While day-to-day my life is characterized by a discouraging lack of improvement, in some important respects my health has improved significantly during the last two weeks: I am rarely dizzy anymore. Since this was my initial symptom dating back to early December (recall here; here; here; here; and here) this is a great relief. My headaches are mostly not incapacitating; out of the last nine days only Thursday and Saturday were really bad. (Strikingly, the felt location of the headache is still moving around my skull, and the timing of the headaches is without rhyme or reason.) My insomnia has lessened: melatonin aided, I now get about six hours of sleep even on bad nights. I also show more competence at basic life skills (like not nearly burning down the kitchen regularly). And I have longer periods (up to three hours) without any symptoms at all.
It's not all good news yet. Even extremely minor physical activity can create a very strange fatigue such that my head (from the nose up) feels very heavy as if filled with a heavy liquid. I call this upper-head fatigue, which makes me want to lay flat and close my eyes. Once upper-head fatigue starts I am basically out of commission for at least an hour or more. I emphasize this because it's not like my lungs or legs are tired after, say, half a mile of ambling. On a recent good day I tried reading a science fiction novel, and even after taking regular breaks after each page (!), within a short amount of time I had the same kind of upper-head fatigue. I return to this below because there is a puzzling phenomenon associated with it.
I also have very low tolerance for background noise, including things we would not be inclined to call 'noise' at all: e.g., simple conversation and music. If any of these things (conversation, music, noise) or other disturbances occur I can be quite irritable. I have developed something akin to the hypersensitivity to sound that reminds me of what I have encountered in some autists. I also find conversation exhausting and annoying [I think this is very much out of character], and avoid it studiously (especially phone or zoom).*
Above I noted that lots of minor noises are irritating; even so, I can spend hours watching kung fu movies, including the very violent Indonesian ones. My main 'research' finding of the pandemic is, in fact, that the sub-text of all kung fu films is the corruption of state institutions generally due to money, but sometimes due to occupation or imperialism. Five Venoms - a cult classic -- exhibits this point relentlessly, also in the final shot. Some kind of reading is still quite out of reach. And writing remains a slow, painful exercise. Even so, I can spend hours reading stuff on social media without getting upper head fatigue.
This had me meditating on the contrast between skim reading (social media) and concentrated reading (books). I wondered whether when I am skim reading I am doing a lot of largely tacit guesses -- based on context and background knowledge -- about what's on the screen, skipping words even whole sentences while my eyes scan content. Whereas when I engage in concentrated reading of books I am wholly present with the text often in silent dialogue with the material, switching intellectual or emotional perspective as needs must. Perhaps the latter really is a lot more taxing on neurons/brain/mind.
My Dutch GP, who returned my call after-hours, listened to my symptoms and interpretation. She suggested an alternative, compatible interpretation: I am having trouble multi-tasking. And anything that distracts from my focus creates mental turmoil and disturbance/irritability. This sounded plausible to me, but I objected that when I read books I am hyper-focused. I was about to launch into a soliloquy on how I could close off from the world with my book in the noisiest public places, when I realized that she was explaining to me the difference between reading a book on the page and reading from a small screen. When you read a book, she said, 'you have to make out words and sentences and ignore enormous amount of other letters and spaces on the same page.'
I was suddenly completely present. 'Normally,' she continued, 'you don't even notice you're doing it. But now it's too many tasks at once.'
I have noted, including in some digressions, I suspect, that I have a growing conviction that even our smartest students with lots of cultural capital find engaging with books difficult. They are taught from text-books, which are good at providing ready-made information and puzzle-solving; don't read the Bible weekly, and are very used to being interrupted by social media which is simply much better at holding our attention (leaving aside that much social media is actively prompting our reactive attitudes). In addition, they are immersed in the pictorial and iconographic worlds of games. I have joked that, despite high literacy, in some respects our future will be more like the middle-ages when the taste for books was constitutive of a rarified niche.
I asked my GP whether there were any experimental drugs she could proscribe, or whether she had any suggestions about how I could read a book again. After counseling patience, and reminding me to stick with not working, she suggested trying to use a ruler magnifier when reading a book, 'that way you can focus on one line at a time when reading.'
When I mentioned all of this to my surgeon-cognitive-scientist spouse, she suggested a kindle might have the same positive effect. If she is right about this, I would give in and start reading fiction and philosophy on a screen and we would put a stop to my mad accumulation of books. As I turned to order a ruler magnifier online, I quietly added a waterproof kindle as well. I always laugh a bit when Thoreau presents his own life, in high minded fashion, as a humanitarian self-experiment. But here I am waiting for the courier eager to start my own experiment.
*There is more to be said about the causes and effects of such self-isolation. Not the least there is a desire to avoid other people's pity and an unwillingness to have to report 'no progress.'
You can use an Onyx Boox instead of a Kindle if you would like more screen estate and the ability to annotate with a 'pen'. Kindles are back in the XX century. :) I do that anyhow for most things I read (carefully) these days. Get well soon!
Posted by: Filippo Contesi | 03/02/2021 at 12:09 PM
If the experiment is promising Filippo, I will consider investing in twentyfirstcentury technology!
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 03/02/2021 at 12:26 PM