Mall monkey see mall monkey do

Went mall walking again and trying to see people's left half of face. At times it does not seem like I could ever have missed seeing someone's left side of the face my whole life.  But to really see and relate to the left side does not feel to me to be a passive activity. It almost seems that first I have to see the persona expressed in the left and then to really connect to almost allow a mimicking in my left half of face to theirs. My left side of face did not have much range of expression in the past and it is work to get it to be used differently. It is more a matter of directing my attention than musculature effort. I can use my right eye to focus on others left eye but there feels to be a difference if I put my attention in my left eye and put it in the lead as I see other's left eye. My left eye/face use does not feel the same as my right eye/face use and my belief is that I used the left in a subordinate undeveloped way. Many people seem to be fairly expressive with the left half of their face at least a great deal more than me. However my sense is that I fit somewhere on a continuum with most of our society communicating right side to right side. Communication and perception feels to me to be a large part of the origin of the brain lateralization to the left hemisphere. I suspect I am developing the right hemisphere with the work I am doing with the left tongue/eye face/throat work but nowhere close to equalization..

Offhandedness

I spent some more time throwing a frisbee.   There has been some improvement in the throws with either hand.  I do not think any D level senior ultimate frisbee team would be interested in me unless they needed a handicap to balance their division. Still it is a nice pastime trying to aim the frisbee and watch it sail off when thrown right (or left as my case may be).  I can throw it easier with the left and coordinate the movement nicer but I am more accurate and stronger with the right.

I think I am correct on how I learned to be right handed. I still see the persona of the person I am looking at on their right side of the head though I am getting better at seeing a persona in the left side. Interesting quote from article I have linked many times.

Handedness, the preference for using one hand over the other, is partially genetic and partially environmental. Identical twins, who share exactly the same genes, don’t always share the same handedness. - See more at: http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/04/left-handed-minority.html#sthash.qMAs0QEt.dpuf

Long term engagement

The truth will seat my head

I think I was a little bit twisted my whole life. Engaging my left eye to see someone else's left eye seems to be changing my habitual head posture. There feels to be a relationship to my left tongue and my left eye that has not been completely fleshed out. When I let my left eye become engaged there is a corresponding use of my left head muscularly in a global sense which includes the left anterior throat/ jaw/tongue and posterior neck. The change is happening very slowly with the tiniest feel being played with and explored. Once explored often there is no change but almost randomly a sensation is captured and then a subtle difference has occurred. My normal throughout the day is to still do what I have done my whole life. It takes attention to slip into my left eye/tongue engaged mode and often it is not possible for me to accomplish during the tasks of daily life.

The truth will seat my head

Any article that starts out with the words "The Truth" is automatically suspect but I could not help but find the first quote below interesting.  Literally I believe I only saw the right half of the person's face that I was talking to. It would make sense that I was getting half the information. Link to a more formal article with second quote.  At times since trying to make the connection with the left eye I find myself spontaneously smiling with the left half of my face. The way (still do most of the time) I related to people and saw their persona represented was only on the right half of their head. It takes a deliberate effort on my part to see a persona in the left side of the head of someone else. I feel once I recognize the left half of the other persona it has a postural influence on my head and spine.

"According to German psychiatrists, the eyes are truly a window to a woman's soul. 'They remain one of the richest sources of social information for the attribution of mental states to others,' says Boris Schiffer, a researcher at LWL-University Hospital in Bochum.

But men are only half as good as women at interpreting a woman's emotions by looking into her eyes, according to Dr Schiffer. His research suggests that women show increased activity in areas of the brain that regulate emotion and memory - the limbic regions -when looking into another woman's eyes. Men's brains generally show less activity here."

