Deep Space : 2012 winners : Astronomy Photographer of the Year…
Winner: M51 – The Whirlpool Galaxy by Martin Pugh (UK/Australia)
M51 or the Whirlpool is the archetypal spiral galaxy and for centuries astronomers have studied it in order to understand how galaxies form and evolve. Here the photographer has made use of exceptionally stable atmospheric conditions, minimising the twinkling or ‘seeing’ caused by air turbulence to produce a sharp, clear image in which every detail of the galaxy is visible.
A recent research review, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that social disconnection may be processed in the brain in the same way as the threat of physical harm. That is, when a person perceives that their relationship with another person is under threat, the brain responds by activating a basic ‘alarm system’. This alarm system sets in motion a range of neurophysiological processes that are the same, whether the threat is physical and in the environment, or perceived and based on individual judgment of a threat to social connectedness. This alarm system includes the amygdala, the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula, all of which are known for their roles in both threat- and pain-related processing.
What happens when this alarm system is activated? The sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis go into overdrive, increasing inflammation and a compromising the immune system. These processes contribute to many diseases such as diabetes, those of aging, and cancer. New evidence suggests that these responses occur in response to perceived social isolation as well to a physical threat of harm.
On the other hand, how does social connectedness improve health? Research shows that being reminded of your social connections activates basic reward-related circuits that are also activated when learning to respond to beneficial environmental cues.
Contrary to the prevailing theories that music and language are cognitively separate or that music is a byproduct of language, theorists at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music and the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP) advocate that music underlies the ability to acquire language.
“Spoken language is a special type of music,” said Anthony Brandt, co-author of a theory paper published online this month in the journal Frontiers in Cognitive Auditory Neuroscience. “Language is typically viewed as fundamental to human intelligence, and music is often treated as being dependent on or derived from language. But from a developmental perspective, we argue that music comes first and language arises from music.”
The paper cites various studies that show what the newborn brain is capable of, such as the ability to distinguish the phonemes, or basic distinctive units of speech sound, and such attributes as pitch, rhythm and timbre.
The paper explores many connections between listening to speech and music. For example, recognizing the sound of different consonants requires rapid processing in the temporal lobe of the brain. Similarly, recognizing the timbre of different instruments requires temporal processing at the same speed — a feature of musical hearing that has often been overlooked, Brandt said.
“You can’t distinguish between a piano and a trumpet if you can’t process what you’re hearing at the same speed that you listen for the difference between ‘ba’ and ‘da,’” he said. “In this and many other ways, listening to music and speech overlap.” The authors argue that from a musical perspective, speech is a concert of phonemes and syllables.
“While music and language may be cognitively and neurally distinct in adults, we suggest that language is simply a subset of music from a child’s view,” Brandt said. “We conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development.”
Brandt said more research on this topic might lead to a better understanding of why music therapy is helpful for people with reading and speech disorders. People with dyslexia often have problems with the performance of musical rhythm. “A lot of people with language deficits also have musical deficits,” Brandt said.
More research could also shed light on rehabilitation for people who have suffered a stroke. “Music helps them reacquire language, because that may be how they acquired language in the first place,” Brandt said.
The human brain is fickle when it comes to commitments. Between 60 and 80 percent of people don’t use their gym memberships. Most diets work at first but backfire in the long run. According to a 2007 survey conducted by the British psychologist Richard Wiseman, about 88 percent of New Year’s resolutions end in failure.
Given how widespread our broken pledges are, it’s no surprise that psychologists study human willpower. Florida State University Professor of Psychology Roy Baumeister is one of the main figures in this area of study. His research on willpower began in the late 1990s with a few papers demonstrating that when people exert willpower, self-control, persistence and rationality founder. Willpower, he discovered, was a limited resource easily drained by everyday activity.
This article summarises three studies on willpower.
#1:
[H]uman willpower is exhaustible. Under this paradigm, exercising willpower in one instance reduces our ability to decide optimally, exert self-control or perform well on tasks in proceeding instances. Willpower is like a muscle, when it’s depleted – what Baumeister termed “ego depletion” – we suffer the consequences.
