Fun experiments with your eyes

Tags

Alternate visual reality, Drug free visions, Fooling with your eyes, Scientific American, Visual experiments

The Scientific American Feb 2010 p.77 has this illustration: 

Cross you eyes to overlap the left + onto the right +.

 

This takes a bit of effort and a little practice but after a couple of minutes you should be able to cross your eyes voluntarily and merge the two pluses into one plus. When you are successful at holding your eyes in that position for a few seconds interesting visual effects will start happening to a newly formed rectangle in between the red and green ones. I discovered that by holding the tip of a pencil between the pluses about half way between my eyes and the computer screen and then crossing my eyes to look at the pencil tip will cross my eyes about the right amount. It is easier than trying to voluntarily cross the eyes and hold them crossed while they decide to fixate on the +. Move the tip slowly forward and backward until the pluses merge. 

My eyes start reacting in unexpected ways. First the bright red and bright green areas merge together and form a silver color. But this color isn’t stable and can vary in several ways: the color can shift smoothly over half a second to some other level of grey or to a color, often tan-green and then drift over to a blend from green on one side to red on the opposite side but that blend can go either way. These various transformations must be taking place in the visual part of the brain and not in the eyes themselves because the two eyes are not presenting the same image to each other for processing but only to the brain. 

This procedure is a strain on the brain and I had viewed these images in the print form in the magazine several times over the last couple days. But, this morning shortly after arising I started to read a magazine and almost immediately began to have a migraine aura. I have blogged about how to cope with these in, Migraine experiment updates are reported. I thought this unpleasant event might be an opportunity for further migraine aura experiments. So, I tried doing the cross-eye experiment on the color patches in the magazine which was a little more difficult because of the migraine flashes but not having much else to do I persisted. It has been shown with brain scans of people actually having migraine auras that there is abnormal blood flow in the visual cortex at that time. I was wondering what would happen if the migraine was overlapped with the excess visual effort being made during these color overlap experiments. At first I didn’t notice anything particular other than the difficulty in seeing the color swatches behind the sparkling auras. Then I noticed that the auras had gone away in about two minutes after starting the experiment. These auras usually take about half an hour to go away when I just lie back and relax or about ten minutes or less when I do the tapping technique mentioned in the blog above. Did something unusual happen this time or was this just a one time event. It will require some further observations. I don’t look forward to migraines because they interfere with my otherwise serene life but this might prove very interesting to me and helpful to others who have worse problems than mine. 

I remade these photographed graphics used above for better viewing results. 

These color blends will merge in your brain.

Sit back from your computer to arms length and then take a pencil and hold the point about half way between your eyes and the screen. Now fix your gaze on the tip of the pencil with crossed eyes. Slowly move the pencil toward the screen a few inches and then slowly back toward you eyes a few inches. Notice that the black dot in the center of the picture moves together and apart as you move the pencil slowly backward and forward. (The bottom dots in the plain fields are easiest to do this with.) At some distance the two dots will appear as one perched on the tip of your pencil. Hold the pencil in this position for five to ten seconds while moving it slowly forward and backward a half an inch and shift your mental attention to the dot. While fixating on the dot slowly lower the pencil out of the picture. About this time you should begin getting visual blending of the blended red colored field and the green colored field into a visual hallucination. 

The phantom box you will probably see first be silver-grey. What is strange is that the area directly behind the dots looks silver-grey and yet neither of these screens has that color at that position. You can look at these things for quite a while and get many different effects but for maximum visual impact do the same experiment on the targets. After focusing on the black dot for several seconds the targets will catch fire and start doing all sorts of crazy things. Reversing colors, going silver, color fatigue effects and after a while total lack of contact with visual reality as you formerly knew it.

Sara Frucht – a good friend and a great artist.

Tags

Cafe Mediterraneum Berkeley, Mediterraneum, Review of paintings, Sara Frucht's paintings, Telegraph Avenue zombies

Friends are wonderful. Sometimes, most times, that simple fact is easily forgotten in the whirl of the daily hubbub. My hour or two of routine coffee shop word-slosh at the Cafe Med is a complex mess of ego clash masquerading as a high-principled exploration of eternal truths.  

We older Med-heads are disparagingly referred to, by the young zombie-kids of Telegraph Avenue here in Berkeley, as the wax museum. The mutual dissing-epithets are not entirely wrong. The youths dress themselves in shabby black clothes, cover their skin with tattooed skulls and move with drug induced staccato gesticulations. In contrast, we mellow geriatrics dress ourselves more conventionally and spurn personal tats but we waxen-people haven’t moved for half a century. However, beneath the wrinkling skin, we are just as weird as the younger zombies. To outsiders we older zombies’ arms appear permanently cocked in various frozen configurations of getting coffee into our brains or in gesticulations of defiance at each other’s innuendos.  But, to us — it’s our life. 

I have said more than a thousand times, Any one is excused for coming through the Med’s  front door the first time but anyone who comes thru it a second time must be crazy. Yet here we are, locked in amiable-acrimony as the millennium and the decades go scooting by, waiting for the return of the enthusiasm of the good old days, usually thought of as the 60’s, or death. Unfortunately, all too many of us have taken the second option for leaving the Med — death. By my definition, we living Med-heads are all crazy.

In the midst of all this bizarre mucking about, like the lotus blossom of Buddhist mythology sits my friend Sara Frucht — artist. I guess we all have our better qualities but one of Sara’s is spectacular — paintings. She paints with a luminous lighting which stimulates one of my old habit exercises, Observe the color and translucency of things. Sara has developed her observational skill to a high art and distilled out the light of things into a spirit-form which we all can see and appreciate — just by looking. Every time, after watching Sara’s paintings for a while, I walk through the world with my eyes cleansed, seeing the translucent glow of our wonder-filled world more vividly and feeling a soft sublime pleasure in being part of it.  

Nasturtium leaves

 

 Que – Sara – Sara !  

Sunflowers

 

Thank you! Sara.  

Ivy

 

Look at Sara’s paintings for a while before you take a walk and your life will be more quiet and joyful.

SanDisk founder Sanjay Mehrotra speaks at Berkeley.

Tags

Future of flash memory, Future technology, Sandisk

Sanjay Mehrotra is one of the University of California’s finest graduates. He cofounded SanDisk and created much if not most of the memory found in cell phones, cameras, PDAs and pocket memory. Without his work of the last twenty years the entire world would be a much poorer place for all of us. We are indebted to him for much of our happiness and productivity. He spoke at the View from the Top Lecture Series at Bechtel Engineering Center.

