Music, Mind, and Meaning This is a revised version of AI Memo No. 616, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. An earlier published version appeared in Music, Mind, and Brain: The Neuropsychology of Music (Manfred Clynes, ed.) Plenum, New York, 1981 Why Do We Like Music? Why do we like music? Have we the tools for such work? Certainly we know a bit about the obvious processes of reason–the ways we organize and represent ideas we get. The old distinctions among emotion, reason, and aesthetics are like the earth, air, and fire of an ancient alchemy. Much of what we now know of the mind emerged in this century from other subjects once considered just as personal and inaccessible but which were explored, for example, by Freud in his work on adults' dreams and jokes, and by Piaget in his work on children's thought and play. Why do we like music? I feel that music theory has gotten stuck by trying too long to find universals. Sonata as Teaching Machine Compare a sonata to a teacher. Cadence. What Use Is Music?
Brain Explorer The Human Brain - Stress Chronic over-secretion of stress hormones adversely affects brain function, especially memory. Too much cortisol can prevent the brain from laying down a new memory, or from accessing already existing memories. The renowned brain researcher, Robert M. Sapolsky, has shown that sustained stress can damage the hippocampus , the part of the limbic brain which is central to learning and memory. The culprits are "glucocorticoids," a class of steroid hormones secreted from the adrenal glands during stress. They are more commonly know as corticosteroids or cortisol . During a perceived threat, the adrenal glands immediately release adrenalin. topics
Artificial Brains - The quest to build sentient machines Neuroscience News - Neuroscience Research Neuroscience Labs Neuroscience Jobs Neuroscience Books Reviews Neuroscience Forums Social Network How the Brain Stops Time One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye. Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. Anxious people, they found, experience greater time dilation in response to the same threat stimuli. An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat? Was it scary enough to generate a sense of time dilation?
The neurobiology of politics What, if anything, should we make of studies that purport to find neurological differences between people who self-identify as "conservative" and people who self-identify as "liberal?" You've seen studies like that in the paper. You've heard them argued about on radio and TV shows. But what do they actually mean? Is this just so much high-tech phrenology? Behavioral therapist Andrea Kuszewski has a great guest post up at The Intersection blog, looking at what we can (and can't) learn from the handful of studies that have attempted to link politics and neurobiology. If you're going to talk about these studies at all, Kuszewski writes, you're going to have to understand the context behind them. This is definitely a story worth reading all the way through. 1.
Sexual orientation – wired that way In a recent post, I presented the evidence that sexual preference is strongly influenced by genetic variation. Here, I discuss the neurobiological evidence that shows that the brains of homosexual men and women are wired differently from those of their heterosexual counterparts. First, we must consider the differences between the brains of heterosexual males and females. These differences are extensive and arise mainly due to the influence of testosterone during a critical period of early development (see Wired for Sex). It should be emphasized that all of these differences are apparent only in group averages and there is very substantial overlap in the distributions of the measures of different brain regions in males and females. With that as background, what have studies of the brains of homosexual men and women found? Differences in brain activation have also been observed, for example in response to pheromones or to visual presentation of male or female faces. Swaab DF (2008).
The Cognitive Behavioral Miracle – Controlling your Emotions Most people who have never experienced a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) session, or at least read about it, tend to share the notion that what psychologists do is pretty much listen to your problems, sometimes offer advice and different points of view, and make you think about your feelings, actions, and emotions. In this popular view of therapy, the patient (or client) is a rather passive subject, and the therapist is the one doing the work. Personally, I don’t think there has been a more profound revolution in the study of human psychology as the cognitive behavioral revolution. I first became fascinated with CBT while translating and editing some course materials for the director of the CBT Institute in Ireland, Sylvia Buet. I then discovered that when one mentions behavioral, most people would think of Pavlov-style basic stimuli-response training; while CBT was in reality much more complex. In a nutshell Problem classification Proven results Conclusions References Dobson KS.
Brain Fitness And Memory Programs, Brain Training - CogniFit - StumbleUpon Neurological Control - Neurotransmitters Neurotransmitter Molecules Neurotransmitters can be broadly split into two groups – the ‘classical’, small molecule neurotransmitters and the relatively larger neuropeptide neurotransmitters. Within the category of small molecule neurotransmitters, the biogenic amines (dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin and histamine) are often referred to as a discrete group because of their similarity in terms of their chemical properties. Click on the links in the table above to read more about some of the important neurotransmitters. Serotonin Although the CNS contains less than 2% of the total serotonin in the body, serotonin plays a very important role in a range of brain functions. Within the brain, serotonin is localised mainly in nerve pathways emerging from the raphe nuclei, a group of nuclei at the centre of the reticular formation in the Midbrain, pons and medulla. Noradrenaline Find out more about noradrenaline and serotonin Dopamine Acetylcholine Neurotransmitter Receptors Serotoning receptors
Dream facts Dreaming is one of the most mysterious experiences in our lives. During the Roman Era, some dreams were submitted to the Roman Senate for analysis and dream interpretation. They were thought to be messages from the gods. 1. Within 5 minutes of waking, half of your dream is forgotten. 2. People who became blind after birth can see images in their dreams. 3. Every human being dreams (except in cases of extreme psychological disorder). 4. Our mind is not inventing faces – in our dreams we see real faces of real people that we have seen during our life but may not know or remember. 5. A full 12% of sighted people dream exclusively in black and white. 6. If you dream about some particular subject it is not often that the dream is about that. 7. The most common emotion experienced in dreams is anxiety. 8. While the content of most dreams is dreamt only once, many people experience recurring dreams—that is, the same dream narrative is experienced over different occasions of sleep. 9. 10. 11.