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almost home
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if i look back, i am lost
shark vs the universe
KIROKAZE
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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occasionally subtle
Monterey Bay Aquarium
@theartofmadeline
Kaledo Art
Andulka
Jules of Nature
Product Placement
trying on a metaphor
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#extradirty
Cosimo Galluzzi
seen from United States
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@gordonius-prime
Followers of Jesus express his teachings in a most profound “christian” manner.
Disturbing to say the least. How deeply this idea has influenced their mind set, to pronounce death to those who don’t think as they. How full they think they are and how empty they are in reality.
Why Your Body Sometimes Jerks While You Drift into Sleep?
Or what are hypnic jerks?
Image by the author (CC BY-SA 4.0). Inspired by Super Science Fiction.
Ahh… sleep. How nice. You turn off the lights. You close your weary eyes. You sigh. You relax. Your breathing slows down. Your mind begins to wander off, fading into the nightly oblivion.
Then…
You stumble, trip, fall. Your body jolts. Your leg kicks. Your heart pounds. Huh? What happened? Did you mistakenly fall asleep on a trapdoor?
Nope. You simply experienced a hypnic jerk.
What’s a hypnic jerk?
Image by the author (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A hypnic jerk, or sleep start, is a phenomenon that occurs when your body transitions from wakefulness to sleep. It involves a sudden involuntary muscle twitch and is frequently accompanied by a falling or tripping sensation. It’s that strange muscle spasm that happens when you’re lying in bed, trying to sleep, and are suddenly jolted awake because you feel like you stumbled over something.
Hypnic jerks are common and benign.
But what causes them? Well, no one really knows. It’s still a mystery. However, researchers have come up with two hypotheses that may explain them.
Hypothesis 1: Your body twitches as daytime motor control is overridden by sleep paralysis
How is it that a bedfellow of yours doesn’t wake up pummeled and bruised if you have a dream about a boxing match? Is it because they’re having a complementary dream where they’re blocking all your jabs, hooks, and other punches?
Image by the author (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Nope. The person sharing the bed with you doesn’t get pummeled because when you’re asleep, your body is paralyzed. This is called REM sleep atonia and it prevents you from acting out your dreams.
REM atonia works by inhibiting your motor neurons. It does so by raising the bar on the amount of electricity the brain must send down a motor neuron to trigger a movement. So, for instance, the little bit of electricity that your brain sends down to your finger to make it move when you’re awake is no longer enough when you’re under REM atonia.
Now, the thing is that there is no single on/off switch in your body that inhibits all your motor neurons at once. Instead, the subsystems of your brain that handle sleep need to wrestle control from the subsystems that handle wakefulness. And sometimes, during this wrestling match, some motor neurons are fired randomly, causing your body to twitch.
Hypothesis 2: Your brain thinks you’re a monkey falling off a tree
Imagine you’re a monkey and the last rays of sunlight have just disappeared behind the green forest canopy. It’s getting dark and you say to yourself: time for sleep.
Your brain begins to ooze some melatonin into your bloodstream and you yawn. All drowsy, you settle down on a comfortable tree branch.
Your eyelids become heavy and your breathing slows down. The outside world begins to fade. Sounds become distant.
At this point, the subconscious part of your brain takes over. “Perfect,” it says, “time to boot up the dream images.” Your brain initiates the dream procedure and just when you’re about to nod off completely, it notices that all your muscles have suddenly and unexpectedly relaxed. “HOLY BANANA!” your brain screams panic-stricken, “Mayday! Mayday! We’re in freefall! Dammit! Wake up! Wake up! Shit, crap, poop! Brace for impaaaact!”
Image modified by the author. Based on a photo by Alessandro D’Antonio on Unsplash.
As you’re probably aware, we humans descend from primates who lived and slept on trees. This means that we’ve inherited some monkey brain routines that no longer serve any purpose. Among them, according to the monkey-fall hypothesis, is a reflex that jolts you awake when you’re falling from a tree.
You see, when a monkey is unexpectedly soaring through the air, it’s muscles no longer have to prop it up and so they go limp. Confusingly, however, your muscles also go limp when you’re sleeping.
So, when you drift off into sleep and your muscles relax a little too fast, your groggy brain sometimes misinterprets this for falling off a tree. As a result, your brain freaks out and triggers a reflex that startles you awake in an attempt to prepare for an imminent crash into the forest floor. Little does your brain know in it’s sleepy state that you no longer live on trees.
Wrapping up
Hypnic jerks are involuntary muscle contractions that occur during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. They’re most likely to occur if you’ve been gulping down too much coffee, have been stressed or sleep deprived, or did some vigorous exercise before going to bed. About 70% of people have experienced them. Even so, they are not well understood.
