What are humans made of? 206 bones and two systems, the axial skeleton (the trunk of our body) and the appendicular skeleton (our limbs) wrapped in muscle and skin with blood and organs moving around. We have tried to understand our surroundings and ourselves for a long time. We have tried to organize in different ways for a long time, we have decided to leave everything to one or multiple gods, or decided to not believe in any god but only in our human society or not believe in anyone but ourselves.

We know everything there is to know about the world, we have explored and exploited every corner, we have mapped it and have even made our way into outer space. We have learned to use and devour everything that lies around us.

We are at the top of the food chain. Yet we are still struggling and suffering, we are realizing there is a lot to learn, we don’t know everything and our decisions are having unwanted consequences.

Some of the most important things that relate to our body are completely strange. It is also ironic that the more we learn about a topic the more we forget about other topics. Is our memory expandable, inflatable, or infallible? Do we really want an infallible memory?

I have suffered for a long time from a self-diagnosed case of short and long-term memory loss problem. Some call it distraction. I have attributed it to a lack of sleep, sometimes to an excess of sleep. In turn I have attributed these changes in sleep patterns to the food I eat. The changes in my eating behaviors I have also related to the stress I go through. This is all very empirical and sometimes based only on what memory can remember. Everything is related in our body.

In my attempt to modify my behavior and attention spans I have relied on tea, medicines, homeopathy and aromatherapy. Which have always helped but then I forget to go through these routines and I get back to square one.

I have learned and I am now still trying to understand and practice that any change in behavior has to be done from the inside. Yes it has to be personal but any change in society has to come from within as well.

So, in an attempt to fix the vicious cycle I went to see a nutritionist and a sleep doctor. Not very internal changes perhaps but still an attempt. One recommendation I got from the nutrition doctor was to document all the meals I was having. It was not easy task, but I wrote a description of every meal for a about two weeks. In the description I could find many cupcakes, many cliff bars and lots of pasta and cheese.

The Futurist art movement in the 1930’s was a fierce enemy to Pasta and stated that it made people slow and sleepy. I learned this later but the pasta did make for a heavy afternoon. I have also heard, from an acquaintance, that cheese at night would bring him very weird nightmares. My gourmet journal as I called it, was still fitting in. I did not like to write before the meal. It all sounded delicious and just writing would get me full. I did not like writing after the meal, because then I would not remember everything or most important I would forget to write all together in my attempt to get back to work on time.

I proposed taking a picture with the iphone of every meal. I was very excited; I was expecting to create a beautiful iphone photo collection photo book. It did not quite work that way. The pictures were very sad and pathetic, looked very far from pictures on gourmet magazine or foodie blogs. It made me repulse my meals. This experiment lasted for another two weeks. On every visit the doctor would make suggestions on my servings or promote healthier options.

In doing that food documenting exercise I became aware that many good bad memories I had were related to food. Most of the good ones happened when I was eating and many of the bad ones were when I had not eaten very well.

I remember how when I am anxious I bite my nails and I am ready to eat just about anything, be it sweet or salty. I read that potato chips give the same stress relief effect as bubble wrapping, the crunching or popping sound releases stress. I wonder if it’s because the sound gets you out of your thoughts and allows you to breath?

Food is important in our machine like body. It is our fuel, or so the cliché says. The transition of hunting it to farming it shaped our evolution. Cities were built around its proper distribution. We have memories attached to it. A lot can be said about how one eats or talks at the table. Rituals and sacred ceremonies have been built around food.

Yet we have developed a very awkward relationship with our food. Author Edward Dean writes that over 50,000,000 people every day eat fast food in the U.S. alone. We are trying to make informed decisions about work, about school, about love about ourselves. How can we make any informed decision when we don’t even know simple things about our food?

I am guilty and as such I am trying to understand how have we become so detached, and is there a non-violent way to understand and embrace that we are what we eat.

In this exploration I am interested in

Food as a living entity

Food as Network

And how food makes us alive

And how Food makes us dream.

So I was trying to get my knee sensor to fit my sensor with my knee, in the attempt  to do that I uprooted mybreadboard out  the wood where I had stuck it last year.  In the process all the silver lining and pieces in the breadboard went out , like if I had taken apart a fern plant.

I made a smaller version,  of my “device”,  I was still trying my flex sensor and a stretch sensor.

I wasgetting reasonable values.  butmainlyfromthe  flex sensor, notreallyfrom the stretchsensor

Theywere very small to notice.

In themean time I was trying to attach to my knee. I started with knee pad,thenwent to saw a stretchy fabric, I was thinking toinsert the arduino andsensors inthe fabric but  Irealized that the sensors needed to be attached in different places for each knee.   So I went back to try the sensors in the fabric, and seehow I coulduse it in a more real scenario.

I needed larger wires to be able to hold the arduino.

I also had to get rid of the stretch sensor,  I put in a flex sensor instead.  and here is when problems started.

I haveno idea why.

I  changed the sensors, I made new ones. changed the analog pins,  but still nothing.

So after weeks of trying to catch up with my (if any) pcomp skills,  I played with light sensors now I have switched to stretch sensors.  They are working alright.  I learned that stretch sensors still sense after being broken, which  was arelief  I ad broken two stretch sensors already.

So I started out thinking out something I wanted to be measuring.  something I  was not really aware  of and perhaps something that was affecting me.  hopefully the information I gathered would help me  change in a certain way my behaviour.

I started thinking about the things I would like to know more about.  I thought about my constant back problems.  I wondered too about my random insomnia, or sometimes and a long time intention of logging my dreams when I remembered them.

I also thought about the times I am biting my nails and how I am not conscious about it.

Meanwhile I was doing this I attended a yoga session across the street at the student health center.   It was very interesting,  meanwhile  I was learning to concentrate and  be mindful I  was asked to relax my knee.  apparently any time we flex them too much to the back, we are straining our lower back. This is called hyperextending our knees.  it was an Aha moment.  thats why my back hurts.   I had been hyperextending my knees many times  but was not really sure how many times, or when or why?

so I thought this might be a good opportunity to put my rest of you project to the test.