black holes and gray matter. in one thousand tangos.

             

“Music moves people of all cultures, in a way that doesn’t seem to happen with other animals. Nobody really understands why listening to music — which, unlike sex or food, has no intrinsic value — can trigger such profoundly rewarding experiences. Salimpoor and other neuroscientists are trying to figure it out with the help of brain scanners.

Yesterday, for example, researchers from Stanford reported that when listening to a new piece of classical music, different people show the same patterns of synchronized activity in several brain areas, suggesting some level of universal experience. But obviously no one’s experience is exactly the same. In today’s issue of Science, Salimpoor’s group reports that when you listen to a song for the first time, the strength of certain neural connections can predict how much you like the music, and that these preferences are guided by what you’ve heard and enjoyed in the past. […]

A few years ago, Salimpoor and Zatorre performed another type of brain scanning experiment in which participants listened to music that gave them goosebumps or chills. The researchers then injected them with a radioactive tracer that binds to the receptors of dopamine, a chemical that’s involved in motivation and reward. With this technique, called positron emission tomography or PET, the researchers showed that 15 minutes after participants listened to their favorite song, their brains flooded with dopamine.

The dopamine system is old, evolutionarily speaking, and is active in many animals during sex and eating. ‘But animals don’t get intense pleasures to music,’ Salimpoor says. ‘So we knew there had to be a lot more to it.’”

Why Does Music Feel So Good

NASA wants to identify an interesting asteroid in deep space, figure out a way to capture the spinning and hard-to-grab orb, nudge it into our planetary region, and set it into orbit around the moon “The capture would be performed robotically, and the relocated asteroid would become a destination for astronauts to explore—and, possibly, for space entrepreneurs to mine. The idea may sound more like science fiction than national policy, but it actually fits in with key goals of the Obama administration and the space community. Those goals include learning how to identify asteroids heading toward us and to change their course, finding destinations for astronauts to go as they try to learn how to make the longer trip to Mars, and looking for opportunities for space investors.”

NASA wants to identify an interesting asteroid in deep space, figure out a way to capture the spinning and hard-to-grab orb, nudge it into our planetary region, and set it into orbit around the moon

“The capture would be performed robotically, and the relocated asteroid would become a destination for astronauts to explore—and, possibly, for space entrepreneurs to mine.

The idea may sound more like science fiction than national policy, but it actually fits in with key goals of the Obama administration and the space community.

Those goals include learning how to identify asteroids heading toward us and to change their course, finding destinations for astronauts to go as they try to learn how to make the longer trip to Mars, and looking for opportunities for space investors.”

Obama to Unveil Initiative to Map the Human Brain

“President Obama on Tuesday will announce a broad new research initiative, starting with $100 million in 2014, to invent and refine new technologies to understand the human brain. […] The effort will require the development of new tools not yet available to neuroscientists and, eventually, perhaps lead to progress in treating diseases like Alzheimer’s and epilepsy and traumatic brain injury. It will involve both government agencies and private institutions.

The initiative, which scientists involved in promoting the idea have been calling the Brain Activity Map project, will officially be known as Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or Brain for short; it has been designated a grand challenge of the 21st century by the Obama administration.”

“Sound can enter our ears in one of two ways: air-conducted or bone-conducted.

Air-conducted sound—listening to a recording of oneself speaking, for example—is transmitted through the eardrums, vibrating three bony ossicles (malleus, incus and stapes) and terminating in the cochlea. The cochlea, a fluid-filled spiral structure, converts these vibrations into nerve impulses to be interpreted in the brain.

What we hear when we speak, however, is bone-conducted. Vibrations from our vocal cords directly reach the cochlea. Our skulls deceive us by, in fact, lowering the frequency of these vibrations along the way, which is why we often perceive ourselves as higher-pitched when we listen to a recording.

“When [someone] listens to a recording of their voice speaking, the bone-conducted pathway that they consider part of their ‘normal’ voice is eliminated, and they hear only the air-conducted component in unfamiliar isolation—what everybody else actually hears,” says Dr. Chris Chang, an otolaryngologist at Fauquier Ear, Nose & Throat Consultants in Warrenton, Virginia.

That explains why we perceive our voices differently, but why do we dislike what we hear?

It’s kind of the same way we like what we see in the mirror, but not what we see in photographs.

We grow up getting used to all of our asymmetries as reflected in the mirror—parting our hair to the left, the little mole on our right cheek, that chip in our left incisor.  When we see a photo of ourselves, all of these tiny differences don’t match up with what our brain expects to see, so we dislike it.

Likewise, we live our lives hearing and perfecting our bone-conducted, but not air-conducted, voices.”

Why You Hate the Sound of Your Own Voice

“To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your precious teeth, the only set you have, the body evolved an automated braking system faster and more sophisticated than anything on a Lexus. The jaw knows its own strength. The faster and more recklessly you close your mouth, the less force the muscles are willing to apply. Without your giving it a conscious thought. Teeth and jaws are impressive not for their strength but for their sensitivity… Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch.” The Marvels in Your Mouth

“To keep your he-man jaw muscles from smashing your precious teeth, the only set you have, the body evolved an automated braking system faster and more sophisticated than anything on a Lexus. The jaw knows its own strength. The faster and more recklessly you close your mouth, the less force the muscles are willing to apply. Without your giving it a conscious thought. Teeth and jaws are impressive not for their strength but for their sensitivity… Chew on this: Human teeth can detect a grain of sand or grit 10 microns in diameter. A micron is 1/25,000 of an inch.”

The Marvels in Your Mouth

©2011 Kateoplis