Distracted.
I have been a bit distracted lately. Although I wrote a few notes for this current blog over a month ago, only now am I here adding it in. My distraction (below) caused this lag; the uninspiring daily dose of my current Teaching Co. course nudged me back to my blog.
The uninspiring current course is on psychology and human behavior and it is basically a boring outline of things I already know. However, my last course, "Sensation, Perception, and the Aging Process", by Francis Colavita, was an excellent course. He told us exactly how incoming messages from the environment are handled by our eyes, ears, skin, tastebuds, and nose so that we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. As we age, our sense organs change, leading to changes in perception. I liked all the factoids that he tossed into the course.
Here's one of the factoids: Patients in the operating recovery room asked for less morphine to control their pain if they were listening to "spinetingling music". They found this out by breaking recovery room patients into 3 groups. One group listened to white noise, one to the normal recovery room noise, and one to spinetingling music. I still wonder what music they chose as spinetingling, it is probably an individual choice. (At the time I listened to this lecture, I had just purchased Joan Osborne's "Pretty Little Stranger" and listened to it over and over - it was my spinetingling music at that moment.)
I notice this in my workouts. When a song that I really like comes on I forget about the pain of the current rep, or when a get-up-and-move song comes on I forget that it hurts to move faster on the elliptical or the track. Colavita's words: "A pleasant event that results in a tingling in your spine is most likely releasing endorphins." Ooooaaah, endorphins.
A pleasant event that released a bunch of endorphins into my system was my purchase of an Audi A3 the day after Thanksgiving. That's my distraction. James and I drove A3s late in the morning the day before Thanksgiving. We drove the 2.0 L first, then the 3.2 L V6. I got out of the 3.2 L and said "make mine silver". I meant it, that car fit me like a glove. And yes, they had one in silver. We walked over to where it was parked and gazed at it for awhile.
I made myself go home and think about buying the A3. Thanksgiving Day, my decision was made, but of course the dealer was closed. I worried that the silver A3 had been sold, so I e-mailed James: "Please, go see if the silver A3 is still there?" This was his response:
"Still there."
The uninspiring current course is on psychology and human behavior and it is basically a boring outline of things I already know. However, my last course, "Sensation, Perception, and the Aging Process", by Francis Colavita, was an excellent course. He told us exactly how incoming messages from the environment are handled by our eyes, ears, skin, tastebuds, and nose so that we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell. As we age, our sense organs change, leading to changes in perception. I liked all the factoids that he tossed into the course.
Here's one of the factoids: Patients in the operating recovery room asked for less morphine to control their pain if they were listening to "spinetingling music". They found this out by breaking recovery room patients into 3 groups. One group listened to white noise, one to the normal recovery room noise, and one to spinetingling music. I still wonder what music they chose as spinetingling, it is probably an individual choice. (At the time I listened to this lecture, I had just purchased Joan Osborne's "Pretty Little Stranger" and listened to it over and over - it was my spinetingling music at that moment.)
I notice this in my workouts. When a song that I really like comes on I forget about the pain of the current rep, or when a get-up-and-move song comes on I forget that it hurts to move faster on the elliptical or the track. Colavita's words: "A pleasant event that results in a tingling in your spine is most likely releasing endorphins." Ooooaaah, endorphins.
A pleasant event that released a bunch of endorphins into my system was my purchase of an Audi A3 the day after Thanksgiving. That's my distraction. James and I drove A3s late in the morning the day before Thanksgiving. We drove the 2.0 L first, then the 3.2 L V6. I got out of the 3.2 L and said "make mine silver". I meant it, that car fit me like a glove. And yes, they had one in silver. We walked over to where it was parked and gazed at it for awhile.
I made myself go home and think about buying the A3. Thanksgiving Day, my decision was made, but of course the dealer was closed. I worried that the silver A3 had been sold, so I e-mailed James: "Please, go see if the silver A3 is still there?" This was his response:
"Still there."
