frequency and French are quite different and Tomatis surmised
among other things this had something to do with their perceived contempt of one another the living out of an adage of not being on the same wavelength.
Writing is my way of getting the scramble of scratching
clashing ideas into a visual form so that I can redigest it. It’s a bit like
crushing a whole lot of rock ingredients together and mixing and sieving to
make a glaze which actually only comes together because of the right electrical
balance of the molecules in it. It’s just annoying knowing that there is some
thought in the back of your head that draws all these ideas together like a magnet and you
just can’t get at it.
One of the pieces of music said to bring about the Mozart effect is this by Greek musician Yanni
Maybe if I sit and listen to it, I will be able to make something that has magnetic attraction.
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