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prototype_abbeyancyF7
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Name: janice
Interests: Books and knowledge. HAH! I want a hippopotamus for Christmas (I don't think Santa Claus will mind, do you?).
Expertise: I'm an expert tease. I've built up a great resistance to caffeine and sugar.
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
2/26/2006
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| Musicians win again at the finer points of being human.
The Sound of Passion
Musical training sharpens the ability to sense emotions.
Patricia Moreau
Imagine a quiet night like any other. Suddenly, your infant’s cries break the silence. Fully loaded with emotion, the sound triggers an urge to stand up and run to your infant’s room. But, considering that your spouse is a musician and you are not, who will be the first to reach the crib?
According to Dana L. Strait and a team of researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois, the musician should win the race. Their latest study showed that years of musical training leave the brains of musicians better attuned to the emotional content, like anger, of vocal sounds. Ten years of cello, say, can make a person more emotionally intelligent, in some sense. So the alarm carried in a baby’s cry make a deeper impression; your spouse wins the race.
The new work is part of an emerging portrait of the broader connections between music, emotion and speech. These studies are finding that musicians are more accurate in detecting emotion -- such as joy, sadness and anger -- in speech samples. The effect has been found even in children as young as 7 years old, with as little as one year of music training. It is a fascinating example of how experience in one domain (music) benefits another (emotion perception). However, it is not until very recently, with the publication of the new study by Strait and her colleagues, that the biological foundation of the effect has been demonstrated.
Strait’s team decided to study the brain’s very first responses to sound, in the brain stem. The brain stem is the most ancient part of the brain, andis the main entry door for all sensory stimuli. Once a sound reaches the nerves in your ears, it travels to the brain stem to be processed in an automatic, unconscious fashion. Both music and speech thus start their journey to the higher brain regions through the brain stem.
To record brain stem responses, the researchers placed electrodes on the heads of 30 people who were either musicians or non-musicians. The electrodes measured the electric currents that send signals through the brain stem, while the participants listened to an infant’s unhappy cry.
The surprising result was that the musicians’ brain showed enhanced responses to the infant’s cries. And the greater the number of years of practice and the earlier the person began training, the stronger the signal.
But how can musical training account for musicians’ advantage in detecting vocal emotion? Strait and her colleagues suggest that as we engage in activities that involve high levels of cognitive processing, such as memory or attention in music, we also enhance our sensory system’s responses. The higher brain areas in the cortex are connected to lower brain areas, such as the brain stem, and, through these connections, the two areas influence each other.
However, there is still the question of causality: Does musical training really affect the brain or could it be that musicians are simply born with a different brain -- that they are naturally drawn to music by their cognitive strengths? Another study suggests that musical training really does drive changes in the brain. Daniel J. Bosnyak and a team of researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, demonstrated that the brain responses of a group of non-musicians could change as a result of their participation in a just two weeks of training to perceive pitches accurately.
With the emergence of brain imaging technologies, our understanding of the effects of music training on the brain has been advancing rapidly. For example, we now have clear evidence of morphological changes in the brain, such as enhanced volume in the cortical motor representation of the hands of string players or larger gray matter volume in parts of the musicians’ auditory cortex dedicated to pitch processing. Numerous studies have also identified differences in patterns of brain activity between musicians and non-musicians. However, even with all this building evidence, we are still far from understanding exactly how music reshapes the structures and activity of the brain.
Surprisingly, even with all the remaining questions regarding musical training, the field of neuroscience of music has even more challenges to face. Although music processing has fascinated neuroscientists for more than a century, it is only in the last decade that it has become a subject of intense and systematic research. Aside from the effects of musical training, many more aspects of music, such as how we perceive it, how we enjoy it and how we make it, have been under the scope of researchers. There is general agreement that the brain is tuned for music, but untangling the complex circuitry behind the wondrous experience of it will require more research in this young and rich field.
Coincidence between cuts in music-program funding and the general desensitising of Americans?
..but okay that was a completely left-field jab.
edit.
I despise how complete, brainless airheads can still exist on university campuses. How the hell did you make it in here if your cognitive skills are at a middle-schooler's level? How can you ask the most vapid, unnecessary questions when the answers are a) self-evident through life experience (which you are -obviously- severely lacking, seeing how such experience necessitates trekking out beyond the mall and gossip pages); or b) easily found through a simple perusal of ready resources - in fact, the very page you registered on? Apparently, a twelve-year education was wasted on you, since you haven't yet mastered the very basic skill of reading.