#2:
This might not be the whole picture, however. A brand new paper by Michael Inzlicht (University of Toronto) and Brandon J. Schmeichel (Texas A&M University) propose that, “[ego depletion] is not some mysterious result of lost self-control resources but rather the result of shifts in motivation, attention, and emotion.”
#3:
There are other reasons to believe that ego-depletion might not be about “resource depletion.” A few studies provide evidence that participants who work hard on an initial task feel justified in slacking off during subsequent tasks. Research from Veronika Job, Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton even found that participants who believed that willpower is unlimited showed fewer signs of ego depletion compared to participants who thought willpower is limited, suggesting that reduced self-control is a function of people’s folk psychological beliefs. Taken together, our struggles with willpower might be a struggle with motivation and perception.
The article’s conclusion:
Motivation and attention are, of course, interdependent, “[The] shift in motivation away from restraint and towards gratification is accompanied by a parallel shift in attention away from cues signaling the need to control and towards cues signaling the possibility of reward.” However, it is unclear which way the casual arrows points.
What is apparent is that a decade worth of research on willpower is incomplete. Inzlicht and Schmeichel aren’t in the business of destroying paradigms. They emphasize that previous research by Baumeister and colleagues is valuable and state that they’ve contributed to it. But they advise psychologists to understand self-control and its depletion at a more mechanical level. “That self-control exertion at Time 1 affects self-control at Time 2 has been replicated over 100 separate times,” they affirm. “Now we need to gain a more precise understanding of why that is.”
The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, had a question: What are the most meaningful innovations in humanity’s culinary history? What mattered more to the development of civilization’s cultivation of food: the oven? The fridge? The plough? The spork?
To answer that question, the Society convened a group of its Fellows – including, yup, a Nobel Prize Winner – and asked them to whittle down a list of 100 culinarily innovative tools down to 20. That list was then voted on by the Fellows and by a group of “experts in the food and drink industry,” its tools ranked according to four criteria: accessibility, productivity, aesthetics, and health.
The top five:
Refrigeration
Pasteurization / sterilization
Canning
The oven
Irrigation
Visit the link to see the rest.
Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, formulated by the theoretical physicist in 1927, is one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics. In its most familiar form, it says that it is impossible to measure anything without disturbing it. For instance, any attempt to measure a particle’s position must randomly change its speed.
The principle has bedeviled quantum physicists for nearly a century, until recently, when researchers at the University of Toronto demonstrated the ability to directly measure the disturbance and confirm that Heisenberg was too pessimistic.
It is often assumed that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies to both the intrinsic uncertainty that a quantum system must possess, as well as to measurements. These results show that this is not the case and demonstrate the degree of precision that can be achieved with weak-measurement techniques.
“The results force us to adjust our view of exactly what limits quantum mechanics places on measurement,” says Rozema. “These limits are important to fundamental quantum mechanics and also central in developing ‘quantum cryptography’ technology, which relies on the uncertainty principle to guarantee that any eavesdropper would be detected due to the disturbance caused by her measurements.”
The human brain is wired in such a way that we can make sense of lines, colors and patterns on a flat canvas. Artists throughout human history have figured out ways to create illusions such as depth and brightness that aren’t actually there but make works of art seem somehow more real.
And while individual tastes are varied and have cultural influences, the brain also seems to respond especially strongly to certain artistic conventions that mimic what we see in nature.
Our brains have a special affinity for faces and for finding representations of them (some say they see the man in the moon, for instance). Even infants have been shown in several studies to prefer face-like patterns over patterns that don’t resemble anything.
So our brains readily find faces in art, including in Impressionist paintings where faces are constructed from colored lines or discrete patches of color. This “coarse information” can trigger emotional responses, even without you bearing aware of it […]
To trick the brain into thinking something looks three-dimensional and lifelike, artists add elements – lightness and shadows – that wouldn’t be present in real life but that tap into our hard-wired visual sensibilities.
