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Are trap jaw ants the ones that can be used as emergency sutures by letting them bite you and ripping their head off or is that a different ant? (Also I don't recommend doing it)

no, that’s army ants which have a stronger, more hook-shaped jaw. trap jaw ants are the ones that bite the ground to fling themselves up into the air like a rogue spitball

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(Image caption: These areas of the brain uniquely activate in people with higher empathy when they listen to music. Credit: SMU, UCLA)

People who deeply grasp the pain or happiness of others also process music differently in the brain

People with higher empathy differ from others in the way their brains process music, according to a study by researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas and UCLA.

The researchers found that compared to low empathy people, those with higher empathy process familiar music with greater involvement of the reward system of the brain, as well as in areas responsible for processing social information.

“High-empathy and low-empathy people share a lot in common when listening to music, including roughly equivalent involvement in the regions of the brain related to auditory, emotion, and sensory-motor processing,” said lead author Zachary Wallmark, an assistant professor in the SMU Meadows School of the Arts.

But there is at least one significant difference.

Highly empathic people process familiar music with greater involvement of the brain’s social circuitry, such as the areas activated when feeling empathy for others. They also seem to experience a greater degree of pleasure in listening, as indicated by increased activation of the reward system.

“This may indicate that music is being perceived weakly as a kind of social entity, as an imagined or virtual human presence,” Wallmark said.

Researchers in 2014 reported that about 20 percent of the population is highly empathic. These are people who are especially sensitive and respond strongly to social and emotional stimuli.

The SMU-UCLA study is the first to find evidence supporting a neural account of the music-empathy connection. Also, it is among the first to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore how empathy affects the way we perceive music.

The new study indicates that among higher-empathy people, at least, music is not solely a form of artistic expression.

“If music was not related to how we process the social world, then we likely would have seen no significant difference in the brain activation between high-empathy and low-empathy people,” said Wallmark, who is director of the MuSci Lab at SMU, an interdisciplinary research collective that studies — among other things — how music affects the brain.

“This tells us that over and above appreciating music as high art, music is about humans interacting with other humans and trying to understand and communicate with each other,” he said.

This may seem obvious.

“But in our culture we have a whole elaborate system of music education and music thinking that treats music as a sort of disembodied object of aesthetic contemplation,” Wallmark said. “In contrast, the results of our study help explain how music connects us to others. This could have implications for how we understand the function of music in our world, and possibly in our evolutionary past.”

The researchers reported their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, in the article “Neurophysiological effects of trait empathy in music listening.”

The co-authors are Choi Deblieck, with the University of Leuven, Belgium, and Marco Iacoboni, UCLA. The research was carried out at the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA.

“The study shows on one hand the power of empathy in modulating music perception, a phenomenon that reminds us of the original roots of the concept of empathy — ‘feeling into’ a piece of art,” said senior author Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“On the other hand,” Iacoboni said, “the study shows the power of music in triggering the same complex social processes at work in the brain that are at play during human social interactions.”

Comparison of brain scans showed distinctive differences based on empathy Participants were 20 UCLA undergraduate students. They were each scanned in an MRI machine while listening to excerpts of music that were either familiar or unfamiliar to them, and that they either liked or disliked. The familiar music was selected by participants prior to the scan.

Afterward each person completed a standard questionnaire to assess individual differences in empathy — for example, frequently feeling sympathy for others in distress, or imagining oneself in another’s shoes.

The researchers then did controlled comparisons to see which areas of the brain during music listening are correlated with empathy.

Analysis of the brain scans showed that high empathizers experienced more activity in the dorsal striatum, part of the brain’s reward system, when listening to familiar music, whether they liked the music or not.

The reward system is related to pleasure and other positive emotions. Malfunction of the area can lead to addictive behaviors.

Empathic people process music with involvement of social cognitive circuitry In addition, the brain scans of higher empathy people in the study also recorded greater activation in medial and lateral areas of the prefrontal cortex that are responsible for processing the social world, and in the temporoparietal junction, which is critical to analyzing and understanding others’ behaviors and intentions.

Typically, those areas of the brain are activated when people are interacting with, or thinking about, other people. Observing their correlation with empathy during music listening might indicate that music to these listeners functions as a proxy for a human encounter.

Beyond analysis of the brain scans, the researchers also looked at purely behavioral data — answers to a survey asking the listeners to rate the music afterward.

Those data also indicated that higher empathy people were more passionate in their musical likes and dislikes, such as showing a stronger preference for unfamiliar music.

Precise neurophysiological relationship between empathy and music is largely unexplored A large body of research has focused on the cognitive neuroscience of empathy — how we understand and experience the thoughts and emotions of other people. Studies point to a number of areas of the prefrontal, insular, and cingulate cortices as being relevant to what brain scientists refer to as social cognition.

