Sounds may affect my body posture and movements. I had thought that this was a part of God's intelligence tests on me (read my first post: The Eternal Mystery - My Onset of Schizophrenia), but I'm now forming a different understanding about this. Due to my current difficulties in standing, walking and sitting, I'm usually found lying in bed reading or watching internet TV when I'm home after work and during the weekends. I've also been regularly taking my antipsychotic Risperidone, and my thoughts are clear enough to be penned down immediately, so I'm certain there's no psychosis.
The origin of my current findings is based on my akathisia (and restless legs) disorder, which should be considered quite mild at the moment (for example at work, I only shift my weight or move my legs, partly also to alleviate buttocks and back stresses due to my spinal cord injury, unlike in 2013 after my second relapse of schizophrenia when I have to get up from my chair regularly and move about). My legs tend to move more than usual to find more comfortable positions when I'm lying down, adopting different postures. In fact, I realise that my upper body, especially my arms, sometimes move in synchronicity. What I've found out is that based on the sounds emanating from my environment, specifically the frequency and texture of sound, my body moves in a way to match the sound produced, sometimes before the sound arrive at my ears, sometimes after. Of course, this is still an unproven hypothesis.
For example, I'm currently rubbing the back of my left buttocks because there's an itch. And suddenly, the sound of a revving motorcycle can be heard. My guess is that the itch arises in anticipation of the sound, and if I don't scratch (the action) to match the sound, my body will protest. This has been a bowel moving day for me (it's Sunday today), which means I've taken my bowel moving TCM medication and after a whole day of moving bowels, it is now night and my bowels should have quietened down.
However, there was an instance of me sitting suddenly cross legged when reading the news on my laptop. It actually feels comfortable because the cross legged posture matches the sound coming from my noisy fan (it sounds like "rrerr"). When my fan is off, I can't sit cross legged easily, unless there are disturbances in the environment, for example, a motor cycle roaring by. However, when the sound of the motor cycle does not match my posture, my body protests and my bowel system starts activating, and I either have to go to the toilet, or just fart from where I'm seated. This happened once when I purposely (by force of will) adopted an uncrossed legs sitting position at my bed, where my feet wore the slippers beside my bed and I sat on the side of my bed with my feet firmly planted to the ground, while the fan was on. I farted almost immediately. However, I couldn't maintain that posture with comfort and had to change after a short while, even though it was a normal sitting position.
This was part of what I was tested on during God's intelligence tests back in 2006, which I've now understood to be God's practices in understanding the sound environment, its effects on people and our perception of sounds. How I learned this began with observation, while I was still in somewhat of a daze after my cortical neural complexity was perturbed from all the coffee shop talk and subsequent travels to different places in eastern and northern Singapore during my onset of schizophrenia (read my first post: The Eternal Mystery - My Onset of Schizophrenia). I still remember clearly one of the sounds, the sound of a boom at a coffee shop. Immediately, one of the patrons at the coffee shop I was in looked in my direction and touched his round tummy.
As we already may be aware of, the varying levels of a sound heard may be due to volume, pitch and silence. Silence because as the environment quietens down, softer sounds can be heard. Pitch because the volume of the high pitch screech of a train stopping need not be very loud to surface to the top of our awareness even when the train is far away. These are the environmental factors. There is one last factor which is our awareness of the sound (paying attention to the sound). If we are only aware of the sound sub-consciously, not much may be heard or remembered. Correspondingly, our postures and gestures may not show much need for sound matching, or our bodies may move sub-consciously to match the sound. Not all movements elicit a sound matching. This is again an unproven hypothesis since I'm the only one whom I know that has experienced it and understood it in such a way.
