It's that time of year again!!!! LOVE Fall! It's so excited to transition into richer colors, she is beautiful both as a blonde and dark. So blessed to have the coolest clients and get to do art work every day. 💇🏼🙌🏻🍁

ellievsbear
art blog(derogatory)

oozey mess
Stranger Things
DEAR READER
YOU ARE THE REASON
Peter Solarz
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Monterey Bay Aquarium

PR's Tumblrdome
noise dept.
almost home
d e v o n
Cosmic Funnies
Game of Thrones Daily

tannertan36
styofa doing anything
Jules of Nature

shark vs the universe
taylor price
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@nicolemerrill
It's that time of year again!!!! LOVE Fall! It's so excited to transition into richer colors, she is beautiful both as a blonde and dark. So blessed to have the coolest clients and get to do art work every day. 💇🏼🙌🏻🍁
The woman who cherished her suffering is dead. I am her descendant. I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me, but I want to go on from here with you fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.
Adrienne Rich, from Twenty-One Love Poems, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (via lifeinpoetry)
My journey
Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you’ll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you’ll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar (via introspectivepoet)
I want to find pretty scissors just like my new tattoo. 💇🏼 #shearstattoo
#shearstattoo love being a stylist
How the Brain Learns to Distinguish Between What Is Important and What Is not
Traffic lights, neon-lit advertisements, a jungle of road signs. When learning to drive, it is often very difficult to distinguish between important and irrelevant information. How the brain learns the importance of certain images over others is being investigated by Prof. Sonja Hofer at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel. In a recently published study in “Neuron”, the neuroscientist and her team show that learning the relevance of images considerably modifies neuronal networks in the brain. These changes might help our brain to process and classify the overload of stimuli in our environment more effectively.
How we perceive our environment greatly depends on what we have previously seen and learnt. For example, expert drivers do not need to think twice about the meaning of different road signs and are experienced in assessing traffic situations. They can filter out relevant information from a flood of other irrelevant stimuli and thus react quickly. In contrast, beginners need much longer to process the new information. Prof. Sonja Hofer’s team at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and University College London addressed the question of how processing of sensory stimuli is optimized in the brain through learning.
The brain learns to discriminate between images
To do this, Prof. Hofer’s team investigated the visual cortex of mice. This part of the brain is responsible for the processing and perception of visual stimuli. Mice ran through a virtual-reality environment where they encountered various images, one of which was paired with a reward. Within one week, the animals had learnt to discriminate between the images and to respond accordingly. This learning was reflected in the activity of nerve cells in the visual cortex whose responses were recorded and tracked over the course of learning. While the responses in the brain to the relevant visual stimuli were quite unspecific in beginner mice, many more neurons reacted specifically to the shown images after one week of training.
Learning optimizes stimulus processing
“From day to day, the response of the neurons to the images became increasingly distinguishable and reliable”, says Adil Khan, one of the two first authors. He speculates that such changes in the brain might also allow us to process important information from our environment more efficiently, and perhaps underlies our ability to react promptly to important visual stimuli. The scientists also demonstrated that diverse internal and external signals affect the processing of the visual stimuli. “We observed that the response of the nerve cells to the same visual stimuli became less accurate when the mice where engaged in another task, such as having to discriminate between different smells. The visual stimuli then lose their relevance and are no longer so effectively analyzed by the brain”, says Khan. “Remarkably, the expectation of a stimulus even before it appears, and the anticipation of a reward also altered the activity of specific brain cells. This means that from one moment to the next our brain might process the same stimulus quite differently depending on its importance and relevance.”
Internal signals influence visual perception
Traditionally it was thought that the visual cortex exclusively processes visual information. This study, however, corroborates that during learning also many other signals from various brain regions influence activity in this brain area. “This means that our previously learnt knowledge, our expectations and the context we are in can have a great impact on our visual perception of the environment”, explains Hofer.
Ligurian Coast, Italy
Villefranche sur Mer by Ramelli Serge
The Streets of Venice by Attila Karpati
Individuals with social phobia have too much serotonin – not too little
Many people feel anxious if they have to speak in front of an audience or socialise with others. If the anxiety becomes a disability, it may mean that the person suffers from social phobia which is a psychiatric disorder.
Social phobia is commonly medicated using SSRI compounds. These change the amount of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. Based on previous studies, it was believed that individuals with social phobia had too little serotonin and that SSRIs increased the amount of available serotonin. In a new study published in the scientific journal JAMA Psychiatry, researchers from the Department of Psychology at Uppsala University show that individuals with social phobia make too much serotonin.
The research team, led by professors Mats Fredrikson and Tomas Furmark, used a so-called PET camera and a special tracer to measure chemical signal transmission by serotonin in the brain. They found that patients with social phobia produced too much serotonin in a part of the brain’s fear centre, the amygdala. The more serotonin produced, the more anxious the patients were in social situations.
A nerve cell, which sends signals using serotonin, first releases serotonin into the space between the nerve cells. The nerve signal arises when serotonin attaches itself to the receptor cell. The serotonin is then released from the receptor and pumped back to the original cell.
“Not only did individuals with social phobia make more serotonin than people without such a disorder, they also pump back more serotonin. We were able to show this in another group of patients using a different tracer which itself measures the pump mechanism. We believe that this is an attempt to compensate for the excess serotonin active in transmitting signals”, says Andreas Frick, a doctoral student at Uppsala University Department of Psychology.
This discovery is a major leap forward when it comes to identifying changes in the brain’s chemical messengers in people who suffer from anxiety. Earlier research has shown that nerve activity in the amygdala is higher in people with social phobia and thus that the brain’s fear centre is over-sensitive. The new findings indicate that a surplus of serotonin is part of the underlying reason.
“Serotonin can increase anxiety and not decrease it as was previously often assumed”, says Andreas Frick.
Port Blanc Arch, Brittany, France by Philip Hartland
Frozen Path
x-q-site
Milky Way by Masaki Kaji
Mid century modern bronze gate. Ljubljana, June 2015