Saturday, March 30, 2013

Talking in the left tongue mode

I have been trying to talk with the left tongue. Not that successful in maintaining it for any length on time (prolly because of the lack of self discipline. I am probably the least organized most undisciplined person I know. )  Anyway I was responding to my wife using the left tongue and she said "Your sounding like your mouth is paralyzed." I agreed because that is how my left tongue feels. Like it does not have much nuance in it's ability to find the proper shape to create the sounds I want.

Does not prove anything about the left tongue but I am happy that what my wife said verifies my internal sensation.

update- Eating with my wife and she noted that I was not moving my lips. When I tried getting my left side of my lips to be incorporated she said you are only using the left side of  your lips. It was what I was trying to do.  More important that this is not really about the tongue, lips, throat or face but about communication using these structures. It more and more feels that the positive feedback that I got lead to enhancement of my communication skills on the right and to neglect of the left.


Thursday, March 28, 2013

Postulate 10

10) There is a high probability one or all of the above are wrong 

This postulate is almost self evident. I think I am saying something fairly radical. That I learned to use the right side of my face and tongue to speak in response to others by mimic and feedback. I am arguing that the Dual Brain theory of Arthur Wigan is correct.  I read another person's right eye with my right eye to the neglect of my left eye to another's left eye.  I am also arguing that I learned to use my left tongue in a subservient pattern so much so that I never perceived it to exist until recently.  The movement image of my left tongue I feel was underrepresented in my right brain hemisphere. Also, I can use the left tongue in speech which to me would mean my right brain speech centers are being activated somewhat now. I think my learning of being right is an arbitrary directional one that is culturally advantageous but not preordained. It dominates how I use my body with a preference for movement.

On the other hand it is prolly much more likely that I suffer at a minimum from an overactive imagination.

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

OT Post When Harm follows you Home from the Hospital

Harm  Link may not be working http://www.propublica.org/article/when-harm-in-the-hospital-follows-you-home

My wife went undiagnosed with Lupus for many years and then even after she tested positive for anti Smith and anti DSDNA.  antinuclear antibodies  She had been diagnosed by a prominent hospital many years earlier of Autoimmune Hypophysitis (anterior pitutiary) The pituitary used to be called the master hormone gland as it issues hormones that activate other endocrine glands to release their hormones. Any stress can cause an adrenal crisis as her pituitary will not signal her adrenals to produce cortisol which  prevent an over inflammatory response. Very early on I was referred for possible abuse. So each time I took her to the ER I gave it 50/50 whether I would be arrested.  Once your name is in the chart it becomes the Seinfeld episode of Elaine trying to get her rash treated and being labeled difficult. Everything you say and do will be used against you. My wife now uses a wheelchair and a walker for short distances. She is no longer working,not on disability.  Since we did not have a diagnosis I did not push my wife to pursue the disability claim as I felt it would give more motive for their case of abuse.  I thought there was a higher probability of me winding up in the clink than her getting any disability.  She had seen a psychiatrist for personality change, fatigue, and memory loss.  I left with the extreme feeling that he thought I was using her to seek drugs.

Working with a patient in a nursing home the issue of abuse came up again. It is something I do not think I would be able to deal with if accused again so when it came time to renew my license I put it on hold. Talking about a left tongue probably puts me way over in the whacko land along with some of my political beliefs. It would be an easy case to establish that I am violating most norms of standard treatments and behavior a great deal of the time.

 A hospital is probably the most dangerous place you will ever be admitted to. I have made my share of mistakes so I understand the other side of the story as well.  I have been very well meaning and have screwed up and that is on my good days. So each time I work up a great deal of anger over the doctors I also understand how most are very intelligent and care deeply about their patients.  No easy answers no matter how many tongues one has.

Update To be more fair I was just walking with my wife today and remembered I did ask the shrink if my wife could benefit from marijuana. She had lost about 30 lbs was not eating often vomiting, dizzy and weak. Since we did not have a diagnosis she was seeing multiple doctors in and outside my benefit plan. All red flags for someone who is seeking drugs. She was on a couple of medicines highly valuable outside the normal  prescribed medical system.  That was not my intent but it sort of goes with the everything you say and do will be held against you theme. I personally feel the abuse and drug issue led to the delay in her diagnosis.




Monday, March 25, 2013

Postulate 6 & 7

6) I can use my left tongue in a dominant pattern but with difficulty.
7) The difficulty both seems be in the right tongue adopting a subordinate role and the left learning to initiate the movement


My left tongue is normal in that the innervation is intact. My tongue does not deviate and I can move it around my mouth as needed to the left and right while in the right tongue mode. However if I switch to the left tongue mode the movement feels spastic and small. I have a very hard time getting it to cross midline to the right and any sensory imput such as touching the teeth seems to switch me over to the familiar right tongue mode.

