“The heart is not like a box that fills up, it expands in size the more you love.
Her, (2013)
Misplaced Lens Cap

@theartofmadeline

ellievsbear

izzy's playlists!
No title available
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

Kaledo Art
NASA
Game of Thrones Daily

roma★
Show & Tell

No title available
Cosmic Funnies

Love Begins
hello vonnie
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
styofa doing anything
Peter Solarz

tannertan36
Jules of Nature

seen from Romania

seen from Germany
seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from Canada
seen from Japan
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Brazil
seen from Germany
seen from Indonesia
seen from Spain
seen from Malaysia
seen from Brazil

seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
@macx-collective
“The heart is not like a box that fills up, it expands in size the more you love.
Her, (2013)
An outline for loving relationships, a doctrine for intimate revolutionaries & relationship anarchists, and a reminder to myself to live each day authentically.
I respect that each connection in my life will find its own right place, time, and spirit – with an appreciative understanding that each connection evolves in unpredictable ways.
I realize and value that there are all kinds of love, and not all of them are sexual. I will be open to all expressions of love. I will give and receive love freely and often.
I do not believe in placing arbitrary limits on myself or others based on an understanding of love as a finite commodity. I firmly believe that the more love I give, the more it grows and that people have an unlimited capacity to love.
I will strive to be aware of how social conditioning is affecting my responses to love, and work towards breaking bad habits so that love can be redefined, explored, and expressed without hindrance.
I appreciate that each expression of love is special. I recognize that all love has value and that one kind of love can never be better than another.
I will keep my heart open to receive love. I will keep my heart open to give love. I will not be afraid to explore and express love frequently in multiple ways. I will be open to vulnerability and intimacy. I will lower my shield to let love in and will slow down and listen when my shield goes up.
I understand that people have varied needs, that one person cannot fulfill all needs of another, and it is our responsibility to express and get our own needs met. I recognize that this builds community and connection, which is the goal and helps to spread love.
I will encourage those I love to love more. I will be supportive when someone I love finds love or expresses love. I will look inward if any expression of love causes me to feel threatened or insecure. I will be open to being told I am not being supportive.
I will examine my own fears and strive to not let them get in the way of expressing and experiencing love. I will listen with an open heart if someone’s honesty hurts me. I will strive to always respond with grace and speak authentically.
I believe in being open to change and fluidity in relationships, even when it hurts. I believe love is the absence of guilt and fear. I believe love is acceptance that love involves choices.
I recognize that love can become strained, love can be withheld, and love can be painful. I will strive to be honest with myself and others in order to remain compassionate to myself and others.
I respect that love fosters deep bonds, and that expressions of love should be encouraged without the fear of threatening someone else’s comfort. I believe that compassion, safety, trust, and respect are essential to maintaining love.
I believe that self-love is essential, and without it, love is impossible.
In fact, if one person is unkind to an animal it is considered to be cruelty, but where a lot of people are unkind to animals, especially in the name of commerce, the cruelty is condoned and, once large sums of money are at stake, will be defended to the last by otherwise intelligent people.
Ruth Harrison (via veganexplanations)
I am the storm and I am the wonder And the flashlights nightmares And sudden explosions
What Else is There,
Röyksopp
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
- Out Of The Night That Covers Me (Invictus), William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)
When we deny the EVIL within ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves, and we deprive ourselves not only of our own destiny but of any possibility of dealing with the EVIL of others. - J. Robert Oppenheimer
Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn't stop for anybody.
Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
With dearly beloved Gigame.
(Image caption: Motor neurons (green) form synapses (highlighted in magenta) on muscle fibers in a fruit fly. MIT neuroscientists have discovered a pathway that contributes to strengthening these synapses. Credit: Troy Littleton)
Neuroscientists reveal how the brain can enhance connections
When the brain forms memories or learns a new task, it encodes the new information by tuning connections between neurons. MIT neuroscientists have discovered a novel mechanism that contributes to the strengthening of these connections, also called synapses.
