Geoff Mangum’s Flatstick Forum: How Music Training Primes Nervous System and Boosts Learning

“Those ubiquitous wires connecting listeners to you-name-the-sounds from invisible MP3 players — whether of Bach, Miles Davis or, more likely today, Lady Gaga — only hint at music’s effect on the soul throughout the ages. Now a data-driven review by Northwestern University researchers that will be published July 20 in Nature Reviews Neuroscience pulls together converging research from the scientific literature linking musical training to learning that spills over to skills including language, speech, memory, attention and even vocal emotion. The science covered comes from labs all over the world, from scientists of varying scientific philosophies, using a wide range of research methods. The explosion of research in recent years focusing on the effects of music training on the nervous system, including the studies in the review, have strong implications for education, said Nina Kraus, lead author of the Nature perspective, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory. Scientists use the term neuroplasticity to describe the brain’s ability to adapt and change as a result of training and experience over the course of a person’s life. The studies covered in the Northwestern review offer a model of neuroplasticity, Kraus said. The research strongly suggests that the neural connections made during musical training also prime the brain for other aspects of human communication. An active engagement with musical sounds not only enhances neuroplasticity, she said, but also enables the nervous system to provide the stable scaffolding of meaningful patterns so important to learning. “The brain is unable to process all of the available sensory information from second to second, and thus must selectively enhance what is relevant,” Kraus said. Playing an instrument primes the brain to choose what is relevant in a complex process that may involve reading or remembering a score, timing issues and coordination with other musicians. “A musician’s brain selectively enhances information-bearing elements in sound,” Kraus said. “In a beautiful interrelationship between sensory and cognitive processes, the nervous system makes associations between complex sounds and what they mean.” The efficient sound-to-meaning connections are important not only for music but for other aspects of communication, she said. “

tags: physiology brain neuroplasticity music

Meditation on Demand: Scientific American

“The Dalai Lama’s interest in neuroscience has been reciprocated by at least some members of the neuroscience community. Reasoning that studying the brains of people who meditate might lead to novel insights about the human brain, investigations of long-term meditators has been fertile ground for scientific investigation, with some of the more rigorous work emerging from Richard Davidson’s laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. From the perspective of neuroscience, meditation can be characterized as a series of mental exercises by which one strengthens one’s control over the workings of their own brain. The simplest of these meditation practices is ‘focused attention’ where one concentrates on a single object, for example one’s breath. When expert meditators practiced focused attention meditation, demonstrable changes were seen using fMRI in the networks of the brain that are known to modulate attention. A second set of experiments studied long-term meditators practicing ‘open monitoring meditation’, a more advanced meditation practice which in many ways is a form of metacognition: the objective is not to focus one’s attention but rather to use one’s brain to monitor the universe of mental experience without directing attention to any one task. The unexpected result of this experiment was that the EEG of long-term meditators exhibited much more gamma-synchrony than that of naive meditators. Moreover, normally human brains produce only short bursts of gamma-synchrony. What was most remarkable about this study was that long-term meditators were able to produce sustained gamma-activity in a manner that had never previously been observed in any other human. As such, sustained gamma activity has emerged as a proxy for at least some aspects of the meditative state.”

tags: physiology brain neuroplasticity

Monitor and Control Memory Usage in Google Chrome

“Do you want to know just how much memory Google Chrome and any installed extensions are using at a given moment? With just a few clicks you can see just what is going on under the hood of your browser.”

tags: computing monitoring memory google google_chrome

Places to visit – a set on Flickr

tags: photos places

Musicians detect pitch violation in a foreig… [J Cogn Neurosci. 2007] – PubMed – NCBI

“The aim of this study was to determine whether musical expertise influences the detection of pitch variations in a foreign language that participants did not understand. To this end, French adults, musicians and nonmusicians, were presented with sentences spoken in Portuguese. The final words of the sentences were prosodically congruous (spoken at normal pitch height) or incongruous (pitch was increased by 35% or 120%). Results showed that when the pitch deviations were small and difficult to detect (35%: weak prosodic incongruities), the level of performance was higher for musicians than for nonmusicians. Moreover, analysis of the time course of pitch processing, as revealed by the event-related brain potentials to the prosodically congruous and incongruous sentence-final words, showed that musicians were, on average, 300 msec faster than nonmusicians to categorize prosodically congruous and incongruous endings. These results are in line with previous ones showing that musical expertise, by increasing discrimination of pitch–a basic acoustic parameter equally important for music and speech prosody–does facilitate the processing of pitch variations not only in music but also in language. Finally, comparison with previous results [Schön, D., Magne, C., & Besson, M. The music of speech: Music training facilitates pitch processing in both music and language. Psychophysiology, 41, 341-349, 2004] points to the influence of semantics on the perception of acoustic prosodic cues.”

tags: music language learning

HowStuffWorks “Why do some people learn new languages easily and some don’t?”

