When I was a younger man I was very into conducting experiments on myself. These usually took the form of some kind of endurance test, or sensory deprivation type thing, or language experiment...
For example:
I stayed awake for over a week (Nearly 2, but sadly my memory of the time is pretty hazy) with no kind of stimulant. Sounds easy eh? Try it. Lots of fun to be had there. Aside from a general deterioration in health and psychological functions the hallucinations and waking dreams were quite fun. I would recommend everybody do it at least once.
Just don't do it when I did, during a series of final exams, leaving me having a waking dream in the middle of a final paper. My brain just, well, switched off for a second and when I came to my hand had decided to break off, mid-way through a word and go off in spiraling loops that eventually escaped the paper. It was at that point I decided to put my pen down, stand up and shamble out of the Exam. The lecturer asked 'Are you alright?'. I remember waving them off and shambling away to find an empty video editing suite, where I curled up under the desk and fell into a blessed sleep.
I also went for about 6 weeks without speaking to anyone and with virtually no human contact. I would wait outside the supermarket for it to open in the morning in order to do my shopping when the staff were just as uncommunicative as I was. I also had no television or phone, and the internet wasn't a thing you had at home yet, let alone in your hand. (yes, there was a time like that).
Surprisingly this led to me going a bit weird. But since there was nobody else there and I barely remember it, due to my brain turning into some kind of mush, I have very little to report back from that one.. except perhaps that even insular introverts need some kind of human interaction, even if it's the illusory ones that spew through the TV in the chummy faux-friend guise of 'presenters'
I have done many other things like this. Some of a mildly less legal/more chemical nature (But still ethical, my Lab is myself, and I wouldn't have hurt or do this to anyone else... oh and I've grown out of that bit now...) I've hypnotised myself, publicly traded my gender role, learned odd skills I'll never use, become obsessive over even odder subjects, done starvation tests...
But why am I blogging about this at all?
Well... I've decided to re-ignite the experiments.. and they'll be done in September. Starting today. They are all commencing at the same time, but I will be reporting on them as we go on... amongst other things. So if you do read this.. firstly.. why? Secondly, expect to hear a lot more from me over this month...
September is a good month for this. It's 30 days long, which seems to be a traditional number for this kind of thing. It isn't Summer, so I won't drop everything to sit in a park and play guitar until a homeless Russian man tries to get me to play a Russian folk song I don't know with a series of gestures and grunts. I won't decide to disappear to a festival where all rules go out of the window in an attempt to synthesise pure 'hedonism'.
Also I have recently returned to London and started a new job*. So I am quite buoyant from that and have decided to transfer that increased energy into all other aspects of my life... I will record how successful I am in this odd self improvement mission here...
Again, the question occurs, why?
Well.. I have found if you want to keep something secret and personal, the absolute best place to do so is by publishing it publicly on the internet... If you fail to include a picture of a Cat, or a gif of a cat... Or something else with a cat, then you might as well have written it on parchment in a long dead language, sealed it in an impenetrable vault, and dropped it into the deepest ocean, on another planet...
So to kick off, and starting small, I am killing all caffeine in my life. No more morning wake up Coffee... Just a Decaff Tea. I have drunk caffeinated drinks for most of my life, from childhood. The longest I've done before is two weeks. That sounds like a dependence to me. So it goes. At the end of the month I will decide which ones to keep and which ones to dispose of... Oh and I'll crow about any successes. Failures... Mmm.. Not decided what to do about them yet...
Anyway.. does anyone else do this kind of thing? Feel free to let me know if you do and how you get on...
(*If you are someone who works with me in this new job and have googled me and found this, I would like to state that this is ALL fiction., especially the bits that insinuated I'd done weird in my distant past.. oh and if I did I'm completely fine now.. well.. harmless anyway...)
For example:
I stayed awake for over a week (Nearly 2, but sadly my memory of the time is pretty hazy) with no kind of stimulant. Sounds easy eh? Try it. Lots of fun to be had there. Aside from a general deterioration in health and psychological functions the hallucinations and waking dreams were quite fun. I would recommend everybody do it at least once.
Just don't do it when I did, during a series of final exams, leaving me having a waking dream in the middle of a final paper. My brain just, well, switched off for a second and when I came to my hand had decided to break off, mid-way through a word and go off in spiraling loops that eventually escaped the paper. It was at that point I decided to put my pen down, stand up and shamble out of the Exam. The lecturer asked 'Are you alright?'. I remember waving them off and shambling away to find an empty video editing suite, where I curled up under the desk and fell into a blessed sleep.
I also went for about 6 weeks without speaking to anyone and with virtually no human contact. I would wait outside the supermarket for it to open in the morning in order to do my shopping when the staff were just as uncommunicative as I was. I also had no television or phone, and the internet wasn't a thing you had at home yet, let alone in your hand. (yes, there was a time like that).
Surprisingly this led to me going a bit weird. But since there was nobody else there and I barely remember it, due to my brain turning into some kind of mush, I have very little to report back from that one.. except perhaps that even insular introverts need some kind of human interaction, even if it's the illusory ones that spew through the TV in the chummy faux-friend guise of 'presenters'
I have done many other things like this. Some of a mildly less legal/more chemical nature (But still ethical, my Lab is myself, and I wouldn't have hurt or do this to anyone else... oh and I've grown out of that bit now...) I've hypnotised myself, publicly traded my gender role, learned odd skills I'll never use, become obsessive over even odder subjects, done starvation tests...
But why am I blogging about this at all?
Well... I've decided to re-ignite the experiments.. and they'll be done in September. Starting today. They are all commencing at the same time, but I will be reporting on them as we go on... amongst other things. So if you do read this.. firstly.. why? Secondly, expect to hear a lot more from me over this month...
September is a good month for this. It's 30 days long, which seems to be a traditional number for this kind of thing. It isn't Summer, so I won't drop everything to sit in a park and play guitar until a homeless Russian man tries to get me to play a Russian folk song I don't know with a series of gestures and grunts. I won't decide to disappear to a festival where all rules go out of the window in an attempt to synthesise pure 'hedonism'.
Also I have recently returned to London and started a new job*. So I am quite buoyant from that and have decided to transfer that increased energy into all other aspects of my life... I will record how successful I am in this odd self improvement mission here...
Again, the question occurs, why?
Well.. I have found if you want to keep something secret and personal, the absolute best place to do so is by publishing it publicly on the internet... If you fail to include a picture of a Cat, or a gif of a cat... Or something else with a cat, then you might as well have written it on parchment in a long dead language, sealed it in an impenetrable vault, and dropped it into the deepest ocean, on another planet...
So to kick off, and starting small, I am killing all caffeine in my life. No more morning wake up Coffee... Just a Decaff Tea. I have drunk caffeinated drinks for most of my life, from childhood. The longest I've done before is two weeks. That sounds like a dependence to me. So it goes. At the end of the month I will decide which ones to keep and which ones to dispose of... Oh and I'll crow about any successes. Failures... Mmm.. Not decided what to do about them yet...
Anyway.. does anyone else do this kind of thing? Feel free to let me know if you do and how you get on...
(*If you are someone who works with me in this new job and have googled me and found this, I would like to state that this is ALL fiction., especially the bits that insinuated I'd done weird in my distant past.. oh and if I did I'm completely fine now.. well.. harmless anyway...)
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