The Neuroscience Of Music - Wired Science Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI) they were able to obtain an impressively precise portrait of music in the brain. The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to.
Michio Kaku: Can We Have Brain-to-Brain Communication? | Science News Countdown: 7 Medical Myths Even Doctors Believe | Untrue Medical Myths & Common Medical Misconceptions Robert Roy Britt | January 24, 2012 10:00am ET Credit: sukiyaki | shutterstock Popular culture is loaded with myths and half-truths. Most are harmless. But when doctors start believing medical myths, perhaps it's time to worry. In 2007, a study published in the British Medical Journal looked into several common misconceptions, from the belief that a person should drink eight glasses of water per day to the notion that reading in low light ruins your eyesight. "We got fired up about this because we knew that physicians accepted these beliefs and were passing this information along to their patients," said Aaron Carroll, assistant professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Click on for the top 7 most common medical myths — debunked.
5 mind-bending facts about dreams When your head hits the pillow, for many it's lights out for the conscious part of you. But the cells firing in your brain are very much awake, sparking enough energy to produce the sometimes vivid and sometimes downright haunted dreams that take place during the rapid-eye-movement stage of your sleep. Why do some people have nightmares while others really spend their nights in bliss? Here's some of what we know about what goes on in dreamland. 1. As if nightmares weren't bad enough, a rare sleep disorder — called REM sleep behavior disorder — causes people to act out their dreams, sometimes with violent thrashes, kicks and screams. 2. Staying up late has its perks, but whimsical dreaming is not one of them. In the study 264 university students rated how often they experienced nightmares on a scale from 0 to 4, never to always, respectively. 3. As in their wake hours, men also dream about sex more than women do. 4. 5.
Ask an Expert - BrainFacts.org | Science News End of the World? Top Doomsday Fears | May 21 Doomsday, 2012 Doomsday | Apocalypse Scenarios By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | Credit: © Dgrilla | Dreamstime.comDoomsday fears With more and more technologies able to wreak mass destruction, a greater knowledge of what cosmic threats our planet faces, and more forms of media capable of trumpeting Armageddon, it seems as if there is more hype than ever about one supposedly impending apocalypse or another in 2012, despite all the failed doomsday predictions over the years. Here are 10 apocalyptic scenarios that have raised fears about the end of civilization, in alphabetical order. Credit: David P HughesZombies There are brain-controlling parasites effectively capable of turning ants into zombies, but no known germs can turn people into the walking dead. Charles Q. Charles Q. Charles Q.
inversion vieillissement A technique to keep the tips of your chromosomes healthy could reverse tissue ageing. The work, which was done in mice, is yet more evidence of a causal link between chromosome length and age-related disease. Telomeres, the caps of DNA which protect the ends of chromosomes, shorten every time cells divide. Mariela Jaskelioff and her colleagues at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, engineered mice with short telomeres and inactive telomerase to see what would happen when they turned the enzyme back on. Four weeks after the team switched on the enzyme, they found that tissue had regenerated in several organs, new brain cells were developing and the mice were living longer. Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09603 Subscribe to New Scientist and you'll get: New Scientist magazine delivered every week Unlimited access to all New Scientist online content - a benefit only available to subscribers Great savings from the normal price Subscribe now! Recommended by
Creative Genius: The World's Greatest Minds | Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawking & Albert Einstein | Geniuses LiveScience Staff | October 06, 2011 01:12pm ET Credit: Apple News of the death of Apple founder Steve Jobs on Oct. 5, 2011, has been received with sadness, admiration and gratefulness for a man considered a "creative genius" who "changed the world" in many ways. In addition to Jobs, plenty of great minds have challenged paradigms, opened windows into worlds we didn't even know existed, and produced innovations that have persisted through time. Here's a look at the world's titanic thinkers, from Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein to Stephen Hawking. molecules storage Storage is a very exciting thing these days: SSDs are increasing in capacity and becoming cheaper, hard drives are offering storage capacity that’s unprecedented at the consumer level, and recently, scientists have been able to store significant amounts of data using unusual mediums, such as strings of DNA and small groups of atoms. Now, scientists have managed to store data in individual molecules. Using a new, still-experimental technology, researchers have managed to turn individual molecules into a storage medium. Molecular memory isn’t an entirely new concept but there have always been significant hurdles, the first of which is no stranger to the computing world: cooling. The team also overcame another significant hurdle standing in the way of molecular memory. Research paper: Interface-engineered templates for molecular spin memory devices [Image credit: Wallsonline]
10 age-defying celebs: Harry Belafonte Interested in uplifting stories on the natural world, sustainable communities, simple food, and new thinking on how to live well? Please enter a valid email address and try again! No thanks Accelerating Future » Top 10 Transhumanist Technologies Transhumanists advocate the improvement of human capacities through advanced technology. Not just technology as in gadgets you get from Best Buy, but technology in the grander sense of strategies for eliminating disease, providing cheap but high-quality products to the world’s poorest, improving quality of life and social interconnectedness, and so on. Technology we don’t notice because it’s blended in with the fabric of the world, but would immediately take note of its absence if it became unavailable. Transhumanists tend to take a longer-than-average view of technological progress, looking not just five or ten years into the future but twenty years, thirty years, and beyond. 10. Cryonics is the high-fidelity preservation of the human body, and particularly the brain, after what we would call death, in anticipation of possible future revival. 9. Clearly, World of Warcraft’s eight million subscribers and SecondLife’s five million subscribers are onto something. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2. 1.
Why do humans still have body hair? Human body hair might seem to be useless on today's modern man, but it could help us detect parasites, researchers suggest, adding there's a chance our female ancestors preferred a bug-free mate, and so opted for hairier guys. Humans appear relatively hairless compared with our ape relatives, but the density of hair follicles on our skin is actually the same as would be expected of an ape our size. The fine hairs that cover our bodies, which have replaced the thicker ones seen on our close relatives, are thought to be an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors. Now scientists find these fine hairs are useful after all — people with more of them are better at detecting bedbugs. "I run a research group that seeks to understand the biology of bloodsucking insects," said researcher Michael Siva-Jothy, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Sheffield in England. The scientists detailed their findings online Dec. 13 in the journal Biology Letters. Related on LiveScience:
Qu'est-ce que la conscience - Le cerveau à tous les niveaux Parmi toutes les approches philosophiques proposées au fil des siècles pour tenter de résoudre , le dualisme et le matérialisme recueillent l’adhésion d’un nombre considérable de penseurs. Ceux-ci ont toutefois été amenés à nuancer ces deux positions théoriques générales afin de faire face aux critiques formulées à leur endroit. Pour éviter les pièges du dualisme de substance par exemple, on a proposé un « dualisme de propriété ». La douleur aurait par exemple une propriété physique (les fibres C qui émettent des potentiels d’action) et, en même temps, une propriété consciente (le sentiment douloureux). Pour les dualistes de propriété comme David Chalmers, cette option ne constitue pas un rejet de la science mais au contraire un appel à élargir ses horizons, en reconnaissant la conscience comme une entité à part entière, aussi fondamentale que l’espace, le temps ou la force gravitationnelle. D’après Valentine, E.R. (1982) et