Low motivation. Or blob on a rock, as I described it to my trainer, the feeling and lack of thinking I've had since Sunday, with a brief retraction on Wednesday afternoon when I managed to be productive. I hadn't realized that that strange feeling, one I haven't had for years and which was prevalent after my brain injury, was low motivation. Anyway, low motivation was one of the networks that LORETA neurofeedback training picked up this week as going past the 2.4-standard-deviation threshold and stopping the movie. I don't recall seeing that one before.
It is not procrastination. Procrastination means doing something else, anything else, to avoid doing the thing you don't want to do. There's a certain feeling to it. My fave way to procrastinate is to clear my desk. Since I've never been a big procrastinator, my desk doesn't get cleared as much as it should. I say should because I do function better without visual clutter. Being a blob on a rock, you don't even have enough thoughts in your head to want to procrastinate.
It is not avoidance. That too has its own feeling to it. I know the things I want to avoid, and writing ain't one of them. Sure, writing sometimes scares me — do I know what I'm doing? am I ready? — but I don't avoid thinking about it. I don't feel like a skittish dog who turns his head to avoid seeing something when I think about writing or marketing (which I hate, but that too is not avoidance). Avoidance may be so severe that you don't know what you're avoiding until someone mentions that dreaded subject to you. But that's not blob-on-a-rock-ness. When someone mentions what I'm supposed to be doing while I'm being a blob instead, I go, “oh yeah…” with that vague feeling of I should care but not caring.
Anyway, after the third screen during this week's LORETA neurofeedback training, I felt my mind brightening, beginning to engage, to care about the movie. I wanted to see what was coming next. Phew. Blob-on-rock feeling abated for now. I am drafting this post without anything or anyone, including myself, telling me to do it. So not only is low motivation reversed (for the moment) but also initiation deficit. Failure to initiate action was also picked up by LORETA, which it has been every week.
Other things picked up: problems with concentration (that must have been in later screens because during the first few screens, I wasn't being distracted but was later on in the session), sequential planning, anxiety, executive function, multi-tasking, obsessive thoughts about self, perception of letters, receptive language, short-term memory, slowness of thought-easily confused, and spatial perception. Some showed up in all the screens; some did not. I didn't do as well as last week because of a couple of tough anniversaries five days apart this week. They said, given the week, I did well. Don't be tough on yourself! Yeah, okay.
I did six five-minute screens like last week, but I also did an extra three minutes because three minutes into my first screen, the program crashed. Changed batteries in the device that connects electrodes to computer, check cable connections, and restart first screen. All was okay after that, and we redid the first screen though picking up in the show where we'd left off. The data from the first three minutes was lost. So I guess that was warm up!
Since we had finished the Kratts Brothers DVD last week, we began a new DVD this week. I can't remember the name; it was a National Geographic show on the Inca. I asked for English subtitles to be turned on because I thought if I had to read something during LORETA, whether closed caption or translation subtitles, maybe that would shove the networks involved in reading into action. And as you can see, some of those networks — perception of letters, receptive language, short-term memory — were engaged and picked up by LORETA.
