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Thursday, August 23, 2012

Paintings of Franz Marc




























































Picasso Photo

Following the lead of his family, Marc studied theology intensely. The family contemplated both the spiritual essence of Christianity and its cultural responsibilities. Marc was sufficiently moved by the background and his confirmation in 1894 that, for the next five years, his goal was to become a priest. But he mingled with his theological studies the Romantic literature of both England and Germany. Finally, near the end of 1898, Marc gave up his goal of becoming a priest to study philosophy at University of Munich. But suddenly, in 1900, the ethical, high-minded youth turned to art. He studied drawing first with Gabriel Hackl and then painting with Wilhelm von Diez, both at the Munich Academy.

In the first years of the twentieth century, artistic training in Munich emphasized the traditional verities of academic naturalism and studio production. French Impressionist color innovations were still largely unknown. At this early stage in his development, Marc reflects the thematic concerns of such predecessors as Caspar David Friedrich in that the human being is dwarfed by the awesome appearance of nature.

Marc's stiff studio style begins to undergo a transition in subsequent years due to a variety of French influences. A trip to Paris in 1903 initiated an interest in Impressionism. Unfortunately, Marc's artistic development was accompanied by melancholy and upheavals in his emotional life. His religious outlook was at odds with the Munich youth movement and the city's burgeoning bohemian atmosphere. He spent summers in the mountains in 1905 and 1906 as well as traveling to Greece in 1906, attempting to recuperate from unhappy love affairs. This period of anxiety came to a tumultuous end when, on his wedding night, following marriage to the painter Marie Schnur, he left for Paris. That summer, in 1907, his marriage was dissolved.

Evolving a Style

Marc's sudden trip to Paris in 1907 marks a major turning point in his career. Apparently freed from his period of despondency, he came under the influence of Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and Van Gogh, all of whom had a profound impact on the young artist. Van Gogh immediately fit Marc's mood:
Van Gogh is for me the most authentic, the greatest, the most poignant painter I know. To paint a bit of the most ordinary nature, putting all one's faith and longings into it - that is the supreme achievement... Now I paint... only the simplest things... Only in them are the symbolism, the pathos, and the mystery of nature to be found.”
Marc and Van Gogh were clearly kindred spirits. Each saw life in religious yet tortured terms and each found transcendent effects in insignificant themes, echoing Symbolist notions. Like Van Gogh, Marc possessed the idea of the artist as martyr.

The year 1907 marks the beginning of his sustained preoccupation with a variety of animal subjects. Beside an anatomical interest in these, as in his few pieces of sculpture, Marc's constant thematic concern is the relationship between animal and human spheres. One reason for Marc's interest in animals was that they represented, for him, a spiritual attitude. A critical element in Marc's turn to this subject was a feeling that animals were somehow more natural or pure than people. Moreover, he believed that through animals he could represent his own spiritual feeling.

Marc's most important work of 1908 is Large Lenggries Horse Painting. Although he had done several small horse subjects earlier, this work was the largest and most significant to survive. It announces Marc's engagement with the major theme of his career, the horse.

While Marc had painted horses earlier, those versions often portray domesticated or placid animals. But Lenggeries Horse Painting introduces the enormous vitality and vivid rendering that would characterize later paintings. It also shows another aspect typical of Marc's mature work - animals arranged rhythmically, yet with each indicating an individual and potentially emotional or symbolic attitude.

The similarities between the figurative works and the animal subjects, especially with regard to poses evocative of either contemplation, dream, or self-absorption, reinforce the likelihood that Marc transferred to the animal attitudes one associates more easily with humanity.

Maturity

At the start of 1911, Marc painted a large sequel entitled The Red Horses, a work which consolidated and advanced his new maturity. Still rendered with light impasto, like the Lenggries Horse Painting, Red Horses departed from that canvas with the rich formal relationship created between the animals and the landscape, as reflected in the rhythmic curves uniting the torsos and hills. Color is now raised to a brilliant pitch, as the red of the horses contrasts to the blue rocks in the right corner and the yellow ground. In the upper third of the painting, Marc mixed the primaries to produce pinks, violets, and greens, which build toward the mostly white sky.

