Category Archives: Thoughtful

Communication, Humour, Neurophysiology, Thoughtful

Changing the Matrix of our Thought

I think that using IT –information technology, laptops, i-phones, satellite boxes and the like – is changing the way we think: changing the actual nuts and bolts of how we think – I think we are enhancing certain neural pathways in our brains and probably neglecting others, the old ways.

Some of us do this with greater ease than others.

For example, when humans detect incongruity in their world  (a soldier knitting or a little old lady pumping iron) we tend to laugh[i], incongruity is the core of humor.  When a train of thought leads us up a dead end, when the system of reasoning we are using doesn’t work, won’t extrapolate – we don’t bash on — we laugh and feel better and then we try another route.  We don’t right click and we don’t get frustrated.  Think of a joke, think why it is funny and you will probably see this.  Laughing protects us and we like to do it so we don’t hang on to trails of logic that don’t hold good — we giggle, abandon that menu and look for a new one — right clicking isn’t so enjoyable.

Sometimes when I’ve been on the computer late at night I dream within the computer’s matrix – it is disturbing – last night I couldn’t get out of Google.  We think in lots of matrices (superimposed restraints) – I’ve only just learned to think in Punctuation – for sixty years I did free thought.

Now, when I go to sleep, I can find myself dreaming in Word, with embedded commands out in the open, kicking my thoughts into shape, but not my shape, they direct the very narrative of my dream – it is weird and it is food for thought.

i] see the work of Marvin Minsky

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lifestyle, Thoughtful

How will you die?

Your cause of death depends to a large extent on when you do it and where.  If you are in the US and between the age of 10 and 24 when you die, there is a very good chance (over 70%) that you will die of an unintentional accident, suicide or homicide – so be careful and stop worrying about cancer!

It’s a similar story in the UK, I’ve been browsing the figures from the Office of National Statistics – if you are between the ages of 20 and 34, suicide and injury/poisoning of indeterminable intent (I think that means probable suicide), accidental poisoning (drug over-dose) and road accidents are the three most common causes of death in both men and women.

In childhood, (5-19) road traffic accidents are the commonest cause of death for boys.  Little girls are more cautious — I knew that.

Not until the age of 50 will suicide cease to be the commonest cause of death for men.  Shocking in itself this is a huge tribute to the power of vaccination, antibiotics and sewers.

What about the other end of the spectrum – what are our chances of surviving birth?  In the US infant mortality was 6.15/1000 live births in 2010, worryingly it is increasing and I don’t know why but obesity, diabetes, pregnancies in older women and in much younger women may be contributing.

In the UK infant mortality is at an all-time low of 4/1000 live births but we can probably expect this to rise as it has in the States.

The lowest infant mortality is in mothers between the ages of 30 and 34, the highest in those under 20 (5.5/1000 in UK in 2012).

The UN Population Division figures tell us that if you live in Afghanistan 135.95 babies in every 1000 die within a year of birth, that’s 13.5 in every 100 or more than 1 in 10!

Without modern medical care how many mothers would die in childbirth? Wikipedia gives us an idea — in Dublin between 1785 and 1849 the figure was about 1 in 100 or (for comparison) 1000 in 100,000.  In some institutions the maternal death rate on occasions reached 40%. It has gradually improved with advances in care; in the US in 2008 it was 14 in 100,000 but don’t be complacent the trend is again upwards.

1 in 100 is about the level of maternal deaths that we find today in Somalia – not as good as our sheep standing outside in the rain (but then they do have the benefit of some modern medical care and good nutrition).

In Sub-Saharan Africa the lifetime risk of maternal death from childbirth is about 1: 16, one in every sixteen women will die as a result of the complications of having a baby.  In the developed world the figure is 1 in 2800.

I commend you to go look at your national statistics and think about what they mean – I haven’t even touched on the lifestyle, cultural or political implications – you can do that for yourselves.