"The finding of heightened right amygdala responses during recognition of male compared to female stimuli might indicate a highly automated and stimulus-driven effect that occurred regardless of different conditions or instructions. Thus, increased right amygdala responses to male stimuli may indicate a sex-specific association between stimulus type (male vs. female) and automated emotion processing or affective empathy. The positive correlation between right amygdala responses and the ability to infer mental states from male but not female eyes also indicated that affective empathy might enhance mentalizing performance for male stimuli in men. Conversely, this indicated that the processing of opposite-sex stimuli might be associated with lower affective empathy which may also be associated with a reduced mentalizing ability. In support of this assumption, a previous study investigating emotion recognition accuracy in two patients with acquired amygdala lesions showed impaired emotion recognition using an earlier version of the RMET [38]. Results from this study particularly showed impairment in the male patient with right amygdala damage, whereas the female patient with bilateral amygdala lesion did not present any mentalizing impairments. Notably, both patients made comparable numbers of errors on items on the RMET [28]."

Bilateral Frisbee

Watching a little boy maybe throw a frisbee naturally about 10 yards. He was possibly 3 years old and I was surprised how well he threw it.  I have always had trouble throwing a backhand with a frisbee. I cheated and threw off my right foot with the frisbee coming from behind my right butt cheek. I have similar problems with a backhand in tennis I never could get it to feel right. Watching the little boy it was hard to see what my problem was but it seemed so natural the way he threw it.  I bought a frisbee to play a little bit in a park.

I grew up playing most sports where my weight was transferred to my left leg where I either hit or threw a baseball, golf ball, hockey puck and football with the right hand dominant and coming from the right side toward the left. With a backhand throw of the frisbee I am coming from my left side and transferring weight to my right side as I pull the disk. Somehow seeing the little boy made it clear that I needed pivot over my right leg and shorten the musculature on the right lower back and up along the right side of the vertical axis of the spine. I think as I went to throw I would still keep the left lower back and along the spine tighter than the right. I was pleasantly surprised with my throws in terms of coordination and feel. The throws still 'suck' (I believe that is the correct term) in terms of distance and accuracy but the coordination felt much better.  I also threw some with the left hand backhanded and was very surprised how well I could coordinate it.(but again the throws still 'sucked') It seems more natural now for me to connect to both sides of my spine as a result of the work with the left tongue. I will have to dig up my tennis racket and see how my backhand feels

To see someone really throw a frisbee

How to really throw a frisbee Brodie Smith

Facial intelligence

creating faces

I am trying to puzzle out (make up some bs to be unkind) why there would be a postural shift with connecting to the left face persona. Playing with the concept the best analogy would be to go back to the example if my left hand was fused to my right wrist. Even though my left hand would have the intrinsic finger musculature there would be thousand of tasks that would no longer be necessary to learn the complex coordination. My left side of my face/eye/lips/throat/tongue  for whatever reason has only learned partially the task needed to communicate with another person. My right side of my head learned the tasks consciously and the left side is used somewhat to enhance the right side or at least not get in the way to much. When I see and connect to the left eye/face my left eye/face needs more range of response. Now with a great deal of work it has the feel of being softer more easy to connect with a smile or wrinkle around my left eye.

There are plenty of people that I meet that seem to have of a pretty good range of facial expression on the left side of their face. In a way I think they use themselves naturally in a more intelligent way than I do. Just the simple task of opening my mouth seems slightly improved with my left side initiating more than my previous use of my jaw. My right side dominated more than it should. My movement picture only included my right side though I would feel the stress in the left. Now when I included the left jaw in the movement image there is more a feel of tightness but the sense it is more correct in it's use.

Creating faces

Working on developing the left memory image of another person's face. I have not investigated how and what parts of the brain stores memories recently.  However my sense is my memory image of the right side of the head of another is quantitatively better than my left memory image. I have been looking at photos of people I know watching how I look at the right side normally then trying to replicate it by looking at the left side.  Then looking away and see if I can recall the images.

I feel a postural shift based on what image I am storing/creating. It does not feel like I see someone's face passively but put together an image that becomes a persona. The persona I see can be either on the right side or left side of their head but it feels like I adjust to relate to that one persona dominated side that I created.

