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#science #brain
Natalie Angier: New Ways Into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’ (NYT)
Natalie Angier: New Ways Into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’ (NYT)
Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response. Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.
·nytimes.com·
Natalie Angier: New Ways Into the Brain’s ‘Music Room’ (NYT)
Bering in Mind: Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself
Bering in Mind: Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself
Jesse Bering: “I don’t think any scholar ever captured the suicidal mind better than Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister in his 1990 Psychological Review article , ‘Suicide as Escape from the Self.’” An exploration of the six conditions that lead to suicide — academic, informative, and imploring.
·scientificamerican.com·
Bering in Mind: Being Suicidal: What it feels like to want to kill yourself
BBC News: Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia'
BBC News: Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia'
So if people are naturally creative or not, to what degree does 'encouraging' creativity even work? And do we understand this enough to know what aspects of creativity we are encouraging, or rather I should say: do we know how to encourage the 'good' parts of being creative and not make people into schizophrenics/sociopaths?
·news.bbc.co.uk·
BBC News: Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia'