Reflection: Different Ways of Experiencing

I think a lot of people, at this point, have at least heard of the brain chemical dopamine. Among the many things it does... Well, I've heard it described in this way: It makes things pop out from the background and seem relevant. It intensifies them. (The picture on the right, which had quite a lot of local contrast added, is intended to represent higher dopamine perception.)

Me, I perceive things more like the picture on the left. I know -- I mean, I can tell -- I don't have normal dopamine processing. As an example... The ayuderdic herb, mucuna pruriens, is one of the only things that naturally contains the most direct precursor of dopamine. It has legitimate medical uses. Some people, if they weren't used to it, would find that it made them more than usually cheerful or confident. Some would find that it sent them right over the edge into anxiety, agitation, mania -- like caffeine, but likely worse. (Some of the disorders that frequently show dopamine overactivity: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety.) My reaction to mucuna pruriens is that is calming and sometimes sleep-inducing. I consider it a preventative measure when it comes to bad dreams.

Sometimes coffee brings me down, too. Going to sleep on stimulants is not an uncommon reaction... for a person with ADHD. I don't have ADHD, but there are common threads. There's a theory that people with ADHD procrastinate so that they can add excitement to a task, so they can stir up enough stimulants in their brain that they are actually able to do the task. Me, I don't do that. It's when it comes to human relationship, very specifically, that I behave as an underwhelmed person. I have consistently, across most of my life, been attracted to people who are far, far more emotional than the norm, who are simply over the top. I have consistently been attracted to situations -- human situations -- where the stakes were high. My emotions are aroused. My bonding impulses come more strongly into play. Low stakes human situations fail to motivate me to the point where... where I can function.

I think it would fly in the face of logic, for a lot of people, that my reactions to certain substances would be characteristic of the underwhelmed as opposed to the overwhelmed. And yet it seems so obvious to me. I am the polar opposite of the hyperaroused person... when it comes to just strolling around. (Though yes, I do respond in intense, 0 to 90 ways to a very few things -- the same ones, predictably, year in, year out... Hey, do you think the light in the corner stands out maybe even a little more on the picture on the left, where there is so little contrast. maybe that's why I calm a little on stimulants. More of the world starts popping out a little and commanding my interest.)

Reflection: The Hand Holds the Key

My little finger wanted me to write this.

Today I was out walking when I became conscious of my middle two fingers tackling the little finger, yanking it so it was perpendicular to it's previous position, and holding it down. The little finger was very appreciative: Ah, that felt good!

No, I'm not just writing this to be silly. I came up with a phrase for something. It occurs to me that some of my postures that are the oddest -- and most comfortable -- are variations of "bend and lock": First bend a finger, arm, leg inward and rotate it differently than the way it grows out of its socket. And when it's rotated to wear it feels comfortable, grasp it, lay on, wedge it somewhere -- yes, somehow lock it into place... but not for long, because a lot of other things are waiting to be bent and locked, too. (Hey, the little finger had it's turn.)

The things we can look at and only think we see. You might look at me and notice that my fist was clenched, but fail to notice the reason: One clue is apparent when you look very closely and observe that the other fingers are curled around the little finger, holding it in that perpendicular position.

Reflection: The Experience of Reward

An understanding of the brain can help us understand some basic funky little things, like why we might bite into a hard candy when ostensibly we want the taste to last. The candy releases neurochemicals into our brain, and so the biting may give a bigger rush. So what is it about really -- the taste or the brain chemicals?

If we accept that a lot of things may ultimately not be about our senses but rather about the chemicals released in our brains in response to our senses... well, then we can begin to understand so much, like what happens when the process goes awry. People realize, because they've witnessed the effect on peers (on TV if not in real life!) that drugs have a detrimental effect on the reward/ motivation system. Most of us, though, have less experience with people whose brains that work like that naturally -- people whose reward systems aren't triggered normally by their senses, but instead respond to only a limited set of stimuli. (It doesn't occur to a lot of people that that way of being even exists at all.)