Sanjay Mehrota founder and COO of SanDisk Corporation

Sanjay speaks to the engineering students at his alma mater the University of California Berkeley about the future of NAND Flash Demand Drivers. He sees it as an explosively rapid growth period over the next several years, say four years, and beyond. Digital cameras have been a big consumer of flash memory over the last few years and media players are at present growing rapidly and soon everyone will have a giant USB in their pocket so they can plug into any computer, and have all their favorite stuff readily available. However, the already big thing and soon to be the really big thing is cell phones, or at least a device which we now call a cell phone, but which will have everything in it and we can use it as a cell phone, and a camera, a camcorder, an internet connection, a gaming device and a PC. Also, a lot of memory is going into automobiles, but the big thing was other. He didn’t talk about other, and if I had asked a question it was going to be about “what is this other that seems to be growing so much faster, in your projections, than all of the other uses?”

It appeared that he was expecting something like a ten times growth in memory delivered, in terms of storage capacity delivered per year, in the next four years. But, this other which appeared on his chart of projections to be even larger. What in the world is other? The already existing categories seem to cover almost everything imaginable in a general way, so what is this other? We will have to keep our eyes peeled and our brains alert for these otherworldly others. My interest is piqued, but I don’t know where to look.

NAND is peaking and 3D Memory is taking off.

He spoke of NAND as approaching its limit of growth, and that the amount of effort to achieve a continued growth was not worth the gains achieved. The new technology seems to be 3D Memory which is just now taking off. The implication to these students is that that is where they should place their efforts.

Watch for this lecture on Cal Webcast/Events.

Migraine cure – an aura event appeared to respond to an ice pack and tapping.

Tags

aura, brain blood flow, Finger tapping stops migraine, headache, Migraine, prodrome, Scientific American

[Update May-26-2012 Please try this new migraine treatment. I created it last month. It is based on induced artery dilation, and let me know how it works. It cured my prodrome in a minute or two, whereas the ice-pack, and finger tapping treatment described below has been taking ten minutes to half an hour. That’s better than just going to bed untreated which takes an hour, but the new method linked above was the best yet.]

Recently I had a migraine aura attack which responded well to an ice pack placed at the back of my head. The migraine problem is reported by about one quarter of people at some time in their lives. Over the years I have experienced them occasionally, and they generally last about half an hour. The event usually begins when I am reading a magazine or working on the computer. The very first symptom is a fogginess of the word that is being looked at as my eyes scan along the text. After about a minute that expands to an area about the size of my little fingernail held at arm’s length that starts glowing with a middle gray quality. As it becomes difficult to keep reading, or writing with this problem floating around in the center of my vision. I will go into my darkened bedroom, and lie down on my back, and just relax with my eyes closed, and idly watch the aura grow into colorful dancing hodgepodge of lines flickering in a rainbow like arc around my central vision similar to the illustration above. As this rainbow grows in size it moves out from the central area of vision, and I can see moderately well again there in the central area, but the area where the dancing rainbow is located is totally blind to the world beyond. The rainbow is as opaque as if it were a solid object held in front of my eyes. By shifting my eyes about it is possible to see almost everything beyond the rainbow, but it is difficult to read. About thirty minutes after first noticing the blurriness the rainbow has usually expanded to the periphery of my vision where it lingers for a while, and by that time the central vision is normal again. After forty minutes the episode is usually gone. During this whole event I could carry on more or less normally with some work if there was no reading required, and could probably convince most people that nothing unusual was happening to me. I avoid driving at this time, not because I couldn’t do it, but because of the possibility of something happening well off to the side which should be attended to but which wasn’t seen, because of the opaque rainbow blocking the view. This blocked vision problem is equivalent to the post between the cars windshield, and the door. I get these events a couple of times a year usually in the late afternoon or early evening while reading.

In the current Scientific American there was a report on migraine headaches. It said a brain scan was being done on a person while they had a migraine event. It showed increased blood flow at the very back of the brain in the visual areas during the attack. A few days after reading that article, when I had a migraine coming on, I decided to conduct an experiment by cooling that part of my head with the hope that constricting the blood vessels would slow the blood flow, and stop the migraine attack. I used an ice pack which was already stored in the freezer. The pack was applied to the back of my head about two minutes after I first noticed the migraine coming on just about the time the dancing rainbow was forming near the center of my vision. I lay down in bed with the pack between the back of my head, and the pillow. It was too cold being directly on my skin so after a minute I put a single layer of wool sweater between it, and my head, and rocked my head slowly back and forth over the cold spot. That seemed to be about right for the maximum tolerable cooling. I just lay there as usual, but with the back of my head being chilled while I watched the rainbow dancers. I tried to observe if anything different was happening.

The rainbow dancers soon turned into gray dancers, and the arc expanded outward in the usual way but noticeably sooner than expected. The whole event was over in about ten minutes rather than the typical thirty or forty minutes, but it didn’t seem possible so I lay there for the usual forty minutes. Having nothing much to do I started putting the ice pack on the bald spot on the top of my head to see how much cold pain there was in doing that. Actually there was quite a bit of pain, but because it was under my control it didn’t seem intolerable. However, if it were not controlled or very long lasting it would have become very painful, and very annoying.

The results from this single experiment seem to be that the cold did affect the migraine, and it did go away quicker. As they say, further funding is needed for further research. There is a possible down side to the experiment because I did get a mild headache an hour later which seemed to be caused by a stiffness in the back of my neck. This report is a bit loose, and anecdotal because it is just a recalling of the event after it happened so the next time it happens I will take the MP3 recorder, and do a voice recording of the entire event as it happens. That way after this migraine aura happens there will be a more accurate description of the events, their timing and exactly what I am doing at any given time.

The blog World thru my eyes at wordpress has a list of 10 tips to fight Migraine. One suggestion I would have would be on tip # X where, “All you need is a package of frozen peas wrapped in a towel.” This is a flexible  icepack, better than the rigid one I used, but rather than, “placing it on the forehead” as recommended in that blog, the new research mentioned at the top of this current posting says the weird excessive blood flow is at the very back of the head, and so the results would probably be better if applied there rather than on the forehead. That is what I did, and it seemed to work.

If you try this, and it works or doesn’t work leave a comment as it may be found to be helpful to the billions of other migraine sufferers. Another option that might influence blood flow at the back of the head is to tap back of the head, and rub of the head, and neck vigorously for ten seconds with the flats of all of the spread out fingers. Do this once a minute when the migraine is first noticed, at the very beginning of the episode. Keep doing this tapping procedure for as long as the aura or prodrome lasts. Please let me know if this works as it seemed to help today as it appears that I am having a migraine swarm, but this tapping seemed to stop it and nothing happened. Maybe nothing was going to happen, and I just thought it might. If several people test this out maybe we can discover if it works or not.

