Spade's Shortform

Recently, I had a strange reaction to Sensodyne Whitening and Gum Sensitivity toothpaste. As luck would have it, I happen to fall into the subset of the population that lose much of their ability to taste certain flavors after using the toothpaste for a couple of days.

I happened to catch on pretty quickly and ended up switching toothpastes within the week, but it still resulted in about two weeks where I could not taste salt, and could hardly taste anything sour, sweet, or whatever makes buffalo sauce taste like buffalo sauce. It felt like I was coating my mouth with flavorless lard, in case anyone was curious.

What I found most fascinating about this experience came after my tongue recovered. Despite only having lacked those tastes for about two weeks, my perception of them became a lot stronger -- apple juice, which I previously would not have called sour, suddenly seemed to have a bit of a twang to it (which is to say nothing for how sweet it was). The taste of salt, surprisingly, did not become overwhelming without amounts that I'd regularly consider to be a lot.

I suppose that this shouldn't be particularly surprising -- this happens with vision. For example, staring at the color yellow, and then looking at a black background will show you a stygian blue, which is impossible to perceive normally. Still, I find this interaction fascinating, and have to wonder what might happen if I were to blind myself for a couple of days, or deprive myself of sound or smell. I must also note that it's incredibly disappointing that I will likely never taste apple juice in that way again, it was probably one of the best drinks I've ever had.

Something that I struggle badly with is valuing (and meaningfully using) small chunks of free time. I feel that I am more inclined to waste a forty-five minute block of free time between classes than I am to waste, say, the entire end of a day.

What I feel is that I cannot meaningfully engage with an activity if I suspect that I might be forced to stop before I'd like to, and I'm not sure that that is an entirely incorrect intuition. After all, there is certainly a loss incurred by context-switching, and perhaps leaving business unfinished in one task while being whisked away to another will make my performance on that other task worse. Anecdotally, I recently started programming for personal projects again, and on the occasions where I decided to start programming even an hour before class, I wouldn't really be able to put my work down -- I'd instead continue to program through my lectures. So, perhaps this intuition is actually my System 2 trying to save me from hurting myself academically?

So, maybe the moral I need to take from this is that I should both be less averse to starting things during small windows of time, and that I should find a way to make myself more inclined to actually put a task down (maybe by making it easier to resume?)

I'd be delighted to hear from anyone who has or had a similar problem, and how they went about solving it.

Last night, I had a dream that scared me awake. I suspect that this was some sort of response to a low heart rate, because when I woke, I noticed that my lips were rather cold, and my heart was now beating rather quickly. I've often heard of dreams of falling being a way for the mind to correct for this kind of danger, but I've failed to find any evidence for that with some quick searches.

If true, though. this would be interesting because it would suggest that some part of my brain has a model of "things I put myself through that I would fear enough to cause an elevated heartrate." I typically consider things like that to be exclusively (stimulus -> response) events in the brain, so some part of me that could work backwards from a visceral response without my conscious faculties would change that perception considerably.

Granted, I can't say for sure that anything like what I describe happened here, because I don't actually know that my heartrate was low to begin with, and I think an experiment designed to show that (low heartrate -> scary dream to elevate heartrate) in some or most cases is probably beyond my means.

That said, if anyone has a recommendation for a device to track sleep, and more specifically heartrate during sleep, please let me know. It could be worth keeping a journal to see (anecdotally) the relation between the two things.