Luckily for you, I suppose that your family's formidable wealth and influence (undoubtedly your ticket into higher education) will negate the need for you to ever read and comprehend and apply anything thoroughly. I can only hope that the sexual education course you alternately giggled and blankly drooled through made a halfway impression in your dense, Abercrombie-and-Fitch-stamped skull. Mercy knows that I shudder at sending any of my descendants into the same zip code as your progeny.
............oh bugger, that's scathing. I still need to finish up my saccharinely-sweet, patiently-polite response.
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| like a punch to the gutI had the wind knocked out.
I did not expect it to hurt this much.
Last Friday (and a bit of Saturday morning) marked the end of a four-year tenure I shared with about nine hundred other similarly-aged people.
We are people now. Most of us are still students, but we are not children anymore. This is what a diploma does.
I am probably never going to see most of you ever again. ("Never" meaning until the ten-year reunion.)
Four years won't be very much forty years from now, but it's almost twenty-five percent of my now-life.
Twenty-five percent. That's ..that's four apples and taking away one. That's how many months summer gets in a year (how many months I get for summer this year). That's not enough petrol in your tank for a trip from Arcadia to Davis. Twenty-five percent is half of half.
I am probably never going to see you again.
Of course, I'll see you, in passing, when the universities let out early and we all converge upon the high school for raising ruckus and reminiscing. I'll see you on Visitor's Day at band camp, I'll see you when we drop in on the first Wednesday night rehearsal and AFOB.
But no more playing Pavlov to the daily bell schedules together, jostling through hallway crowds together, exchanging words together.
One of the -or maybe the greatest- things I'll miss about Arcadia is that sensation of being hemmed in by four hundred other people and knowing that they all want the same thing that you do (or something similar). It was a uniform and being indistinguishable, but knowing that your personal excellence is vital to the cohesion of the group - as a whole. It was a four-hundred-person Bb-major chord and knowing that you could never produce something of that depth or sheer enormity on your own.
I'll miss that.
I may never see -a lot of- you again.
And these aren't the pedestrian faces I glance at in the halls. These are people with whom I was vaguely familiar - acquaintances that made me smile and made the days lighter, more bearable.
I'll miss that, too.
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| three cliches(written Thursday, 11 June 2009)
Today was a grey day.
Yesterday, I drove solo for the very first time. I went to Longley Way, Holly Avenue, and First Avenue, in that order.
Today, I walked home for what is likely the very last time.
This
walk was in complete solitude. No soundtrack, save for the purrs and
groans of cars speeding by, and the loquacious songbirds saluting the
sunless sky.
Today was like somebody pulled a switch. Or, per my mental metaphor, extinguished the flame.
Freshman
year, it was a fluorescent bulb. All flashy packaging and bright
idealism, you could appreciate the effort but it wasn’t anything to
look at – nothing extraordinary, if you’ve been acquainted with the
gentler glow of halogen lamps.
Then there was a neon light. A little subtler, but still tawdry and
flamboyant. One year’s worth of a high school education and you think
you know everything.
Junior year is an incandescent lamp.
Tungsten wires and all. Old-school classic, with a humility easier on
the eyes, but if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. There’s no
effort left for garishness here, but there’s already little to spare
for uniqueness.
Here. A candle. Not for its primitive
regression (except perhaps in hormones), but for how it burns. There is
always the wavering, the occasional flicker. The light of a candle has
no great scope, in comparison to those of electric lights. There are
always dark corners and shifting shadows. Though you see less with a
candle, you are more aware of the things around you.
In
freshman year, I had everything pre-planned out for myself. I believed
that I knew where I was headed, and what the end looked like. Whether
or not I liked it was insubstantial; I just wanted to know.
My
cognition of the surrounding world grew with every year. The circle of
light waned relative to the growing dark of the room as I realised the
great breadth of the future I was preparing myself for. This year was
me and a candle, sitting, somewhere in a cavernous room. I was staring
at the flame, waiting for the grand, glorious spectacle that would
announce the end.
That was before the flame flickered out. One
moment there was the illusion of steady warmth and light, and in the
next second, there wasn’t.