---

Personal comment: One month later. It appears that a migraine swarm was in progress when the original post was written, and over the course of the ensuing month there were several times when an aura appeared to be starting. The icepack procedure wasn’t attempted again instead what was done was the tapping on the back of the head rather vigorously with the outstretched finger pads for about fifteen seconds per minute. That appeared to be sufficient to improve the blood flow from what ever it was that was causing the migraine, but there were none to report. Once again this was limited to personal experience, and needs to be corroborated by others so please send a comment if you have some experience either of it working or of it not working.

[Update from 2012/05/11 – Migraine prodrome miracle cure mabye please try it and comment. This method used hot water held in the mouth to dilate the arteries in the head, which combined with the cold pack contracting arteries on the back of the head might stop the excess blood flow to the visual centers in the back of the head. ]

---

DESIGNA – Technical Secrets of the Traditional Visual Arts – book review

Tags

Book review, Book review of Designa, DESIGNA

I haven’t finished with this book and probably never will because it has so very many interesting things to ponder and reponder. It is written at the crossroads of classic intellectual mathematics and psycho-emotional eye-catching patterning of the external and internal world of the human mind and the absolute weirdness of the natural patterns underlying and motivating the real world.

What is symmetry in physics, in math, in Fibonacci sequences, in everything: in Golden Spirals, self-organizing DNA spirals, hurricane clouds, turtle-shell patterns? These strange, naturally driven patterns are everywhere and may be easily seen once you have gotten embroiled in this book. Go to page 277 for a collection of self-organizing symmetries and let your eyes and brain go to the center of each one and float around for a while. You will come away with a new appreciation for the world. See also page 285 for harsh man-made patterns and try to find and see the underlying mental constructs.

There are hundreds of illustrations. … I paused here and started counting, and a liberal count got me over a hundred by page 20. On page 259 there are over one-hundred drawings of insects showing dorsiventrality (the symmetry of moving creatures). You will learn quite a few new words and become aware of thousands of new shapes and patterns.

If you have the itch to see your world in a new way and are willing to explore bizarre abstract visual excitement, get it with DESIGNA.

