“In the past, scientists had been able to detect decisions about making physical movements before those movements appeared. But researchers at Berlin’s Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience claim they have now, for the first time, identified people’s decisions about how they would later do a high-level mental activity – in this case, adding versus subtracting.”
“The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who ‘speak in tongues’ reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that … Continue reading “Speaking In Tongues: And The Brain Scan Says …”
Montreal’s McGill University has debuted an impressive new building housing its school of music. The project was a long time coming – planning began in 1994 for what was originally supposed to be a library and archive – but the final result is one of the more cutting-edge facilities enjoyed by any conservatory in North … Continue reading “McGill Puts Its Money Where Its Music Is”
It was probably inevitable – marketers want to see inside your brain to see what products you like. “Using the tools of neuroscientists are trying to learn more about the mental processes behind purchasing decisions. The resulting fusion of neuroscience and marketing is, inevitably, being called ‘neuromarketing’.”
“The chromatic scale — the musical scale that follows the notes of the piano and of which the Western seven-tone do-re-mi scale is a subset — may not be based on number ratios, as many physicists and mathematicians have proposed, but rather on human speech, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of … Continue reading “The Basis Of Music?”
Why is music – pleasurable to be sure, but hardly essential to life – so ubiquitous to every culture? “Archaeologists have found evidence of musical activity dating back at least 50,000 years. Even babies as well as some animals, such as birds, whales and monkeys, have a built-in sense of tone and rhythm, according to … Continue reading “Why Music? Scientists Want To Know”
Does listening to Mozart make you smarter? That’s the claim, repeated often, without much scientific study to back it up. Now the Neurosciences Institute, a “respected research body perched by the sea near La Jolla,” California is presenting a concert series with neuroscience experts to address the question.
A new book examines the properties of human consciousness. “Scientists tend to concentrate on the locations, mechanisms and functions of consciousness. Philosophers, meanwhile, worry away at problems that used to be very old but, thanks to neuroscience, are now very new again. What has the mind to do with the brain? Is it true, as … Continue reading “Wake Up… Now How Did You Do That?”
Are personality, intelligence, gender, and the moral sense in the genes or are they the stuff of culture? A new book argues that “new sciences of human nature — combining cognitive science, neuroscience, genetics, and evolution—strongly suggest that our minds are partly ‘hardwired’ at birth. This hardwiring likely underlies many human universals—forms of behavior and … Continue reading “Getting Under The Hood Of Human Hardwiring”