By early 1911 Marc had already developed a symbolism for his use of color. In this, he followed a pattern established earlier by another early-nineteenth century German Romantic painter Wassily Kandinsky. Marc ascribed spirituality and maleness to blue, femininity and sensuality to yellow, and terrestrial materiality to red. The context in which Marc worked suggests he employed these correspondences programmatically, for Wassily Kandinsky was extremely serious about color symbolism, and the Symbolists, with whom Kandinsky and Marc had much in common, were likewise interested in such ideas.

With Red Horses, Marc was reaching the point of genuine maturity. Coloristic freedom and composition had become integrated with his vision of nature.

Paralleling Marc's artistic evolution was the emotional peace he achieved upon marrying Maria Franck in the summer of 1911, on a trip to England. Maria may have inspired the magnificent Yellow Cow, especially yellow is the color of femininity for Marc. Supporting this possibility is an interpretation of Blue Horse I of the same year, as epitomizing Marc's mood. In each case, Marc's color symbolism reinforces exaggerated archetypal portrayals: the male blue horse is contemplative and spiritual; the yellow female is active and sensual.

Following Red Horses and Yellow Cow, Marc completed his suite of monumental, primary-color compositions in 1911 with The Large Blue Horses. He returned to the Large Lenggries Horse Paintings for the pose of the animals and for the semi-circular arrangement, with all pointing to the left. The grouping of animals is rather awkward and bulky, as they are bunched in a small, constricted, entirely blue area, with the viewer's vantage point close to the action. Compositionally, the animals are more fully integrated with a hilly landscape than was the case in Red Horses, for the curvilinear rhythm that characterizes the torsos is repeated precisely in the hills.

Der Blaue Reiter and Expressionism

Der Blaue Reiter was founded in Munich in 1911 by Marc and Kandinsky after they resigned from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München due to their differences of opinion with other members of the association. Marc and Kandinsky shared similar ideas on art: both believed that true art should possess a spiritual dimension. Kandinsky's views are outlined in his text Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which first appeared in 1911. For Marc the spiritual aspect of art was perhaps more concerned with representing the inner soul of a being; Kandinsky represented the spiritual by abstract means. Both felt that much of the art of their day lacked any such dimension and thus hoped that Der Blaue Reiter would create a spiritual revolution in art. In addition to Marc and Kandinsky, other members of the group included Macke, Münter, von Jawlensky, the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin, and the Swiss artist Paul Klee. Their work was not united by a particular style but by common objectives in their artistic production. The key events of the group's activities were two exhibitions, in 1911 and 1912, and the publication of an almanac in 1912. Both exhibitions were held in Munich, and subsequently travelled around Germany. They featured works by members of the group and by other artists, including the Spanish artist Picasso, Delaunay, and the French artist Henri Rousseau whose work was chosen by Marc and Kandinsky because they represented what they believed to be true art. The almanac, which explored the group's shared consideration for the spiritual aspect of art, consisted of a series of essays by its members and was edited by Marc and Kandinsky, who also contributed three essays each. The essays in the almanac are interspersed and accompanied by illustrations which compare art works from different regions and epochs. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 brought an end to Der Blaue Reiter's activities, but the group's work, together with that of the Dresden-based group Die Brücke, marks the high point of German Expressionism. A brief comparison is drawn between these two Expressionist groups in The Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists:
Where the Brücke artists used distortion to signal tensions in the artist and sharpen viewers' responses, Blaue Reiter artists typically wished to involve us in a more meditative communication. Whereas some of the Brücke artists wished to be seen as 20th-century Germans developing a truly German art in a country too long dominated by French values and manner, the Blaue Reiter circle was of its nature international, and viewed art in global, even eternal terms.”
The importance of the almanac as evidence of the articulation of Marc's views and ideas cannot be underestimated. In his essay in the almanac entitled 'Spiritual treasures', Marc discusses the idea of the "mystical inner construction," referring to the sense of spirit which gives a being or place its unique character. Marc explores this theme through the figures present in works by El Greco and the landscapes by the French artist Paul Cézanne. The use of the word "mystical" encourages both the impression of something which is not immediately obvious or material and a sense of intrigue. Marc seemed to be striving to achieve and to capture this "mystical inner construction" in his paintings of animals. Another essay entitled 'The "savages" of Germany' can further aid an understanding and appreciation of Marc's paintings and the objectives of his artistic production. In this essay Marc identifies "symbols that belong on the altars of a future spiritual religion" within the work of Kandinsky and von Jawlensky. He implies that this is a basis for the work of Der Blaue Reiter and consequently for his own work. Hence, it appears that Marc was preoccupied with representing the inner being of his subject, and that spirituality and religion were at the forefront of his objectives.

