Such is Monday...

Here's a strange phenomena of the human brain: if you think about waking up early (as something that you need to do), you actually will wake up early.

This morning, I woke up at 6:40 without any alarm clock.

I thought to myself, as I went to sleep last night, "Wake up at five, wake up at five, wake up at five." That was at eleven o'clock, however, and who's to be picky when the brain says "YOU MUST HAVE 7.7 HOURS OF SLEEP" ?

Papa comes out of his office when Mama gets up, and immediately goes over to the thermostat. "Who turned the heater on?" he asks Mama. "It's not that cold."

"I only set it on 67," quoth she, "and the heat kicked in as soon as I turned it on. It must have been freezing out here."

Papa laughs a little and looks confused. But then, he's wearing his quilted jacket over his shirt, and he has his shoes on...

I walked and ran the sun up this morning, in my gloves and wool coat, watching the cars clustered at the school-bus stop.

We're running really low on groceries, but we still somehow have bread and eggs in the house, so that's what we had for breakfast. Greg and I made warm egg-and-cream-cheese sandwiches for whoever wanted them (mostly us).

I retired to my room for a few hours of gleaning from Neil Carlson's Foundations of Physiological Psychology, which is a very cool but also very huge book, and made some more research notecards. (give my heartfelt frustration to the research paper, wherever it may be...)

All my research comes off of pages 374-76. It's just CRAZY.

Well, after making a few notecards, I distracted myself. And I read some stuff I didn't really need to know.

Then I tested it on Brother1, since I don't have any white rabbits or lab rats...

A form of conditioned learning, where a neutral stimulus evokes a strong reaction, because of a provocative association.

A practical example of this:

~I stroke brother's forearm with tactile gloves.
~then I give him a pinch: small, focused, and just painful enough to make his muscles tense.

I repeat this in a predictable series, with a short pause in between each.

Soon, his arm tenses as a reaction to the tactile gloves, because his mind tells him that what follows will be painful.

The best results came about when I sang a note in his ear, then blew a puff of air on his eye.

After three repetitions, I could make him blink just by singing the note.

Of course, I had to do all of Brother2's therapy. cross-lateral patterning, pleoptics, etc., etc., etc....

If you want to completely and totally bore an audience, demonstrate pleoptics.

A formerly interested observer will leave in a matter of seconds.

Why?

Because counting "ONE, TWO, THREE, OFF. ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE, SIX, SEVEN, EIGHT, NINE TEN" over and over for two minutes straight, doesn't exactly engage the casual observer.

Brother2 and I have taken to skip counting: "TWO, FOUR, SIX, OFF..." But it's still boring.

And that's all I have to tell about today. Except, I changed the song on my blog again. ^_^