At each synapse, a presynaptic neuron sends chemical signals to one or more postsynaptic receiving cells. In most previous studies of how these connections evolve, scientists have focused on the role of the postsynaptic neurons. However, the MIT team has found that presynaptic neurons also influence connection strength.
“This mechanism that we’ve uncovered on the presynaptic side adds to a toolkit that we have for understanding how synapses can change,” says Troy Littleton, a professor in the departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and the senior author of the study, which appears in the Nov. 18 issue of Neuron.
Learning more about how synapses change their connections could help scientists better understand neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism, since many of the genetic alterations linked to autism are found in genes that code for synaptic proteins.
Richard Cho, a research scientist at the Picower Institute, is the paper’s lead author.
Rewiring the brain
One of the biggest questions in the field of neuroscience is how the brain rewires itself in response to changing behavioral conditions — an ability known as plasticity. This is particularly important during early development but continues throughout life as the brain learns and forms new memories.
Over the past 30 years, scientists have found that strong input to a postsynaptic cell causes it to traffic more receptors for neurotransmitters to its surface, amplifying the signal it receives from the presynaptic cell. This phenomenon, known as long-term potentiation (LTP), occurs following persistent, high-frequency stimulation of the synapse. Long-term depression (LTD), a weakening of the postsynaptic response caused by very low-frequency stimulation, can occur when these receptors are removed.
Scientists have focused less on the presynaptic neuron’s role in plasticity, in part because it is more difficult to study, Littleton says.
His lab has spent several years working out the mechanism for how presynaptic cells release neurotransmitter in response to spikes of electrical activity known as action potentials. When the presynaptic neuron registers an influx of calcium ions, carrying the electrical surge of the action potential, vesicles that store neurotransmitters fuse to the cell’s membrane and spill their contents outside the cell, where they bind to receptors on the postsynaptic neuron.
The presynaptic neuron also releases neurotransmitter in the absence of action potentials, in a process called spontaneous release. These “minis” have previously been thought to represent noise occurring in the brain. However, Littleton and Cho found that minis could be regulated to drive synaptic structural plasticity.
To investigate how synapses are strengthened, Littleton and Cho studied a type of synapse known as neuromuscular junctions, in fruit flies. The researchers stimulated the presynaptic neurons with a rapid series of action potentials over a short period of time. As expected, these cells released neurotransmitter synchronously with action potentials. However, to their surprise, the researchers found that mini events were greatly enhanced well after the electrical stimulation had ended.
“Every synapse in the brain is releasing these mini events, but people have largely ignored them because they only induce a very small amount of activity in the postsynaptic cell,” Littleton says. “When we gave a strong activity pulse to these neurons, these mini events, which are normally very low-frequency, suddenly ramped up and they stayed elevated for several minutes before going down.”
Synaptic growth
The enhancement of minis appears to provoke the postsynaptic neuron to release a signaling factor, still unidentified, that goes back to the presynaptic cell and activates an enzyme called PKA. This enzyme interacts with a vesicle protein called complexin, which normally acts as a brake, clamping vesicles to prevent release neurotransmitter until it’s needed. Stimulation by PKA modifies complexin so that it releases its grip on the neurotransmitter vesicles, producing mini events.
When these small packets of neurotransmitter are released at elevated rates, they help stimulate growth of new connections, known as boutons, between the presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons. This makes the postsynaptic neuron even more responsive to any future communication from the presynaptic neuron.
“Typically you have 70 or so of these boutons per cell, but if you stimulate the presynaptic cell you can grow new boutons very acutely. It will double the number of synapses that are formed,” Littleton says.
The researchers observed this process throughout the flies’ larval development, which lasts three to five days. However, Littleton and Cho demonstrated that acute changes in synaptic function could also lead to synaptic structural plasticity during development.
“Machinery in the presynaptic terminal can be modified in a very acute manner to drive certain forms of plasticity, which could be really important not only in development, but also in more mature states where synaptic changes can occur during behavioral processes like learning and memory,” Cho says.
