Brain Creation Coffee or Cortisol Folding Mirror Poem

This latest Folding Mirror poem developed out of a few articles and documentaries I’ve seen recently; while the screen hypnosis was featured in Moby’s Porcelain memoir, cited here recently; so at least five multi-media sources over a coupla/few months.

A couple were about ideal coffee drinking times, in relation to your cortisol levels, saying you should avoid drinking coffee just after awakening, as your body is naturally producing cortisol then, which has a similar effect as caffeine. Cortisol is produced on average by the body’s circadian rhythm between 8-9, 12-1 and 5.30-6.30 so the article said it’s best to avoid drinking it then.

Another article said that cortisol could actually shrink the brain, which I thought I might have felt during times of coffilosophy, when I was digging deep into the mind to create, and then concentrating to get it down on screen. I’d also feel tired afterwards a lot of the time, needing a nap, which could have been to do with the physical demands I think this kind of creation can impose.

In a Horizon documentary about the body clock, circadian rhythm and sleep, with volunteer, Aldo Kane, locked away from daylight for a month without knowing the time, chronobiologist Professor Jeffrey Hall  said the circadian rhythm is in all animals and was one of the first genetic imprints in us all.

A BBC Click documentary had a nice introduction to a piece about new ADHD technology with roundabout-cars chaos, which reminded me of some coffilosophy times when I’d feel like that. Sometimes the ideas would come together into a poem, story or blog post, like this one; other times I’d forget some of it, like the cars of the roundabout going the wrong way and getting lost!

It was kinda fun, and the best way for me to work, but not really efficient and dependable, which is why I think I’m more suited to this kind of creative writing!!

This is a self-portrait image I created in 2005, when the current mental health initiatives were in their infancy, to try and show as best I could how I thought my ADHD mind worked:

As Brain Shrinks, Squeezed Information Links

I am animal
of circadian rhythm
drinking coffee
for tunnel vision
organising thought
wild ideas pulled taut

ADHD roundabout thoughts, words directed downwards

sometimes converging one way
creation overlay
streamlining writing process
screen hypnosis
natural hormone cortisol
can contract cerebellum