From Inside The Sane Asylum...Dumb Ass Reflex...

For the last few days I have been watching more football than my brain can enjoy. But what the hell, everyone else seems to be enjoying so why not join in. There is a lot of talk about the coaches...mostly about how much they make and second guessing their play calling. What I noticed most was the dumb ass mental mistakes by the players. Case in point. The Off Side call. The lineman execute this down set before you snap the ball thousands of times, but every once in a while they just jump off sides before the ball is snapped for no dump ass reason. The brain just makes a dumb ass reflex.  Can't explain it. The reflex just happens. Grown men slapping their helmet in disgust and lip syncing "What the ----".

The other day I was backing out of my garage. I thought I put the car in reverse but guess it was a dumb ass mental mistake and I dropped it a notch or two lower into drive. Now when you accelerate and you sense you are going in the wrong direction your brain wants to help out and slam on your breaks. It knows how to do that, but the brain makes a big dumb ass reflex and presses the foot harder on the accelerator rather than withdrawing. "What the ----", I thought as I sat in my storage closet looking at the rake and hoe hanging on the wall. Never use them but there they were, hanging neatly just outside my car door. Ended up off sides in my storage closet.

Now I must say, Ms. Ego was not very happy, even after I tried to explain to her that it was a big dumb ass mental mistake followed by a dumb ass brain reflex. "It was only a mental mistake and a brain reflex, can happen to anyone", I pleaded.  I even tried to explain to her that older people's response time is much slower and it never occurred to me to take my foot off the accelerator.  A lot like my recall lately. Things just don't occur to me like they use too. I went so far to explain that the average reaction reflex time to a visual stimuli is .025 of a second and .017 to an audio stimulus, and if she would have been watching she could have yelled at me and maybe I would have stopped sooner...She's not happy!

Reflexes come in all kinds. Conditioned, unconditioned and just the ordinary kind when an action is carried out through the mediation of the nervous system but not requiring the cooperation of the brain for its execution. Just a response of a perturbing stimulus that acts to return the body to homeostasis. The reflex arc, the receptor at the end of a sensory neuron, the afferent neuron, the efferent neuron traveling up the efferent pathway. I know all that crap but it was of no value in explaining how I ended up in the storage closet due to a dumb ass reflex.

I needed some deeper insight on this reflex subject, so I called my good friend Jess Ben Rambling and related how I had been hit hard of recent by "dumb ass reflexes".  Now I don't  know what I was expecting to hear. Maybe some sympathy followed by "it can happen to the best of us". Or maybe, "are you ok?". Hell, I would have settled for, "that was a real dumb ass reflex". He was silent for a moment trying to make contact with his deeper self, I suppose, then responded..."Many times I reflex while I reflect on past memories and friends."

What the ----!

Somewhat-not-half-bad-on-a-good-day...Doc

Discovering Ourselves...Emotions

The concept of ‘basic’ or ‘primary’ emotions dates back at least to the Book of Rites, a first-century Chinese encyclopedia that identifies seven ‘feelings of men’: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking, and liking.

In the 20th century, Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) and Robert Plutchik eight, which he grouped into four pairs of polar opposites (joy-sadness, anger-fear, trust-distrust, surprise-anticipation).

It is said that basic emotions evolved in response to the ecological challenges faced by our remote ancestors and are so primitive as to be ‘hardwired’, with each basic emotion corresponding to a distinct and dedicated neurological circuit. Being hardwired, basic emotions (or ‘affect programs’) are innate and universal, automatic, and fast, and trigger behaviour with a high survival value. So much can hardly be said of more complex emotions such as humility or nostalgia, which, for example, are never attributed to infants and animals.

The other day, I opened a cutlery drawer on a large lizard, which, of course, I had not been expecting to find. As the critter darted off into the blackness behind the drawer, I unthinkingly jumped back and slammed the drawer shut. Having done this, I suddenly discovered myself to be feeling hot and alert and primed for further action. This basic fear response is so primitive that even the lizard seemed to share in it, and so automatic as to be ‘cognitively impenetrable’, that is, unconscious and uncontrollable, and more akin to a reflex than a deliberate action. One of high survival value I suppose.