Studies have shown that activation of the social circuitry in the brain varies from individual to individual. People with more empathic personalities show increased activity in those areas when performing socially relevant tasks, including watching a needle penetrating skin, listening to non-verbal vocal sounds, observing emotional facial expressions, or seeing a loved one in pain.

In the field of music psychology, a number of recent studies have suggested that empathy is related to intensity of emotional responses to music, listening style, and musical preferences — for example, empathic people are more likely to enjoy sad music.

“This study contributes to a growing body of evidence,” Wallmark said, “that music processing may piggyback upon cognitive mechanisms that originally evolved to facilitate social interaction.” — Margaret Allen, SMU

laughingsquid

chaosophia218

Circle Map showing the Anatomy of the Fibonacci Number and the Symmetrical Binary Code of Nature. Numbers are not found in nature. Humans have created numbers in order to abstractly represent what we find. In nature, all things are individuals and together equal one whole individual the Universe. Similarly in math, 1 is the only number and all other numbers are multiples of this 1. So our number system is perfectly designed to represent the seemingly endless individuals that we find in nature. Things built of things, built of things. The Universe is the only thing that is truly one of a kind. It is the only true individual. Like us it is composed of a number of smaller pieces but on an infinitely larger scale. The largest individuals we know that the Universe is composed of are super clusters, which are composed of galaxies, which in turn are composed of solar systems, planets, molecules, atoms and so on all the way down to its most basic pieces. It would seem logical that the shape, motion and interaction of the base units “the smallest particles of the Universe" would be directly responsible for the shape, motion and interaction of all larger cooperative structures which are composed of those smallest units. Perhaps the smallest individuals of our Universe are responsible for creating the Golden Ratio that we find so prevalent in all that we see. The Code When you add up any length of the Fibonacci sequence the sum is always 1 less than another Fibonacci number. Example: 1+1+2=4 (1 less than 5) 1+1+2+3=7 (1 less than 8) This is true no matter how far you count up the Fibonacci sequence. The sum of all the numbers together will always be 1 less than another Fibonacci number. So why not add a 1? Perhaps Fibonacci was off by 1. This again seems logical because 1+1=2+1=3. That’s three 1’s in beginning. When we add a third 1 to the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence an amazing thing happens. With the extra 1 the whole sequence becomes another Fibonacci number. Example: 1+1+1+2+3=8 (another Fibonacci number) Even more amazing is what happens when you continue this chain or mirror it back down to the last 1. 1+1+1+2+3+2+1+1+1=13 (another Fibonacci number) In this way you can see the symmetrical anatomy of the Fibonacci number 13. This works for every Fibonacci number. Like the Universe, every Fibonacci number is composed of smaller pieces. Take the number 21 for example. If you were to break 21 into its two smaller Fibonacci numbers you would get 13 and 8. Then break those down into there smaller Fibonacci numbers. Eventually you will end up with a bunch of 1’s. When looking at a bunch of 1’s there is no discernable code or pattern, but if you group some of those 1’s into 2’s you can start to see the code of nature. This diagram is a hypothesis on the shape, motion and interaction of the base units of the Universe. This theory offers convincing evidence that the smallest particles or “building blocks” of the Universe are circular in shape and all the same size. There is a circular gear type process which results in symmetrical cooperative structures that create Fibonacci numbers, and subsequently exhibit the Golden Ratio. In this theory 1+1 only equals 2 when motion is not part of the equation. Motion is what enables interaction to occur between individuals. Without motion everything would remain as it originally was, stagnant and without growth or evolution.

porterr-robinson

syntheticphilosophy

“Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

exhaustedscreen-deactivated2019

‘The grave of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke in Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow is surmounted by a stone on which is engraved a rest beneath a fermata with a triple forte noted at the bottom: A very, very loud extended silence.’

- John Biguenet, Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p.49.

senfonikankara

Symphony No.1 "Winter Dreams" - i.Allegro tranquillo

Visit Original Link

Çaykovski | 1. Senfoni “Kış Hayalleri”, Allegro tranquillo

image: Svetlana and Sabir Gadghievs

#fave!

aiweirdness

How to make high-tech pies sound really old

A while ago I made a bunch of new pies. Well, I didn’t *make* them because they were neural network invented titles and although it tried to imitate the list of pies I gave it, the neural net’s imitations are imperfect.

The neural network, after all, is a computer program with about as many neurons as an earthworm. It doesn’t understand what the ingredients are, or why some combinations don’t work. Some of its titles were intriguing, though. They sounded mysterious. Potentially delicious and/or magical?