“The attitude with which you approach the language is important, so if you can’t stand Chinese food, that may influence your performance in Mandarin class. On the other hand, if you’re motivated to learn Mandarin so that you can speak to your grandmother in her native tongue, you may find that you have an easier time picking it up. And immersion is also important — if you wake up in China one morning and need to get around by yourself, you may pick it up very quickly indeed. Teachers say that with enough hard work, motivation and practice, those who may not think they’re good at foreign language may end up being star pupils.”

tags: language learning

Melodies that help:The relation between language aptitude and musical intelligence | Carmen Fonseca-Mora – Academia.edu

“Music and rhythm have been defined as powerful aids to language learning, memory, and recall. But isthis due to structural and motivational properties of instrumental music and songs or is there a relation  between learners‟ language aptitude and musical intelligence? It seems that everyone who feels motivatedto do it is able to learn other languages to some degree as long as an appropriate learning method is used.However, learning foreign languages is not easy, as many variables need to be considered if the desiredresult is optimal language learning in a non bilingual environment. Probably, one of the main obstacles tolearning a foreign language in this context is the lack of continuous target language auditory input. Whilein first language acquisition babies start receiving sonorous stimuli in their mother‟s womb, in foreign language learning opportunities to receive auditory input are mainly limited to the classroom, the teacher,the classmates and situations in which listening is included in the lesson.”

tags: arts music language learning

Musical training helps language processing, studies show

“In two Stanford studies, researchers demonstrated that people with musical experience found it easier than non-musicians to detect small differences in word syllables. They also discovered that musical training helps the brain work more efficiently in distinguishing split-second differences between rapidly changing sounds that are essential to processing language.”

tags: arts music language learning

NUTN.org

“© 2013 National University Technology Network. All rights reserved. NUTN is a networking and professional development organization for innovative leaders in the advancement of teaching and learning.”

tags: networking teaching learning educational_technology

Landsat GeoCover dataset

“The Landsat GeoCover dataset is a collection of high resolution satellite imagery provided in a standardized, orthorectified format, covering the entire land surface of the world (except Antarctica). This is an invaluable record of land cover and land cover change, provided in a consistent manner that allows for use in a wide range of activities including environmental assessment, planning, land management, resource stewardship and many Earth science research activities.”

tags: mapping

6 Examples to Backup Linux Using dd Command (Including Disk to Disk)

“To backup an entire copy of a hard disk to another hard disk connected to the same system, execute the dd command as shown below. In this dd command example, the UNIX device name of the source hard disk is /dev/hda, and device name of the target hard disk is /dev/hdb.”

tags: system_administration linux

WRITER’S TOOLBOX: 35 Best Tools for Writing Online

From 2008, but many sites are still around and have matured: “Whether you’re new to the world of authorship or a veteran trying to make the most of Web services and applications, there are a number of online tools for writers of all types. From blogging platforms to networking hotbeds, and job boards to real-world gatherings, and more, the supply of utilities is comprehensive, to say the least. But finding them all can be hard-going, so we’ve taken the liberty to make the discovery process easier by arranging our top finds here for your perusal. Here are 35 of the best social media tools for writers.”

tags: writing web_apps

NASA Opensource – Projects

tags: open_source software government

FITS Support Office

“The standard data format used in astronomy stands for ‘Flexible Image Transport System’ “

tags: open_source software government

Welcome to Software Catalog | Software Catalog

“Welcome to the NASA Glenn Research Center Software Catalog. Within this site you will find publicly available software codes for the release to US citizens.”

tags: open_source software government

Open Channel Foundation: NASA Cosmic Collection

“Open Channel Software has entered into an agreement with the National Technology Transfer Center (NTTC) to publish the COSMIC software collection. This collection represents software created by NASA in a wide range of disciplines including engineering, chemistry, aerodynamics, and other areas.
“

tags: open_source software government

Internet Census 2012

“Abstract While playing around with the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE) we discovered an amazing number of open embedded devices on the Internet. Many of them are based on Linux and allow login to standard BusyBox with empty or default credentials. We used these devices to build a distributed port scanner to scan all IPv4 addresses. These scans include service probes for the most common ports, ICMP ping, reverse DNS and SYN scans. We analyzed some of the data to get an estimation of the IP address usage.”

tags: internet networking connections

Buddhist-Artwork & Buddhist Statuary; Devoted to Japanese Buddhism & Asian Buddhist Art

“OVERVIEW. Buddhist-Artwork.com was founded in July 2006. We specialize in hand-carved wooden statues made for the Japanese market, and to a lesser degree we handle handcrafted Buddhist artwork from China and Southeast Asia. Our online store features charming and delicately carved Buddhist statuary, amulets, glassware, and antiques — most are closely aligned to Japanese iconographic traditions. Our sister site, Onmarkproductions.com, is now in its 13th year, and features an online photo dictionary with 2,000+ photos covering hundreds of Japanese deities, gods, goddesses, demons, and creatures from Japan’s Buddhist & Shinto pantheon.”

tags: history religion buddhism japanese

100+ Useful Bookmarklets For Better Productivity | Ultimate List

“In a nutshell, bookmarklets are small little applications you can place as browser’s bookmark bar and they each perform a specific function, depending on what they are coded for. Bookmarklets are usually written in Javascript and they are extremely easy to install/remove. Bookmarklets work in most common used browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari but probably lesser support in Internet Explorer.”

tags: bookmarklets

Danner – Since 1932

The window display at Beckel Canvas, located just steps away from the pulse of Clinton Street in Portland, Oregon, can be as curiously chaotic as the workshop sitting just inside. The business, whether by accident or design is run entirely by women with Kathy Beckel in the drivers seat. 48 years earlier, this family owned business opened its doors making the interior curtains and detachable side tents that came with Volkswagen camper vans. From there, Kathy’s father moved on to making tents for his friends when VW took the production of the curtains in house.

tags: @shopping survival edc camping

Useful Google Bookmarklets

“Here’s a small list of bookmarks related to Google’s services. Most of them provide features from Google Toolbar. To save them, make sure bookmark toolbar is visible (go to View > Toolbar and check Bookmarks Toolbar, Links or Personal Bar, depending on your browser) and drag the link to the toolbar.”

tags: bookmarklets google