I told a friend once that what looked like excessive fear on my part was actually monotropic vulnerability. I'm not sure the distinction was clear. I meant that if a person's reward system is triggered in unnaturally strong ways by just one or two stimuli -- and if they fail to respond to other supposed rewards -- then an unnatural amount of their attention is going to be focused on those one or two things.

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Reflection: The Difference Between 'Illogical' and 'Not Logical'

Can everything be classified as either logical or illogical? I don't think so. I think a lot of people call behavior 'illogical' when it is merely 'not logical' -- and that there is actually a huge difference between those two things. So much of our experience, whether we're normal or not so normal, is not about logic at all -- it's about drives and impulses and changes in arousal level (perceived as either interest or fear).

Is motivation logical? Well, it's mitigated by logic -- hopefully-- but that's not the same as being driven by it. There's quite a bit of evidence of brain reward systems running on chemicals (ie dopamine) in kind of a 'ka-ching ka-ching' fashion. There's scientific evidence of reward system irregularities being implicated in various disorders. Is a person less logical because they fail to experience reward or motivation in the more typical ways?

Ah, and then there's the issue of drives. Just about everyone has heard the term 'drive' applied to things like sex, but there's also a drive toward monogamous/ faithfulness, supported by its own system of neuroeptides. (Some of the early research on that came from studying prairie voles, and why it was that they formed pair bonds and nurtured their young for a long time when other related species didn't.)

Of course I've also written recently about the issue of sensory processing -- having the 'volume of the world' turned up unusually high or turned down unusually low. Ultimately... I think it's illogical to expect others' non-logical parts to operate the same as our own!

Reflection: Mirroring Abilities and Disabilities

My left hand is proud of its schoolwork and delighted with the comments and smiley face that the right hand left for it in red ink. (Do you see the title there in gold gel marker?)

Seriously, though, this relates to some issues that are important to me. I just put up a lens on Squidoo titled Neurological Disorders: Differing Abilities and Gifts. I've got some lenses featured on it that are my own, and also half a dozen that are by other Squidoo 'lensmasters'. (A lot of us do feature or link to each other's writings; it's a way of helping one another... and the site.)

I've read different statistics; I believe one thing I read said that Squidoo was one of the top 100 websites in the U.S. -- and it's very much in the black in these trying times. It can be a good thing to work not only to increase one's share of the pie, but the size of the pie -- especially when one finds many pages that are quality and that they believe in.

Among the premises of that page I just put up: that multiple anomalies tend to reflect an underlying condition, and that anomalous brain structuring may come with mirrored disability and giftedness (usually in a metaphorical sense... and not quite so graphic as what you see in the picture).

Reflection: Mirror Writing

I had wondered for a long time if a particular thing was normal... It's not that I really cared whether it was normal, but I was interested in what it could tell me. I don't think I'm a lot more adept with my right hand or my left, but my right likes to go right and my left likes to go left. Well, I learned a new phrase on Squidoo: "mirror writing". I came across a lens about it, written by an internet friend. I knew I had some proclivity at it, but wondered just how good I was. I put a pencil in just my left hand and wrote as fast as I could, just about as fast as with my right hand. A couple of the letters I actually thought I was making in the normal direction as I went along, but when I looked back, every single one of the 26 was mirrored.

Apparently if one can write easily and naturally with either hand but in opposite directions you're a "mirror writer". And mirror writing is yet another anomaly that sometimes happens on its own in an otherwise normal person, and sometimes occurs as part of neurological disorders that cause autism or mental retardation.

I figure there are people who have been defeated by me at Boggle who would be quite surprised to know that I would have trouble mirroring even the simplest gesture of someone who's facing me. I would see that their head was tilted, but determining which way and then telling my own body to do the same thing... that would be a major struggle. People assume someone who can read forwards, backwards, and upside down that must have at least a normal ability to differentiate one direction from another, but that's not always true. I will say that I am much better at such skills than when I was a kid.