Evidently, not everyone may respond in the same way to the different sounds, and each sound has different qualities of frequency (wavelengths), texture (some sounds are aggregations of different sounds), timing and duration, so there is a complex synchronicity going on in everyday life. As long as your hands or your feet are resting in the right position on your body for that moment in time, it should be comfortable for your body. Usually, the posture or its absence is more specific while standing or walking, because you can't keep changing your bodily touches, unlike while sitting or lying down, unless you have a reason to fidget a lot. The absence of a bodily touch is something I was commonly at fault with during my onset of schizophrenia, possibly due to my thinking too much about where to put my hands while walking or standing. This relates to another aspect of God's intelligence tests or practices, the direction or cause of action which is what I perhaps synesthetically perceived as commands embedded in the beats of the sound, but that is another story.
What I've lost during my onset of schizophrenia was my sub-conscious instincts to move naturally with the sounds. My mind became exceptionally sensitive to sounds and began to start processing how to interact with the sounds, and I started following the actions of the people I saw. Naturally, I thought that I had failed the tests because I couldn't cope with the demands of processing all the sounds I hear and moving around constantly to different places upon God's direction. I had no time to think about or do other things, such as talk, eat, drink, sleep, or go to the toilet. This relates to the fact that the sounds when perceived as commands do not have a, for example, "go to the toilet and pass urine" translation. Staying on the topic of sound, movement and posture, it's my supporting materialist hypothesis after reading a book about consciousness by Susan Blackmore, that it may arise from our body's attempt to cope with our environmental stimulus based on our mind's internal state. When our mind is well formed in thoughts, in a state of peace, without many doubts and questions, it will likely be conscious of less sounds which are usually more specific. Hence, there will be less movements in the postures. When our minds are plagued with questions and possibilities, we may or may not be conscious of more sounds due to the thoughts in our minds, but our body is unlikely to stay still. We are likely to hear more sounds when our mind reaches a mental/cognitive block, from which symptoms of depression or psychosis may emerge.
Evidences of these occurrences to people in research papers are difficult to find unless we consider the concept of spirits or music's effects on endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin. There is one related paper from Singapore in 1993, written by Kua EH et al, titled "Spirit possession and healing among Chinese psychiatric patients". Another paper from Poland by Siedlecka B et al written in 2015 titled "The influence of sounds on posture control" tells us that experimentally sounds have effects on normal human beings. An overview is provided in the paper by Lennie Gandemer et al written in 2016, "Sound and Posture: an Overview of Recent Findings". There are a number of related articles found using Google about how pleasant sounding music increases the "happy hormones", and how unpleasant sounds such as the crying of a baby increases the cortisol level. Even if we can control or stop our movements in response to these sounds, our mind and body will not feel very well, especially in relation to unpleasant sounds.
In a book "Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will" by Nancey Murphy et al, Nancey quoted an estimate: "consciousness plays a causal role in as little as five percent of our daily behavior, implying that 95 percent is automatic" in her book's "Introduction and Overview". This confirms the sub-conscious aspects of what I was tasked to do with spiritual/sound awareness during my onset of schizophrenia. The sub-conscious, left on its own, will be natural and automatic, but it having been brought to my awareness speaks perhaps of a different spirit in me. Perhaps it's the student spirit that couldn't grow up, find a suitable job, get married and have children (read my post: Princess Mononoke's Reminder of my Suicide Attempt (My First Relapse of Schizophrenia)). However, having been brought to my awareness, much needs to be done to verify these phenomenon-bodily responses as facts, such as having daily sound and video recordings of ourselves. Despite my technology constraints (I've not made any sound or video recordings), what is evident to me is that, spirits not withstanding, there is a knowledge gap between my MBA studies done online, and the ability to find a job and work in Singapore. This created a vacuum in my mind, and absent of solutions, my mind broke through the sound barrier of my surroundings and derived solutions from that instead. This is an example that shows the fallability of a student mindset/spirit. It can also be said that I lacked work experience going into my MBA studies, because I graduated and started working in 2001, and consequently took a graduate diploma and then started my MBA in 2003.