Mall walking

Remembering lines

Went mall walking yesterday because of the threat of rain.  Trying to see and remember the left side of peoples faces while letting my left eye being the initiator in scanning their left side facial features. My natural inclination is still to the see the right side and it is a conscious decision to see the left. On occasion a left sided image stays in my memory and I think of the person in that way. The persona of another then seems to be reflected in my memory image of the left sided face. When I see the right I make an easy right side global scan and I quantify the persona in my memory that way. To see the left side and quantify does not always happen. It helps if the face is somewhat asymmetric.

Ear plugs

Went to a concert the other night in a bar/nightclub that reminded me of the 70's.  One of ushers recommended ear plugs as we were sitting close to the stage. I played with singing with the left tongue and it was interesting that there was more feedback on my voice because of the internal vibrations. It seemed easier to identify if I was using the left tongue/throat to generate the sounds.

Posture, Acture and One Eyed Curs

Moshe Feldenkrais made a distinction between posture and a term he called acture. My understanding was that he considered a posture a static idea that implied a fixed position of the skeletal structure. Acture implied a global active positioning of the skeleton in response to the environment. I have tended not to use acture as it is a term not accepted in popular culture but one's adaptation to the environment I feel is an important concept. I have relatively poor acture and posture.  However the popular belief that it can be changed easily seems to me vastly overstated. My posture is a reflection of how I interact and perceive others.  

It took a long time for to recognize that I do not really perceive the left half of other peoples faces. At the start I tended to dismiss it. I must have seen it because I know it's there kind of feel. Almost like knowing the top of a glass is a circle when viewed obliquely. In my attempts to draw the glass I draw the circle for the top of the glass instead of the ellipse that I actually see. My knowledge of what is trumps my ability to see/feel. I am sort of like the proverbial one eyed cur reacting negatively to approaches in it's blind spot but friendly in where it can see. My posture/acture is a reflection of my perception. I pull back on my left side and offer the right. Shield arm and sword. I am defensive in posture and acture. How can I change that by exercise or verbal cues? I believe exercise is generally good and there can be improvements by proper strengthening regimes but they do not alter my perception and therefore my interaction with my environment. My posture/acture habits are so ingrained that they are overlay-ed instead of changed.

Remembering lines

Walking on the creek path again today. Trying to make contact with the left eye/face of others. Something slightly different happened when I passed one individual. I actually retained the left image as I continued down the path. It feels normally like I see and remember the right side facial image with the left somehow incomplete. I imagine I can identify a person only seeing a left profile based on my understanding of the right side with other visual clues, but I do not remember the left side facial features per se.  My sense of my remembering the left side facial image is still very underdeveloped. I would hazard a guess that many others may have a much better bilateral facial remembrance naturally.

Peter Frampton Lines on my Face

Talking crazy to myself in public

I was in the bank the other day and there is a TV screen with my image on it as I came to the front of the line. Playing with my left tongue I attempted to say a few lines softly so others would not hear while watching myself. It was sort of freaky as it became more clear that is not where my visual sense expected to see movement. If I talk while watching myself in the mirror its does not seem as weird.  The reverse image of my left is on the mirror's right while it was opposite on the bank monitor. Almost like I was looking at another person as I stood on line.

Last night while having a few decaf cappuccino's at a large coffee chain house I was sitting and practicing using my left tongue while I read the newspaper out loud softly to myself. A man directly opposite me got up and moved seats after awhile. I was making weird head movements while shutting the right eye and keeping the right side of my face in a sort of a controlled flaccid position that looks somewhat stroke like while I attempted my leftsided talk. To speak with the left side of my head muscles initiating I believe it requires more than just the lip and superficial tongue musculature.  I think the left anterior throat /eye/face/subtongue structures and muscles are all involved. They do not require the same coordination in my usual right side initiated talk.

The example below is just something I noticed while watching a clip on youtube. From seconds 19 to 24 his right upper lip was making the same as my left upper lip in the bank monitor the other day.

watch his top lip on the right

This video is not intended as investment advice as I am sure anyone in their right mind would not want to imitate somebody who talks to himself in public with right eye shut and crazy facial movements.