Some people get frustrated that people see them as "dumb" because of their spatial skills. My problem was never that anyone thought I was dumb. No, they'd see me as so smart that there just had to be a psychological reason for everything. (If someone's IQ tests low and they're in adaptive PE because of coordination and spatial problems, people assume they don't get a driver's license because they don't have the skills. But if someone's IQ tests high and they're in adaptive PE because of coordination and spatial skills, people will see their not getting a driver's license as one more piece of evidence that they're cowering in fear of the world.)

I could be dead wrong on leads I follow, so I avoid saying too much. I will say that there are people who have a corpus callosum (the part that connects the hemispheres of the brain) that bends at an abnormal angle through the brain's language center, but fails to reach as far as the motion center at the base of the brain. There was one study of children with this disorder that found that the wider the bending angle the more over the top the storytelling behavior -- the more bent those children were on capturing an audience and hooking them. And that is but one example of a weakness that comes with a mirroring gift.

Reflection: Intact After an Attack

I'm intact. I have learned, though, not to go near Madrona Grocery Outlet even at midday in bright sunlight. There are some major teenage thugs there. There is something to be said for quitting certain things while one's ahead -- or at least intact, save for one knee. Someone does have my purse, unless they discarded it somewhere. I lost some signed time sheets, but I retained my keys and a few valuables that were in a smaller bag that fell out. My jeans leg is ripped, and one knee bleeding, but I declined to have the officer haul me somewhere to have someone "take a look at it". It's not worse than if I took a fall somewhere.

It was because I held so tightly to that purse that I was dragged a few feet. Was my heart racing when I finally collected the fallen possessions and walked toward the bus stop? No. Once again, I think the physiological/ emotional response was a good bit less than most people's would be. I wasn't as deflected.

That's hard for people to imagine, if they've seen me when I've had to face some narrow phobic-fear. There's a little bit of research to back up that in some cases focused phobic-type fear is associated with not hyperactivity, but rather deficits/sluggishness in the normal fear response system. There's a saying that when the zebra is outrunning the lion, it can't afford to be thinking about the past. In other words, forgetting isn't always a passive act; there are neurochemical systems designed to help us forget, to disengage from our own core selves and act (in extreme circumstances) as if our past didn't exist. Some people disengage -- dissociate -- when circumstances don't demand it. Others lack the wiring to so. I may look like I have zebra instincts (and not just to teenage thugs by Madrona Outlet!) but those zebra instincts are actually a component of what's missing in me.

Well. I wrote two posts this afternoon. I hope people do still read that earlier one -- I think it was a good one.

Reflection: Whelment Issues

I found a book Fidget to Focus on the lobby bookcase and have been read it intensely. Ever since college, I have been aware that I identify with some ADHD behaviors characteristics (again) others are simply the polar opposite of me. A relatively new theory, based on brain research: that a person with ADD has some brain systems that process stimuli so poorly that it results in constant boredom, or underwhelment.

I not only sleep well with caffeine in my system -- I seem to sleep better with all around lousy sleep hygiene. I know there are people who can remember me sleeping on the couch of a 16 bedroom co-op, amidst the chaos and the activity. I wonder if anyone sees some humor in the following passage. "Fidget strategies work for falling asleep, just the way they do during the day, the goal being to help us achieve optimal arousal for a given activity. One mother reports that her daughter, who occasionally declared herself too bored to sleep, experimented with different sleeping venues: the floor, the couch, and once even the bathtub."

On the next line, though, I cease to identify with the phenomenon: "Changing where she slept created just enough novelty that the strategy worked every time." There's a general assumption that the chronically bored seek out novelty... But what if one's brain processes novelty so poorly, on an emotional level, that they simply fail to experience normal 'whelment' from it? What if, in order to experience 'optimal arousal' or 'whelment', they have to get a good rhythm going?

