As noted, I have been spending a fair amount of time working on the care-giving book, about the years that my wife and I cared for her mother here at home. And mostly this has consisted of going through all my old posts here which touched on that experience – there are at present 125 posts tagged with ‘Alzheimers’. Add in email excerpts, and the similar amount of material from my co-author, and you can get a sense of just how much editing and organizing work is involved.
But there’s also something else. It’s a odd sense of vertigo I get from re-reading this stuff. Because I am now far enough from being in the middle of it to have some perspective, but still close enough that a lot of the emotional content is immediately accessible and somewhat overwhelming. And then there’s articles like this one in the NYT by Natalie Angier, which really resonate:
Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop
If after a few months’ exposure to our David Lynch economy, in which housing markets spontaneously combust, coworkers mysteriously disappear and the stifled moans of dying 401(k) plans can be heard through the floorboards, you have the awful sensation that your body’s stress response has taken on a self-replicating and ultimately self-defeating life of its own, congratulations. You are very perceptive. It has.
As though it weren’t bad enough that chronic stress has been shown to raise blood pressure, stiffen arteries, suppress the immune system, heighten the risk of diabetes, depression and Alzheimer’s disease and make one a very undesirable dinner companion, now researchers have discovered that the sensation of being highly stressed can rewire the brain in ways that promote its sinister persistence.
Ayup. Independent research confirming a lot of the stuff I talked about in all those Alzheimer’s posts. Another excerpt from the article:
Unfortunately, the dynamism of our stress response makes it vulnerable to disruption, especially when the system is treated too roughly and not according to instructions. In most animals, a serious threat provokes a serious activation of the stimulatory, sympathetic, “fight or flight” side of the stress response. But when the danger has passed, the calming parasympathetic circuitry tamps everything back down to baseline flickering.
In humans, though, the brain can think too much, extracting phantom threats from every staff meeting or high school dance, and over time the constant hyperactivation of the stress response can unbalance the entire feedback loop. Reactions that are desirable in limited, targeted quantities become hazardous in promiscuous excess. You need a spike in blood pressure if you’re going to run, to speedily deliver oxygen to your muscles. But chronically elevated blood pressure is a source of multiple medical miseries.
“Think too much.” Gee, I don’t know anyone who does that.
Well, I mean, those 125 posts about being a care provider can’t possibly be evidence of that, can they?
Jim Downey
Filed under: BoingBoing, Music, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, tech, YouTube
. . . are almost endless:
Bare is a conductive ink that is applied directly onto the skin allowing the creation of custom electronic circuitry. This innovative material allows users to interact with electronics through gesture, movement, and touch. Bare can be applied with a brush, stamp or spray and is non-toxic and temporary. Application areas include dance, music, computer interfaces, communication and medical devices. Bare is an intuitive and non-invasive technology which will allow users to bridge the gap between electronics and the body.
Here’s one application:
Another step towards the tech from Communion, though I didn’t use it in quite that, um, way.
Jim Downey
Via BB.
No, I’m not kidding:
* “Robot Suit HAL” is a cyborg-type robot that can expand and improve physical capability.
* When a person attempts to move, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles via motoneuron, moving the musculoskeletal system as a consequence. At this moment, very weak biosignals can be detected on the surface of the skin. “HAL” catches these signals through a sensor attached on the skin of the wearer. Based on the signals obtained, the power unit is controlled to move the joint unitedly with the wearer’s muscle movement, enabling to support the wearer’s daily activities. This is what we call a ‘voluntary control system’ that provides movement interpreting the wearer’s intention from the biosignals in advance of the actual movement. Not only a ‘voluntary control system’ “HAL” has, but also a ‘robotic autonomous control system’ that provides human-like movement based on a robotic system which integrally work together with the ‘autonomous control system’. “HAL” is the world’s first cyborg-type robot controlled by this unique Hybrid System.
* “HAL” is expected to be applied in various fields such as rehabilitation support and physical training support in medical field, ADL support for disabled people, heavy labour support at factories, and rescue support at disaster sites, as well as in the entertainment field.
Here’s what the Telegraph had to say:
Japanese ‘robot suit’ to help disabled
The suit, called HAL – or Hybrid Assistive Limb – is the work of Cyberdyne Corporation in Japan, and has been created to “upgrade the existing physical capabilities of the human body”.
* * *
People with physical disabilities, such as stroke-induced paralysis or spinal cord injuries, can hire the suit at a cost of Y220,000 (£1,370) per month, and Cyberdyne Corporation believes the technology can have a variety of applications, including in physical training and rehabilitation, adding extra “muscle” to heavy labour jobs, and even in rescue and recovery operations.
HAL can help the wearer to carry out a variety of every day tasks, including standing up from a chair, walking, climbing up and down stairs, and lifting heavy objects. The suit can operate for almost five hours before it needs recharging, and Cyberdyne Corporation says that it does not feel heavy to wear, because the robotic exoskeleton supports its own weight.