One hypothesis considers them nothing more than a side effect of the process that replaces normal daytime motor control with sleep paralysis. The other considers them to be an archaic reflex we inherited from our tree-dwelling ancestors, who were at risk of falling off a branch while sleeping.
Either way, hypnic jerks are benign and nothing to worry about. The worst that can happen is probably an occasional kick against the shin of whoever is sharing the bed with you, which should be okay as long as you don’t wear steel-toe boots in bed.
By David B. Clear (Medium)
Now I have a name for it.....how re-assuring.
haha, i sure love this guy
must give it a try.....
What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about the Brain
By Christof Koch (Scientific American)
Image Credit: Brian Stauffer
A close brush can leave a lasting mental legacy—and may tell us about how the mind functions under extreme conditions
A young Ernest Hemingway, badly injured by an exploding shell on a World War I battlefield, wrote in a letter home that “dying is a very simple thing. I’ve looked at death, and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did.”
Years later Hemingway adapted his own experience—that of the soul leaving the body, taking flight and then returning—for his famous short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” about an African safari gone disastrously wrong. The protagonist, stricken by gangrene, knows he is dying. Suddenly, his pain vanishes, and Compie, a bush pilot, arrives to rescue him. The two take off and fly together through a storm with rain so thick “it seemed like flying through a waterfall” until the plane emerges into the light: before them, “unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.” The description embraces elements of a classic near-death experience: the darkness, the cessation of pain, the emerging into the light and then a feeling of peacefulness.
PEACE BEYOND UNDERSTANDING
Near-death experiences, or NDEs, are triggered during singular life-threatening episodes when the body is injured by blunt trauma, a heart attack, asphyxia, shock, and so on. About one in 10 patients with cardiac arrest in a hospital setting undergoes such an episode. Thousands of survivors of these harrowing touch-and-go situations tell of leaving their damaged bodies behind and encountering a realm beyond everyday existence, unconstrained by the usual boundaries of space and time. These powerful, mystical experiences can lead to permanent transformation of their lives.
Keep reading
Little by little, we piece our minds together and subsequently pick out some of the religious dross that’s got lodged in there (sorry, the tub was handy so I felt I had to offer a thumpin)
It really is this simple.....it’s a form of abuse to encumber them with all that rubbish. We are the amazing, praise worthy.
What hypnosis does to your brain, and how it can improve your health
Source: Courtesy of New Scientist (By Helen Thomson)
Image Credit: Dan Page
“Honestly, I wondered whether I was actually in labour, because surely it was meant to be more painful than this.” That’s Shona, describing the recent birth of her daughter. Her secret? Hypnosis. During pregnancy, she learned how to hypnotise herself into a state of mind that allowed her to minimise the pain of labour and, in her own words, “quite enjoy the whole thing”.
The word hypnosis may call to mind a swinging watch or an entertainer getting people to believe they are naked on stage for an audience’s amusement. Its history is one of sorcery and magic, tales of the occult and exploitative charlatans. Practitioners are rarely doctors or counsellors, clinical trials struggle to get funded and there is still no regulatory authority that monitors the practice.
Yet despite these issues, people are turning to the technique to help with everything from labour to hot flushes, anxiety and chronic pain, and a growing body of research is starting to confirm its benefits. We are also beginning to get a handle on how it actually works and what happens in the brain during hypnosis.
The result is that how we define hypnosis is changing, and its use in mainstream medicine is increasing. The UK’s Royal College of Midwives now accredits hypnobirthing courses and funds training in the technique. Some anaesthetists now include hypnosis in their toolkit, and it is even being touted as a solution for the opioid addiction crisis. Hypnosis is certainly no cure-all, but learning what works, why it works and how to do it ourselves may help us harness the power of the mind for some of life’s toughest battles.
Hypnosis has a long history in medicine. The earliest recorded use dates to 1550 BC, but it took off in the 18th century when German physician Franz Mesmer decided that the planets’ physical influence on people could be manipulated using magnets to cause a trance and treat disease. Mesmer was later denounced as a fraud and hustler, but the idea of changing people’s behaviour through trance persisted, and gained more credibility in the 19th century when the Scottish surgeon James Braid began to investigate what physiology might underlie this strange phenomenon.
“You’ve probably been in a trance, when you were so absorbed you didn’t notice the passage of time”
Today, hypnosis is used for a vast range of conditions. But even as its use has become more common, its reach within medicine has been limited. In part that is because few can agree on what exactly hypnosis is. Cobbling together opinions from several researchers, a hypnotic “trance” could be described as a state of focused attention, concentration and inner absorption, accompanied by a loss of awareness of the other things around you.
