The Close Season Zander Quest Pt.*** - Fractals and Fringilliforms

I for one cannot wait for the first bite, the first bob of the float, the first ripple on the surface, that bend in the rod.

Recently the monotony has been broken up with a walk out to see some trains go by (yes really) , trying to spot the 60 strong Space X satellite train in ones dressing gown. Some Goldcrest and Tit twitching and yeap, you guessed it to add some more pre-bait to the Zander swim I'm priming.

Another tidy up of the garage ( if that was at all possible ) I stumbled upon the VR headset I thought I'd lost. Now if you've not seen these before, its a relatively cheap bit of kit that uses a couple of magnifying lenses and your phone for the display.

Various platforms can be used to view media, YouTube, BT sports etc and many are in 360 degrees too, so you can look left and right, look up and down and even behind you and the image will follow your head. With the BT sport app can watch a match from the goal and look over your shoulder to see the crowd.

Depending on the source the screen splits in to two on the phone, the lenses giving a very immersive experience even though the tech is pretty basic.

Ben is an adrenaline junkie which is odd because of his sensory issues but he loves roller-coasters and fast ones too. This headset can be used to get close to the experience without all the rough and tumble which cannot be achieved in lock-down.

For me fractals such as this , psychedelic colours and landscapes can be viewed in conjunction with the Skullcandy crusher headphones.

Haptic bass feedback that needs to be heard to be believed. It's like being stood on those 20 hertz woofers again, enough air moved by the cones to lift skirts. The good thing is, an out of body experience without disturbing the family.

Now Benoit Mandelbrot first coined the term ‘fractal’ in 1975, discovering that simple mathematic rules apply to a vast array of things that looked visually complex or chaotic.

As he proved, fractal patterns were often found in nature’s roughness in clouds, coastlines, plant leaves, ocean waves, the rise and fall of the Nile River, and in the clustering of galaxies.

To understand fractal patterns at different scales, picture a trunk of a tree and a branch, they might contain the same angles as that same branch and a smaller branch, as well as the converging veins of the leaf on that branch. 

And so on. You can have fractals creating what looks like chaos.

To find out if that dimension induced a particular mental state, EEG has been used to measure people’s brain waves while viewing geometric fractal images. 

They discovered that in that same dimensional magic zone, the subjects’ frontal lobes easily produced the feel-good alpha brainwaves of a wakefully relaxed state. This occurred even when people looked at the images for only one minute.

Your visual system is in some way hardwired to understand fractals. The stress-reduction is triggered by a physiological resonance that occurs when the fractal structure of the eye matches that of the fractal image being viewed.

If a scene is too complicated, we can’t easily take it all in, and that in turn leads to some discomfort, even if subconsciously. It makes sense that our visual cortex would feel most at home among the most common natural features we evolved alongside. So perhaps part of our comfort in nature derives from fluent visual processing.

Fractals engage the parahippocampus ,which is involved with regulating emotions and is also highly active while listening to music. Looking at an ocean might have a similar effect on us emotionally as listening to Brahms.

The sort of emotions us anglers get in abundance when the float dips, the bite alarm sings, or when a fish hits in to a lure hard and it's felt through the braid and the subsequent bend in the carbon.

Keeping sane is required at this time, keep that mind in a good place in any way you can under these current restrictions. 

The RC car given the once over, Ni-Cad's charged, that oven cleaned, yes you heard me the oven cleaned. Heck even a slow roasted pork shoulder on the BBQ, as distraction, the smoke, smells and satire sat in the garden the time passes.

That homemade sauce another hour down. We'll all be back sooner than later hopefully, that hurdle nearly there to be negotiated.  I've a 10lb canal Zander to catch, I cannot do that sat at home now can I. Still in these uncertain times of pensions plummeting and pasta plundering not being able to go fishing is the least of worries for me and for many.

Stay Safe !!!!