I feel I can use the left tongue to talk. I am unclear if the right tongue is contributing when I do. I can talk in right tongue mode and I do not think the 'left tongue is contributing except in a subordinate pattern. However I do not know if the right tongue ever really does the subordinate thing. As I pay attention the right tongue seems to be contributing more than I want it to when I try to use the left tongue solely.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

More on Moshe

More Moshe

I cannot find it on the innnertubes but there are some excellent videos of Moshe working with some very disabled clients.  It is amazing watching  him work as I see the person change but I don't completely understand how.  I have worked with hundreds of people in standard rehab therapy in similar situations and once in a great while I was able to poorly proximate his process. However watching him sitting there sometimes puffing on a cigarette but immensely focused touching, sometimes pushing and pulling and the client literally transforms seemingly painlessly . Having watched many therapists work I have seen nothing remotely close to his ability.  They may have been excellent therapists in their own right who greatly assisted people with severe deficits but it is often very slow and sometimes very painful.

I feel the difference between standard therapy and what  Feldenkrais did was he allowed people to change because they sensed something better instead of forcefully modelling someone into an abstract ideal. However I think there is a place for both. After a new acute injury the basics of getting out of bed, acquiring endurance, using the toilet, dressing, walking or using a wheelchair in a functional enough way needs to be done for people to move on with their life. I do not feel his method is often the most practical to address these concerns.


PS I did not become aware of the left tongue when it did not move I only became aware of it through movement

Friday, March 22, 2013

Postulate 5

5) The way I use my tongue, eyes and face is the foundation for my right handedness.

I really jump the shark here.  I have no empirical evidence. Even the subjective 'feel' that I have is not complete. It reminds me of when I was young trying to figure out the mysteries of sex. I guessed a great deal but did not understand the physical act.

I have worked the last 15 years as a Physical Therapy Assistant in various rehab settings inpatient and outpatient. I spent four years and graduated in a program based on the works of Moshe Feldenkrais. I have studied Akido and tai chi. I grew up much a book nerd but loved sports playing pretty much everything but not at a high level of competence. I am a worrier, somewhat paranoid, overweight advanced middle age white male of not that high level of intelligence.

I was drawn to the works of Moshe Feldenkrais after doing a simple exercise of laying on the back and stomach. I lifted the arms and legs in different sequences and by activating the proximal muscles of the shoulder it felt like my humeral heads were walking out of their sockets. It was a good feeling of freedom in the joints but scary in a way. I wondered why with my backgound in sports and some in the martial arts I had never experienced such an unusual transformation in such a short period of time. My dad was a Chiropractor so I was used to being manipulated, massaged and stretched but this was outside of my experience.

Moshe explaining his touch

I attended a seminar with Dr. Frank Wildman and jumped on the table when he asked for a volunteer. He put on quite a show and was flipping me on the table like a rag doll moving me hither and yon. I never felt so good or relaxed in my life. Almost like he had slipped me a shot of morphine that lasted about a week. I decided to quit my job as an estimator/project manager for a general engineering contractor and enroll in a program. Before leaving the seminar I ran into him in the bathroom. He did an odd thing.  He twisted himself up in a way that made me say to myself "this guy does not have it going on" and I immediately felt more confident. Later back in the class he said "if you show a mirror posture image to someone you can get others to relate to you as they drop their guard." (paraphrasing after many years) I think he showed a mirror image of myself to me and that is when I felt less threatened by him.  It suggested to me that I am twisted to a certain degree

I started the program with high hopes with other teachers but after a year I did not think I was progressing. I enrolled in a PT assistant program concurrently for a surer method of generating income and wound up doing the programs concurrently. The work based on the ideas of Moshe Feldenkrais made me a much better PT Assistant but I do not think I ever really 'got it'. I was hoping to transition to doing the work solely on it's own but after 4 years I did not still feel like I knew what was doing.

I kept investigating myself based on what I knew sometimes using the exercises but I wanted to understand how I was twisted. I started looking at myself in a very crude sort of operation where if I found one area of tightness on one side of myself, I would transposed it to my other side and try to contract it and have the first side loosen and relax. I began with the lower back and pelvis and over many years worked my way to the head, neck and jaw. I wound up creating this exercise below which suggested to me that the center of my search  was how I use my tongues. The left tongue showed up as something outside my usual control. In a sense it felt like it moved by itself. As I played with it more the more interesting it got from the standpoint of how come I never knew it existed.

http://mylefttonguetoo.blogspot.com/2012/12/differentiating-head-and-jaw.html

 The Bit between our Teeth. The Sissy Bar in our Throat

PS

I highly recommend seeing an experienced Feldenkrais practitioner if you have any sort of  physical problem that has not remedied itself by the more conventional therapies. To find a practitoner.