Keep reading
Re blogging so as to not lose it.....want to really take it in....certainly seems to be tying in with a few of my own thoughts on our brains...
This is the most genius thing i’ve seen in years. Thank you happytoast.co.uk 💯
well done! splendid use of your day.
Feeling more than grumpy, or should that be trumpy about all the shinanagins they are all presently throwing at each other.....want to do a diatribe....chapters of it...can’t be arsed.......I grow more despondant day by day.....Ho Hum.
Felicitous Salutations
Historical Note
In the post below, from the 1956 Montgomery Ward catalog, you will see proof of the statement on this blog’s title page: “Underpants designs were well worked out by 1957, the peak of underpants technology.” The average boy and man (or the woman of the house) in those days chose from the similar designs of a host of manufacturers. Everything comfortable and manly in underwear had been worked out. We think boxer briefs, for example, are new; they are not – see the illustration. Since that period, “innovative” manufacturers have merely recycled existing designs or sacrificed comfort and masculinity for designs that strangle the genitals, cut into the buttocks, are made in black to disguise stains, absurdly imitate the underwear of women (bikini briefs and thongs), or appeal to the insecure man who has to bolster his sense of his maleness with “fashion” and “bold statements” – in overpriced undergarments few will ever see! These are not advances. These are abominations – unsexy and an enormous waste of money.
In the 1950s, there were boxer short wearing Dads, and briefs wearing Dads. This divide started with the invention of white Jockey briefs in 1936. Some Dads wanted the support, others stayed with the traditional loose boxer shorts. The latter tended reveal the outline of the penis much more than did Jockey shorts, at least until the Jockeys got bagged out and loose with laundering and age. It was a common complaint among gay men in the 1940s that briefs had ruined “basket cruising”: the ability to estimate and ogle the shape and heft of man’s endowment through the movement of his genitals in his loose boxers and roomy trousers. White briefs, which are based on the white training pants of toddlers, have their own appeal: an association with youth and purity. In those boxer short wearing families, an adolescent would look forward to graduating from his boy briefs to his first pairs of boxer shorts (then made in youth sizes by the waist inch) so he could be just like his Daddy. In briefs wearing families, there would be clotheslines full of bright white briefs in boy, youth and adult sizes: a glorious, but vanished, display.
The current mockery of white briefs is but one swing of the pendulum. Boxer shorts were similarly mocked as granddad underwear until the young generation adopted them wholesale in the mid-1980s. White briefs may be mocked at present, but millions of them are sold every year to men who see no reason to change from the snug and comfortable underpants of their adolescence. They will be back in fashion, and that will happen with a bang! You read it here first!
In the 1950s, underpants were designed to come up to the waist. This is clearly the natural point on the male body, and no amount of underwear redesign will convert the male body into something that will comfortably accommodate low-rise underwear on a height/weight proportional male. It is worth noting, sadly, that North American men have become a great deal thicker and heavier since the 1950s, and many no longer actually have waists. It matters little if their underwear’s top intercepts their fat at any point. This is not a good thing, not least because every extra twenty pounds of lard reduces the apparent size of the penis by approximately half an inch.
What more delicious experience is there than watching a fit man strip, and discovering that his confidence is such that he wears high-rise white briefs, traditional boxers, that they are not brand-new, that he doesn’t need his underwear to tell a story about him, that he is confident in his choices, that he hews to his family’s tradition? Now THAT is sexy!
I totally agree that classic white briefs will come back and dominate. Too many guys love them and look good in them.
What a delicious little disertation.......I for one: miss basket cruising.
Awesome stuff... love my grease monkeys 🐒 BRAVO 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Freddy Fabris
Had to pass these on to everybody......I believe I’ve seen other of his works in the same style....masterful.
“The brains of people are more interesting than the looks, I think. People have the idea I’m sort of a stupid thing. I never knew I looked good to begin with because my mother wanted a boy named George. So unfortunately I didn’t become that and she wasn’t too thrilled about that. I was different, I guess. Maybe I came from a different planet—who knows? But whatever it is, inventions are easy for me to do.” -Hedy Lamarr in an interview with Forbes magazine journalist Fleming Meeks, 1990. Remembering the legendary Hedy Lamarr on her birthday, actress, mother, glamour icon, film producer, artist, and the co-inventor in 1942 of frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology (alongside composer George Antheil), used today as the basis of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth wireless data connections, and in satellite and military communication systems around the world. Lamarr and Antheil came up with the idea for spread spectrum technology as a way of securely scrambling signals during torpedo launches in order to prevent enemies from launching a pre-emptive counter-strike after Hedy became upset learning about the alarming number of children being killed in Europe during World War II. They used a player piano roll as the inspiration for their invention, correlating the holes in the piano roll with the concept of scrambling signals and messages by broadcasting them across an array of constantly changing frequencies that only the intended recipient of the signal would be able to access. Because the patent for spread spectrum technology expired in 1958 and wasn’t adapted for use by the U.S. government until the Cold War during the early-1960s, Hedy and George didn’t earn a penny from the technology which now powers numerous multi-billion dollar industries and shapes how we communicate, listen to digital music, watch movies and TV shows, and access the Internet through our phones. They were, however, honored with both the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award in 1997, Antheil posthumously (he died in 1959) and Hedy shortly before her own passing a few years later. They were also inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Alexandria, Virginia in 2014 on the 100th anniversary of Hedy Lamarr’s birth. In memory of Hedy… Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on November 9th, 1914 in Vienna, Austria Died on January 19th, 2000 (age 85) in Casselberry, Florida ❤
i find it very telling that people are so ready to straight-up pathologize donald trump while mentioning his wealth and social status only in passing and almost never as the main reason for why he’s so persistently self-centered and disconnected from reality.