To be continued...

Reflection: Is it in my Genes? (I)

I'm not fearful of incoming information over in Squidoo-land; thus I allow comments and dialogue on the more occasional blog posts that I write there. Coming home in tears one day -- I think I'm about to do something tears, I'm close enough to feel the fear tears -- I felt the impulse to post this particular on my Squid blog first... before this one even. The post that I am reprinting here I actually had up at the time of that write-up that I shared in Another's Images.

I've been contemplating the various factors that affect how other's view me, and the credence they put in things I express. I've also very much been contemplating genes. There are multipe themes in this post that you can expect me to return to:

"I express well in writing, and sometimes I’m very glad for that… on a personal level.

I’m getting ready — at least I think I’m getting ready! — to write a letter to a nurse… a nurse I respect, one who struck me as both more knowledgeable and more respectful the doctors I have known. I don’t make a good impression on doctors. I’m afraid of medical prefessionals, but my demeanor doesn’t mean that I’m ignorant, or irrational. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that doctors have often treated me like I was very small.

So I’m going to write to a particular nurse, and I’m going to explain in the most courteous manner I can that I don’t really want to hear anyone’s opinion, and that I don’t really want to talk. I want blood. I want genetic testing. I’d rather not spend hundreds of dollars out of pocket, of course (I don’t have a lot at this point) but if I have to, I will. I just need to put it all in someone else’s hands.

I could chicken out or postpone the ordeal — I have been doing that for over a year. But I will say it felt a little less daunting to take those first steps when I realized I have some very relevant posts on my Evening Nigh Reflections blog… a few relevant lenses and articles. I don’t have a lot to say, but I can sift through my writings and pass along a few links.

Those who read this post can probably see why my web personas get wary of each other. 'You do what you need to do,' said TBT, 'You do what you need to do for both of us, but if you’re going to issue memos like this from our joint headquarters, make sure you keep on referring to me by my initials only'..."

Reflection: Listening to Caffeine

Here is my Listening to Caffeine lens -- my second-to-most-recent one. Monday is one of two days that I am available to sub all day. I didn't find a position today, though I sorely needed it. If I had been up plugged into the online Subfinder at 5:30 this morning (as I was on Thursday) I would have had a better chance of finding something. Over the course of the early morning hours, positions briefly open up -- very briefly some mornings.

By the time it was obvious that I was going to spend the day at home... well, I was writing away. The writing gig would be very supplemental in the income department, even if I manage, over time, to push a few more lenses into the upper tier. Still, I can point the educational ones -- like the one I wrote this morning -- at my website and eduFire profile. And of course there's a song on the Animoto site -- which I may set my Farmer's Market slides to -- called "Love is Better Than Money". Ah, that it is. Still, it's better if I don't run out of money altogether.

Now speaking of markets -- and of caffeine -- Super C energy drink is back at Madrona Grocery Outlet, and I should stock up. I gather that it's more commonly people with ADHD who can drink coffee or energy drink and say, "Well, that was a nice nightcap -- yawn." I don't have ADHD, but I have said for a long time, that my brain is distinguished by very unusual attention patterns, moreso than by anxiety per se. Isn't it interesting that the very brain chemicals that are stereotypically associated with anxiety -- the so-called 'fight or flight' chemicals -- tend to... mellow me out a bit? I do take diphenhydramine, but I'm more likely to konk out on half a dose if I have a little caffeine in my system, too.

Image credit: Saut Eman, Free Digital Photos

Reflection: Tagging (A Metaphor for Monotropism)

I belong to a lesser known social bookmarking site -- and from the experience of bookmarking and tagging, I draw another metaphor for monotropism:

I tag websites with keywords and -- metaphorically -- I tag real-life stimuli as well. A particuar stimuli is tagged 'fear', and it is always fear; a particular person is tagged 'love' and they are always love.

