Habitual process

"My left sublingual muscles were in a sense unknown to me and minor play with them seems to influence the more immediate structures first which then have an influence on structures and musculature progressively far away.  I feel I kept them more contracted through out my life in comparison to the right."

Pick a side

The more I think on this statement it feels partially correct and partially wrong. Relaxing my sublingual muscles on the left and I immediately get an echo of a similar movement in my left erector spinae. There is no direct connection and the sequence that I am postulating through the hyoid to the styloid process of the temporal bone from there subtly affecting the skull on the axis and then through the cervical, thoracic and lumbar spine. The mechanical connections feel to slow and too minute to effect the change I feel. However looking at my body mechanically has in it it's own deficit of thought. I am much more a creature of habits. I have a habit of contracting and inhibiting all the muscles that link in that chain partially because of the function of relating to other people. I make the link right eye to right eye and the subtleties of what I do fall in line without conscious thought. I do not have to be communicating at the moment to have the preference of my usual. I imagine most people do what I do to some degree with as large variability on the range as there are different postures. 

Pick a side

Playing with my sublingual muscles and hyoid I find a discrepancy between the left and right side. An idea that Moshe Feldenkrais advanced was that to control the variations in movement some structures will be held relatively stable with other muscles relatively free. My left sublingual muscles were in a sense unknown to me and minor play with them seems to influence the more immediate structures first which then have an influence on structures and musculature progressively far away.  I feel I kept them more contracted through out my life in comparison to the right.

Unlike the elephants who lateralize their trunk control to either side I feel I must have picked the right side in response to how I perceived the people around me using their right side. I can not see the sublingual muscles but I think the the feedback of their right eye/face mouth to my right eye/face/mouth created the input to start the preference of communication to the right side. Once picked the development of the right progressed over the left side. The intrinsic muscles of the tongue are known to me in my understanding of how to move food around in the mouth so in sense the blog is misnamed. However somehow My Left Sublingual Muscles Too  seems an inferior pick. 

"There should be no advantage at all for preferring one hand or one foot because our world demands from us that both sides should be able to perform manipulations equally well," says Matthias Konstantin Laska, PhD, a biologist at the University of Munich who studies side preferences in new world monkeys. For example, a monkey grabbing for a banana would benefit from being able to choose the hand closest to the food, he notes. Additionally, localization of an ability to a particular area of the brain means an animal is more vulnerable to having that skill knocked out by a stroke or brain damage, notes Franziska Martin, PhD, a biologist at the Free University in Berlin.

Such apparent disadvantages to side preferences, notwithstanding, new research on elephants by Martin suggests there are also some benefits. She finds that limiting precise movements to one side of the body--and subsequently one-half of the brain--may lead to better muscular control, leaving the ambidextrous with less dexterity than animals who specialize.

Trunk to mouth

Standard deviate

My sense is many if not most people use their jaws more efficiently with both sides cooperating more equally. There may be many people who encapsulate both eyes equally in their view of other people. I can only really say that I did not see both eyes but only the right. I still have to make myself look for the left eye and many times I will still not be looking at it. My habits of movement run almost on the instinctual level where I often do the opposite what I think I do. Having access to my left tongue and jaw now in a way I never did, I think came from work that is not normal in how most people learn to use themselves. Yet I feel many have the access I now have just in the natural process of learning while growing up. I may just have been a few standard deviations shy of average.

Supra live stupidity

My wife's disease has given me plenty of opportunity to annoy MD's with my stupidity.  She was taking a medicine that control's the volume of pee she makes and was taking it according to her main endocrinologist's recommendation. Since she had partial pituitary function, it was dangerous to take too much of the medicine as she would retain water driving the volume of sodium down in her blood. If she did not take the medicine she would pee out her water leaving too much sodium relative to her water volume in her blood causing hypernatremia. It is still safer in her condition to undertake the medicine as her thirst drive will cause her to drink water. She will be running to the bathroom every thirty minutes but will maintain the proper level of sodium as long as she drinks to replace the water lost. The endo wrote her prescription for many years at the greater dose in case she needed it but with the verbal instructions not to take it if she was not thirsty. It worked well when she had her normal level of mental functioning and did not have memory loss. I did not understand any of this and when I took her to one of her many visits to the ER I could not explain to the doctors why my wife was not taking the prescribed dose. She was adamant about not taking the morning dose when I offered it.  I don't know for sure but in the ER they replaced quite of lot of normal saline fluid and when she started peeing that night her sodium levels probably went through the roof. I wonder if  Doc's sometimes do not take the particular lab needed if they suspect what is happening as a way to cover themselves.. The amount of water she was peeing would have given them the clue they needed and in their haste to correct the problem the 2nd year resident gave her the hemophiliac dose of the medicine. The dose was about 30 times her normal. The next day when I arrived in the ICU the resident laid in to me real hard and basically accused me of altering her meds.  I already had been accused of possible abuse by a MD seen a psychiatrist who seemed to be setting me up for drug habit and had a wife who was really sick with an undiagnosed condition. There was not much I could say at the time. My own stupidity about her original disease was responsible for my inability to tell the resident why she had not taken the prescribed dose..

