Only the Hyoid

Only the lonely Chris Isaak

I am trying to hit the notes that Chris sings with my left tongue/ throat. I am very monotone and unable to hit the pitch he sings throughout. (Yet in my mind I sound good:). I can feel echoes of my attempts to sing all along my spine on my left. I don't know of any structural connections between the activation of my tiny throat musculature and my lumbar region.  The attempt to activate the song in the left tongue throat seems to recruit muscles far from the site of sound. Most of my focus attempt seems to center around my hyoid bone on the left. There are many muscles that connect to the hyoid and to get the freedom for the vibration necessary the muscles need to be inhibited/relaxed. Inhibition is often looked at in therapy as the higher neurological function. My developing sense of this region suggests I often fix it comparatively to the right side musculature where I normally allow sound to be generated. To change the stabilization of the left muscles in order to improve the sound there feels to be an effort to reorganize my muscular skeletal habitual posture. I am incapable of changing through the power of thinking/imaging alone. I seem to need the functions of how it sounds and work from there with my mentations. The sensation I get from this exercise I find quite remarkable.

PS I know on some level the vocal cords/folds are the main origin of sound and pitch. The surrounding structures feel more to enhance enunciation. I am unclear of any differences between my right and left vocal folds but my understanding is there is often asymmetry.

The importance of being 'right'

Seeing another persona existing in their left side of head and attempting to communicate with my left tongue seems to be giving me the ability of accessing and changing my left posterior neck musculature and from there the orientation of my habitual spinal musculature activation. There is a posture that I have adopted in my life that twists me to the left and puts the right side in a slight position of advantage.  However it does not come form the habit of exercise, handwriting etc but from my perception of the persona I see that is communicating to me. Some of the importance of being 'right' comes from the activity of seeing 'right' and the understanding of my being 'right' as in accordance with another.

The lives of others

Flipping the bird autistic

"It is the chaffinch, however, that provides an illuminating example of the open instinct. In Denmark the chaffinch begins to sing about February 15. Poulsen raised males in isolation. By the middle of January they were beginning to twitter and in two weeks were producing an abbreviated chaffinch song, imperfect of pitch, imperfect of rhythm. [23] When Chaffinch Day came in the middle of February, he freed them but allowed them at first to mix only with linnets. They imitated the linnet and succeeded in producing some of its notes. But then they heard a chaffinch. Immediately they perfected their chaffinch song, nor did they imitate the linnet ever again."

The Territorial Imperative

If the study above was done with a large enough group of chaffinches I wonder if there would be an occasional  bird that would either stay stuck in the linnet song or unable to process the chaffinch song. Would we then have an autistic bird?

How to create an autistic monkey

The left tongue's territory

A bird does not fly because it has wings; it has wings because it flies.

The Territorial Imperative

The statement feels like the inverse of the logical or backward reasoning. My immediate response is of course the bird flies because it has wings. However the statement strikes a similar chord with me and my argument for the left tongue. The age old question does function dictate structure or vice versa . I have a left tongue in it's wiring but I perceive it as one tongue with a right and left side. I do not sense a left tongue and a right tongue co-joined. I see the other persona as existing in their right side of head and I respond to it with my right side. My right eye crosses my midline to their right eye. I know the left eye is there on my periphery but I do not engage it nor does my left half of face initiate emotion in concurrence or opposition with their left half of face. The initiation of movement is a prerogative of my right side of head. I feel my brain lateralization of speech/communication is enhanced by my perception of others and the need for efficiency instead of the brain lateralization existing solely a priori.

."It is the chaffinch, however, that provides an illuminating example of the open instinct. In Denmark the chaffinch begins to sing about February 15. Poulsen raised males in isolation. By the middle of January they were beginning to twitter and in two weeks were producing an abbreviated chaffinch song, imperfect of pitch, imperfect of rhythm. [23] When Chaffinch Day came in the middle of February, he freed them but allowed them at first to mix only with linnets. They imitated the linnet and succeeded in producing some of its notes. But then they heard a chaffinch. Immediately they perfected their chaffinch song, nor did they imitate the linnet ever again."