The funny thing is, I actually have trouble responding emotionally to stimuli that haven't been 'tagged'. Here's something I've puzzled over at various times: I will sometimes order an item at a restaurant or juice bar that ends up turning my stomach. I think I do it because I don't recognize, or experience, body signals well. I can tell you what my favorite foods are, but if you ask me what my stomach or taste buds crave at a particuar moment in time, you'll be met with bafflement. Salty? Sweet? I don't know, and I'm not sure I know how to know.

Some people say that emotions are largely physiological responses to stimuli. Well, this is just a theory, but it does so seem to fit: Deficient in normal body signals, deficient in the very mechanics of attraction and repulsion, emotion for me consists largely of conditioned responses to a limited number of stimuli. (I just want my favorite. I just want whatever it is I've tagged as 'favorite'.)

Memory: Struggling to Pass Brain Chemistry

I was fixing to publish this piece when I wrote in "Evening Nigh's Year in Reflection" that I would continue to be 'the author of people's lives' (aren't we all?) and that I would strive, in the words of The Moody Blues, to "Say it With Love".

I actually wrote this particularly piece a few years back; at the time, I made several unsuccessful attempts to publish it in lit journals.

I went over Struggling to Pass Brain Chemistry again and again with a fine tooth comb before I added media and resources and posted it to Squidoo. I waited until the piece had received a few comments (also a couple Squid Angel blessings) before posting it here. I wanted to do right by the piece. The piece, in its new incarnation has 10 illustrated text sections; I used stock photos, of course, running most of them through photoeffect programs. Only one text section is new -- it's a short one that discusses the limitations of labels and of medication... and it's accompanied by the same picture you see here in this blog entry.

It's good, from a pragmatic standpoint, that I've got some real publishing credits (lit journal and anthology) but I'm happy to have "Struggling to Pass Brain Chemistry" under the Squidoo domain, dressed up, like various other lenses, in resources and media and one of those little Amazon MP3 modules.

PS Picked up another one from someone -- down in the Philipines, I believe -- who has commented on other lenses, and is part of the new "Angels crew". She not only read, but listened to the whole thing, and what she wrote was really kind. (The volunteer Angels are of course a part of how the site maintains its integrity, too.)

Reflection: Of Appearance and Illusion

I was reading a blog by a woman who's autistic. She said that people naturally assumed she was high-functioning when they met her online, and that they assumed she was low-functioning when they met her in real life. Well, reading her narratives, I doubted many people would think she was autistic at all; they'd think she was simply articulate and perceptive. The woman expressed herself in writing much better than the average person does, and was probably more astute than average in her discussions of human behavior. But if you look at her features and facial expressions, it's very easy to imagine she has a developmental disorder. Well, I don't doubt that there were autistic symptoms (sensory overload, difficulty reading body language, or even speaking) that came out in face to face interaction. Yet I also wonder to what extent it would affect her to simply be looked at the way people probably did.

How many times in my own life have people looked through me, so certain that their social perceptions and capabilities were beyond mine that it didn't even merit thought? And haven't I done the same, looking across the aisle of a bus as if from some great height? I've written about neurological irregularities before, in Modeling the Latest in Hypertonic Arm Wear and Sometimes You Picture Me. I won't spend a lot of time discussing 'stereotypies' today -- but I will link to a bit of writing. I think I've written 3 lenses since the last time I linked to one in a post! There's one titled Teaching Critical Literacy With the Ugly Duckling that seems on the surface like something written by my teacher persona that wouldn't be of interest to friends. I'm not on my soapbox in the overt way that I am here, but there's quite a bit of me in that piece. There's also a bit of theme music and some stunning swan and duck pictures, that no, I didn't take. (Of course I've got my own snapshots and Animoto shorts in Step Into Ravenna Creek Ravine.)

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Refection: Outside the Rain Begins...

