In this post I’m going to go more into depth over some of the things I did not yet cover in my earlier posts, like books I read, how I perceive Braille, how I do music, and all of that good stuff. I was also going to dedicate the first section to NASA and their research on sensation, as well.
So, first of all, I’ve been looking, as several other people have already started doing, to build a new home on Mars, after changing its atmosphere by creating factories and regulating the amount of greenhouse gasses, or possibly setting up a forest of plants. Over at http://www.blindscience.org/ I was able to partake of a week-long course that explored some of the possibilities, but I soon discovered astronomy was harder to understand than astrophysics, since I liked things that moved, rather than knowing the order of stars and the materials they are composed of. I am also interested in cosmology, knowing the origin of the entire universe. While there, I was able to learn about the sensations involved in micro-gravity, and it had me thinking of ways to simulate weightlessness on earth. NASA has been doing visual, vestibular, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory-related research to help us understand why some people get more sick than others, how motion sickness could be treated with chemicals, and things like that. I proposed an experiment in which I wanted to find out if it were true that blind people could not be grossed out by a sickening image the way a sighted person would. The thing is we would have to find a way to send the image to their brains, and to see if blind people have an instinctive response, or if they have to learn how to associate it.
Once, in the year 2004, I went over to the county fair, and there, I rode a ride that I will never forget. At the time, I had absolutely no idea that I could have someone read the ride name to me and I could research it, which applies to all rides, and for this reason I am an amusement ride enthusiast. This is because I had no computer back then, yet I had a quick way of learning it later. I probably wouldn’t have ever known what the name of the ride was, except that I read a book once that mentioned the Gravitron. I decided to look it up, and by the description of the ride, it remminded me of the very ride I went on. The operator who sat in the centre of the centrifuge told me after I asked him when the ride ended what it was called, and he said it was called the Starship.
I will describe to you all the sensations I experienced and why it was that I experienced it. When I got on board by climbing a small set of steps, I ventured into the chamber, and then I walked to the right to lean back on a panel that was padded with diagonal (20 degrees) bars with gaps in between. I remember the ride started spinning anticlockwise and I knew this because my ear canals and my tactile sense was communicating that sensation I learned to associate through various repetitions. After that, I could feel the ride spinning faster and faster, until suddenly I felt like I was being forced back onto the wall and then I felt like I was tilting until I was suddenly lying back and staring up at the ceiling. This is actually false, but the reason I felt this sensation was because the centrifugal force was pulling down on the fluid found within the vestibule, located in the middle of the ear canal to give me the sensation as if I were lying on the ground, and the blood in my body was shifted downwards, as well. In reality, I was still facing the opposite wall, but without any vision I would never know.
When the ride reached its maximum speed of twenty-four revolutions per minute, I decided to sit up, thinking it would make me feel better, for I really didn’t like riding the ride lying down, or so I thought. Imagine someone sitting on a wall that is perfectly perpendicular to the ground. That is how it looked like when I sat on the wall. I should mention that when I was lying down, the feeling of spinning disappeared altogether. The purpose of the ride was to make passengers believe, based on their vision, that they are pinned to the wall and their feet are off the ground, and everything inside is spinning with them. When the wall moved on the rollers, I felt like I was being scooted back, and then forward, rather than up and down because I was now experiencing a new sensation. I could have either moved sideways or go upside down, which would have felt like I was lying on my stomach, or I could have stood up on the wall and grabbed onto the railing that surrounded the booth, but the force would have been so strong that I might have never made it and escaped the force. The operator sometimes increased the RPM to give us a higher G-load, and that’s when the panels rolled up.
Finally, after the operater timed the ride to end in eighty seconds, he slowed it down, and I began to feel myself tilting as if the whole ride were tilting me upright rather than my brain doing it. I got off, and I remember feeling a little dizzy afterword. I’m wondering what would happen if you blindfolded someone and then they went on a ride, would they have a different experience than they would have had if they saw everything?
I am also interested in knowing if vision and hearing correlate to one another. Kids are afraid of certain images, and the dark, but are they afraid of the silence because you can hear tinnitus or because your brain starts associating sounds at random? What makes some afraid of loud noise and afraid of certain sounds, including some people who are twenty something and afraid of fireworks? Is it something to do with how our cerebellum is developed? I remember being scared of a certain sound emited by a toy keyboard. It was a breeping sound that was at around 680 HZ with isochronic beats of 15 HZ, pulsating at three times per second. This happened when I was five years old. I remember this very clearly. I was learning how to play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in the key of E-major. I was sitting in a small table in a small room with a tile floor. A speech and language pathologist, who didn’t know how to speak Spanish was trying to teach me how to play the keyboard, but she didn’t realise I was covering my ear because I was afraid of that sound. She thought I wanted to nap.
