Review of my 2017

My Parkinson’s Disease is quite stable; there is no pain, and I am calm and peaceful most of the time. Symptoms include soft voice and stuttering - I cannot sing; loss of fine motor control in my hands – I cannot play guitar or music keyboard; and I am clumsy using the computer keyboard and mouse. My handwriting is very small and illegible. I take pills five times a day.

But I am still a teacher. I do desk research to find who the cutting-edge thinkers are and what they are saying. I then write about the new ideas and make the notes available in a blog. The main subjects are evolutionary psychology, brain science, mindfulness meditation – and the links between them.

The idea is that in the last few years there has been a paradigm shift in neurology which calls for changes in various branches of psychology and it is important to note that the insights from ancient Hinduism and Buddhism are very similar – especially about taming and training the mind.

I no longer research and write like a western academic (scientist): there are many others who can do that better than me. Instead, I write subjectively and note how the new ideas do or do not make sense to me. The unconscious is forever busy with its games of making sense of material arriving from the sense organs - by comparing them with similar materials stored in memory.

Amongst other things executive functions in the pre-frontal cortex create and label metacognitive concepts which can be used to refer to baskets of short hand mini-cognitive concepts. The process is called ‘clumping’ and it is useful in that we cannot be conscious of more than four concepts in a thought moment.

Exercise: sit and notice

• sit with your eyes closed in a warm, quiet space
• set the kitchen timer for five minutes
• just sit and notice what thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) come and go
• option – after the five minutes are up write a list of as many concepts as you can remember: were you aware of clumping?

I use this exercise as one of my techniques for letting the unconscious expose itself. Quite often an item in the list will expand itself and offer several possible continuations. ‘I’ just go with the flow. There seems to be a rule about keeping stories short – and this is good for putting them on my blog which has about 40 pageviews per day from many countries.

The writing is normally in ‘flow’ so it is non-egoic. This means that ‘I’ (the illusory ‘self’) am not present during the writing so ‘I’ do not remember writing whatever appears. But there is often a noticeable sequence in a set of blogposts. But the sequence is a product of the unconscious)

There are now well over 1000 A4 doodles. They are also done in flow so ‘I’ am not involved. If I begin to be stressed and panicky because of ‘self’ thoughts switching into attention, I do a doodle and the ‘self’ gets lost. On average they take about 30 minutes to complete.

Exercise: doing a doodle

• Clear a space on a table large enough to hold an A4 sheet of paper and a box of black pens of different sizes
• Pick a pen
• Look at the paper and wait for the initial act of marking the page (There must be a first stroke and it can be large, medium or small)
• Mark the marks – and again and again
• Use lines or dots to fill enclosed spaces
• Keep going till there is no urge to add anything else
• Put the date in the bottom right corner
• File the doodle where it is to be kept until scanning takes place

The doodles come straight from the unconscious. I have not been able to invent a classification scheme for them other than purely abstract v faces, figures and landscapes. The feeling is that the default unconscious is without intention until some significant stimulus causes it to focus.

Because of the Parkinsons I have problems with voice and hands and therefore with my ability to perform live music. I have a back catalogue of 75 tunes and 66 songs. If I remember correctly most of them were produced in flow.

There is now a band “Paulina and the toonloons”. There are 6 of us with an average age of over 60. We are gradually building a repertoire which includes items written by several of us. Instrument wise there is guitar and bass, keyboard, flute, tin whistle, mouth organ, and trombone. We meet in my house on Tuesday mornings and with extra part group meetings at other times. Two of us have multitrack recording gear. Thought is being given to the production of CDs.

So all in all I am grateful to be living in such a peaceful village within easy walking distance of the Doctor’s surgery, the pharmacy, the sea, and a well-stocked supermarket. I write my little stories (lessons) and make them available to all those people who have access to an online computer.