Here, I would present a couple of quotes from Nancey's book's introduction for our reading:
"Emergentists, such as Roy Wood Sellars, argued that the increasingly complex organization, as one ascends the hierarchy of systems, accounts for the appearance of new kinds of entities with causal powers that cannot be reduced to physics. The organic emerges from the physical; so too do the levels of the mental or conscious, the social, the ethical, and the religious or spiritual."
"Wegner brings together reports of research on the role of consciousness and other factors in behavior with surveys of some of the stranger phenomena from the history of the human race, all supporting his contention that the feeling of conscious will does not always correlate with the true causes of action. One category of evidence is cases where it is highly likely that people are in fact the causes of their own actions, but they experience the acts as being controlled by some other source. These include instances of automatic writing, spirit possession and mediumship, table-turning, and so on."
To close off this post, I would make a recommendation to try out mindfulness meditation if you also have problems with sounds. Find some place to sit or lie down, close your eyes and focus your awareness on your breathing in and out. If sounds from your environment filter into your awareness, it is likely you can't sit or lie still, or you may be distracted by stray thoughts/ideas which may or may not be important. It is only when the environment has calmed down or when your mind does not perceive the sounds from your surroundings that your mind and body will calm down and be aware of only your breathing. Here again, I'm quoting my personal experience in using mindfulness meditation to help me sleep.
04 March 2019 Update
It is clear based on my senses that my observations were correct most of the time, but the margin of errors for both sound/frequency(wavelength), timing and touch/movement were so broad, that my hypothesis will be proven time and again. Unfortunately, based on my continuous observations before I sleep every night (when I remember to pay attention to my surrounding sounds), I don't think the margin of error can be reduced. In addition, the observations only show linkage between sound and movement, not causation. Hence, my theory here can only be preliminary and approximate at best. It is probably very difficult to conclude on any basis for the relations between sound and movement based on just these observations. More research may be done in this area, but these strange occurrences do not affect my work or research as I can ignore them in daily life.
References:
- Susan Blackmore, Consciousness - A Very Short Introduction, 2018
- Kua EH et al, "Spirit possession and healing among Chinese psychiatric patients", 1993
- Siedlecka B et al, "The influence of sounds on posture control", 2015
- Lennie Gandemer et al, "Sound and Posture: an Overview of Recent Findings", 2016
- Nancey Murphy et al, "Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will", 2009
- www.google.com
The origin of my current findings is based on my akathisia (and restless legs) disorder, which should be considered quite mild at the moment (for example at work, I only shift my weight or move my legs, partly also to alleviate buttocks and back stresses due to my spinal cord injury, unlike in 2013 after my second relapse of schizophrenia when I have to get up from my chair regularly and move about). My legs tend to move more than usual to find more comfortable positions when I'm lying down, adopting different postures. In fact, I realise that my upper body, especially my arms, sometimes move in synchronicity. What I've found out is that based on the sounds emanating from my environment, specifically the frequency and texture of sound, my body moves in a way to match the sound produced, sometimes before the sound arrive at my ears, sometimes after. Of course, this is still an unproven hypothesis.
For example, I'm currently rubbing the back of my left buttocks because there's an itch. And suddenly, the sound of a revving motorcycle can be heard. My guess is that the itch arises in anticipation of the sound, and if I don't scratch (the action) to match the sound, my body will protest. This has been a bowel moving day for me (it's Sunday today), which means I've taken my bowel moving TCM medication and after a whole day of moving bowels, it is now night and my bowels should have quietened down.
However, there was an instance of me sitting suddenly cross legged when reading the news on my laptop. It actually feels comfortable because the cross legged posture matches the sound coming from my noisy fan (it sounds like "rrerr"). When my fan is off, I can't sit cross legged easily, unless there are disturbances in the environment, for example, a motor cycle roaring by. However, when the sound of the motor cycle does not match my posture, my body protests and my bowel system starts activating, and I either have to go to the toilet, or just fart from where I'm seated. This happened once when I purposely (by force of will) adopted an uncrossed legs sitting position at my bed, where my feet wore the slippers beside my bed and I sat on the side of my bed with my feet firmly planted to the ground, while the fan was on. I farted almost immediately. However, I couldn't maintain that posture with comfort and had to change after a short while, even though it was a normal sitting position.