Or maybe it just helps that they’re vague. I decided I wanted more like these. To help it along, I spiced up the pie dataset with the names of cookies and apple varieties from the 1905 edition of Apples of New York. I filtered the names for those that had possessives: Mcaffee’s Nonesuch, Cornell’s Savewell, Wile Ox’s Winter (all apples), combined with Goldy’s Dungeon Bars, Esther’s Bracelets, and Fido’s Rewards (all cookies). Then, to give it added old-school flavor, I added all the Dungeons and Dragons spells that had possessives as well (for example, Ivy’s Irresistible Scent, Freedom’s Toast, and Leomund’s Tiny Hut).

I arranged the training data so the pies would be last (so they would be freshest in the neural net’s virtual mind). Then I gave it one single look at the data.

It turns out that I didn’t manage to prevent the neural net from coming up with bad ideas. Perhaps what I should have done instead was remove all the meat pies from the training data.

But some of the pies were exactly what I’d hoped for.

And some even went a little past “ancient” and into “legendary”

This week’s bonus material: a few more pies, including some that were inexplicably PG-13.

bipw03-deactivated20180203

Merry Unnameable to you all!

#lovecraft #xmas

neurosciencestuff

(Image caption: Worms lacking CEPsh glia (right) tend to abruptly pause in place, suggesting that these cells help regulate the immobility that accompanies sleep)

Drowsy worms offer new insights into the neuroscience of sleep

A good night of sleep entails about eight hours of blissful immobility—a state of near paralysis that, though welcome at night, would be inconvenient during the day. In a recent paper published in Cell Reports, Rockefeller scientists shed new light on the transitions between a wakeful, active state and the stillness of sleep.

Through a series of experiments in the roundworm C. elegans, the researchers show that glial cells play an unexpected role in ensuring that worms don’t suddenly succumb to sleep-associated immobility. It’s the latest in a growing list of functions ascribed to glial cells, which were once thought to function solely as scaffolding for neurons, but are turning out to be sophisticated biological actors in their own right.

The research may offer new insight into the function of glial cells in humans, and reveals a nuanced relationship between sleep and movement.

Narcoleptic worms

In C. elegans, a type of glial cell known as CEPsh glia surround neurons in the worm version of a brain, and are known to wrap around select synapses, the connections between neurons. Shai Shaham, Rockefeller’s Richard E. Salomon Family Professor, and research associate Menachem Katz took an interest in CEPsh cells because they seemed to share many features with astrocytes, star-shaped glial cells suspected by some scientists to regulate sleep in humans and other vertebrates.

To better understand the function of CEPsh glia, the team developed a line of C. elegans that lacked these cells,then monitored the tiny worms’ movements. The scientists noticed that, often, the animals abruptly stopped in place for seconds to minutes at a time—an unusual behavior for this type of worm.

“We can watch C. elegans all day when they search for food, and we rarely see them stop. The worms lacking CEPsh glia were abnormal—they looked narcoleptic,” says Katz.

The researchers also found that during lethargus, a sleep-like state associated with molting, C. elegans without CEPsh glia fell asleep abnormally early and stayed asleep for a longer-than-usual amount of time. Overall, worms lacking CEPsh glia appeared to possess an increased propensity for sleep.

“They’re like teenagers,” says Shaham.

The scientists also noticed that the modified worms matured through larval stages at a slower pace than controls. They were surprised by this outcome, which suggests that healthy development depends in part on healthy sleep patterns.

A sleepy synapse

Next, the team examined the neurons whose synapses are covered with CEPsh glia. Specifically, they looked at the connection between ALA, a neuron involved in sleep, and AVE, a neuron that controls movement. They found that this synapse is inhibitory, meaning that when ALA is active, AVE can’t do its job.

Katz and Shaham believe that ALA is responsible for their worms’ apparent drowsiness. When they removed ALA neurons in C. elegans lacking CEPsh cells, these worms no longer displayed the odd behavior seen in previous trials: movement, sleep, and development returned to normal.

These findings suggest that, when CEPsh cells are absent, ALA inhibits AVE continuously, thereby impeding movement at inappropriate times. But CEPsh glia seem to counteract ALA neurons, permitting normal movement. “When the animal needs to be moving, the glia are important in making sure that AVE isn’t listening to ALA,” says Shaham.

Furthermore, Katz and Shaham discovered that ALA inhibits movement without completely deactivating AVE, an usual decoupling of neuronal activity and motor output. “That’s a very exciting concept,” Shaham says.

“We spend more than a third of our life asleep. But we don’t really understand what it’s good for, and we don’t understand how it works,” says Shaham. “In the worm, we’ve now shown that animals don’t develop properly if sleep is messed up—and we’ve uncovered aspects of the underlying control processes. Given that sleep is so ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, our work may provide important general insights.”