Optical illusions show how you see, by Beau Lotto.
To my notion this talk perfectly completes Oliver Sacks observations. I love Lotto’s view on the world. He stresses that there is no stimuli-inherent information, information or content respectively is the result of an interactive process, expressing a relation. Perceptions are volatile and subject to change depending on the context, one may call it illusions, I won’t. Perceptions do not mirror the real world. Perception/content is determined by context and experience, experience not only limited to our individual life, but to evolution. The senses, Lotto says, are not fragile, and therefore prone to illusions. It is the process of perception that is determined by much more than only a stimuli like light that is processed by our visual organs.

After my intensive weeks with triathlon I feel it is high time to shift gears and focus on other topics too. My readers who are not involved with this sport may be bored by then, and complain about the monotony. Since weeks I have not been checking my newsreader, today I did… being so tired that I just let myself drift through the headlines, my eyes came to an halt at the name of Oliver Sacks. I listened to his talk and it really hit me. It gives wonderful evidence that seeing is not only a phenomenon induced by the world that surrounds us, but also by the very inside of our body and brain.

If your eyes go blind, then you may realize that seeing is a complex process that also produces images without external stimuli. And I think we should be aware of the fact that seeing (hallucinating) is not necessarily connected with insanity. Many a blind person probably sees images and doesn’t dare to speak about them because they are afraid of being discriminated as insane.

Oliver Sacks is well known as a writer of such best-selling case histories as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, and his memoir of his early work, Awakenings, all of which have breathed new life into the dusty 19th-century tradition of the clinical anecdote. He maintains a small practice in New York City.

For my friend Isabel

When most of the triathletes have arrived on Big Island for competing the Ironman race next Saturday, 2 or 3 days after their arrival many of them, especially the European guys, start to complain about symptoms that are related to an impaired immunity. Undefined sickness is so common among the athletes and endangers their participation in the race. Just today, when we have been at Captain Cook’s with Hannes’ group, we heard people complaining about common colds, sore throats, stomach problems etc.

Here an excerpt from an article I wrote for tri2b.com

Since I have been speaking to many athletes through Biestmilch about their health problems, it was alarming to find out how common it is that athletes suffer from various symptoms that point towards incompetence of and strain on the immune system. Many of the symptoms increase during the strain of intensive training or competitions, with the result that even athletes between the ages of 15 and 20 suffer from unclarified symptoms of pain or after having hardly moved out of the area of basic endurance, they develop some infection or another.
In many cases, they have consulted doctors of various specialist doctors without success. Here is a short list of the problems that indicate that one is just about to fall off the narrow ridge of balance and alarm signals are cropping up, which should prompt oneself to be careful not to fall into the valley, out of which it is difficult to get out: severe respiratory infections and infections of the sinuses, herpes infections, gastrointestinal disorders or irritable bowel disorders, sudden injuries, pains typically in the groin, knee, back or Achilles tendon that bear no relation to what the x-ray shows, for example, stress-induced asthma, spreading of an existing allergy to other organs (hay fever suddenly accompanies asthma), springing up of neurodermatitis….. the list could go on and on. (more…)