This was part of what I was tested on during God's intelligence tests back in 2006, which I've now understood to be God's practices in understanding the sound environment, its effects on people and our perception of sounds. How I learned this began with observation, while I was still in somewhat of a daze after my cortical neural complexity was perturbed from all the coffee shop talk and subsequent travels to different places in eastern and northern Singapore during my onset of schizophrenia (read my first post: The Eternal Mystery - My Onset of Schizophrenia). I still remember clearly one of the sounds, the sound of a boom at a coffee shop. Immediately, one of the patrons at the coffee shop I was in looked in my direction and touched his round tummy.
As we already may be aware of, the varying levels of a sound heard may be due to volume, pitch and silence. Silence because as the environment quietens down, softer sounds can be heard. Pitch because the volume of the high pitch screech of a train stopping need not be very loud to surface to the top of our awareness even when the train is far away. These are the environmental factors. There is one last factor which is our awareness of the sound (paying attention to the sound). If we are only aware of the sound sub-consciously, not much may be heard or remembered. Correspondingly, our postures and gestures may not show much need for sound matching, or our bodies may move sub-consciously to match the sound. Not all movements elicit a sound matching. This is again an unproven hypothesis since I'm the only one whom I know that has experienced it and understood it in such a way.
Evidently, not everyone may respond in the same way to the different sounds, and each sound has different qualities of frequency (wavelengths), texture (some sounds are aggregations of different sounds), timing and duration, so there is a complex synchronicity going on in everyday life. As long as your hands or your feet are resting in the right position on your body for that moment in time, it should be comfortable for your body. Usually, the posture or its absence is more specific while standing or walking, because you can't keep changing your bodily touches, unlike while sitting or lying down, unless you have a reason to fidget a lot. The absence of a bodily touch is something I was commonly at fault with during my onset of schizophrenia, possibly due to my thinking too much about where to put my hands while walking or standing. This relates to another aspect of God's intelligence tests or practices, the direction or cause of action which is what I perhaps synesthetically perceived as commands embedded in the beats of the sound, but that is another story.
What I've lost during my onset of schizophrenia was my sub-conscious instincts to move naturally with the sounds. My mind became exceptionally sensitive to sounds and began to start processing how to interact with the sounds, and I started following the actions of the people I saw. Naturally, I thought that I had failed the tests because I couldn't cope with the demands of processing all the sounds I hear and moving around constantly to different places upon God's direction. I had no time to think about or do other things, such as talk, eat, drink, sleep, or go to the toilet. This relates to the fact that the sounds when perceived as commands do not have a, for example, "go to the toilet and pass urine" translation. Staying on the topic of sound, movement and posture, it's my supporting materialist hypothesis after reading a book about consciousness by Susan Blackmore, that it may arise from our body's attempt to cope with our environmental stimulus based on our mind's internal state. When our mind is well formed in thoughts, in a state of peace, without many doubts and questions, it will likely be conscious of less sounds which are usually more specific. Hence, there will be less movements in the postures. When our minds are plagued with questions and possibilities, we may or may not be conscious of more sounds due to the thoughts in our minds, but our body is unlikely to stay still. We are likely to hear more sounds when our mind reaches a mental/cognitive block, from which symptoms of depression or psychosis may emerge.
Evidences of these occurrences to people in research papers are difficult to find unless we consider the concept of spirits or music's effects on endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin. There is one related paper from Singapore in 1993, written by Kua EH et al, titled "Spirit possession and healing among Chinese psychiatric patients". Another paper from Poland by Siedlecka B et al written in 2015 titled "The influence of sounds on posture control" tells us that experimentally sounds have effects on normal human beings. An overview is provided in the paper by Lennie Gandemer et al written in 2016, "Sound and Posture: an Overview of Recent Findings". There are a number of related articles found using Google about how pleasant sounding music increases the "happy hormones", and how unpleasant sounds such as the crying of a baby increases the cortisol level. Even if we can control or stop our movements in response to these sounds, our mind and body will not feel very well, especially in relation to unpleasant sounds.