Find


I do not consider myself a practitioner nor am I a member of their guild. I doubt if any would ascribe to my current thinking. I do not have a method that is appropriate to address someone's physical deficits or concerns. With all the work I have done I still feel like my posture and body mechanics are average at best.



Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Postulate 3 & 4

3) I learned to use my right tongue in a dominate fashion mimicking others primarily my parents but society as well for the use in speech. It also how that they related to me.

4) I normally read the right side of a person's face especially the right eye in a right eye to right eye contact and neglect the left eye and face

Postulates 

In the 18th century, the poet Edward Young asked if "we were all born originals, why is it that so many die copies?"


Before I discovered my left tongue I began to notice that I do not actually see another person's left eye.  (Interesting  just on TV  interviewing 2 people side by side in different locations both right side of the faces lit while the left in shadow). It remains at the periphery of my consciousness normally. I believe I learned to relate right eye to right eye. In a sense I know at some level that I am speaking to the other person's right side and that is how the other person relates to me. I often now try to see a person's left eye with my left eye. It appears to me most of the time that the left side is not the side that is communicating verbally back to me.

Meltzoff & Moore

A long-standing puzzle in developmental psychology is how infants imitate gestures they cannot see themselves perform (facial gestures). Two critical issues are: (a) the metric infants use to detect cross-modal equivalences in human acts and (b) the process by which they correct their imitative errors.




If I learned to imitate on an unconscious level did I learn to communicate verbally right side to right side? It would be feedback back and forth between my parents and me at first.

Increased lefties with blindness

The percentages of left-handedness were 18.23% and 17.02% in male and female blind children, and 11.02% and 7.52% in male and female sighted children, respectively. It can be stated that sighting is important in the development of normal typical cerebral lateralisation or hand preference.


Since it is not 50% it would not seem that the visual feedback loop could be the only cause.

 Why lefties rare

Two Northwestern University researchers now report that a high degree of cooperation, not something odd or sinister, plays a key role in the rarity of left-handedness. They developed a mathematical model that shows the low percentage of lefties is a result of the balance between cooperation and competition in human evolution.

Autism and lefties

A test of handedness in a sample of 20 autistic children and 25 normal children revealed marked differences. The frequency of non-right-handedness in normal children was 12%, whereas it was 65% in autistic children. The significance of this difference for the etiology of autism is discussed

Possible connection to autism and mimicking


I believe I learned to connect right eye to right eye as cued in that was the half of me that my parents were communicating with. I learned to make the communication back using the right eye and tongue leaving the left eye and tongue in a more subordinate role. In a way I think my left side in way is almost autistic. I cannot hold a beat with my left hand among other things. In a right handed society I can get by(just barely). Others may be more naturally balanced.


Monday, March 18, 2013

Postulate 2

2) My normal use is right tongue dominated though I use my left tongue muscular in a subordinated role as needed. I was unable to sense my left tongue as independent even though I could eat. breathe, swallow and talk fairly normally

Postulates

I am right handed and and believe I am right tongued in my normal use. After finding my left tongue the question I asked myself  was "What evidence do I have that my right brain left tongue knows how to use the musculature in the same ways as the left brain right tongue?"

Hyoid Posture

Hyolingual Complexity

Hemispheric Dominance

Hyoid and tongue difference in speaking and eating

Just a brief review of the above links I am struck with how complex the use of tongue and associated structures are. How does the left tongue/right brain know what to do in speech if the speech centers are in the left hemisphere? My sense of my left tongue in speech is that it is subservient to the point it essentially does not exist. However in swallowing and eating there feels to be more of a bipartisan role but  I have less conscious control of both tongues. Which leads into the next postulate.

I am not happy with this post but what the heck.

No one really gets the last word on who we are

Something to think about




Sunday, March 17, 2013

Postulate 1

I wrote an arbitrary list in Postulates which is self contradictory. If they were postulates they could not be arbitrary. More of a blogging device to put some of my ideas on the screen.

1) I have a left and right tongue co-joined but with separate motor control from both hemispheres.
I think this is the most important and the most factual. However if does not explain why I never had a sense of the left tongue. I had a sense of the left side of the tongue. I could taste, move and feel the left side of the tongue but I believe my sense of it was through the right side movement control. I have a different sense of the 'left tongue' now and most of the "postulates" are actually hypothesis-es to explain it to myself.

If my left hand was fused to my right wrist and if I used my right hand for all my tasks would I have a sense of the left hand as independent? It's job would be to go where ever the right hand 'decided' it needed to be.  I think in a sense my right tongue/left brain is dominant and my left tongue/ right brain learns to be subservient. So it's role is not to get in my way. As someone who has bit his tongue it is a painful teaching device. It is not that I/we? cannot do it but that it is not the most efficient way to run my mouth.