Abstraction

By late in 1913 Marc was increasingly organizing his vision with an abstract vocabulary. A language largely evolved from Wassily Kandinsky, and Futurism, as well as Macke's color compositions of 1912, this abstract mode unified his subject matter while reducing the melodrama. Abstraction, in Marc's view, became a means of expressing the eixstence of one creative law of the universe. Hence, his subject matter while reducing the melodrama. the horse is no longer shown in individual terms of heroism or pathos but rather as an aspect within a universal field of forces. That field, whether determined by a generative or destructive law or by an overall "structure of universe," occupied Marc in his final paintings.

Stables, 1913, the last major work based on the horse theme, aptly demonstrates Marc's late approach to his favorite subject. He no longer show the world in representational terms or as seen from an individual animal's advantage point. Rather, an overall pictorial structure of large diagonal crosses holds within it a group of red, blue, and white horses. Opposed to earlier gatherings, the animals in Stables have a more rigid and schematic portrayal. the circular and semi-circular body parts form a rhythm across the surface which is contrasted with the angular lines of the stable structure.

Frequently in 1914 Marc presents vibrant formal relationships that epitomize the most extreme moments in nature. for example, in Fighting forms, 1914, he dramatically depicts red and blue areas in conflict; in Animal in Landscape, 1914, he created a similar aura of intense energy, with raging linear, coloristic, and planar juxtapositions, characteristic of Marc's finest work of 1914. Both creation and apocalypse assume similar appearance for Marc, as the visual attributes of Painting with Bulls, which is without clear suggestions of conflagration, appear, also, in Fate of the Animals. Thus, Marc's aim in 1914 is to show a singular red-versus-blue relationship underlying all events, like a law of nature. This contrast was the dominant one in Blue Horses of the three ears earlier.

We have seen that Marc's career in part consisted of metamorphosing themes he had already considered, as in the case of his treatment of human figures and animals, and the absorption of human qualities into the animals.

Marc's conclusion that animals, like humans, were ugly became an important motivation for his concentration on nostrils. In emphasizing snouts, he chose one of the least attractive attributes of animal, as if to turn himself from his fascination with their dynamic, physical character to an aspect of no inherent beauty or interest.

Broken Forms is an example of Marc's final series of works, a group from 1914 with tile such as Playing Forms, Abstract Forms, fighting forms, Higher Forms, and Small Composition I, II, III, and IV. In these, Marc has taken the step to virtual abstraction, a move he had continuously approached. Apparently, as with the earliest horse paintings, Marc was somewhat dissatisfied with these works, however, and, calling them experiments, he preferred not to exhibit them.

In the spring of 1914 Franz and Maria Marc bought a small country house in Ried. According to Kandinsky, this purchase was one of "Marc's greatest wishes come true." He was even able to keep a dog and a tame deer there. But in August of 1914, at the outbreak of the war, Marc volunteered. Kandinsky visited him to say "Auf Wiedersehen." but Marc replied "Adieu." Within two months, Marc's first personal indication of the war's magnitude occurred; August Macke died in battle in September at the age of twenty-seven.