My most popular posts list

Tags

Contents, Home, Home page, index, Most popular list, Table of contents

“You can’t cure stupid!” especially Detroit-stupid.		113,279
Home page		28,934
A solar powered refrigerator would be non-polluting and free to operate.		10,674
A Doomsday Chart comparing Doomsday Clock to pollution.		7,583
Google Earth – The new controls for zoom and horizon tilt.		7,308
The colonoscopy laxative drink made enjoyable.		6,671
Lifehaven – South Georgia Island		5,958
Lifehavens – Bouvet Island for a difficult to attack haven.		4,977
Colonoscopy – and how to enjoy drinking the foul tasting purging fluids.		4,862
Fayoum – The Egyptian mummy portraits restored somewhat.		4,709
Tunguska Event – Sherlock Holmes and the adventure of the missing comet.		4,667
A cure for the common cold using 105° F baths.		4,432
Codex Gigas – The Devil’s Bible		3,949
Surviving heart attacks with aspirin taken immediately.		3,714
Swamp cooler air conditioner upgrade.		3,367
Jack the Ripper was Arthur Conan Doyle		3,311
How many modern people can the Earth sustain? 16 million!		3,138
Jack the Ripper suspects photos		2,930
Publish or die; or publish and kill. – How does one get noticed?		2,738
A Convenient Truth – lecture by Dan Reicher of Google.org		2,729
Migraine cure – an aura event appeared to respond to an ice pack and tapping.		2,658
How to stop broken ribs from hurting when you sneeze.		2,493
Norman Rockwell, an artful illustrator reviewed.		2,346
INDEX by subject.		2,294
Lifehaven – War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.		2,278
BMI (Body Mass Index) is replaced by BDI (Body Density Index)		2,168
What will be the Earth’s maximum population?		1,994
Lifehavens – Survival caves for humanity.		1,972
Imhotep was the first master of Doomsday.		1,856
Jack the Ripper pursued by Sherlock Holmes and Dr. James Watson		1,849
2012 — Doomsday the Mayan way.		1,767
Andrew Carnegie aims to maximize the benefits to humanity.		1,728
Probaway’s Person of the Year.		1,717
Probaway – Person of the year Nadya Suleman (Octomom)		1,647
100 Top Museums of the World – with links		1,642
Lifehavens for humanity. Survival alternatives with 1,000 people each.		1,640
Paul Ekman on understanding emotions and detecting suicide bombers.		1,536
Google Earth Street View comes visiting us today.		1,508
The Earth is two different planets.		1,499
Thomas Malthus influenced Charles Darwin and Wallace		1,464
Emotional Awareness: by Paul Ekman & Dalai Lama – review lecture		1,438
LIE TO ME, Paul Ekman		1,416
Solar powered air conditioning for cheap comfort.		1,352
The Doomsday Trilogy – Dr. Strangelove, On The Beach and FAIL SAFE.		1,329
Lake Tahoe vacation September 2008 reviewed		1,318
Lifehaven – Gough is a remote South Atlantic island but accessible.		1,298
Do you have trouble remembering faces?		1,246
Smell good be good – smell bad be bad – but why?		1,211
Lifehaven – Request to dock the ship Queen Mary in Tasmania.		1,193
Finding the Santa Barbara fire location using Google Earth		1,157
About		1,123
Christopher Columbus – Admiral of the Ocean Sea – book review		1,122
Lifehaven – Adams Island – A second chance for humankind.		1,121
William Collins – CO2 emissions, CO2 concentrations and climate.		1,112
Lifehaven – Antipodes Island is at the other end of the Earth.		1,111
Human evolution was controlled by emergent human women.		1,104
Poison Oak, Poison Ivy itching cured with hot air.		1,090
The easy paths to human maturity.		1,071
Two ways of surviving hospital induced infection.		1,047
A day at the Cafe Med. – A coffee shop in Berkeley.		1,026
Doomsday — ten years later. The worst extinction Earth ever experienced.		1,022
A FREE cure for a simple pimple.		988
How to lie successfully using the Stanislavsky technique.		974
Probaway Script – shorthand system is shown complete on a single page.		965
John Adams – The mini-series conclusion.		946
My Venterium circle of life in a square explained.		942
Dewey decimal system, Library of Congress LOC index and JulianA.		920
Great gas mileage, 51mpg, with a 1996 Corolla		912
Weapons of Mass Destruction – WMDs – atomic bombs – B-47s.		908
Aptera should exceed 250 passenger miles per gallon		905
Curtis Lemay — the real Doomsday prophet.		886
Population control – The most unpopular solution of all.		877
Measuring Catastrophe – How long do we have till Doomsday?		866
Global warming melts polar ice which floods Holland and California.		856
The cure for the common cold is six 102 degree fevers.		855
A migraine prodrome aura cure with a strange eye exercise.		826
The Gene Barrel distribution around the South Pole		825
Itching, itching and more itching!!! How to stop itiching???		824
Machiavelli – The Prince, Discourses and Doomsday inevitability.		751
Mnemonics – for remembering people’s names.		746
Antarctic gene barrels, the final refuge of civilization		710
Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake – locating the photos on GoogleEarth		707
Who will be the most hated person in history?		697
Amazon KINDLE-2 screen protective cover		694
How to revive cold-dead people by warming their heart		692
Paul Ehrlich – The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.		686
Doomsday, Armageddon, Apocalypse and Revelation		680
Darwin Awards are coming humanity’s way.		666
Cure the common cold with 102°F voluntary fevers.		660
Human population viewed in reverse as zero growth.		657
A TOP NEWS stories of 2010 list by news sources is pathetic.		644
Lifehavens – A secure shelter from natural disasters.		644
Michael Marks – The chairman of Flextronics and much much more.		623
“The Office” – Michael Scott desperately needs a girlfriend.		619
doomsday-clock		602
imhotep-louvre		601
Lifehaven – Pitt Island is a rich tourist’s end-of-the-world destination.		594
Another walk to the Med cafe.		578
Alfred Russel Wallace is the father of Darwinism		565
iRobot – The new creepy crawlies are not science fiction.		551
Dogs have important things to communicate.		544
Life found on Mars? Or, Mars life found on Earth?		534
Google Maps – Street view for Antarctica and finding meteorite concentrations.		519
Sun Tzu – Doomsday preparations.		515
Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580: The Secret Voyage of		514
New symbolism for a Sun based global economy.		505
Childish behavior is okay for children but very poor for older people.		501
Doomsday precursors and population crash.		494
Lamarck and pre-Darwinian species adaptation theory.		488
John Doyle Lee’s execution site.		482
I posted some Photos around El Cerrito BART station to Flicker.		477
How to survive frostbite to the fingers and toes		475
Survival, Survivalism, Lifehaven, Doomsday, Armageddon.		468
Learning from Extreme Events: Risk Perceptions after the Flood		465
Why are old people so stupid on computers?		460
Are distant galaxies being pulled away by old light?		450
Why didn’t American Indians have domesticated animals?		421
Why are white people so stupid?		417
Doomsday count-down clock replaced with a count-up clock.		414
Laurie’s quick-click home page.		410
Self-Consciousness and the Emergence of Good and Evil		410
A Maturity Quotient MQ-test to replace IQ-tests.		400
Lifehaven – The green zone of possible survival after an Atomic War.		395
Why was a missile launched from Los Angeles harbor?		394
Fainting, heart attack and G-forces are countered by contracting stomach muscles		389
William Shakespeare – The Chandos portrait restored.		389
Doomsday precursors — update.		378
Population cap with transferable reproductive rights		376
Global (Holistic) Thinking: how do we think abstractly?		371
The Metric System Contracted For Easy Use		369
The Story of Western Architecture – book review		367
Antarctica’s Gamburtsev mountains and the Earthark.		365
Happiness in Bhutan the world’s happiest country.		362
Salima Ikram – Egyptian animal mummies, past, present and future.		361
SanDisk founder Sanjay Mehrotra speaks at Berkeley.		360
Pain Scale for Intensity Measurement and Management		360
My personal camera history and some experiences.		359
The new Sherlock Holmes is frivolous fun.		355
SearchMe – Google – LiveSearch – PageBull – are my favorite search engines.		342
Cell phone icons and on-line human interactions.		342
N95 face mask upgraded for the flu sneeze		341
Bell’s palsy and how personal facial expressions affect one’s own emotion.		340
Lifehavens – A list of potential refuges for humanity’s survival.		339
Why is Jack the Ripper still famous?		330
Sun Tzu – Comments on Doomsday and the Lifehaven Strategy.		326
The Probaway single stroke shorthand system		323
The Pain Scale for measuring suffering and alleviation of suffering.		312
Flu shots might make you sick and save your life.		309
Coffee shop conversation control and manipulation techniques.		299
The Next 100 Years by George Friedman – book review with comments		299
Virginia Woolf – Portrait comparisons		298
Cramps— How to relax cramps with Capzasin and Quinine and stop the pain.		297
Storm clouds over Berkeley.		295
A new type of aircraft base for long distance aircraft deployments.		292