The study is significant because it is among the first to reveal how presynaptic neurons contribute to plasticity, says Maria Bykhovskaia, a professor of neurology at Wayne State University School of Medicine who was not involved in the research.
“It was known that the growth of neural connections was determined by activity, but specifically what was going on was not very clear,” Bykhovskaia says. “They beautifully used Drosophila to determine the molecular pathway.”
Littleton’s lab is now trying to figure out more of the mechanistic details of how complexin controls vesicle release.
Every day is the opportunity for a better tomorrow.
Nix, Tomorrowland (2015)
Fuck You Brain
Fuck you my shit brain turd son of a bitch shut up. Fucker won't shut up. Tell it to shut up will you? Goddammit. I love you brain but sometimes you are fucking moronic. What the fuck. You need a bitch slap. Wake up you shit. Stop that nagging.
We live in a world in which the majority of encounters and interactions involve work and commodity exchange. In other words, the dominant forms of relating are economic, based on the domination of survival over life. In such a world, it is no surprise that the concept of friendship no longer has much value. Today, neither the daily interactions of one’s “communities” (these strange, disconnected “communities” of family, school, work) nor the chance encounters (at the market, on the bus, at some public event) have much chance of sparking a real and intense interest in another, an impassioned curiosity to discover who they are what we might be able to create with them. The common thread that runs through these not so varied interactions and encounters is that they originate in the operations of domination and exploitation, in the social order that immiserates our lives an to which most people grudgingly submit. The sorts of relationships most likely to spring from such a situation are those that reflect the humiliation and social impoverishment inherent in it. Based on the necessity to escape the isolation of a crowded, but atomized society, a generalized “friendliness” that is slightly more than mere politeness (since it permits harmless, light mockery and safe, substanceless flirtation) develops. On the basis of this generalized “friendliness”, it is possible to meet some individuals with whom to commiserate more closely — people with whom to share a beer at the pub, go to football games or rock shows or rent a movie... And these are one’s friends. It really is no wonder then that what is called friendship today so often seems to be nothing more than the camaraderie of mutual humiliation and disrespectful toleration. When all we really have in common is our shared exploitation and enslavement to commodity consumption and our differences mainly lie in our social identities, themselves largely defined by our jobs,, the commodities we buy and our uses to those who rule us, there is really very little to spark pride, joy, wonder and passion in our so-called friendships. If the deep loneliness of massified, commodified society draws us to others, what little our impoverished beings have to offer each other soon leads to resentment. Thus, interactions between friends at this time seem to be mostly dominated by comic mockery and various forms of one-upmanship. While such forms of play may indeed be amusing as part of a strong relationship based on real mutual pleasure, when it becomes the main way of relating, surely something is lacking. Some of us refuse to accept the impositions of exploitation and domination. We strive to create our own lives and in the process of create our live and in the process create relationships that escape the logic of submission to proletarianization and commodity consumption. By our own will, we redefine our commonalities and our differences, clarifying them through the alchemy of struggle and revolt, basing them on our own passions and desires. This makes the form that friendship tends to take in this society completely unpalatable: to simply tolerate another out of loneliness and call this one friend — how pathetic! Starting from that sense of pride that moved us to rebel, that point of selfish dignity that will not tolerate further humiliation, we seek to build our friendships upon the greatness we discover in each other — joy, passion, wonder sparked both by what we share in common and by how we differ. Why should we expect less of friendship than we do of erotic love? Why do we expect so little of both? Rebellion sparks fire in the hearts of those who rise up, and this fire calls for relationships that burn: loves, friendships, and, yes, even hatreds that reflect the intensity of rebellion. The greatest insult we can give another human being is to merely tolerate them, so let us pursue friendships with the same intensity with which we pursue love, blurring the boundaries between them, creating our own fierce and beautiful ways of relating free of that logic of submission to mediocrity imposed by the state and capital.
Against the Logic of Submission, Wolfi Landstreicher (2005)
moving beyond human, someday
Things I Want On a Sunday Night Isa Gueye
The mind-controlled Modular Prosthetic Limb [ Δ ]
@roboticjames