I never had the feeling of the possibility of the 'left tongue' before several years ago and it explains to me why it may be important. I was doing a movement exercise where I was trying to differentiate the head and the jaw. I would turn my head and jaw in the same direction and then I would try gently for my head and jaw go in opposite directions. The head going to the right and jaw to the left felt natural whereas the head to the left and jaw to the right was difficult and felt wrong. At some point in playing with it I felt the major discrepancy of how I used left and right side of my jaw and further play led to my discovery of my left tongue.

If it was just my left tongue it may be interesting but unimportant. However it is how I organize my self in my body in many tasks on the left and right side.  I tend to overuse the left side to support my right side to be free. I am asymmetric in the use of myself. I have had minor back pain for years centered on the left lumbar region. It feels 'improved' now and a majority of that improvement came after discovering the left tongue. However I am not really able to make the differentiation of my left and right side still when the demands of my life exceed a very low level of stimulation.  I quickly revert to my normal organization of twisting myself to get things done.

I don't think everyone does what I do. Somehow there are many people who seems to divide the tasks of using themselves much more naturally.  To take self-examination to this level may not be fruitful or healthy. I think it is a more 'truthful' picture of how I use myself. I feel it may have a role in specific areas of physical rehab but at this point I am unable to devise a practical method of implementing it. The (benefit gained/ time spent) ratio is way out of whack.


Saturday, March 16, 2013

Postulates

1) I have a left and right tongue co-joined but with separate motor control from both hemispheres.
2) My normal use is right tongue dominated though I use my left tongue muscular in a subordinated role as needed. I was unable to sense my left tongue as independent even though I could eat. breathe, swallow and talk fairly normally
3) I learned to use my right tongue in a dominate fashion mimicking others primarily my parents but society as well for the use in speech. It also how that they related to me.
4) I normally read the right side of a person's face especially the right eye in a right eye to right eye contact and neglect the left eye and face
5) The way I use my tongue, eyes and face is the foundation for my right handedness.
6) I can use my left tongue in a dominant pattern but with difficulty.
7) The difficulty both seems be in the right tongue adopting a subordinate role and the left learning to initiate the movement
8) Reading and writing left to right facilitates my right tongue/left brain dominance as the future is to the right and right to left writing and reading facilitates my left tongue/right brain use
9) There may be an auditory component and that I remain unaware of it's contribution
10) There is a high probability one or all of the above are wrong 

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Nothing new

Left tongue this AM has the strong sensation that it wants to do it's own thing but is running into resistance. It is a strange feeling somewhat alien but I can leave it at anytime and switch back to the right tongue mode. The strength of the submuscular underneath the tongue from the hyoid to the mandible feels to be immensely strong with an immediate sense that it ties in to the whole use of the cervical spine extending down through the thoracic spine to the lumbar and pelvis.

Seems on the surface very improbable but that is what I am feeling.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Left tongue lockdown

As I mentioned in Beluga and ad nauseum at this point I use my left and right sides of my body in different patterns but they both have a role to fill.  I believe it extends to my tongues with the left tongue playing a role but different than the right.  I  am not sure what the left tongue does when I talk normally but it feels like it does much what the rest my left side does. Stabilize/contract? and allow the right side more freedom of movement. I have been trying to talk with the left tongue that I did not feel to exist a couple of years ago. I am not sure I am doing what I think I am doing but if I would have to bet on it I'd take the bet. One of the problems is that with any engagement of someone else I automatically switch back into the familiar right tongue organization.

If it was just a matter of the tongue I think it would be somewhat pointless. However I feel it is more than that and gives me clues on a very deep organizational level on how I use myself in movement. It feels like I organize myself from the inward out or proximal to distal with the most proximal being the tongue hyoid and throat. I feel I have two distinct throats, two hyoids and two tongues a left and a right of each. To say I have one too me is an illusion of my dominant right side.

On the other hand it also feels to be an immense struggle against all my existing habits of movement and communication without any clear direction or sense that I will able to make a difference.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Beluga on a board

Did some paddle boarding in Hawaii. I am fat and very whitey so if you want to imagine me on a board here is a similar image.

My sister in law a fabulous Pilates instructor has been playing with the board for awhile and is impressed with how the board facilitates the use of the core.

What seemed to strike me more is my feeling that my left and right side use is not symmetrical and I have a role for each in my learned everyday tasks. It makes it hard for me to balance on the board as I tend to use the left for stance and stabilization and the right free for movement and power. That and being somewhat beluga and marshmellow like.


Quiet

Quiet

Saw it out of the corner of my eye and was drawn to it. Worth a read.