The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell – review		292
What would Cesar Millan the Dog Whisperer do about Doomsday?		291
Antarctica mountains considered for Eartharks		291
A320 Hudson River crash was unnecessary and risky.		289
Jack the Ripper had a chameleon personality.		287
Iatrogenic and nosocomial diseases can be limited.		287
Further observations on how to survive a famine.		284
Selection – Natural, Sexual, Artificial and Eveish		283
Nina Jablonski’s hairless human skin theory		283
Life after Doomsday? Maybe.		281
The coming human population crash is an unpopular topic.		278
Antarctica – possible Earthark storage sites		276
Glenn Eidemiller Jr. – A wonderful life in my memories.		262
Too few Olympic medals! We want more…!!!		261
Energy trends and technologies by Steven Koonin		261
Charles Darwin’s original idea !!!		258
Publicly burning the American Flag is a legal right here in America.		254
The TV series Hung finds sex symbols everywhere in Detroit		253
Great spherical monuments to Modern Architecture		250
Experiments with your eyes and brain #5		249
“Why you can’t cure stupid” even with Wikipedia		244
How to separate pages of paper.		240
How to pick up women.		233
How to eat chocolate cake, apple pie and other desserts.		232
The ten day diet plan – The easiest diet ever.		231
Bulls horn their way through deep time.		229
What is the ideal human population for maximizing happiness?		228
The real Sherlock Holmes was also Jack the Ripper.		223
Life adapts to poisonous arsenic in Mono Lake		222
How to get to an Earthark container in Central Antarctica		220
ChronoZoom is the coolest thing since GoogleEarth.		219
Field Guide to the San Andreas Fault – a review		218
Observations on how to survive a famine.		217
Afghanistan is the route from China to their OIL !		215
Plantar fasciitis – a pain in the foot.		214
Top Ten reasons not to worry about Doomsday.		213
Religion, Belief, and Politics – a scholar’s review		212
Dear Boss – Jack the Ripper		209
Jeremy Waldron—Legal theory revisited		206
Oil consumption collides with disaster		202
Human life on Earth in the year 7,000 CE.		200
Pandora’s Seed by Spencer Wells – review #2		198
‘The Great Delusion’ of endless economic growth		198
New Zealand is the modern Noah’s Ark, an Earth Ark.		198
Top 10 or Top 100 or TIME Person of the Year, says who?		197
REVENGE Rache! Rachel poster from Chicago Haymarket bombing.		196
Keyboard Space bar improvements.		196
The EMPATHIC Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin – review		195
Fun experiments with your eyes		192
Doctor doom and doctor gloom and now trying to doctor Doomsday.		191
Why are adolescents so stupid? I don’t mean low IQ I mean stupid.		190
Spider bites can be fun to watch.		190
Doomsday blasts and radioactive fallout will be in the Northern Hemisphere.		189
The Grief Cycle for Doomsday and how we will respond.		189
Mature behavior is helped by a higher IQ		188
Marin County Library book sale.		187
How to do a deep cough to clear inhaled food.		185
Lifehaven – South Pole		181
Lifehaven – Peter Island, Antarctica is not an easy choice for survival.		180
Surviving the Swine-flu, Bird-flu. 4 new ways.		179
The knowledge of Good and Evil		179
Hamlet not weak but powerfully conflicted and very sane.		177
A photograph of the Jack the Ripper in the victim’s eye.		177
The little finger on Adam Smith’s invisible hand.		175
The Clash of Civilizations – S P Huntington		175
Water saving – Drought threatens California and we need real reductions.		173
Dr. Strangelove: the movie was a morbid noir BOMB.		173
Oceans of Wind Power – An energy creation proposal using wind.		172
TIME – Person of the year 2009 – review		170
Some obvious flu preparations: masks on airplanes.		170
Potential Earthark sites in central Antarctica		170
Noteworthy people I have met.		168
How to speed up grocery store check out.		168
Dror Wahrman lectures on Evert Collier’s hidden codes.		168
Climate Change – How do we know what we know?		165
Famine is now here and coupled with A-bombs and ICBMs.		165
UNESCO – World Heritage Sites – with links		163
The best search engines and Wikipedia		163
Type 2 Diabetes – Causes and cures.		162
Google Earth upgrade improvements needed.		157
Prevent the common cold with capsaicin		155
Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Jack the Ripper and Vincent Van Gogh		154
A photograph of Charles Scamahorn		153
How to fix a leaking Delta faucet		153
Reducing the flu threat for everyone.		153
Stupid traffic signs cause auto accidents		153
Lifehavens for humanity. 10 survival caves with 1,000 people each.		152
How Adam Smith’s invisible hand might help us avoid Doomsday.		152
My treatment of today’s flu worked okay.		150
Population pendulum will soon swing to well below a billion people		149
Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 camera personal experiences.		148
Who will die when there is a major crop failure?		148
‘The Great Warming: Climate change and the rise and fall of civilizations’ by Brian Fagan		147
How you can solve The Doomsday Equation		146
What do people really want – a Hummer or a Tata? ? ?		144
Automatic battery charging makes an all electric economy work.		143
Levels of consciousness? Is anyone or anything conscious?		141
Roosevelt, Oppenheimer, Air Force pilots and Plutonium manufacturers.		141
Sherlock Holmes was Jack the Ripper		137
Mexican flu, bird-flu, swine-flu human-flu deadly flu.		137
Reducing NOx pollution a little bit		136
Why are people good to each other?		135
Mars rocks on the cheap. Man on Mars? No need.		135
Air France Flight 447 crashed in the coffin corner?		134
The Future of Carbon Capture and Sequestration		133
Top 10 Tips on how to enjoy eating.		133
Carolyn Merchant lectures on scientific revolution and a new contract with nature.		132
What is the ultimate good for human behavior?		130
Glen Eidemiller of Tippecanoe		129
How to survive a heart attack by brain cooling.		127
Earthark Project – Sample Index Page		127
Cross-eye mind games versus religious mind games		126
Is a thousand year digital data storage possible using Pergamum?		125
A convertible sport car, coupe, minivan, pickup		125
Seasonal flu – infectivity, susceptibility, humidity, transmission, infections		124
Queen Tiye, Monotheism, Moses and the Hebrews		123
How ethical behavior can help us survive Doomsday.		122
Microsoft – HealthVault is for personalizable health control.		120
Similar function of animal bones in very different animals		118
Discovery, enthusiasm, delusion, denial, grief, acceptance and libration.		116
Robinson Crusoe Island is a fun Google Earth vacation spot.		116
Pandora’s Seed by Spencer Wells – review #1		116
Merapi kills Maridjan, the volcano’s famous guardian		115
Wind energy		114
Earth_North_Pole		114
The fake Drake Plate was created by Conan Doyle		113
How to fix your umbrella for next year’s rain.		113
“The future of energy: It’s closer than you think.”		112
The coming global disaster is in full speed ahead mode.		111
Sara Frucht – a good friend and a great artist.		111
“The Second Green Revolution,” by Frederick Kaufman – review		110
The Virtues of Mendacity by Martin Jay – lecture review		110
Bernie Madoff for President		109
El Cerrito BART bike trail.		109
Religion, magic, paranoia regain personal control.		109
Battery powered cars need a quick battery change.		107
Lifehaven – What to do about usual disasters and terrorism?		107
NEJM – Shattuck Lecture – Health of the Nation		106
Breaking Bad – Fly: or How to swat flies. review		106
Casablanca – Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart – book review		106
30 sit-ups, 16 push-ups, and posting photos to flickr.		102
Earthquakes in Nevada		99
Measuring disasters on a scale permits rational comparisons.		97
Intelligent Design — of humans by humans and for humans.		97
EarthArk logo symbol		96
Airbus A320 needlessly sinks in the Hudson River		96
Decision Points by George W. Bush – book review		96
The setpoint diet is easy.		95
The 11th Hour—This movie gives a false hope because it’s already the 13th hour.		95
Adam+Eve		94
Paul Ehrlich & Carl Sagan – The Cold and The Dark – review		94
Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller review.		93
Top 10 search engines with a surprise!		93
No Blade Of Grass – After the disaster unfolds.		90
TIME – Person of the Year 2010 – final votes		90
Doomsday dawns when a nuclear state has a famine.		88
DMOC: Discrete Mechanics and Optimal Control		88
An electric bicycle race isn’t cheating. If …		86
State Secrets: Russian Chemical Weapons – review		86
Fat, Fatter, Fattest! – The regulation of Energy Balance.		86
Estimating the interaction between Earth’s stressors.		85
“Jack the Ripper left no clues”?! Ha! Ha!		85
Modern architects don’t know what architecture is!		84
Too warm in the sun too cool in the shade.		84
A Wellbeing Scale for measuring healthy behavior.		84
View of Cal Berkeley Campus from the downtown penthouse.		83
Oceans of wind power are available for humanity’s use		83
iRobot and Mars rovers in the Antarctic		83
