noc·turne ˈnäktərn/

[jewist]

[nnocturnes]

Picasso learning ballet

[thescienceofreality]

The Science of Watching Memories Form By Erin Mae Dul

Image Credits: First image via ScienceAlert by Zeiss Microscopy. Second image, gif made by The Science of Reality. 

By using advanced imaging techniques researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University have captured a video of mRNA in motion, shedding light on how the brain creates memories in real time, focusing on neurons. The molecules of mRNA pertinent to making memories were marked with fluorescent “tags” within a mouse model the scientists had developed so they could watch the process unfold live within living brain cells. 

"It’s noteworthy that we were able to develop this mouse without having to use an artificial gene or other interventions that might have disrupted neurons and called our findings into question," said Robert Singer, Ph.D., the senior author of both papers and professor and co-chair of Einstein’s department of anatomy & structural biology and co-director of the Gruss Lipper Biophotonics Center at Einstein. He also holds the Harold and Muriel Block Chair in Anatomy & Structural Biology at Einstein. [x]

Basically, some neurons located in the mouse’s hippocampus, where memories are stored and created, were stimulated by the Einstein researchers. After stimulating the neurons, they were then able to observe the tagged beta-actin mRNA molecules form within the nuclei of neurons and make their way traveling within the branched projections of the neuron, also known as dendrites. 

Read more from the full article via the Albert Einstein College of Medicine here.

[c-a-f-f-e-i-n-3-blog]

[currentsinbiology]

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (via currentsinbiology)

[bookmania]

To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind.

Geraldine Brooks, March (via bookmania)

[ucresearch]

Empathy, Art & Entertainment

At his Google talk (“The Neuroscience of Empathy”), UCSF’s Dr. Thomas Lewis answers the question: 

Are depictions of destruction and pain in art designed to blunt our sense of empathy?:

“If art works, it makes you feel something and often, say in a novel in which you identify with the characters, if something bad happens to them it is somewhat painful for you.  So I think good art evokes [empathy]. I think entertainment blunts it.  So, say if you see a mass market entertainment film…I just saw the Bruce Willis film —not to say it’s bad, which it’s not, but— Bruce Willis is tossed about like a rag doll throughout the course of the film.  Nothing bad happens to him.  He doesn’t break any bones. He doesn’t suffer visibly at any point.  That, I think, does blunt our empathy: entertainment.  But art shouldn’t do that.  And actually it is one of the fundamental distinctions between art and entertainment that’s worth describing.” 

[image via sandandglass]

[nnocturnes]

We were living through the emotional truths on the screen together, often in coded form … sometimes they’re expressed in small things, gestures, glances, reactions between the characters. Light, shadow. I mean, we experience these things that we normally couldn’t discuss, or wouldn’t discuss, or even acknowledge in our own lives. And that’s actually part of the wonder. So whenever I hear people dismiss movies as fantasy, or make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life. It’s an ongoing dialogue with life.

Martin Scorsese at the 2013 NEH Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities

[nnocturnes]

How dissatisfied with the present do you have to be in order to prepare a satisfying future? How neurotic do you have to be, how unhappy do you have to be?

Sam Harris, Death and the Present Moment

[nnocturnes]

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all.

From Paul Celan's Collected Prose: "Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen"

[nnocturnes]

There is nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even when he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Paul Celan, Jewish-Romanian, German-speaking poet, and Holocaust survivor (Paris, 1948)

[nnocturnes]

Does freedom of expression include the license to offend?

[fakemikemitchell]

Hitchcock’s definition of happiness. I like it. 

[thescienceofreality]

Leonardo da Vinci was right all along, new medical scans show.

“He has long been praised as one of the finest artists of the Renaissance, working far ahead of his time and producing some of the world’s most recognisable works. But Leonardo da Vinci has finally received the credit he deserves for his “startling” medical accuracy hundreds of years in advance of his peers, as scientists match his anatomical drawings with modern day MRI scans. The artist also produced the first accurate depiction of the spine, as well as drawing a child in the womb in the correct position.

The project, which will be unveiled at the Edinburgh International Festival in August, compares the work directly for the very first time, unveiling the minute details recorded by the artist. In a series of 30 pictures, the Royal Collection Trust will show da Vinci’s distinctive anatomical drawings alongside a newly-taken MRI or CT scan.

The comparison is intended to show just how accurate da Vinci was, despite his limited technology and lack of contemporary medical knowledge.

Above 3D images of the shoulder, arm and neck can be compared to Leonardo’s work (Dr Richard Wellings, Warwick Medical School, West Midlands Surgical Training Centre, UHCW Trust 2013)

The Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man exhibition, part of the festival showing the influence of technology on art, will open at The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, in August. It will be based on Leonardo’s ‘Anatomical Manuscript A’, on which he crammed more than 240 individual drawings and notes running to more than 13,000 words in his distinctive mirror-writing.”

  Read more here.

[nnocturnes]

I find your use of the word "mercy" strangely inappropriate, Captain, and here you stand a perfect symbol of our technical society: mechanized, electronicized, and not very human. You've done away with humanity, the striving of man to achieve greatness through his own resources.

Kodos the Executioner to Captain Kirk, Star Trek 1.13 

[nnocturnes]

"How much would you pay for the universe?"

[nnocturnes]

You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. There's no such thing as the unknown--only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.

Captain Kirk, Star Trek 1.10

[nnocturnes]

But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest way, as though it were champagne. Take the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon -- the Great and also the present one. Take North America -- the eternal union. Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein . . . And what is it that civilisation softens in us? The only gain of civilisation for mankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations -- and absolutely nothing more. And through the development of this many-sidedness man may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed.

Ch. VII in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground