Sunday, November 30, 2014

One at a time if I please

If I am trying to use my left eye to see the persona on the left side of another person, my attention on the left dominates the use of my right. In those moments of time I am unclear what the right of both the person I am seeing and what my right eye is doing. It is not that my right stops seeing but it feels to resemble how I use my left eye in normal day to to day activities. In order to see a persona on the left using my left eye the right side of the other person disappears in my mind. There is a real tendency for me to drift back to the right side of most people's faces as that is the side that seems more communicative. The left side of others often appears to be more expressionless.  When I drift back to focus on the right I lose the left.  I don't seem to be able to see the persona of others reflected in their faces in a bilateral way but with a focus of one side or the other.

Saturday, November 29, 2014

It's complicated

I now believe as I grew up I learned to see the right side of other's faces and the mimicking of those movements had a great influence in leading to the right side dominance of my speech and the corresponding left side of my brain. When I use my left eye to see to others left eye it takes a long time to see a persona manifested in the left side of their head. It is automatic on the right but with the left I often have to use my imagination and a careful scanning of the face on the left. Somehow my brain can then put a persona there but not always. Sometimes it is easier and I wonder what the problem was with the other times that I did not manage to have a persona appear.

It makes me wonder about my whole process and doubt what I am believing at times. However I can feel the postural adjustments in reaction to relating to the persona on their left and the relatively new way I am able to use the left sublingual/throat/jaw/head/neck musculature. It is a different process. I then wonder why it never developed before. But the process is complicated and it feels to me that is why it may have never developed. In trying to see with my left eye I have to first put my attention in it.Then I have to move it to center on their left eye and somehow get a global image that includes the persona. However if I am correct about the right eye to right eye connection it is the input of others that I noticed very young. It is the development of reading the more active side of the face that is more natural and productive. It develops and developing the left side would just confuse matters.

From the second article linked in previous post. It does not make the division between the sides of the face that I believe is important in my development of how I see others. I mimic what I see not what I don't.

Humans are incessant imitators. We unintentionally imitate subtle aspects of each other's mannerisms, postures and facial expressions. We also imitate each other's speech patterns, including inflections, talking speed and speaking style. Sometimes, we even take on the foreign accent of the person to whom we're talking, leading to embarrassing consequences.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Empathy emphasis on the left

When I use my left eye to center on someone else's left eye I find myself mimicking the expressions almost below the level of my conscious control. It feels as if I am developing a new independent usage of my left facial muscles as an effect of the mimicking. It is not at a level at which the right side is able to express but something very new for me. There seems to be a connection between empathy and muscle mimicking. My sense is my left eye/ face has been underdeveloped as I would exclusively focus on the right side of the face of others.

Empathy of either sort relies on unconscious mimicry: “empathic individuals exhibit nonconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions of others (the chameleon effect) to a greater extent than nonempathic individuals” (Carr et al., 2003). The ability to mimic is key to the empathic process of relaying information from one brain area to another via “mirror neurons”:

2nd article

That finding is evidence that unintentional speech imitation extends to lipreading, even for normal hearing individuals with no formal lipreading experience, they wrote in a paper titled "Alignment to Visual Speech Information."

Friday, November 14, 2014

I am a not right idiot

Interesting article. After reading it I am of course less sure in what I am saying. But what the author hints at but does not mention is how often most of us develop a certain expertise in the things we do. Usually we wind up knowing details that very few in the world do. Not that we have the whole story correct but we find a method, practice or something in the way we care about the thing we do that is uniquely our own. That may or may not be the case with what I am saying. It would seem improbable that the lateralization of the brain in regards to communication comes down to a lack of differentiation between how I use the left and right side of my head but I think it does. That idea points me in the direction that it may be superfluous to develop the undifferentiated left side use in normal day to day activities but I have not fully come to that conclusion either.

