M/\K/\N/\

Like you would appreciate a gift from the heart, Appreciate the Process...

[makanamuses]

The rainbow questions

Those faithless when all thunder 

Is silent anew

 -- MJL

 🌍👳🌺 

 #AppreciatetheProcess

[makanamuses]

It's my 14 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

[icaseybaybee]

[remanence-of-love]

[miseducatedmelanicmuse]

[moonfirebrides]

Nina Simone

[endlessrebel]

You owe it to yourself to be you.

- endlessrebel

[miseducatedmelanicmuse]

[exhaled-spirals]

« Tenderness is the art of personifying, of sharing feelings, and thus endlessly discovering similarities. Creating stories means constantly bringing things to life, giving an existence to all the tiny pieces of the world that are represented by human experiences […]. Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed. It is thanks to tenderness that the teapot starts to talk.

Tenderness is the most modest form of love. […] It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our “self”. Tenderness is spontaneous and disinterested; it goes far beyond empathetic fellow feeling. Instead it is the conscious, though perhaps slightly melancholy, common sharing of fate. Tenderness is deep emotional concern about another being, its fragility, its unique nature, and its lack of immunity to suffering and the effects of time. Tenderness perceives the bonds that connect us, the similarities and sameness between us. It is a way of looking that shows the world as being alive, living, interconnected, cooperating with, and codependent on itself.

Literature is built on tenderness […]. »

— Olga Tokarczuk in her Nobel speech, December 2019

[wtf-fun-factss]

Tsundoku is something many of us can related to. Click to read the full fact.

[neurosciencestuff]

Breathing: the master clock of the sleeping brain

While we sleep, the brain is not switched off, but is busy with “saving” the important memories of the day. To do this, brain regions are synchronized to coordinate the transmission of information between them. Yet, the mechanisms that enable this synchronization across multiple remote brain regions are poorly understood. Traditionally, these mechanisms were sought in correlated activity patterns within the brain. However, LMU neuroscientists Prof. Anton Sirota and Dr. Nikolas Karalis have now been able to show that breathing acts as a pacemaker that entrains the various brain regions and synchronizes them with each other.

Breathing is the most constant, enduring, and essential bodily rhythm and exerts a strong physiological effect on the autonomous nervous system. It is also known to modulate a wide range of cognitive functions such as perception, attention, and thought structure. However, the mechanisms of its impact on cognitive function and the brain are largely unknown.

The scientists carried out large-scale in vivo electrophysiological recordings in mice, from thousands of neurons across the limbic system. They showed that respiration entrains and coordinates neuronal activity in all investigated brain regions - including the hippocampus, medial prefrontal and visual cortex, thalamus, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens - by modulating the excitability of these circuits in a way that is independent of olfaction. “Thus, we were able to prove the existence of a novel non-olfactory, intracerebral, mechanismthat accounts for the entrainment of distributed circuits by breathing, which we termed “respiratory corollary discharge”, says Karalis, who is currently research fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel. “Our findings identify the existence of a previously unknown link between respiratory and limbic circuits and are a departure from the standard belief that breathing modulates brain activity via the nose-olfactory route”, emphasizes Sirota.

This mechanism mediates the coordination of sleep-related activity in these brain regions, which is essential for memory consolidation and provides the means for the co-modulation of the cortico-hippocampal circuits synchronous dynamics. According to the authors, these results represent a major step forward and provide the foundation for new mechanistic theories, that incorporate the respiratory rhythm as a fundamental mechanism underlying the communication of distributed systems during memory consolidation.

[wtf-fun-factss]

Pineapples were once luxury items. Click to read the full fact.

[oftriip]

[makanamuses]

🤔💭💙

[fyblackwomenart]

“Box” by @worldofcat.art Why fit in when you were born to stand out?

[themedicalstate]

Anatomical Works Sculpted in Crystal and Glass

Santa Fe-based sculptor and jewelry designer Debra Baxter combines glass, bronze, crystal, wood, and found objects to create ghostly sculptures of human forms. 

For many of her recent works Baxter shares with Roq Larue Gallery that she drew inspiration from the phenomenon of the “Ghost Heart.” In this medical procedure, a heart is cleansed of all of its blood cells and then injected with hundreds of millions of new blood steam cells which cause the heart to begin beating again. Baxter is interested in how this concept explores the complexity of existence, walking the line between life and death.  

1. Catch Your Breath, 2021

2. Love Side, 2019

3. Cross My Heart (1), 2019

4. Cross My Heart (2), 2019

5. Love Hard, 2021

6. Holding Onto Black Metal, 2020

7. Heart of Gold, 2019

8. Ghost Hand, 2019

9. Silver Heart, 2019

You can see more of her sculpted artworks on her website and Instagram.

[nowayhome]

Zendaya as Rue Bennett  Euphoria 2x08: All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name