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Shannon McCarthy
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Roses

Peace Roses Painting

$410
White Roses on Yellow. (9x12") Sold

White Roses

Sold

Joan of arc- the vision

Joan of arc

$275

shannonmccarthyart

:::Sense of an Ominous Presence::: Have you ever r :::Sense of an Ominous Presence::: Have you ever read “The Tell-Tale Heart”? By Edgar Allen Poe, who we can be glad we are not. The poor man suffered from a temporal lobe epilepsy in which during seizure, terrifying people would lean over him in a kind of attack. Poe would at times be found wondering the streets confused. We humans are the most dangerous earthly predator now, but it wasn’t always so. We were often prey, so we rightly developed an acutely sensitive risk assessment network. It’s right next to the zone that determines salience: how important a sound or a glimpse is. Now suppose an unintended electrical burst zooms around that neighborhood, then travels into the temporal lobes where feeling and meaning are navigated. Many effects could come from this errant cause, and one of them is the ominous sense of a predator. We read the Tell-Tale Heart in high school and I thought it was the scariest thing ever. Too close to home. I was often spooked as a kid. There was the Booger Wolf! The Booger Wolf, who would lurk around. He was 10 feet tall! A dangerous tower of matted fur, slime and teeth. I would wake suddenly in the night, terrified to say anything unless the doom do me in! Fast forward to adulthood and being afraid of the dark. That is, until I read a lovely piece called “The Neuropsychiatry of Paranormal Experience”.... “There appears to be a continuum of temporal lobe sensitivity along which all human beings are distributed.” If you’re on the sensitive side of the spectrum, you’ve probably had paranormal experiences too. But guess what! By using complex magnetic fields, the researchers can induce the paranormal experience in anyone, and they started doing it for people who were, you know, afraid of the dark for good reasons. And what happened? They stopped being afraid after that! Because it was demonstrated to them that the sense of an ominous presence could be magnetically created. I’m not saying that there aren’t ghouls and ghosts- cause, buddy, it’s a wild world. But! if you get the random spooks, isn’t it more pleasant to think, “Could be magnetic...” 🧐 ** #temporallobeepilepsy #magneticfields #paranormal #neuropsych
Just kidding, I wouldn’t put you on the spot lik Just kidding, I wouldn’t put you on the spot like that. But if someone ever DOES ask who your favorite epileptic is, here is a starter list: Socrates, St. Paul, Mohammed, Joan of Arc, Kierkegaard, Tennyson, Harriet Tubman, Van Gogh, Dostoyevsky, Emily Dickinson. Then there was Julius Caesar, but that’s not a very happy story, is it? I’m not trying to say that seizures make you superdeeduper, because they don’t. But I had this thought in my mind about all the people that visit the Mona Lisa. Da Vinci carried that painting with him always. And he wore rose colored tunics! And he kept male companions, and had to wiggle out of sodomy charges. And I wonder, do they see the whole man that made the masterpieces? Do the same people who adore his work support gay rights? Do the people who step away when I say epilepsy, do they read Paul’s stuff in the Bible? Do they dig the Socratic method? * * * #epilepsy #epilepsyfoundation #temporallobeepilepsy #socrates #emilydickinson #vangogh #stpaul #davinci #harriettubman #kierkegaard #tennyson #joanofarc #gayrights
“Jamais vu”: it’s like deja vu, but the oppo “Jamais vu”: it’s like deja vu, but the opposite: the feeling of never having experienced something before. It comes for me after a seizure and is like a little bell that tells me a tiny one has passed. I couldn’t understand the brown I saw: What is this strange bit? It is round, it is wet. Is it a creature? Is it a food? I stared at it. Hmm. Ah! Now I know. It is a leaf. The feeling of knowing (when you know you know the word, and it’s on the tip of your tongue), takes place in the anterior insula. Yer inner brain! When I come back to the world I feel like the world is new- not in a joyful way, just like- it’s not familiar. In some ways it aches, and in other ways, a dew drop on a spider web is outrageous! You’ve got the spider in and of itself, who is hiding. But all her work is there to see. And while the world was sleeping, the air grew heavy and landed upon a minute spindle of silk which she had meticulously threaded across blades of grass in a mesmerizing pattern, catching the wet ethers. People can’t think up and make stuff like this! Something beyond us came up with this! Now here’s the thing: with enough jamais vu, a person ends up with new perspectives and wonder. But with too much, they forget the world even exists! And probably worse things we’ll avoid mentioning. If you feel burdened by what you know, just forget everything this morning and take a tour of your life fresh. It’s a very special life. * * I painted this Japanese maple outside a month ago and was happy to see that it has a brain shape. 🧠 * * #jamaisvu #dejavu #epilepsy #temporallobeepilepsy #focalseizures #nature #spiders #pleinairpainting #pleinair #oilpainting #art
Still true. The slings and arrows of outrageous fo Still true. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune are real! Mercy for the suffering. Only the other century, epilepsy patients could be castrated as treatment. Seizures freak people out. Shame wafts around. I cringe being asked if i peed my pants. Did you bite your tongue? Can I see your bruises? The humbling happens quickly. It’s easy to feel low. Thats why I love this little story. The human experience, the light in all of it. “But felt through all this earthly dress, bright shoots of everlastingness.”* * * *#henryvaughan #bookofjohn #manbornblind #oilpainting #art #visionaryart #epilepsy #seizures #brain #neurology #temporallobeepilepsy #shakespeare #hamlet
Why say anything? Jung said that whatever problem Why say anything? Jung said that whatever problem we are working on individually has value to the rest of humanity. When it comes to epilepsy, some families have it really bad. Young children with uncontrollable seizures: what a nightmare. Plenty of people have to have parts of their brains removed. A doctor at Yale told me that “there’s also surgical solutions”, and that’s when I was like- I’m out, y’all. I am out on the brain surgery note. But many don’t have the option to ditch the idea. I saw a video of a recently living brain and it was like a milky jellyfish, ornately supplied with vessels and folds, a juicy superconductor. Usually when we see a brain it has been dehydrated in formaldehyde, hardened and drained of its watery pearl luster. You can’t even hold it, or it gets a dent in it. Seeing that brain made clear to me how the brain truly floats (and must float) in the cerebral spinal fluid. One cool evening when I was 23, I got off the subway on 8th Avenue and heard screeching tires and a hard thud not far behind. My whole body felt the sound. I knew a person had been hit by a car. I resolved not to turn around. It had only been two years since for me. There were a hundred people, they would do the helping. But the driver raced off and a woman yelled for the license plate, and I sprinted to get the number, then sprinted back to her phone to tell the dispatch, shielding my eyes. At my feet a strange puddle wound, and I followed the peculiar clear river with my eyes, until it merged with a red river, and together they flowed from a soaked, oh God, her beautiful blonde hair drenched on the outside with what should be on the inside. I wonder what became of her and her brain and her stories. I am sad to acknowledge that she likely ended that day. We, however, still have today. “Go forward to improve the present. It is thine.” -HWL. * * * #henrywadsworthlongfellow #heart #brain #tbi #epilepsy #nyc #art #oilpainting #temporallobeepilepsy
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