There’s even video (in Japanese, but you get the idea):
Now, I’ve written about these sorts of things before, but this one does seem to be an improvement over the other versions. And it is good that there is some actual competition, from a source which isn’t tied to the US military-industrial complex. What strikes me as particularly promising is the biosensors being used, picking up very subtle nerve impulses. Once you solve that problem, there is no longer either a learning-curve the user has to go through, nor a lag-time which they have to compensate for, making the use of this technology completely intuitive and natural.
Interesting. Very interesting.
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
. . . knock down:
Reminds me of this “toy” I had as a kid. Coolest toy in the world. Of course, it made a lot of people deaf, but it was just amazing to have that ball of compressed air blow your hair up, or your hat off, or knock your glasses aside from across the room . . .
Yeah, OK, I was a loon, even as a kid.
But I had a *Sonic Blaster!* and was the envy of every other kid in the neighborhood.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, Art, Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Buzz Aldrin, Government, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Science, Society, Space, tech, Travel
. . . I decidedly *do* remember this, but it is a blast to see the pix again! From Phil Plait:
You just knew The Big Picture would take on the premier space event of the 20th century now, didn’t you?
Whoa. Head on over there for high-res spacey goodness! Many of those images made me a little choked up, in fact. Sigh.
I couldn’t agree more.
Further recollections on the 20th.
Jim Downey
And a worse sort that doesn’t even work that way.
OK, briefly: on Monday I did one of those things you’re supposed to do when you reach a certain age. No, I didn’t join AARP. I read a Dave Barry column. Actually, I lived a Dave Barry column. Well, minus the ABBA.
I didn’t write about it because it wasn’t very interesting, all in all. Or at least I didn’t think so until a couple of days later. Following the procedure, after I got home and was feeling more or less human again, I sent a note out to a couple of friends and family members letting them know that everything went fine and I didn’t have anything to worry about. In that email I mentioned that it actually went so well that the doctor didn’t even see the need to chat with me afterward, nor did they bother to show me images from the procedure. I mentioned this in passing to a couple of other people when discussing the procedure.
But that’s not how it actually happened.
My wife, who was there in the recovery room with me following the procedure, told me that the head nurse did indeed go through the images taken during the procedure with me, explaining how each just showed a happy pink colon and other bits.
Say what?
What seems to have happened is that I came out from under the anaesthesia, and part of my brain engaged well before other parts did. I was seemingly fully awake, lucid, conversational, even joking. But the little DVR in my head hadn’t rebooted yet. I had absolutely no memory of having seen the images. Some scattered fragments have since come back to me, showing that the images were stored somewhere in my head but probably the indexing function that the brain usually uses was inoperative.
This is not the first time something like this has happened to me. I have a history of waking and holding conversations, seemingly fully conscious when I am actually still partially asleep. My wife has learned to discern when this is happening. I think that it is related to my tendency for lucid dreaming – that some part of my brain is capable of still functioning in normal waking condition when other parts are in sleep mode.
Which makes me wonder – is this part of the reason why I am so creative? Is part of my brain tapping into a dream state more readily than is typical? It would be interesting to see whether other writers and artists have a similar slight scrambling of their neural abilities, a related ability to smear the seemingly discrete stages of consciousness into a blur.
And hence the quote used in the header. Because if anyone was capable of tapping into dream imagery, it was Lewis Carroll.
Jim Downey
*From Through the Looking Glass.
Filed under: General Musings, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Travel, Writing stuff, YouTube
I’d sent around a YouTube link to some of my friends, showing what happen when a freight train encounters a tornado – it’s worth watching (stick with it to the end of the 2 minute clip!). But in the discussion about it on MeFi, someone posted the following item with Richard Feynman explaining just how a train stays on its tracks:
As I told a friend this morning: “I did not know that.”
And, thinking about it as I have gone through my morning routine, I keep coming back to just how clever us monkeys can be. The basics of modern railroad technology are over 200 years old. The solutions to the problems that Feynman explains in that clip are classic applications of mechanics & geometry – but they are still really quite clever, being simple & self-correcting (once properly constructed in the first place).
And yet, I did not know this. I’m reasonably smart, well educated, curious about the world around me, and with a high level of mechanical aptitude. Still, I did not know this.
Now, I don’t mean to over-think this. There is no end to the things that I don’t know. There is even a lot about the underpinnings of our current technology that I don’t have a clue about. Coming across something I don’t know about railroads should be no real surprise.
And yet . . .
This is something I explored a bit in Communion of Dreams, in the discussions about *how* intelligence or technological sophistication could manifest itself very differently in an alien race. I used one of the characters, who has studied the matter in different human cultures, as a foil for examining different strategies to achieve a given level of technology. Why? Well, for my own enjoyment, mostly. But also to prompt a reader to consider the matter from perhaps a different perspective. In fact, that is a lot of what the whole books is about. So I spent over 132,000 words trying to do it.
And Richard Feynman accomplished much the same thing with an anecdote a bit more than two minutes long.
Ah, humility.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 