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Bereavement, Metaphysical, Thoughtful

Supernatural Elements of Pheasant Plucking – Really

There is no pleasant way to pluck a pheasant, the pheasant pluckers agreed.

‘You put the wing tips under your feet, so, and hold the feet in your hands, so, and you just pull, hellish hard,’ the domino players were discussing novel ways to disassociate the tasty bird from its feathers.

It’s quick, but messy.’

Ah, but if you get the knack you can disembowel it all in one movement, have a look on You Tube,’ — unlikely things you hear in a Welsh pub.

‘Layered with sausage meat and bacon and wrapped in foil and baked in the oven, that’s how I like it.’

And so, last night, I went to sleep thinking of the first time I tasted it – pheasant —  picked from the dried-out carcass of the left-over roast bird that invariably sat in my ex-father-in-law’s  massive but largely empty fridge, next to a half pint of dodgy milk and the stale eggs that made us ill, in the days before he re-married, when all there was to eat in the old patriarch’s brightly lit kitchen in the dead of night was the remains of his Sunday lunch and hard baked water biscuits; a Sunday roast, no veg or trimmings, but a roast nevertheless, is the benchmark of a proper home-life.  There was sometimes roast rib of beef, tender, pink and delicious, served with salt and there was always whisky and Canada Dry, whatever time of day or night that we arrived.

Last night I had a dream; other people’s dreams are very boring, but it illustrates something, something quite important that we all know but which I have rarely felt. 

Pop, he of the Sunday roast who has been dead for years and anyway long estranged from me by circumstances, visited me – a visitation.  He walked down our lane weaving through the puddles, in a tweed suit and a beige waistcoat (he usually wore a cardigan) but the buttons were still straining.  The wind lifted a layer of his unruly frizzy hair, darkened and restrained by repeated applications of Brylcream.  His small feet (size 7) wore good leather shoes, shiny and very stylish with leather tassels on the laces and he guffawed when he trod in horse manure which is odd as we do not have a horse.  He rebuked me for my directions; everyone gets lost when they visit us.

That’s all.

Afterlife is what I’m writing about.  Heaven, if you like.  Ghosts.   You can fill in the details but I woke with the glow of affectionate recall (Pop wouldn’t do love).  But there he was.

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Thoughtful, Uncategorized

On your own at Christmas?

Husband, pillar of the church, run off with the Sunday-school teacher?  Partner of twenty years gone and died on you, after harrowing illness, leaving you bereft and penny-less?  Wife of even longer, your right-hand and practice manager (married to the job, not you, apparently), upped and off on the day you retired?  Daddy/ Mummy just gone to have some me-time — but what about me?  Gone to live with your grown-up daughter and her family’s just fallen apart?

That’s who we all were that first Christmas, the first Christmas after Armageddon, our own personal Armageddons — so what could we do?

As it approached we all knew that it would be terrible, that Day so laced with expectation and us with our open sores.

323feat Chris Tree

For the first time we realised that there were people who were alone, not freaks but people like us.  Not all strictly alone;  some had children, but all were bereft, abandoned.  We felt bad that we’d never thought of them before — you see good things do come out of bad.

On Christmas Day four women, all supreme in their own kitchens, their own Christmases, stood stirring around the central hob, with no vying for dominance, we stirred as one. Tom attended the Turkey and the children watched their new almost grown-up friend, almost a cousin, eat fire in the garden and had goes on his unicycle and tried their new diabolos and blew bubbles that made rainbows  in the winter sunshine.  When the sprouts boiled over we laughed until the tears ran down our faces,  it was the first time that had happened to me (the tears of joy, I mean) for years and years but, you know, it was to happen more and more.

After lunch, we lolled on the sofas and on cushions on the floor to watch the Queen’s speech, in the euphoria of full stomachs and alcohol, moulded to each other, inspecting singed hair and smelling slightly of paraffin, in comfortable congestion, like a pride of circus lions.

That was how we had our best-ever Christmas.

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