In a book "Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will" by Nancey Murphy et al, Nancey quoted an estimate: "consciousness plays a causal role in as little as five percent of our daily behavior, implying that 95 percent is automatic" in her book's "Introduction and Overview". This confirms the sub-conscious aspects of what I was tasked to do with spiritual/sound awareness during my onset of schizophrenia. The sub-conscious, left on its own, will be natural and automatic, but it having been brought to my awareness speaks perhaps of a different spirit in me. Perhaps it's the student spirit that couldn't grow up, find a suitable job, get married and have children (read my post: Princess Mononoke's Reminder of my Suicide Attempt (My First Relapse of Schizophrenia)). However, having been brought to my awareness, much needs to be done to verify these phenomenon-bodily responses as facts, such as having daily sound and video recordings of ourselves. Despite my technology constraints (I've not made any sound or video recordings), what is evident to me is that, spirits not withstanding, there is a knowledge gap between my MBA studies done online, and the ability to find a job and work in Singapore. This created a vacuum in my mind, and absent of solutions, my mind broke through the sound barrier of my surroundings and derived solutions from that instead. This is an example that shows the fallability of a student mindset/spirit. It can also be said that I lacked work experience going into my MBA studies, because I graduated and started working in 2001, and consequently took a graduate diploma and then started my MBA in 2003.
Here, I would present a couple of quotes from Nancey's book's introduction for our reading:
"Emergentists, such as Roy Wood Sellars, argued that the increasingly complex organization, as one ascends the hierarchy of systems, accounts for the appearance of new kinds of entities with causal powers that cannot be reduced to physics. The organic emerges from the physical; so too do the levels of the mental or conscious, the social, the ethical, and the religious or spiritual."
"Wegner brings together reports of research on the role of consciousness and other factors in behavior with surveys of some of the stranger phenomena from the history of the human race, all supporting his contention that the feeling of conscious will does not always correlate with the true causes of action. One category of evidence is cases where it is highly likely that people are in fact the causes of their own actions, but they experience the acts as being controlled by some other source. These include instances of automatic writing, spirit possession and mediumship, table-turning, and so on."
To close off this post, I would make a recommendation to try out mindfulness meditation if you also have problems with sounds. Find some place to sit or lie down, close your eyes and focus your awareness on your breathing in and out. If sounds from your environment filter into your awareness, it is likely you can't sit or lie still, or you may be distracted by stray thoughts/ideas which may or may not be important. It is only when the environment has calmed down or when your mind does not perceive the sounds from your surroundings that your mind and body will calm down and be aware of only your breathing. Here again, I'm quoting my personal experience in using mindfulness meditation to help me sleep.
04 March 2019 Update
It is clear based on my senses that my observations were correct most of the time, but the margin of errors for both sound/frequency(wavelength), timing and touch/movement were so broad, that my hypothesis will be proven time and again. Unfortunately, based on my continuous observations before I sleep every night (when I remember to pay attention to my surrounding sounds), I don't think the margin of error can be reduced. In addition, the observations only show linkage between sound and movement, not causation. Hence, my theory here can only be preliminary and approximate at best. It is probably very difficult to conclude on any basis for the relations between sound and movement based on just these observations. More research may be done in this area, but these strange occurrences do not affect my work or research as I can ignore them in daily life.
References:
- Susan Blackmore, Consciousness - A Very Short Introduction, 2018
- Kua EH et al, "Spirit possession and healing among Chinese psychiatric patients", 1993
- Siedlecka B et al, "The influence of sounds on posture control", 2015
- Lennie Gandemer et al, "Sound and Posture: an Overview of Recent Findings", 2016
- Nancey Murphy et al, "Downward Causation and the Neurobiology of Free Will", 2009
- www.google.com