Left me alone

On more occasions I can have the left side of my head relax. It feels my 'usual' is to pull back on the left side of my head. It is does not feel to be necessary but does feel it is a learned behavior with several factors. One I look to connect with other peoples right eye with my right eye. Two I think there is a slight advantage of freedom in speech for the right side if the left side is more stabilized. Three I think there is a social element of fear of being hit by a right hand causing a pulling back of my structures on the left.  I think there is a social learned element in my posture as a whole. The way I relate to people has a large defensive fear component. In a way the posture itself probably provokes the reaction I seek to avoid. There have been many times in my youth that I was bullied being small and a very late maturer.  I felt I did nothing to cause the bullying but thinking about it now I wonder how much the postural element provoked the dominant primate response.

I defer to people a great deal as usually I am more afraid of their anger than I am in being right in the current situation. I also have the sense of powerlessness in the presence of the dominant personality that I adopt both on the emotional and structural skeletal level. Hopefully being able to access my left side habitual tendency to pull away on a very fundamental level will give me more freedom of response.

Rockin and rollin

Driving and attempting to sing with my left tongue/jaw/lips/throat again today. Key word is 'attempt' on many levels. I think I saw a hawk fly by listen for a moment and then decide to end it all.  Where it feels like things are moving to is that the cavernous aspect of sound created on the left side needs relax supple muscular structures to sound more correct. In order to create that very subtle amount of relaxed space the right side needs to be a little more stabilized. It feels like I am slowly being able to switch my habitual orientation of my jaw and mouth structures.   It does not seem to make sense but there feels to be more torque put on the cervical spine than I would imagine possible and from there through the thoracic down to my lumbar spine.

An older post where I was not feeling some of the differences as strongly as I do today  Then as now a great deal of conjecture on my part

rocks for my head

I left my TMJ

We have been taking long aimless drives in our car around the SF bay area while playing music. My favorite currently is Tony Bennett. His most famous song is I left my heart... but we have been mostly listening to his recent duet albums.  My wife often falls asleep and I try to croon along with Tony initiating with the left tongue/throat/lips/jaw.  I have had a borderline left side TMJ problem for most of my life with the left upper quadrant of my shoulder neck and head feeling tight with occasional soreness. During my body awareness work I have tried to relax most everything in my body yet this area seemed the most stubborn in it's refusal to cooperate.  There is a remarkably different feel in this area developing. The feeling that it is beginning to relax lengthen and work properly. There has been quite a bit of pain getting to this place and also the feel that I may hurt myself badly quite easily.

The relaxation and lengthening feels to come from the attempts at singing and talking with the left structures. My body is responding more to my inept tries to improving the sound instead of mental efforts at attempting to relax. It suggest like most things I am not smart enough to change by thinking but by attempting to improve the appropriate functional activity.

Screwy, Good morning

Attempted to say "Good morning" a bunch of times using the left half of my head to initiate/coordinate the sounds as I passed people on the path today. I don't think I always accomplished it. Often when trying to vocalize with the left I wind up doing the usual way and say things with the right side dominant. There feels to be a tentative connection to the ways I see the person I am talking to. Normally, I feel I view the the person as right side dominant and I verbalize to that side with my right side. It seems to be more than just my seeing the person as right side dominant but more in terms that I feel that persona exists in his/her right side.

The attempts to vocalize with my left side feel to change the orientation of muscular-skeleton. It is unexpected to me as the structural connections do not have the power to cause the changes I am feeling. Function seems to dominate over structure though my structure provides plenty of resistance to the change. To vocalize with left side dominant feels to require both more space and relaxation of the left side vocal structures and my body seems to make an attempt to accommodate that need with subtle postural changes far from the throat, tongue, head and jaw. The subtle postural changes can be painful and often seem to be dangerous in that I can screw up my head,neck and back real good in pursuing them.

Why the right knee?