Now I’m crouching, stunned, alone
in the swallowing blackness. This is the period of time where your
pupils dilate rapidly, attempting to adjust to the new dark (it was
there all along, but you never noticed it). You’ll fumble awkwardly for
a while until you find your footing. No use sitting here by yourself in
the dark. You start walking. You can’t see where you’re headed, but
you’re willing to keep moving until you find it.
No
two candles burn the same. They may be mass-produced with the intent of
fulfilling the same function, but chaos and drip patterns and air
currents interfere, and no candle looks like another once its wick has
been lit.
I was drifting home on my usual route, when my lower body suddenly
pivoted onto a street I had never taken before. I had noticed the
street previously, of course, but it was all flat lawns and squat
houses and decorative shrubs, no leafy giants for greenery and shade.
There was a bend in the road about a hundred metres in, so I couldn't
even be sure if it was a through street. But today was a grey
day. No need for shade when there’s no sun to hide from, so I tried
something new. I took the road never-travelled.
It surprised me.
Walking
down my lateral street, I passed a fragrant rose garden. It was an
explosion of a melting crayon box, with brilliant golds blending into
vibrant pinks and deep reds. And the most irresistable aroma wafted out
over the short hedge demarcating the boundary between the private and
public properties.
For the seven seconds it took me to cross
one end of the yard to the other from the sidewalk, I inhaled. It
wasn't enough, though. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen or
smelled roses that spectacular, and in a suburban garden, no less. I
needed more.
Cautiously, I eyed the sidewalk ahead and behind
me. I have no idea what I was looking for. Maybe I didn't want to my
tentative actions to be observed. Would this count as trespassing? Two
clichés down, one to go, right?
Purposefully now, I walked up the cement path leading to the roses,
pulling my camera out. Flip, flip. Whirrr. Click. Click.
Clickclickclickclick.
It wasn't until I was walking back out of the yard that I noticed the
pair of female hands peeling vegetables beneath the half-pulled
blinds in a window I had previously thought empty.
I don't know what I'm waiting for.
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| way to honour their memoryThis is how the weekend went.
I am thirty-three percent body fat! The Internet said so. The Navy said so.
/appearance fixation.
Watched NCIS season finale.
Makes me happy:
a) The show is doing so well, a spin-off's in production.
Anti the above:
a) WHY (the cliffhanger; WHY not resolve everything?)
b) MUST WATCH RE-RUNS UNTIL NEW SEASON. IN AUTUMN.
/television geek.
Discovered EBAY.
This does not bode well.
(Un)fortunately, I'm not old enough to sign up for an account.
/materialism.
New man-crush. He's displacing the Doctor in the thirties category.
(Yes, they're categorised by age. Guess who's dominating the twenties?  ) /stalker.
Progress:
1: He's four years younger than the Doctor.
2: He's real (technically speaking; more real than ink-and-paper or pixels on a screen).
Not progress:
1: Where the Doctor was ....a doctor, yes, with degrees and the white coat and stethoscope - he is either an evil, cannibalistic serial killer or an alien.
2: He's less real. This is strange to explain. Before, it was the Doctor, himself, not one of the many ninja-y disguises he assumes. Now, it's either one of two personas assumed by this one person on-screen. It's no longer a real person; it's who he's paid to become. [deleted vulgar simile]
Therein lies the problem with celebrity crushing.  It's not very practical, the crusher is only one in a crowd, and the infatuation only lasts until the end of the episode/movie.
Cor blimey he's going to eat the cat's braaaaiiins.
random fact of the day
According to cognitive behaviourists, any set of numerals with more than six digits can be made eighteen percent more readable when hyphens or periods are used to separate every three to four digits.
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| I did not expect it to happen this way. Keeping in mind that this is the interwebz and everybody can see everything (unless if you click the "private" box instead of "public," like with that other post *ahem* shuffled in here), I appreciate the solicitude. Okay, just deleted a block of text. This stays neutral.
I resent how everything in Psych is applicable to real life. Not in the way that biology and statistics are applicable, but relevant on a personal basis.
Self-justification? Bah.
On another note: This was absurdly funny. It made my day ridiculous, my eyes water with hilarity tears, and my side ache.
Also,
Sean Maroongroge. Prom King.
He's nice, considerate, funny, cute, smart, polite; he's on varsity tennis so he must have a toned body; and he gets 114 hits on Google (not much until you consider the uniqueness of the name and that they're mostly him).
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