You can survive a heart attack with two aspirin taken instantly..		83
The rabbit Achilles finally catches Zeno’s tortoise		82
John Adams – The mini-series part 2.		82
The water table must be raised world wide.		82
Darwin follows Lamarck		81
One hundred million healthy people is probably ideal.		80
We live in a world run by professional liars.		80
Disaster – compare the magnitude of worldwide human disasters.		80
Lifehaven – Doomsday forecast — but not today thank you.		80
Recent Top 10 actors and best scenes.		79
Al Gore – “An Inconvenient Truth” ignored the real problems.		79
Some tinnitus noise might be cured with a self-controlled hiss.		79
Lifehaven – Pitt Island		78
Global Warming – the facts, the science and the scientists.		78
Humanity’s Genes and the Human Condition: past, present and future		77
Getting rid of old stuff is hard to do.		76
Roger Bacon was the prophet of science and Doomsday.		75
ViewSonic LCD monitor VX2835WM review and comparison to old CRT		75
How to achieve dominance in a coffee shop.		75
After Doomsday are there gods and angels or devils and demons?		75
Transcend: Nine Steps to living well forever – review		74
A cure for the bird-flu ! ?		74
Creating a secure password is solved at last		74
The human population explosion.		73
Estimating the total world population of humans – historical.		73
Temperature triggers biological responses.		73
A Doomsday scenario with a limited atomic war.		73
Founding a Billion Dollar Company by James Truchard		72
When something becomes easier to use it becomes more useful.		71
Combining the power of Google, Google Maps and published photos.		70
Funny times in the bathtub with a common cold.		69
Nuclear Deterrence in the Age of Nuclear Terrorism – Graham Allison – review		69
Craig Venter speaks at San Francisco Long Now Foundation.		69
GLOBAL WARNING – The Last Chance for Change.		67
Mars Rovers need help because they are covered in dust.		67
More FREE stuff. – What, if anything, is worth anything?		66
Lifehaven – How bad are the 15 Homeland Security Disasters?		66
Doomsday precursors, Doomsday event, Doomsday survival and Lifehavens		65
Fever kills cancer by triggering the body’s defences.		65
I am Apophenio! I see what others don’t!		65
How you can cure H1N1 flu – maybe.		65
A Big Bang clock’s time is based on a Ytterbium vibration count.		65
Paul Ehrlich – The Dominant Animal ! ! ! ! !		63
New uses for old rechargeable batteries.		62
How to build a Great Pyramid.		62
My new Samsung TL34HD versus my old Casio EX-Z1000		62
I overate today so tomorrow I must under-eat.		61
Worse than War by Daniel Goldhagen – book review		60
Darwin’s Darkest Hour is Wallace’s darkest hour.		60
Paul Atwood and the collapse of the American Empire		59
A perfect catastrophe is brewing for humanity		59
Robots — who love their masters.		58
Darwin’s questionable priority over Patrick Matthew.		58
Vint Cerf – Google VP and Chief Internet Evangelist		57
The Chevy Volt needs a quick swap battery to succeed.		57
Give away FREE stuff other people are selling.		57
Colonoscopy – I’ve been scoped.		57
The Drake Plate of Brass was made by Conan Doyle		56
Does science make belief in God obsolete?		56
Ecological groupthink is destroying the Earth.		56
Survival strategies: A list of successful survival methods.		56
Where are the coldest places in Antarctica?		56
Is this a Recluse spider and a recluse spider bite?		55
Comparing Freedom Fighters vs Terrorists and Republicans vs Democrats.		55
The Foul and the Fragrant: by Alain Corbin – review		55
How to convert the sun’s power into human power.		54
Why am I so unpopular?		54
A Time and Space warp for Christopher Columbus.		54
Armageddon Week – the deluge begins		54
Aspirin can save your life or kill you.		53
NEJM makes the flu policy confusion worse – review		52
Lifehaven – Maatsuyker Island, the balmiest Lifehaven.		52
So, you want to be famous.tv popped into my life.		52
How to control your emotions.		52
A Google Earth measurement tool is needed.		51
adam		51
The EarthArk Project Goals		50
Experiments with your eyes and brain #9		50
Coffee shop information control techniques.		50
Eve choosing Adam with a little help from her friends.		49
The Pope says God is responsible for the Big Bang		49
Boarding airplanes takes too long and here is the fix.		48
$20 Per Gallon: by Christopher Steiner – book review		48
Sudden global climate change has happened before.		48
Permanent Birth Control for women.		48
What will control the world for 10,000 years?		48
Obama Grand Junction poster controversy		48
Super-super-computers and climate modeling		47
How do we maximize our happiness?		47
Stephen Hawking on God, existence and our Universe		47
Probaway’s Person of the Year – Jimmy Wales		47
The Office – flu preparations – TV review S7 – E7		46
A Doomsday scenario limited to major combatants.		46
Ambrose Bierce, a lovable curmudgeon.		46
Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray – review		46
I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas with Vera-Ellen.		46
Trustworthiness Scale measures the verifiability of information.		46
Reconstructing high quality audio from old recordings.		45
A spider bite photographed for two months		45
Permanent speed bumps replaced with reactive speed dents.		45
How to understand and predict people’s behavior.		45
santa_barbara_jesusita_fire		44
The easy life at Lake Tahoe.		44
Is Blu-ray dead? Yes and here’s why.		44
Phoenix sits on Mars		44
Earth’s resources are limited		44
New ideas are always rejected!		44
Changes in Climate Extremes:		44
Jack the Ripper was a consummate doer of evil.		44
Review – Your Inner Fish – by Neil Shubin		43
Last year’s “Ten Day Diet” was a great success.		43
Coolerado air-conditioner		43
Ensuring Digital Documents and a Wikipedia lecture.		43
1500 Human languages are great but one common language is essential.		42
A year of diets. The Probaway 10 day diet plan worked for me.		42
Probaway’s Person of the Year – TIME list		42
imhotep-djoser-pyramid		42
Restoring animal life to a ravaged Earth.		42
WIRED: Pleistocene Park – reviewed		42
Experiments with your eyes and brain #4		41
Give people of the future what they need to survive.		41
Artificial gravity for astronauts		41
The new rules of conversation in coffee-shops or at dinner.		41
To maximize happiness behave at your highest maturity level.		41
Ethics functions to promote species survival.		41
Why people don’t look at paintings in museums.		41
My goal is 100 billion happy people.		41
Al Gore – An Inconvenient Truth, revealed.		41
Charles Shaw recorked, a simple solution to my open wine bottle problem.		41
The most amazing map of our mother Earth.		41
An essential upgrade to the Four Human Freedoms		40
Saving humanity and the world includes saving books		40
Humanity’s “Laws of stability” in the year 7,000 CE.		40
How to improve the browser’s go-back function.		40
What We Know about Emotional Intelligence – Review		39
the really cool people – Andrew Hargadon, Jean Paul Jacob, Julien Decot		39
Earth_South_Pole		39
The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade – book review		39
Look both ways before walking across the street !		39
The murder rate in Berkeley is a reason to avoid that city.		39
Give your friends a healthy elbow greeting.		39
Isle of the Dead		38
Adam Smith was a primogenitor of Darwinism		38
How to lie, cheat and steal, falsify, prevaricate and observe		38
Airliner crash at Buffalo that shouldn’t have happened		38
Review – Dance of the Continents by John W. Harrington		37
Global Warming – Solutions for America.		36
Why discussing the Lifehaven project is so unpopular.		36
Doctor Doomsday says — Prepare now for the Black Swans are in the air.		36
santa_barbara_jesusita_fire_ge		36
Sleep with your heart attack aspirin handy.		36
RFID = Ubiquitous identification of you and your stuff.		36
Where the people aren’t on planet Earth?		35
Probaway – Person of the Year – Craig Venter		35
Humanity’s survival after a disaster of a billion deaths.		35
Humanity’s survival with a population of 100 million people.		35
Is Hans Van Ripper a model for Jack the Ripper?		35
How will people in a perfect society find a meaningful life?		35
TIME – Person of the Year 2010 analysis		35
Craig Mundie of Microsoft spoke of the future.		35
Wikipedia – how trustworthy is it?		35
Torino Scale of the impact hazard associated with near-Earth objects (NEOs)		35
Earth_Central_Africa		34
Humanity is on a collision course with the obvious		34
Shakespeare_Chandos_7		34
Humanity’s appropriate response to extinction risk.		34
Megaprojects for the real future.		34
Climate – Air above, earth and water below.		34
Happiness is available for everyone.		34
A good relationship starts with honesty on the first date.		34
TIME person of the year – the pre-selection list.		34
Notes on Earthhaven, Lifehaven, Earth Ark		34
Mysterious product labeling of Ivory soap and Capsaicin		33
Artificial Intelligence as a precipitator of Doomsday.		33
Preying upon unfortunate helpless people is wicked.		33
Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona		33
Seawave energy gives electric power.		33