For most of my adult life, I've had a rain song: some particular song that begins playing in my head, in almost clockwork fashion, when those torrents come. Sometimes it's been the same song for years at a stretch. When I lived in Tucson -- yes, across that whole span of years -- the song was "Outside the rain begins, and it may never end..." (Kind of an odd image, I know, for Tucson -- with its sudden downpours and its months of drought.)

When I moved to Seattle the song abruptly switched: "The fog meets the beaches, and out on the reach, it is rain-ning." Later it became "Come in from the rain." And for a period of time, following a drought, the lyrics were my own odd creation: "Rain on Seattle, the way it should be..."

Our minds are so different, aren't they, in ways that aren't at all apparent from the outside? There's a reason why I so often quote song lyrics: I scarcely have a thought, or a feeling, that doesn't trigger a lyric. Ah , and it doesn't necessarily even take a true emotion or true thought; a simple two-word phrase may have some stock lyric attached to it. Perhaps eventuallyI'll be able to explain the neurobiology of it. Today I'll just describe: The word "Thank you," -- flashed across a computer screen, after I've filled out some form or other -- well, that triggers "Thank you for the kindness and your stories of the road..." And that "home" button on each page of my blog (under the bottom post and above the eduFire button and the quotes)? "How much I wanted you home."

Reflection: A Page Set with Few Pages

Before I write more about monotropism -- or the mind in general -- I want to talk about the word 'experience'.

I think that people often confuse two very different concepts: To talk rationally about which life pursuits are (or not) important is one thing, but to experience motivation is something else. Experiencing motivation (or experiencing interest or fear) is largely a neurochemical reaction in which arousal levels are either heightened or subdued.

Depression is, on one level, a disorder of motivation. I am using the word monotropism to refer to a very different sort of disorder of motivation: one that is less mood-dependent, but in some ways more pervasive. It's like being a website with few pages. Most things in life are experienced simply as links leading off of or onto one's pages.

I believe it's possible for a person to simply lack the hardwiring or neurochemicals that are needed in order to experience motivation normally -- by that, I mean that there's a lack of intrinsic/instinctual motivation toward very basic things like comfort, security, or cleanliness. A monotropic person may experience, at the neurochemical level, very little motivation by anything that doesn't relate to their particular passion (their cause or purpose, their relationship, their career...)

Reflection: A Thing and its Opposite

There are multiple reasons a person will sometimes allow another human being to insult him: It might be that he believes what the other person is saying, or it might be that he believes none of it. It could be that he lacks ego strength -- or it could be that he has enough ego-strength that the insult wasn't an issue. Many things look, on the surface, like their opposite, and I think that's one of the biggest barriers to understanding between and among human beings. I wrote in an earlier post that I thought Dr. Laura blurred the distinction between attachment and dependency -- two things that, as I see it, are not only distinct, but often functionally opposite. We're all constantly making inferences about one another, often at such a subconscious level we don't even realize we're doing -- yet in that split second in which we infer, we may, in fact, be choosing between opposites. Here's an example of how tricky it gets: Those repetitive motor behaviors associated with autism and other disorders... well, according to neurologists, they can reflect one of several things, like 1) a massively overstimulated nervous system, or 2) a massively understimulated one.

Reflection: A Response to Dr. Laura

My sister-in-law sent me a book by Laura Schlessinger, and I read the whole durn thing. Now I’ll concede Dr. Laura a few points: Yes, there are things one shouldn’t put up with from another human being; yes, there are wrong reasons to ’put up with’ things. And yes, one’s primary attachment should be to one’s babies. That said, I’ll spend the rest of this post arguing with Dr. Laura. She argues against “stupid attachment” -- attachment to flawed human beings who aren’t your little kids -- and then describes scenarios that don’t involve attachment at all. I remember an acquaintance, some years back, saying you were not attached to something if you were willing trade it for something else of greater or equal value. Boy, do I stand with him on that one! The I want somebody, I need somebody mentality is an example of dependency; it has nothing, but nothing, to do with attachment.