Right knee

Apparently, women find men that move and twist their torsos and nod and shake their heads whilst grooving to be the best dancers. And, while they aren't so keen on fancy footwork generally, moving your lower body quickly (as opposed to slowly) is the way to go -- and bending and twisting your right knee is a particularly effective move to showcase your dancing skill.

Who is in charge?

The left side tongue, jaw and side of face are again sore from overplaying with the movements. I am trying to search for analogies for me to use. If I did not use my left hand independently as if fused to the right wrist getting it to move would create soreness once detached. I imagine it would feel similar to the sensations I am now having. My left face and tongue were doing something my whole life but I am not sure what. My best guess is that I used it in a undifferentiated sense in subordination to the right. The new use of my left tongue, jaw and side of face feels foreign and unrefined but not any sense there is a different personality involved. It is still the same old me that seems to be in charge.

Talking bad

Playing with my head

The image of a glass pane sliding down into my body comes from Moshe Feldenkrais. I took the existing idea and modified it to play extensively with the tongue, jaw and relationships. I don't know if he used the glass pane to get people to feel the difference of the left and right side use but I can come up with no other reason. The training in his method is very experiential. With four years of training I still could not talk about it in a way that that I could make other people see the sense in it.  That may be largely due to shortcomings of my own communication skills and not what was being said.

What I feel to be unexamined about the head is the functional relationship between the left and right side.I am getting a totally new experience of using the musculature of the back of the neck coming from my work with the left eye, face, tongue, anterior throat. It is suggesting to me a reversal of how I think about the pain in my neck. I can now feel a difference in how I can use both sides of the musculature on the posterior side of my cervical spine but that came about from my self study of the anterior structures used in my attempts at communication.

Structured Calisthenics

The difference the way I perceive the left right discrepancy may have a large cultural component. There was an old youtube clip of the Iraqi's doing exercise under US troop guidance.  There is a certain degree of prejudice implied by the clip but they are of course as competent in using their bodies as any average American. The question then occurs to me why do they have such a "foreign" reaction to our calisthenics? My sense is they do not see what I see when I watch the exercise. I would not look as good as the troops but I would actively be searching them for the cultural structured cues to imitate. Like yesterday in the park it feels to be for me a very right side mode activity. I would quite likely look as silly to them doing activities that are Iraqi in origin. I doubt I be able to visually discern the differences that would mark me as a foreigner.

Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception

Thus, it appears that differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view a scene.

http://www.pnas.org/content/102/35/12629

 

Playground differences

Went to the trail today. The playground area was fill of kids on monkey bar type apparatus updated with a different feel than when I was a kid. Bill Cosby had a cute bit on playgrounds. Being a Saturday many parents were there. A dad was pushing a bunch of kids on the thing that goes around and I felt myself shift very much into the right sided mode as if to relate to him and his facial cues. As soon as I felt it I tried shifting into my left sided mode just to get a feel of the differences. The right sided mode almost has a sense of being able to understand commands in a physical sense. In recalling the sensation it is almost like I turned on not in anyway sexual but a heightened sense of how can I cooperate with the activity. The sort of feel I got playing a team sports. I had to be aware of not only my teammates but what the other team was trying to do. Shifting to the left mode seemed to turn it back down a notch. As if I had more of a feel of interest what others were feeling than how to cooperate with what they were doing..

I played a great many sports growing up The old saying "The older I get the better I was" has some truth. Playing with lefthanders always seemed to have a slight different feel. Like they were more independent from the rest of us righthanders. I think they could be as adept as a righthander in reading the cues necessary for sports. It may be just that they were different hand dominant, but going into a very subjective sense they often seemed to have a sense of being  "cooler".

Old link

Painful

The left head, neck and tongue movement picture is still changing.  In a strange way it almost feels like someone else is making the movements. I often play with it long enough that there is quite a bit of pain. I suffer from the illusion that if I keep playing with it long enough I will break through the restricted feeling but I don't know. It is feeling more and more like I have two separate movement images of the head and I was only aware of the right. I identified the movements through the right side image with the left neglected or never developed. I may or may not be correct in my thinking and I am very unsure if there is any benefit for me to continue to play with this. The pain would be a good indicator not to.