The brain sounds kinda nice. Watch on YouTube: brainmusic: fmri into musical sound Hear what the brain scanner sees. Data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are converted to musical sound. (This is the short version; See the 6-part … [Read more...]
Weekend Links For Your Pleasure
I've been extremely light on the blogging front lately, but I have big plans to breathe new life into this site. I'll be shifting gears as I reexamine my time, attention, and creative work. In the mean time, here's a few links I've been meaning to … [Read more...]
The Neuroscience Of Jazz Improvisation
Mind Hacks pointed me to an interesting study by science journal PLoS One on the cognitive neuroscience of Jazz. The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain … [Read more...]
Cool And Recent Podcasts From Around The Web
Here's some recent podcasts from around the web that I've been inspired by musically. The Ring and I It might seem hyperbole to claim, as many Wagnerites do, that The Ring Cycle is "The Greatest Work of Art Ever." But the grandeur and power of … [Read more...]
God, Darwin clash again in Kansas
Here we go again. OVERLAND PARK, Kansas (Reuters) - For the fourth time in eight years, the Kansas Board of Education is preparing to take up the issue of evolution and what to teach -- or not teach -- public school students about the origins of … [Read more...]
Master Your Emotions With The Most Important Image Ever Taken
I love videos like this. They help put my life in perspective. And they put me in a resourceful state. I've often found that most unresourceful states are accompanied by a narrowing of the field of vision into one area -- not a metaphorical vision, … [Read more...]
Meditation Has A Measurable Effect On Alertness
Meditation is often credited with helping people feel more focused and energetic, but are the benefits measurable? When researchers tested the alertness of volunteers, they found that the practice proved more effective than naps, exercise or … [Read more...]
Mathematicians Solve the ‘Cocktail Party Problem’
Officials at the CIA and scientists around the world have pondered the "cocktail party problem" for decades. How could they separate one sound - perhaps a voice - from a group of other recorded sounds, perhaps a multitude of voices at a cocktail … [Read more...]
“Neurogenesis Is An Optimistic Idea.”
The mind is like a muscle: it swells with exercise. Gould's and Kozorovitskiy's work reminds us not only how easy it is to hurt a brain, but how little it takes for that brain to heal. Give a primate just a few extra playthings, and its neurons are … [Read more...]
Triple Your Ability To Rock
Two Canadian mathematicians from the University of Moncton in New Brunswick, have created an entirely new kind of string instrument that exploits a kind of mathematics owing more to Pythagoras's theorem for triangles than to anything he ever thought … [Read more...]