The idea that I was altering my wife's meds followed me around the hospital for many years on top of the possible drug use and the possible physical abuse. Several years later the point was brought up by both her primary MD and her rheumatologist. Her rheumatologist laid in to me again about giving her the pee medicine the wrong way.  (The funny in a bad way thing is I had just taken her out of the hospital with an early discharge the week before because the hospital was screwing up her sodium for the umpteenth time. Often it felt Keystone Coppish with one doctor saying one thing and another care provider doing something else). The rheumatologist brought up the point that her 'Lupus' was very rare and hard to diagnose. I was trying to agree with her and mentioned that her endo always said that she benefited from supra-physiological dosing of steroids.  Growing up in Long Island, NY we have a habit of taking the 'er' and make the 'a' sound and taking the 'a' and making a 'er' sound. So Mr Parker becomes Mr Parka and the parka you wear becomes parker. So what the rheumatologist heard was 'super'-physiological and put it in the chart to further alert future docs that we got a live stupid one here. Super physiological just sounds dumb and in my opinion reinforced the original belief that I was probably altering her meds. It puts an additional layer of complexity on a very complex problem. The tragic thing is her primary endo used the term supra-physiological in a letter to them many years prior and just before her major admit to the hospital. In my interpretation it would indicate to them that it was always an autoimmune condition. Even with the positive antibodies for Lupus her condition was not diagnosed for over a year later by outside doctors.

So it was with great trepidation that I am going to use the word supra again. There is a term supra legal suggesting the legal issue is above/outside the law.  I think the work I am doing with my left tongue is 'supra' normal. I don't think it is needed for my 'normal' functioning. I am beginning to think that the development of my being right or left handed could have gone either way but it was based on my relationship to what I perceived in my environment. My working on the left tongue therefore would be outside my normal development. So the rheumatologist was also right. I am definitely a supra live stupid one.

The power of speech

Went for another drive and working with singing with the left tongue throat. The difference that I feel in the musculature in my left head neck and paraspinal is one that I never could imagine.  I do not have complete easy control but almost like toughened rope I am getting some of the strands to relax. There is a power in the uncoiling that is very surprising. I have brought up the issue of my left being a slave to the right and that seems to be more correct now than ever. My left side muscles feels to have existed largely to make the right side functioning easier. The more distal muscles as in the left hand seemed to have their independence to a much larger degree compared to the muscles of the posterior neck on the left for example. Again my accessibility to the area seems to come from the higher function of speech than directly trying to feel and imagine the structures themselves.  I don;t have a good understanding of why my left sublingual/anterior throat muscles would have such a wide reaching influence. Differentiating the smaller left and right muscles feels to be tied to of how I perceive how another's persona exists in their body. The larger musculature of the trunk then appear to get their cues from the smaller.

Anti dentite

Went to the dentist yesterday for my teeth cleaning. In the past when I have sat in the chair and opened my mouth I get resistance on my left side and I am unable to keep it open for long as it begins to ache. My belief is that I was opening my mouth with my right side dominant and the left not participating fully or correctly, (almost in opposition to what it should be doing). In my normal activation I am to stupid to open my mouth with both sides contributing relatively equally. Yesterday there was a definite improvement but still not what I think what most people achieve quite easily. It did not ache throughout and I felt for the majority of the time the left side was cooperating instead of doing what it did before. I think the improvements came from me trying to generate sound/speech with the left tongue/throat but not from the conscious attempt to fix the imbalance of the musculature. The function of speech attempted with the left tongue/throat changed the usage. There has been a significant amount of pain with my efforts and I do not see a practical way to share this with others. The pain/time ratio to benefit still feels to be way out of whack for it to be easily adopted.