This blogger(and much more) develops a post on the above linked article.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Toilet confirmation

When our daughter was two and a half we had her in daycare at my wife's workplace. (Back in the day when they had that kind of thing). She was wearing pullup diapers at the time and of the slightly older girls said to her "You are a baby. You still wear pullups." Our daughter did not have a bowel movement for two days and then on the third asked to use the toilet. She was potty trained from that day on. It saved my wife and I a great deal of work and in it's own way something to be thankful for. However nothing ever struck me as how significant were members of group on getting someone to conform.

A recent article confirms with very young children the urge to conform even when the kids know that it would not be the optimal choice. Us adults are not much better as shown in this study.  My sense in watching both sides of people's faces and feeling my postural adjustment to where I see the persona that I did not have a clue on how significant how my own use of myself conforms to what I see in others.


Monday, November 10, 2014

I identify with the right

Re reading some of my posts. It is embarrassing how badly I write.

I am trying to identify why I could not feel the musculature moving on the left side of my face/throat tongue prior to a relatively recent history. I could sense these areas to touch or sensation and the areas did move. However I am feeling movement in a different way in these areas that feels to be left side dominated instead of a more reflexive habitual left side to a right side functionally dominant way.

It appears that the function sets the playing field. As an infant I believe I saw people's right side of their face/eye as the more expressive and mimicked that with my right side as the communication was directed that way. After trial and error the slight adjustments that led to the right side being in a more optimal position and utilized my left side to facilitate the right. The identification of the movement became right sided with the passage of time with more and more control going into the myriad of movement patterns including those necessary for making sound expressing emotions. The left's role being more a facilitator which often means stabilization and less movement.

For example I identify eating with the movement of the right side so much when I try to eat left handed with a utensil I still use my jaw trunk shoulders in a right side dominated pattern. As I bring the fork to my mouth I run into increased resistance. It becomes hard to get the fork in my mouth and I can feel the over effort to get the job done. I can make it a great deal easier if I just use my shoulder blades in the opposite normal pattern. If I retract and stabilize the right shoulder blade and let the left be more free to protract then it becomes much more easier for me to reach my mouth.

If I try to throw a ball with with my left arm the main activity that needs to be adjusted is the role of the right. It is the right arm/shoulder complex that needs  to allow the throw from the left. It is also remarkable how I switch back to the right side dominated pattern when my sense of the situation is that is difficult for the left to make the particular throw. (Say if the throw is just a little longer than I think I can make easily then there is an unconscious shift in the way I organize my shoulders)

I think the same is true in how I use the tongue/throat/face/lips musculature. The movement is identified with the right side. I am saying movement when a great deal of it is the spoken word but there is a muscular pattern with every word to generate the particular sound. There is also a facial/eye expression that assists along with hand and postural and hand gestures that facilitate the communication. All of these elements have become right side dominant with the left taking a subordinate role. To switch to the left side dominated speech takes a great deal then just remembering the word. I have to reorganize how I use myself on multiple levels.


Friday, November 7, 2014

Left eye monkey see, left eye monkey do

When I am centering my left eye on another's left eye my right eye is moved slightly more to the right while my left is put in the more center position to see the left eye. Not all the time but enough to where I am feeling that I am actually make a connection, then there is a global response on my left side. It is a fleeting feeling most of the time but on occasion the sense that I am mimicking what I see. My face on it's own seems to try and muscuarly reflect what is seen. There is often a feeling that I generate an emotion to match the emotion that I see.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Left tongue creationism

In trying to get my left tongue/sublingual muscles and throat to pronounce words there is a distinct muscular pattern to form a pronunciation of the word. If I check in on my normal right side creation of the muscular pattern the right side seems to be in charge of the origin of the word while the left is used in a undifferentiated sense. Getting the left side to create the words is often tricky as I can easily switch back unnoticed to my normal right side dominated generation. However I think I am succeeding in getting the left side a good portion of the time. As each word has a different sound formation pattern there are a great many patterns to achieve. What is interesting I seem to know how to make the sounds but have more difficulty achieving the result I want. I don't have to think about shaping the left tongue for the long O sound in 'hello' but more on the coordination side of what I am trying to achieve.

Trying to coordinate the sounds often is difficult and I am slower on the left than the right.  The whole head, neck and throat complex feels to be involved in the coordination of the simple saying of the word 'hello'