Cockroaches are fascinating creatures. Did you know that they can continue living days, even weeks, after being decapitated. That’s because their blood pressure, circulation, and respiration is not controlled by their brains. They can feel and sense and amble about, appearing whole, though headless. And what’s even creepier is that their heads will survive also. Yet neither will survive effectively. 

The body will roam around aimlessly, with no memory or mission, until it finally starves to death (seems they do at least need the head to eat). The head will also survive, with antennae strobing, responding to stimuli, consciously aware of its surroundings, but unable to move or make any impact on its environment. Two separated parts of one body – alive, yet utterly ineffectual. Check out this video.

Ever wondered what your tears really look like? Rose-Lynn Fisher did. "One day I wondered if my tears of grief would look any different from my tears of happiness - and I set out to explore them up close."

"The Topography of Tears" she says, "is a study of 100 tears photographed through a standard light microscope. The project began in a period of personal change, loss, and copious tears. … Years later, this series comprises a wide range of my own and others’ tears, from elation to onions, as well as sorrow, frustration, rejection, resolution, laughing, yawning, birth and rebirth, and many more, each a tiny history."?

In photographing these various tears, she discovered that they are not unlike snowflakes--each one unique in its composition and design. Tears of joy looked nothing like tears of sorrow. And tears of elation looked nothing like the tears we shed when chopping an onion.

They can be explained, in part, by the chemistry of our tears:

Joseph Stromberg of the Smithsonian’s Collage of Arts and Sciences explained that there are three major types of tears: basal, reflex, and psychic (triggered by emotions). All tears contain organic substances including oils, antibodies, and enzymes and are suspended in salt water. Different types of tears have distinct molecules. Emotional tears have protein-based hormones including the neurotransmitter leucine enkephalin, which is a natural painkiller that is released when we are stressed. Plus, the tears seen under the microscope are crystallized salt and can lead to different shapes and forms. So even psychic tears with the same chemical composition can look very different. 

"The random compositions I find in magnified tears often evoke a sense of place," says Fisher, "like aerial views of emotional terrain."*

Although the empirical nature of tears is a chemistry of water, proteins, minerals, hormones, antibodies and enzymes, the topography of tears is a momentary landscape, transient as the fingerprint of someone in a dream. This series is like an ephemeral atlas ….

Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Wordless and spontaneous, they release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis: shedding tears, shedding old skin. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.

*Follow the link to source above to view their "topography" to understand just how personal tears are and how unique they are to our life experience.

A headline this past week really caught my eye, “Rare Disorder Makes N.J. Woman Fall Asleep When She Laughs.”  I’ve heard of sleep walking, but never sleep laughing.  Turns out the New Jersey homemaker, Claire Scott, suffers from a rare condition called cataplexy--a sleep disorder wherein the sleep center in the brain is wired incorrectly, allowing the REM sleep cycle (the time of deep sleep when one’s muscles are effectively paralyzed) to inappropriately crossover into one’s state of consciousness.   It is, in other words, a sort of emotionally induced paralysis, the effects of which can last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes.

The trigger mechanism can be any sudden surge of emotion—fear, anger, even happiness.  In Ms. Scott’s case, her trigger is laughter.  As many as 50 times a day, she suddenly finds herself in a puddle on the floor, slumped in her chair, or face down in her plate of food.  Sadly, it’s no laughing matter.  She has young children and cannot trust herself to care for them safely.