when you grow up rich you’re kind of by default disconnected from reality. you learn that you can just… make things happen. an expensive education? top-quality healthcare? a fancy seat on the plane? you just wave your credit card in the right direction AND IT HAPPENS. you get your way, every time, immediately, and to your exact specifications. you’re also immune to failure by default because if you fuck something up you can afford to start over, so even if you reach your 70s with a trail of financial disasters behind you, you’re still rich, so they can’t have been that bad. you’re blind to your own incompetence. and you’re inevitably going to end up with very few, if any, genuine friends, especially if you’re inherently a bit of an asshole. instead you’ll be surrounded by people pursuing their own agendas, who will tell you literally anything you want to hear: that you’re a genius, that everyone loves you, that you can successfully accomplish anything you set your mind to. which you totally can, of course, but because of your money, not your personal merit.
trump is not a pathological narcissist with the under-developed mind of a child and a half dozen other mental disorders experts have not yet reached a consensus about. he’s too used to being obscenely rich and likely never had a problem in his life he knew he couldn’t solve by throwing enough money at it. and right now he’s angry that he can’t use that to get his own way anymore.
like, there’s enough stigma around mental illness without talking about it as if it’s the reason a rich entitled fuckhead is going to jump-start the nuclear apocalypse.
He also believes that “master race” bullshit. He thinks rich white people are genetically superior. This is a guy who has literally said he thinks success is genetic. Let’s be really explicit about this, most upperclass white people in the US do believe that bullshit that says they are genetically as well as morally superior to poor people and people of color. Old school eugenics is still the norm among the wealthy in the US. Trump isn’t pushing eugenics by accident, he’s pushing eugenics because it’s what him and his buddies firmly believe.
And using ableism as the basis for attacking him isn’t attacking his views and the ideas they rely on, it’s supporting them.
Money, one of the ghastly trinity that holds our sway....and in America’s case at the moment we have all three in action .... the aforementioned plus politics and religion. They are all divisive. They all kill us .... and as the collutions gather, can’t help feeling rather glum.
that is exactly my point of view. if all people were given universal basic income, we could have tens of thousands of boring, tedious, dangerous, and long term harmful jobs done by robots, while humans are free to explore their passions without fear of poverty and homelessness.
in a good society, automation means a boom in the arts. language, painting, music, dance, writing, philosophy, architecture, etc. these are the sectors that advance tremendously during periods of human health and flourishing
universal basic “income”, the resources we need to live, ALL of us, Globally, fairly and equally. Then and only then do we evolve. Firstly remove Money, Politics and Religion....all of which divide us.
If you're ever bored, here's a list of Studio Ghibli films you can watch for free.
Castle In The Sky (1986) Grave of the Fireflies (1988) My Neighbor Totoro (1988) Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) Only Yesterday (1991) Porco Rosso (1992) Pom Poko (1994) Whisper of the Heart (1995) Princess Mononoke (1997) My Neighbors the Yamadas (1999) Spirited Away (2001) The Cat Returns (2002) Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) Tales from Earthsea (2006) Ponyo On A Cliff From The Sea (2008) The Secret World of Arrietty/The Borrower Arrietty (2010) From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)
If any of the links stop working, please let me know so I can fix it.
For Castle In The Sky, wait for the free user button to be clickable and it will send you to the video.
how do I not share this, though (HIGHLY RECOMMENDING HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE IT’S MY FAVORITE)
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013) The Wind Rises (2013)
These are so good if you need something to calm you down on a bad day or after panics :)
It would seem I need this list! ....
“There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.”
— Dostoevsky, The Idiot (via kasbadjibilel)
“3 Defining Features of ADHD That Everyone Overlooks”
I need access to this....