Later, I started having dreams in which my brain would amplify certain sounds in my dreams if I twitched the inner muscles of my ears, and I would hear a crackling or clicking sound, followed by a loud ringing at 1000 HZ. This would usually happen if my brain was warning me of an impending nightmare. When I was younger I used to sleep call once a year for two years, but I never remembered them. I later learned that the amplified sounds might be due to a feeling of going to astral project. I experienced this tingling sensation and hear a high-pitched whining or ringing once when I took melatonin, and a minute later, I felt rested as if my mind were reset even though I had only slept for an hour. It might have also been related to Exploding Head Syndrome.
BRAIN: Okay body, I am going into a really high brain activity. I need to lock you in so I can safely carry out these tasks.
BODY: Okay.
BRAIN: Oh no, I cannot seem to lock you in. We will just have to continue.
The brain maps out the following scene of a person going to the airport. The scenes change, but the movement of a person walking from the security check point to the gate are carried out in real life. The body moves from the bed to the door going out.
When the plane is boarding and everyone is seated, the body is moving to the nearest car and climbs in. The scene shifts to the time when the plane is on and taxiing for takeoff. The body starts up the car and drives out. Suddenly the plane takes off into the air and the body pushes down on the accelerator hard and the car speeds off. The sensations from both the dream and reality become mixed that the sensation of crashing becomes a feeling that the plane crashed during takeoff. When the person wakes up screaming, they will find themselves in a big mess. This is just a reminder that sleep-action happens when the brain cannot paralyse the body to not act out the movements in the dream. This is why unconscious crimes and other wrongly-accused actions are happening that many people find hard to believe.
In one of my readings, an author predicted through a story that in the 2080’s, the crude oil would have run out, and because of it, no more plastic could be manufactured, cars could not be built, planes and such would not be able to travel, and not only that, but the ice caps located on the poles of the earth would melt because of too much heating that it would flood the oceans, causing lands like Florida to submerge, forcing its inhabitants to move to higher ground, adapt, or go extinct. Many science-fiction enthusiasts would be disappointed because they thought people would have been able to do better than that. Like George Carlin said, let it all happen because “the longer we live,” he said, “the more selfish we are being to each other.” If I had to choose sides, I would neither agree or disagree. We can protect our environment so we would not die a miserable death as long as we are willing to do goodness, not just protect endangered species like those in the ocean and in the forest. “You know what they say, ‘Here today, gone to-morrow’. George once said. When I got down to discussing this, I didn’t realise there was a culture totally devoted to driving, why people like to drive big vehicles on the road cross-country, etc, rather than go on a boat or fly. To me, driving is primitive, hovercrafting is more exciting. If time were not scarce then we could do what we wanted.
That brings me to think of something. What is the origin of time? How has humankind defined that concept throughout history? Was it possible that a time system existed before the human race evolved? Could someone who invented the watch might have been a perfectionist? What about the sundial? What kind of scientists did we have before the first century in the world? Some people say there are things you just know when they ask you how you know it, but truth is you forget how you know those things because language is not innate, only sensation is. Surely time works the same way, which is why it is easier for people with eidetic, superior, and spacial sequential memories that allow them to perceive time and space together. People like we can remember things of the past, but nothing before our birth. This is known as hyperthymaesia. If someone told me it was three thirty PM when I heard my favourite PBS Kids show, I’d immediately remember that next time I heard it.
Can a learning disability be caused by lack of repetition which forces the brain to rewire itself, and not just be caused by biological imbalances or deficiencies due to a mutation or by a predetermined gene? People say it gets as narrow as knowing the building blocks that we can refer to when we are little, which is why child development fascinates me. https://www.quora.com/Are-learning-disabilities-caused-by-a-mutation-in-genes-responsible-for-memory-and-recollection People use month numbers for about two years to accurately measure a milestone, so we just get used to it over time and it becomes a habit. In Louis Sachar’s Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, a mind-listener tried to perceive what was inside the infant’s mind, but all they could perceive were the emotions associated with oxytocin, endorphins, dopamin and external sensations. The language part of the brain was still not developed, so the author said it was impossible to describe in words what was being perceived, yet I know there must have been a way, because I just described it.
I’m also fascinated with hypnosis as well, though I am not sure how this will neurobiologically change your brain in the end. I could imagine having someone hypnotise you to extract information from your brain, something you would not remember. It is like you are trying to get the brain to extract hidden memories by shutting down a small portion, the part that makes us go to sleep. That’s why when they hypnotise you in the movies, they swing a watch back and forth, at delta speed. You can do this with sound or magnetic pulses and slow down your brain waves as well. Can you really erase someone’s mind, change their thinking patterns to make them not addicted to something using hypnosis? I am not sure how that would be possible, using amnaesia-like characteristics. How can psychological trauma cause the brain to get rid of certain cells that holds the information to that particular memory? Some say lightening causes memory loss if you are struck by it. I may have to do research on things like neurosteroids and how and why people use synthetic substances rather than naturally-occurring ones. The main reason is because of patenting, which leads to profits, which you cannot do with natural things. Many of these things involve manipulation of memories, creating false memories, or causing amnaesia. There was a movie some years back, “Total Recall”, which introduced the idea that you do not have to really have done something to feel that you have.