Now I wonder what Dr.Laura would say about the prairie voles. Prairie voles have been in the news much more often than the average rodent. It’s partly because of them that scientists know that monogamy is a drive, supported by its own neurochemical systems. There's a volume of research that goes back years: scientists wondered why this one species of vole was monogamous and nurtured its young for a long time, when other closely related species weren’t (and didn’t). What was different about this vole’s neurochemical systems -- and were some of those same systems at work in human beings ?

The short answer is yes. Those same systems are in place in people, though they don’t function identically. One of my all-time favorite movies is A Beautiful Mind. The woman in that story… well, there are different types of strength, but hers is the type of strength I can admire. Of course a Dr. Laura could argue that life isn’t the silver screen... and that an over attached person has only themselves to blame when their attachments cause pain. That’s a valid argument. But it’s not valid to equate over-attachment with dependency, or to suggest it’s an affliction of women who lack their own strength, their own self-worth, or their own voice. I think that often -- I’m not going to suggest always -- it's the people who don’t have strong attachment/monogamy drives themselves who most self-assuredly and vocally mistake attachment for weakness.

Reflection: Hyporeactivity

Some people who read this may have memories of me, years ago, sleeping sprawled out on the couch of a 16-bedroom co-op -- a place where both the front and back doors were sometimes left open and people literally wandered in off the street. (You might want to keep that image of hyporeactivity in mind as you read this.)

Fear and excitement are both forms of arousal; from a neurochemical standpoint, they can be quite similar. People differ greatly in their response to novelty -- it's not just a matter of whether they perceive novel stimuli as positive or negative, but of the extent to which they experience an increase in arousal at all.

As for me, I'm like a stereo with a few pre-set buttons: When it comes to those stations that I've pre-set, arousal can shoot sky high; when it comes to most of the rest of the world, including most novel stimuli, arousal levels (both interest and fear) run so low they've literally left people staring at times.

Memory: Modeling the Latest in Hypertonic Arm Posture

This is me at four, modeling the latest in hypertonic arm posture. Hypertonia is the opposite of hypotonia: it means it's easier to flex your muscles than it is to extend them. If you fingers curl just a bit when you relax them -- well, that's hypertonia's 'normal cousin'. When my arms dangle, it can feel like they have weights attached to them; that sense of weightedness disappears when my forearms are supported or angled upwards. Ah, but across my life, many people have interpreted as fear what is a matter of muscle tone!

Reflection: Listening to Chamomile

I never did read Listening to Prozac, but I have been listening to a glass of iced chamomile tea...

I like chamomile. It's a mood brightener, and it seems to be good at relaxing muscles. I can't drink it near bedtime, though, or it makes me hyper.

Am I making that up? I wasn't sure myself, so I asked Google. Google suggested I had a legitimate point -- some people find chamomile energizes them up at least briefly before it brings them back down.

Chamomile increases a brain chemical called glycine, which is mostly inhibitory but sometimes excitatory. (And as for how scientists knew that... they ran an experiment where people drank five cups a day of chamomile, and donated their bodily fluids regularly to science. Even a week or two after they finished the chamomile regime, they were still able to produce glycine-enriched pee.)

It's hard, sometimes, to listen to what one's brain really says, and not what it must say -- I mean, it's hard not to listen to what everybody knows. For years, I said caffeine didn't affect me, because I could drink it and go right off to sleep. But sometimes I'd go decaf, anyway, because of things I read. I mean, everybody knows caffeine is harmful to the likes of me. But then I started drinking a great beverage mix that seemed somewhat calming. What does this Super C energy drink have in it? I wondered. Apparently it has quite a bit of caffeine, among other things.

It turns out that many people have been surprised to realize that caffeine was calming them down -- and that roughly half of them have written about it on the internet. Some people say atypical reactions to caffeine are a trait marker for ADHD. I don't have ADHD -- but I also don't have brain chemistry remotely typical of... well, of some of the labels I've picked up over the years.

And isn't that the case for a lot of people?