I spoke to Dr. Lynda Thompson on the phone last week. I hadn’t spoken to her since March. She noticed a big change in me: I was organized. That puzzled me. You get so used to being the way you are — and especially when people keep telling you you’re articulate and neglect to tell you about the deficiencies they see or hear in you until they notice something has improved — that you don’t realize anymore how abnormal your manner of speech (or thinking) is. Also I think of organized as akin to getting things done in an organized fashion.
But she was referring to my speech.
Turns out, the up and down of my speech — the prosody — has improved (and here I thought it was all better . . . apparently not). Also the flow of my speech is smoother. I complete topics; I don’t bounce around as much; I don’t interrupt as much; I talk on a topic in a more organized way.
I thought about that. Yeah, I don’t have such a feeling of sharp impatience when talking anymore, the kind of impatience where you get tired, literally, of talking on a topic and at the same time another thought barges in, and you want to get to it NOW. And you have to fight not interrupting the other person as they’re speaking (though in early years, you couldn’t even fight that urge since interrupting in direct obedience to that NOW command seemed reasonable), yet as soon as the other person stops talking, you’ll jump to the new thought. Sometimes if your mind doesn’t blank out on the topic you were in the middle of, you’ll be cognizant of the fact that really you should finish it, and you will try.
But again: fatigue.
Fatigue empties the mind, and you need something new to keep talking and thinking. Eventually though, not even something new will counter the fatigue, and you just have to get off the phone. Bye!
The ADD Centre changed the parameters of my neurofeedback settings this week. The 16Hz has normalized. So we’re doing a regular-old protocol of enhancing 13-15 Hz, as well as reducing 20-35 Hz (a normal busy brain range unlike my previous one of 19-30). We’re sticking to reducing 2-5 Hz and as a secondary 7-10 Hz. To celebrate I read a bit of the Thompsons’s neuroanatomy book during tDCS. Heh.
This past weekend, after I spoke to Dr. Thompson, I felt an uptick in intelligence. I didn’t feel or notice anything in particular, like I was processing faster for example. It was strictly a felt experience. And I don’t know how it will manifest. I’ll have to hope if people see changes, they’ll tell me. Then I can go, ah-ha, that was what the uptick was about!