So was Picasso right – is art a lie? The description of Zeki’s exhibition in Italy may highlight the truth:
“Our purpose is to show how the brain reality even overrides the objective reality.”
At the same time that storytelling seems an obsolete handicraft, classic stories—the bloody, surreal folk inventions we know as fairy tales—seem to be having a revival. It’s even possible that in a time of economic uncertainty, readers are drawn to the oldest, most familiar stories. What else explains the simultaneous appearance of Grimm Tales: For Young and Old, in which Philip Pullman has translated 50 of his favourite stories from the classic German storytellers; a slimmer selection of tales, Long Ago and Far Away, that draws from French and Italian sources; and the new study The Irresistible Fairy Tale, by Jack Zipes, the dean of academic fairy-tale studies? And that’s just the books: the last few months have seen two movie versions of the Snow White story, Mirror, Mirror, starring Julia Roberts, and the darker Snow White and the Huntsman, starring Kristen Stewart. Viewers of American TV can tune in to Grimm, a show about a police detective with magic powers who is called upon to fight supernatural monsters; and Once Upon a Time, in which ordinary human beings are revealed to be the avatars of fairy-tale characters like Prince Charming and Rumpelstiltskin.
The reason they survive to this day, Zipes suggests, is because the classic fairy tales—such as Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, which all have analogues in cultures throughout the world—are perfect examples of “memetic” engineering. Drawing on the notion of the meme coined by Richard Dawkins, Zipes imagines the elements of fairy tales competing for mental space over generations of cultural evolution, until only the fittest tales survived. And what makes a tale “fit” is that it has the power “to determine and influence social practices,” to shape the way human beings live together.
If fairy tales are “marked” as literature for children, it is not, despite Zipes, because the patriarchy is trying to minimise their subversive power; it is because only children can be truly affected by stories of magic. The proof of this lies in the way that fairy-tale movies, even those designed for children, inevitably minimise the eventfulness and randomness of the tale in order to make it more logically and psychologically truthful: Snow White becomes a fable about vanity, Cinderella a fable about humility. In the Harry Potter stories, the formula of the fairy tale is inverted: magic becomes an accessory to what is essentially a parable about growing up, which may be why the Potter books appeal to older readers as well.
To read fairy tales in their original forms, on the other hand, is to realise that what they are really about is the primitive wish-fulfillment that storytelling makes possible. Literature is born when this kind of storytelling begins to acknowledge that the world never does grant our wishes, and that the stubbornness of things is ultimately more satisfying to hear about than their mutability.
Review of Reinventing Bach by Paul Elie. Farrer, Straus and Giroux; 512 pages.
Paul Elie uses the story of [Glenn] Gould, along with those of other outstanding musicians, to argue that the age of recordings has allowed Bach’s music to be reinvented by its interpreters, as well as making it available to everybody and for all time as “an ever-expanding collection of peak experiences”. Bach’s music, he says, derives its power in part from its quality of superabundance; and its superabundance has now been compounded by recordings.
Interest in Bach has waxed and waned since his death in 1750, and 60 years ago it was in a waning phase; the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein said you “had to go to certain churches or special little concerts” if you wanted to hear his music. Mr Elie shows how the development of ever better recording techniques since then has allowed Bach to pop up everywhere, despite a supposed decline in the popularity of classical music: as a soundtrack to Walt Disney’s animated film, “Fantasia”; as part of the backing in some of the Beatles’ songs; even as a jingle in would-be classy television advertisements.
Mr Elie deploys considerable scholarship (the more notable since his previous book, about four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God, had nothing to do with music), and he writes beautifully. He makes a strong case that within less than a century a succession of new recording media—from the wax cylinder to the 78, the LP, various kinds of tape, the CD and now the computer—have brought Bach’s music, in multiple versions, to vast numbers of new listeners at the press of a button. It is a luxury previously unavailable even to princes, who in order to enjoy live performances had to employ entire orchestras. Recording technology has made a monarch of everyone. A chapter or two into the book, you will find yourself reaching out for your “Goldberg Variations”.