Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evolution. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Thursday, August 5, 2010
The Brains of Storytellers And Their Listeners Actually Sync Up
You may be talking and I may be listening, but our brains look strikingly similar.That’s the conclusion of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week. After conducting brain scans of a woman telling a story off the cuff and then of 11 people listening to a recording of her, researchers Greg Stephens and Uri Hasson say they found that the same parts of the brains showed activation at the same time, suggesting a deep connection between talker and listener.
Graduate student Lauren Silbert was the team’s storytelling guinea pig. She recounted tales of high school, like deciding whom to take to prom, while undergoing an fMRI scan.
As Silbert spoke about her prom experience, the same areas lit up in her brain as in the brains of her listeners. In most brain regions, the activation pattern in the listeners’ brains came a few seconds after that seen in Silbert’s brain. But a few brain areas, including one in the frontal lobe, actually lit up before Silbert’s, perhaps representing listeners’ anticipating what she was going to say next, the team says [ScienceNOW].
When the neuroscientists scanned the same listeners while they heard a story in Russian that they couldn’t understand, the coupling of brain regions didn’t show up.The study certainly comes with caveats: Its sample size is small, and scientists don’t know exactly what causes the synchronization, nor the exact function of the brain regions in question to any more specificity than “language.” But Stephens and Hasson argue that their findings speak to conceptual common ground people must meet to make conversation possible:
“If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain” [Wired.com].
The findings leave neuroscientists with a host of directions in which they could go. Hasson says his team’s next step is to go beyond one talker and a bunch of listeners and actually study people engaged in dialogue.Related Content:
80beats: Boom Boom Krak-oo! Have Monkeys Demonstrated Syntax?
80beats: Electrodes Stuck in the Brain Show How Thoughts Become Speech
80beats: TV Can Slow Language Development, Even in the Background
DISCOVER: Why Has Steven Pinker Studied Verbs for 20 Years?
Image: iStockphoto
Saturday, December 12, 2009
to be or not to be....
Daniel Askill - WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE from Cgunit on Vimeo.
"We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not."
Heraclitus the Riddler
Sunday, September 27, 2009
evolution....
Evolution from Alex Glawion on Vimeo.
This short animation reflects shortcomings of mankind in different stages. It was entirely created in Blender within a university motion design class.
enjoy
http://www.alexglawion.com
music by sia
http://www.blender.org
"We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not."
Heraclitus the Riddler
Saturday, April 4, 2009
pale blue dot
If you look carefully at the NASA photo below, you will see a little white dot. This minute speck is Earth seen from the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it exits the solar system, nearly 4 billion miles away. The photo was taken back in 1990.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
"We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not."
Heraclitus the Riddler
Friday, January 16, 2009
A big Darwinian event
Friday, December 26, 2008
Evolutionary cooking by Mrs C.Darwin
A cookbook based on notes by Charles Darwin's wife is to be published. Mrs Charles Darwin's Recipe Book features more than 40 dishes from her personal cookery notebook, which is housed in Cambridge University Library. Turnip cresselly, broiled mushrooms, cheese straws and baked apple pudding all feature in the Victorian notes.
"We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not."
Heraclitus the Riddler
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