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.

The untold story of the fight over the legacy of “H.M.” — the patient who revolutionized the science of memory.

One evening, some 40 years ago, I got lost in time. I was at a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major.

A heartbreaking, fascinating profile of a postman with LSD-induced (-abetted?) schizophrenia.

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.

This guy seems to have some family issues that his addiction to incoming data via screens is severely aggravating. I experience, on a smaller scale, some of the problems outlined in this article, and, though none of this is particularly new to me, it's frightening to see these habits taken down the slippery slope. Should all of us, and especially people like Kord, make a concerted effort to make screens less a part of our lives, lest we lose our humanity? Or is trying to avoid technology's increasing integration with our every second just being traditionally biased and counter-progressive? I think there is a middle ground where one can be hooked in and focused on doing work while still not ignoring ones' children. Food for thought.

Why we need fiction, and why we pretend.

Written with the opinion that this is necessarily a Bad Thing. Revisit; this is interesting.

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?

Stressing the importance of actively engaging everything that you take in and the way that you take it in, so you can synthesize and maximize and!

"Equalizing the balance causes your brain to reorganize the tones, so that you hear two smooth melodies instead."