Just a note: we don’t count your own visits to your site.

Generated 2011-02-01 10:57:08 UTC-8

Cross-eye mind games versus religious mind games

Tags

Cross-eye experiments, Religious experiments, Seeing God

The cross-eye experiments seen below can be explored quite easily and if not exactly understood can be observed and enjoyed. On the contrary the Trinitarian mind games of the Christian mystic Bonaventure (1221-74) trying to see three and one simultaneously do flip flops with the mind but leave one bewildered. The object in both of the exercises is to see and experience two contradictory things simultaneously. See a more detailed description of cross-eye method and more experiments.

This cross-eye experiment gives contradictory information to the brain.

These experiments take a couple of minutes to do but it is strange how the colors blend, fuse to silver grey, and jump around to vivid colors.

Karen Armstrong in her book The Case For God on page 147 has some discussion of Bonaventure and his verbal experiments trying to perceive God. They seem to have some similarity to these cross-eye experiments I did earlier where I tried to see two opposite images simultaneously and he seemed to be trying to see two separate verbal things at the same time.

—”Bonaventure made it absolutely clear that it was inaccurate to say that “God exists” because God does not “exist” in the same way as any mere being. But being itself is an attribute that can apply only to God. We have no idea what being is: it is not—indeed, it cannot be—an object of thought. We experience being merely as the medium through which we know individual beings, and this makes it very difficult for us to understand how God can be real:

Thus the mind, accustomed as it is to the opaqueness in beings and the phantoms of visible things, appears to be seeing nothing when it gazes on the light of Being. It cannot understand that this very darkness is the supreme illumination of our minds, just as when the eye sees pure light, it seems to be seeing nothing.

To counter this, we have to say contradictory things about God in order to break through this conceptual barrier. For Being is “both the first and the last; it is eternal and yet most present; it is most simple and yet the greatest… it is supremely one and yet omnifarious.”—

I have trouble wrapping my mind around this rather long quote but he seems to be reporting some similar mind and perception flips that you can more easily observe by using the cross-eye experiments above. Or try this from, p.157, The Cloud of Unknowing,

So let go this “everywhere” and “everything” for this “nowhere” and this “nothing.” Never mind if you cannot fathom this nothing, for I love it so much the better. It is so worthwhile in itself that no thinking about it will do it justice.

Some reports of God’s presence may be replicated with easily done experiments.

Do you have trouble remembering faces?

Tags

conference, face blindness, Health, Neuroesthetics, personal, prosopagnosia, psychology, trouble, vision

Today I attended “The 7th International Conference on Neuroesthetics” which was held on the University of California, Berkeley campus. The conference was primarily a series of lectures about facial recognition, and the lack of it by people with a condition called prosopagnosia, which is sometimes called face-blindness. Sometimes, these people acquired the condition by being brain injured in an accident and sometimes they are born with it.

An early report, “Quaglino, 1867 – “Mr LL, a 54-year-old bank clerk from Turin, a strong and healthy man … on February 28th, 1865 … fell unexpectedly on the floor, unconscious … He recovered after several days … I examined him a year after his stroke … At this stage, his near and far vision was excellent, and he could read even the smallest characters extremely well. As he joked, he could have hunted the tiniest birds from the tops of the trees. … he could not clearly discern objects presented to his left side (left hemianopia) … Of all colours, he could only distinguish white and black. Having presented him with a series of large characters in various colours, in fact, he failed to name any of the colours … He also noticed that he had completely lost the ability to remember faces, the facades of house, and familiar scenes. I remember, he said, the names of my friends when I meet them, but as soon as they have turned their backs to me, I no longer recall their features.””

An extreme example of this condition is Lincoln Holmes who can see perfectly well – but he cannot recognize his own face.

People with prosopagnosia may have normal vision, but somehow they don’t have the ability to automatically assemble the various parts of their view of a face into a coherent conception of an individual face. It seems they have to intellectually assemble the various components of a face by looking at the various parts. But with their condition their brain doesn’t automatically click the images into a completely recognizable face. They can’t recognize their own friends by their faces but must look at some detail such as their clothes. For most of us this clicking together, and recognition of a friend’s face is automatic and takes place almost instantly. We see faces, and recognize many things about them instantly and without effort.

