rg

[rickgonzalez]

[pangeen]

this felt good

by Liam Morgan

Music: Eyedress - Tokyo Ghost

[captainpotassium]

Saturn, Tethys, Rings, and Shadows via NASA https://ift.tt/3fMPlpJ

Seen from ice moon Tethys, rings and shadows would display fantastic views of the Saturnian system. Haven’t dropped in on Tethys lately? Then this gorgeous ringscape from the Cassini spacecraft will have to do for now. Caught in sunlight just below and left of picture center in 2005, Tethys itself is about 1,000 kilometers in diameter and orbits not quite five saturn-radii from the center of the gas giant planet. At that distance (around 300,000 kilometers) it is well outside Saturn’s main bright rings, but Tethys is still one of five major moons that find themselves within the boundaries of the faint and tenuous outer E ring. Discovered in the 1980s, two very small moons Telesto and Calypso are locked in stable along Tethys’ orbit. Telesto precedes and Calypso follows Tethys as the trio circles Saturn.

(Published January 23, 2022)

[nevver]

All the feels, Hallie Bateman

[archatlas]

mike_n5

The amazing artwork of Mike, a Londoner playing with shapes, lines, pixels and perspective.

Check out more following the source link.

[freedomcreww]

[nevver]

In every direction, Cy Kuckenbaker

[nevver]

Darkness on the Edge of Town, Michael Streckbein

[archatlas]

Architecture Photographed in Fall 

September 22nd marked the start of fall in the Northern Hemisphere. This season of the year is excellent for architectural photography due to the effects of nature, which delights us with wonderful red and orange foliage. To mark the beginning of this season, we have created a selection of 10 works captured in fall by prominent photographers such as Francisco Nogueira, Jorge López Conde, and Steve Montpetit.

[neurosciencestuff]

Music Has Powerful (and Visible) Effects on the Brain

It doesn’t matter if it’s Bach, the Beatles, Brad Paisley or Bruno Mars. Your favorite music likely triggers a similar type of activity in your brain as other people’s favorites do in theirs.

That’s one of the things Jonathan Burdette, M.D., has found in researching music’s effects on the brain.

“Music is primal. It affects all of us, but in very personal, unique ways,” said Burdette, a neuroradiologist at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. “Your interaction with music is different than mine, but it’s still powerful.

“Your brain has a reaction when you like or don’t like something, including music. We’ve been able to take some baby steps into seeing that, and ‘dislike’ looks different than ‘like’ and much different than ‘favorite.’”

To study how music preferences might affect functional brain connectivity – the interactions among separate areas of the brain – Burdette and his fellow investigators used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which depicts brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Scans were made of 21 people while they listened to music they said they most liked and disliked from among five genres (classical, country, rap, rock and Chinese opera) and to a song or piece of music they had previously named as their personal favorite.

Those fMRI scans showed a consistent pattern: The listeners’ preferences, not the type of music they were listening to, had the greatest impact on brain connectivity – especially on a brain circuit known to be involved in internally focused thought, empathy and self-awareness. This circuit, called the default mode network, was poorly connected when the participants were listening to the music they disliked, better connected when listening to the music they liked and the most connected when listening to their favorites.

The researchers also found that listening to favorite songs altered the connectivity between auditory brain areas and a region responsible for memory and social emotion consolidation.

“Given that music preferences are uniquely individualized phenomena and that music can vary in acoustic complexity and the presence or absence of lyrics, the consistency of our results was unexpected,” the researchers wrote in the journal Nature Scientific Reports (Aug. 28, 2014). “These findings may explain why comparable emotional and mental states can be experienced by people listening to music that differs as widely as Beethoven and Eminem.”

Not surprising to Burdette was the extent of the connectivity seen in the participants’ brains when they were listening to their favorite tunes.

“There are probably some features in music that make you feel a certain way, but it’s your experience with it that is even more important,” said Burdette, who also is professor of radiology and vice chairman of research at Wake Forest School of Medicine. “Your associations with certain music involve many different parts of the brain, and they’re very strong.

“In some cases, you might not even like the particular song, but you like the memories or feelings that you associate with it.”

In other research projects, Burdette and colleagues at the School of Medicine and the University of North Carolina-Greensboro have found that trained music conductors are likely to be better at combining and using auditory and visual clues than people without musical training; that activity in brain areas associated with vision decreases during tasks that involve listening; and that different levels of complexity in music can have different effects on functional brain connectivity.

“I find this type of work fascinating, because I think music is so important,” Burdette said. “If science can help get more people to recognize what music does to and for us, great.”

Music is just a small part of Burdette’s research activities – his most recently published study, for example, showed that brain volume could be an accurate predictor of success in weight-loss attempts by the elderly – but it has long been a big of part his life.

Burdette grew up playing viola, piano and guitar. He has been singing since childhood and continues to do so, including in the chorus in productions staged by the Piedmont Opera, of which he has been a board member for more than 10 years. He’s also done some conducting. His wife, Shona Simpson, plays piano. Their three teenage daughters – Fiona, Ellie and Jessie – perform professionally as the Dan River Girls. His brother, Kevin, is a singer who has appeared as a soloist with the Metropolitan Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic and other top-tier opera companies and symphony orchestras.

“Music is my avocation,” the physician in the family said. “Radiology is my vocation.”

