My butt hurts. The back of my thighs are sore. They merge into one big pain. That's my overriding thought on LORETA day. The MiWay (Mississauga) bus that took me to the ADD Centre’s offices must have the most uncomfortable seats in the universe. First, they're hard. Second and worse, they’re too short seat-size-wise, and I am not a tall person. If they end short for me, how much more precarious they must feel for an average-height Canadian?! And third, some are too high. So my legs are simultaneously too long and too short. So with my butt and thighs thoroughly sore from the bus, they were not happy having to sit for another hour and a half during LORETA neurofeedback. It was amazing I could move after all that. And then I had to get back on the same blasted bus. I was praying for the older MiWay bus I had gotten on last week. But no luck. The other thing is that I can balance on TTC buses fairly okay holding on to the poles. I don't have a hope in hell on a Miway bus. Is it the driver? The roads? Or the hellish bus design?
All this of course is a distraction from how the LORETA session went. Because the ADD folks were attending a workshop all week, I had to go on a different day, and I had a different trainer. It was so quiet with just her and me. My brain was happy in all that quiet, and only her kicking me out got me to head back out into the wild, noisy world.
I was not as tired or in pain as last week. So naturally my scores were lower. On the plus side, they were more consistent. It was a miracle I wasn't in pain, given how much the MiWay bus banged around and the lead-footed driver. But I think I was spiking gamma brainwaves at some points; they make you feel good. From my training for the past year, I can tell when my gamma is increasing; it's a visual change, like an eagle zeroing in on its target. This week the DVD was on the ancient lines in the desert in Peru, and as usual, we turned on closed captioning for me to read, thus hopefully engaging the brain networks involved in reading. I became hungry during screen 4 and by end of screen 5, I was starving. And so I did something I normally don't do during biofeedback: I ate my energy bar. After that longish break, I did screen 6. I felt pretty good afterwards. I had a fleeting moment where I thought that maybe I could do a seventh screen. But the fatigue set in, disabusing me of that idea.
The last half of the session (screens 4 and 6, maybe 5 too), I had periods where the DVD played full screen with seemingly no effort on my part. It was beautiful. And then I had periods where the damn thing stayed off too long. Grrr.
However on the bus as I was typing the draft of this blog post in IAWriter app on my iPod Touch, right here, right at this point in the writing, I could feel my brain speeding up. And my fingers could barely keep up on the iPod Touch as the bus trounced along. It reminded me of the early days of brain biofeedback when my speech would speed up, and my mind couldn’t keep up with my talking. Weird.
Reading has been up and down. This past weekend was depressing with respect to that. But on the way to my session, I realised I was reading the eBook on my Kindle with not much problem. I managed to keep going for about 7 then another 8 minutes. Pretty good! Last week, reading on the way to my session was a depressing affair of being unable to focus and feeling like I was stuttering all over the place. And right here at this point in writing the draft of this post, I feel like my neurons are happily and swiftly shooting electrons to each other, sparking my brain awake. Vision cleared up, and my stamina felt a bit longer than last week. So there you go.