For example, a normal person would see a face when looking at this image, and if they knew the person instantly know who they were –

but a person suffering from prosopagnosia would see something like this –

or even worse. It is a bit difficult to communicate what they are actually seeing, and perceiving because their total view and acuity can be excellent; it is the assembling of the eyes’ images into a coherent whole automatically which is faulty, and their view it isn’t described as being blurry. For these people the image just doesn’t seem to stay assembled into an individually recognizable face, and they must use words to identify the face, and then remember the description to remember the face. For examplethe face  above might be described as: Full lower lip, drooping eyelid, exposed nostrils, arched eyebrow, slight wrinkle dropping from the corners of the mouth. Part of the problem is that that list of words becomes too long and difficult to remember, and also one must stop, and think up something that groups several unique items together. From a separate personal problem I developed Probaway-Habits. Perhaps those suggestions may offer some possible help. See numbers 24, 27, 40, 56, 59, 65, 68, 73, 168, 170, 174, 185, 192, 211, 213, 228, 229, 386. A blind friend of mine has developed a remarkable ability to identify people by their voice alone.

Jeff Hawkins‘ book On Intelligence (website) describes how all the brain areas are very similar in physical tissue, and tissue organization. It is the input from various locations, eye, ear, finger or nose that determines what the particular bit of brain does with basically the same type of electro-chemical input. At any given brain location the input goes through six layers of organization, and is in turn throughput to the next layer which in its turn creates organization, and is throughput to the next layer. There is a constant feedback looping to the various layers until a consciousness is presented. It is only the final organized data on the last level that becomes the information which becomes conscious to the person observing the original external event. With some persons with prosopagnosia there is actual injured brain tissue, or absent tissue, or non-functioning tissue in the Hawkins’ sense. It is still an enigma, but with active research there may be some helpful results developed. Some things of particular interest are: the impaired holistic processing of the face, in particular the loss of diagnosticity of the eyes and for some reason an increased reliance on the mouth region.

For me, with normal vision, what the lecturers described was similar to what I experience when I look at 3-D pictures without using a proper stereo viewing scope. I have to point my eyes consciously and separately to an infinity distance point, beyond the picture, but focus each eye up close. When I do it just right I see in 3-Dimensions. The wikipedia article on stereoscopy shows some pictures which you can look at to get more of a theoretical understanding of 3-D.

This is a separate issue from prosopagnosia but it may be helpful for you normally sighted people to get a feel of the problem the prosopagnosiacs are facing. If you look at the pictures below you can, if you have the ability, feel and see the stereo image click into view. This all happens in your brain more than in your eyes and you can feel it happen. With a person with prosopagnosia this same assemblage of parts of a face doesn’t appear to click into a whole perception of a face. Below is a face from the New York Stereoscopic Society.

Observe how your emotions and your brain feel a bit dazed and confused just a second before the images resolve into a stereo 3-D image.

Try and resolve this into 3-D and while you do try and feel your eyes and brain working. It is worth the effort, and there is more than one mental effect you will get.

If you can’t make that one work the one below may be a little easier.

To get more on prosopagnosia go to:Macquarie University – the site has some perception tests.

The Wikipedia site on Prosopagnosia

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Berkeley Science review article on prosopagnosia.

At the conference they said that it was previously thought that prosopagnosia was a very rare condition, but now that it is being researched it is thought that as many as two percent of the general population may have it. By the time people with the condition are adult they have usually worked out various strategies for coping with the problem. However, being isolated individuals they may not know that they have a treatable problem, and that there are techniques which others may have discovered which may be helpful to them. So, if you have trouble recognizing faces check out some of the sites listed above.

How to cope with getting old.

The technology to reverse aging is already here and being tested in primates like us.

This is Ed Mylett’s show and at the end of the wonderful presentation, Ed Mylett asks David Sinclair if he has a final thought on his mental health. David’s response:

1:27:00 prep 1:28:30 “Mental health is very important to me as well, I have learned to reduce stress. Don’t worry about the little things. Think about what will matter five or ten years. I know you are very good at this. I’ve listened to you as well. I mean I’m grateful to you as well. And the ability to cope with pressure. I was a very nervous kid and in my twenties and my thirties, getting a job at Harvard was pretty scary. In my forties and now in my fifties, I’m a relatively calm guy, and you have to work at it. It doesn’t come naturally. Some breathing; I’m more recently now trying meditation at night. Just for a little bit, just for fifteen minutes or so a day, but I find that I can even get bye with less sleep. I have a helmet and a head set, that helps me. I’m not very good at meditation, because my mind is everywhere. It’s called BrainTap, and I have no connection to them, but I like it. Brain tap has headphones, it has calming music, and it’s shining light in your eyes at frequencies that get you to calm down. So mental health is very important because if you are always overly stressed, a little bit of agitation is good, right? It gets you going, but if you have cortisol coursing through your veins, it will accelerate aging. 1:29:41

The other thing is, I’m working on democratizing another type of test for age, which is your true biological age, which is measuring the chemicals that are on DNA that actually determine biologically how old you are. It starts at conception, and it ticks away, even when you are young and I can basically take a blood test or a cheek swab from you or anybody, and predict how old you are but also when you might die, if you don’t change your life. And, what I want to do is give everybody the equivalent of their credit score and help them improve their credit score. (A big Smile from both of them.) Alright. So, you’ve got this number, and here’s what we think you should do, given everything we know about you. And that way just coach millions of people into a healthy, longer life. And, we do have a signup, that’s my gift, you can get. We are developing a test. It’s going to be a lot cheaper than anything, we’ve just filed a patent that brings the cost down by a couple of orders of magnitude. The website is called TALLYHEALTH.COM. So get on that list, and I’ll contact you, and we will see. TALLYHEALTH.COM, and that’s the latest that’s been out from my lab, but I think that in the same way medicine will help millions of people, five, ten years from now, this will be soon. And that’s the coaching that we do. I love touching people’s lives now and not just saying in five years I’ll get back to you.”

My color vision is still hyper-colored.

One of the curious things about my strange sickness last Friday was that my color vision improved, and everything is still more vivid. That is in addition to the vast improvement in visual sharpness after last year’s insertion of new retinal lenses for cataract cloudiness. That was a fantastic and unexpected improvement because, during daylight, I felt that I was seeing perfectly.

This new event seemed to be triggered by my taking an overdose of spicy foods on an empty stomach to do an annual clean-out of the bad microbiome that collects in one’s intestines. My conclusion after searching the internet was that I had stripped out the intestinal lining, and stuff leaked through to my intestinal wall into my bloodstream. I had a terrific reaction, with a temperature of 101.6 of which one of the effects was some sort of psychedelic reaction in my brain and/or eyes. But if it were like an LSD event, it would have gone away in a day or less, but this vivid vision is still shockingly present six days later.

I just look around at anything, and it is vivid! This vividness isn’t like ramping up the vivid setting of a camera, where too much of that adjustment will make the light colors all go fully white, and the shadows go full black. The effect is full range without any washing out of subtleties, and the subtleties are, in fact, emphasized.

I am really enjoying this experience, while it lasts!