Music-Memory Connection Found in Brain | LiveScience People have long known that music can trigger powerful recollections, but now a brain-scan study has revealed where this happens in our noggins. The part of the brain known as the medial pre-frontal cortex sits just behind the forehead, acting like recent Oscar host Hugh Jackman singing and dancing down Hollywood's memory lane. "What seems to happen is that a piece of familiar music serves as a soundtrack for a mental movie that starts playing in our head." said Petr Janata, a cognitive neuroscientist at University of California, Davis. "It calls back memories of a particular person or place, and you might all of a sudden see that person's face in your mind's eye." Janata began suspecting the medial pre-frontal cortex as a music-processing and music-memories region when he saw that part of the brain actively tracking chord and key changes in music. "This is the first study using music to look at [the neural correlates of] autobiographical memory," Janata told LiveScience.
Reduce stress with 3 operational modes | Tim's Blog A large part of stress is thinking about something that worries you for too long or in a repeated cyclic fashion. It can happen very naturally, as our minds can be free to wander at any given time in the day. Sometimes we let problems cycle in our minds uncontrollably. The loop must be broken. A good way to prevent such insanity is to change the way you think. The initial resistance you may have to dividing up your day this way is that you might miss some opportunity to resolve that problem. And it’s been shown that reducing stress can increase productivity. So consider spending a set amount of time, maybe in the morning, to think about problems. In the second mode, you will get busy and start doing things. You will experience great productivity. Finally, you need the third operational mode: relaxation. Passive relaxation is a bit harder for beginners. Hope you enjoyed this tip!
This is your Brain on Music | Neurotic Physiology Sci will admit I spent most the time "preparing" for this post by listening to LOTS of music. This is your brain: (Source) Is this your brain on Music? (Source) Well, to be entirely honest...probably not. So, let's start out with a little bit of a musical "high": (ahhhhhh, that's the stuff) Salimpoor, et al. Whenever I do outreach to kids in schools about drug research and drugs in the brain, we end up talking about "natural" highs. The idea is this: humans find a lot of things pleasurable. (Dopamine system is in Blue, image is from NIDA) The nucleus accumbens is mostly studied for the way dopamine signals within it change in response to drugs like cocaine or amphetamine. ...and music. To see how much of an effect (and in what time the effect worked) music has on the brain, the authors of this study recruited people who responded strongly to music. They took people who got "chills" when listening to music, and unlike other studies, they had them bring their music IN. Time for pretty pictures.
Tony Schwartz: The Myths of the Overworked Creative :: Videos :: The 99 Percent Time is finite, but we act as if it were otherwise, assuming that longer hours always lead to increased productivity. But in reality our bodies are designed to pulse and pause – to expend energy and then renew it. In this revelatory talk, energy expert Tony Schwartz debunks common productivity myths and shows us how to regain control over our energy so we can produce great work. Tony Schwartz is founder and CEO of The Energy Project, a company that helps individuals and organizations fuel energy, engagement, focus, and productivity by drawing on the science of high performance. Tony has written four bestselling books, including The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, published in 2010, and The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy Not Time, co-authored with Jim Loehr.Tony has also published widely about leadership, engagement, and culture change. www.theenergyproject.com@tonyschwartz
Music a 'mega-vitamin' for the brain - CNN.com LONDON, England (CNN) -- When Nina Temple was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2000, then aged 44, she quickly became depressed, barely venturing out of her house as she struggled to come to terms with living with the chronic condition. Sing for Joy is a choir made up of sufferers of neurological conditions plus friends, family and carers. "I was thinking of all the things which I wished I'd done with my life and I wouldn't be able to do. And then I started thinking about all the things that I still actually could do and singing was one of those," Temple told CNN. Along with a fellow Parkinson's sufferer, Temple decided, on a whim, to form a choir. By 2003, with the help of funding from the Parkinson's Disease Society, the resulting ensemble "Sing For Joy" was up and running, rehearsing weekly and soon graduating to public performances. Watch Sing for Joy perform » But singing also has physical and neurological benefits for the choir's members. Vital Signs Each month CNN's Dr.
The Four Paradoxes of Great Performance We each long for certainty – the security of simple answers. What, for example, are the specific qualities that make us more likely to be successful? Companies spend millions of dollars trying to define the key competencies for specific jobs. Researchers seek to pinpoint the qualities that distinguish top performers from everyone else. The more time I spend working with leaders at other companies, and leading a company of my own, the more convinced I’ve become that the paradoxical key to great performance – and leadership – is the capacity to embrace opposites.Stoic philosophers referred to this as the mutual entailment of the virtues. No virtue, they argued, is a virtue by itself. Honesty in the absence of compassion becomes cruelty. As Gregory Bateson put it: “There is always an optimal value beyond which anything is toxic, no matter what: oxygen, sleep, psychotherapy, philosophy.” Instead, operate best when we embrace our opposites in each of the four key dimensions of our lives: 1.
Let’s rock! Even newborns can follow a rhythm - Health - Children's health | NBC News Newborns can follow a rhythm, a new study has found, suggesting rocking out is innate. The finding, published in the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, adds to growing evidence that the newborn brain is not the blank slate it was once thought to be. Rather, scientists have shown, at birth we already have sophisticated methods for interpreting the world. Discrimination may be crude, explained lead researcher István Winkler of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, but "the basic algorithms are in place already." This may be particularly true when it comes to sound. Newborns can't exactly swing their hips to prove they can jive, so Winkler and his colleague Henkjan Honing of the University of Amsterdam monitored the brains of 14 infants listening to variations of a rock rhythm — complete with drum, snare and high hat cymbal. Infants can perceive anger, happiness and sadness from a caregiver's cooing and baby babble, he said.
How to Identify and Learn from Your Mistakes Until mankind realizes that by "Design" is made to "Fail" he will always have a problem realizing his or her mistakes. We are not all created equal?,some of us are Tall, short, fat, thin, smart and dumb! That is a fact of life you can't ignore!