Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
We often contemplate cyborgs, people enhanced by machines, but what would a civilization built upon cybernetics be like?
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Our brains constantly work to make predictions about what’s going on around us, for instance to ensure that we can attend to and consider the unexpected. A new study examines how this works during consciousness and also breaks down under general anesthesia. The results add evidence for the idea that conscious thought requires synchronized communication—mediated by brain rhythms in specific frequency bands—between basic sensory and higher-order cognitive regions of the brain.
Previously, members of the research team in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and at Vanderbilt University had described how brain rhythms enable the brain to remain prepared to attend to surprises.
Cognition-oriented brain regions (generally at the front of the brain), use relatively low frequency alpha and beta rhythms to suppress processing by sensory regions (generally toward the back of the brain) of stimuli that have become familiar and mundane in the environment (e.g. your co-worker’s music). When sensory regions detect a surprise (e.g. the office fire alarm), they use faster frequency gamma rhythms to tell the higher regions about it and the higher regions process that at gamma frequencies to decide what to do (e.g. exit the building).
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
Aesthetic bewilderment is a kind of common ground in science and art, an engine for new ideas in both disciplines, writes Brazilian artist Vik Muniz in the introduction to a new book of photographs and essays about bacteria by microbiologist Tal Danino. That book, titled Beautiful Bacteria: Encounters in the Microuniverse, was published last week.
Danino collaborated with Muniz on a number of projects—including one that involved making art out of viruses and cancer cells—when Muniz was a visiting artist at MIT. “I think that scientists oftentimes see a beautiful pattern and wonder about the underlying processes that make such a pattern happen,” says Danino when I ask him what aesthetic bewilderment means to him. Take the complex architectures of the snowflake, the markings on the coats of animals, or the fractal-like arrangements produced by some communities of microbes. “I think that there’s a lot of scientific work that just begins with a scientist saying, ‘Wow, this is such a cool pattern or dynamic process and I really want to study it,’” he says.
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
While the benefits of music therapy are well known, more in-depth research explores how music benefits children with autism.