Burdette additionally has deep interest, if not direct involvement, in music’s clinical applications.

“Music isn’t going to cure anything, but it definitely can play a therapeutic role,” he said.

In countries such as Germany, Burdette noted, music therapy is commonly an integral part of the rehabilitation process for people who have had strokes, brain surgery or traumatic brain injuries.

“If you’re trying to restore neuroplasticity in the brain, to re-establish some of the connections that were there before the injury, music can be a big help, and I’d like to see it used more widely in this country,” he said.

Burdette also is a proponent of programs that help people with Alzheimer’s, dementia and other cognitive and physical problems re-connect with the world through music. One such program is Music & Memory, which employs iPods with customized playlists featuring songs popular when the participating individual was under 30 years old.

“You can actually see the power of music,” Burdette said. “People who were just sitting there, not engaged in anything, light up when they start hearing music from when they were 25.

“It’s fantastic. What else can do that? I can’t think of anything other than music.”

[neurosciencestuff]

Be More Patient? Imagine That

How often do you act impulsively without considering the consequences? What if you could learn how to be more patient?

By using functional MRI (fMRI) to look inside the brain, neuroscientists Adrianna Jenkins, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral researcher, and Ming Hsu, an associate professor of marketing and neuroscience at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, found that imagination is a pathway toward patience. Imagining an outcome before acting upon an impulse may help increase patience without relying on increased willpower.

Scientists call this technique, “framing effects,” or making small changes to how options are presented or framed. And the method may increase a person’s ability to exercise patience.

The findings can be found in Jenkins and Hsu’s study, “Dissociable contributions of imagination and willpower to the malleability of human patience,” forthcoming in Psychological Science.

The authors’ approach stands in contrast to previous research, which has mostly focused on the exertion of willpower to positively affect a person’s patience.

“Whereas willpower might enable people to override impulses, imagining the consequences of their choices might change the impulses,” Jenkins says. “People tend to pay attention to what is in their immediate vicinity, but there are benefits to imagining the possible consequences of their choices.”

Hsu and Jenkins conducted two experiments to explore the role of imagination and willpower on patience. In the studies, participants made choices about when to receive different amounts of money depending on how the offer is framed. The actual reward outcomes were identical, but the way they were framed differed.

For example, under an “independent” frame, a participant could receive $100 tomorrow or $120 in 30 days. Under a “sequence” frame, a participant had to decide whether to receive $100 tomorrow and no money in 30 days or no money tomorrow and $120 in 30 days.

The first experiment replicated past research, which found that framing outcomes as sequences promotes patience. 122 participants saw both independent and sequence framed options and expressed stronger preferences for the larger, delayed reward when choices were framed as sequences.

The second experiment involved 203 participants who had to make a choice based on one frame: 104 people had to choose under an independent frame; the other 99 had to choose under a sequence frame.

The result: participants in the sequence frame reported imagining the consequences of their choices more than those in the independent frame. One participant wrote, “It would be nice to have the $100 now, but $20 more at the end of the month is probably worth it because this is like one week’s gas money.”

In contrast, participants exposed to the independent frame demonstrated less imagination. One participant commented, “I’d rather have the money tomorrow even if it’s a lesser amount. I can get the things I need instead of waiting. Why wait a month for just $20 more?”

By framing the options in the second experiment, the researchers found that the participants escalated their use of imagination. The more participants imagined the consequences of their choices, the more they were able to be patient in order to receive the greater reward.

In the fMRI portion of the experiments, Jenkins and Hsu measured participants’ brain activation while the participants made a series of choices in both frames. They found the areas of the brain that process imagination became more active when participants were more patient during sequence framing. In contrast, in the independent framing, the researchers found patience more strongly linked to brain regions associated with willpower.

“There is a long tendency of behavioral interventions, ranging from promoting healthy eating to reducing drug dependence, to appeal to willpower. For example, ‘commit to be fit’ or ‘don’t do drugs’,” Hsu says. “Our findings highlight the potential benefits of interventions that change the nature of the impulses themselves by encouraging people to imagine the consequences of their choices.”

The researchers acknowledge that using brain scans to study human cognition has its limitations because it relies on certain assumptions about the links between brain regions and their functions. This is why the experiments combined several methods, which all converge on a similar conclusion.

“We know people often have difficulty being patient,” Jenkins says. “Our findings suggest that imagination is a possible route for attaining patience that may be more sustainable and practical than exerting willpower.”

[archatlas]

L.A. by Art

[lsleofskye]

Wave faces | ohdagyo

[archatlas]

The Art of Elena Limkina 

If you’ve got an old soul, you’ll be enamored by the delightfully old-fashioned work of Moscow-based artist Elena Limkina. Every week, she offers the world a glimpse into her personal sketchbook, and its pages tell vivid stories of nature, architecture, and classical paintings.

[archatlas]

Stunning construction photos of Zaha Hadid Architects’ Leeza SOHO tower and its record-setting atrium 

Construction of the Zaha Hadid Architects-designed Leeza SOHO mixed-use tower in Beijing is making progress as newly released photographs document.

Once the 46-story structure reaches its final height of 207 meters (679 feet) in September of this year, it will be home to the world’s tallest atrium — an impressive 190-meter-tall central tunnel hugged by two wavy halves of the dissected larger volume.

[lsleofskye]

North Shore, Hawaii | clarklittle

[0rient-express]