Marc wrote and drew extensively at the front. His drawings show a remarkable looseness and facility, for the most part combining figurative elements within a Cubist of Futurist framework of lines. Frequently still, innocent animals are depicted, yet now within a gradually tightening web of force lines that are reminiscent of Marc's vision of destruction, Fate of the Animals, 1913.

while cataclysmic events occurred around him, Marc nevertheless theorized on the supposed benefits of war, including the thought of a spiritual breakthrough and redemption through suffering. He was so moral in his belief in the eventual beneficent effects of the war that he could ignore the fact that patriotic allegiances fueled the war and caused his presence. Finally, he interpreted events in a more fatalistic way. Like the animals who had become simply motifs in a large scheme, he saw himself at war in similar terms. In the war Marc was forced to rationalize his aim, but the conflicts and questions that resulted disturbed him profoundly. Paul Klee was "afraid that he might be a completely different man some day," as if his delicate balance might not withstand reality. The trauma of the war for Marc was such that, at the end, only death could give him relief. In that state his own innocence could be restored. One of Marc's last letter, before his death at Verdun in 1916, concluded on this notes:

I understand well that you speak as easily of death as of something which doesn't frighten you. I feel precisely the same. In this war, you can try it out on yourself - an opportunity life seldom offers one...nothing is more calming than the prospect of the peace of death...the one thing common to all. It leads us back into normal "being". The space between birth and death is an exception, in which there is much to fear and suffer. The only true, constant, philosophical comfort is the awareness that this exceptional condition will pass and that "I-conciousness" which is always restless, always piquant, in all seriousness inaccessible, will again sink back into its wonderful peace before birth... whoever strives fro purity and knowledge, to him death always comes as a savior.”

Conclusion

Franz Marc contributed to the vision of abstraction in its second wave, 1911-14, by wedding an Expressionistic outlook to the new pictorial developments emanating from France. There, formal innovations were largely an end in themselves. But in the hands of Franc Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, arbitrary color, faceted planes, and pictorial structure became modes with which certain deeply held themes could be stated. Marc's achievement was in effect creating works of art that, through abstract means, evinced his conception of the overall unity and character of nature.

As a founder of the Blue Rider, Marc holds a place in the theoretical impact of this pivotal movement of future developments, such as Dada, and Bauhaus. More specifically, Marc was to have an influence on his colleague Paul Klee. the latter described their relationship as a pair of overlapping circles, with a "relatively large common area." Although a year younger, Marc reached artistic maturity ahead of Klee. In general, the overall delicacy of touch and transparency in Marc's watercolors are close to the work of Klee after 1914. Also, certain motifs appear fist in Marc's work and subsequently in Klee's; for example, Marc's use of triangles and upward-moving forms to imply aspiration became a constant in Klee's art. The two shared much in common theoretically, especially the desire to see through a transcendent vantage point. reinforcing their common belief in fate was the fact that, on the day Klee received word from Maria Marc of his friend's death, he was drafted.

The desire by the German wave of abstractionists to unite the new pictorial means from France with ambitious or transcendent subject matter, or both, quickly became the goal of subsequent movements of twentieth-century abstraction. While Marc was not alone in possessing lofty aspirations, he and Wassily Kandinsky established a critically important step in making Cubist and Fauvist harmonies apply to an elevated concept of subject matter. For instance, the desire for the content of epic proportions became a touchstone in the work of Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, and then, among American Abstract-Expressionists Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Did you know Now plants can also use SMS and all other internet services..




Interactive telecommunications researchers designed a soil-moisture sensor device that allows a house plant to communicate with its owner. The device can send short messages to a mobile phone or, by using a service called Twitter, it can send short messages to the Internet. The messages can range from reminders to water the plant, a thank you or a warning that you over- or under-watered it.

Teens who smoke and drink may be more likely to abuse prescription opioids later




Teens who smoke and drink may be more likely to abuse prescription opioids later

Illustration by Michael Helfenbein
(Medical Xpress) -- Adolescents who smoke cigarettes or use alcohol or marijuana may be at greater risk for subsequent abuse of prescription opioids as young adults, according to a new study by Yale School of Medicine.
The researchers believe their findings are the first to demonstrate that early alcohol, cigarette, and marijuana use are all associated, to varying degrees, with a two- to-three times greater likelihood of subsequent abuse of prescription opioids. The study appears online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.
The researchers set out to determine whether certain tenets of the so-called “gateway hypothesis” applied to subsequent abuse of prescription opioids — specifically, whether substance use in the adolescent years was associated with later abuse of harder drugs. They studied demographic and clinic data collected from 18- to 25-year-olds from the 2006-2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health to determine the likelihood, based on their prior usage.
Their findings included: 
  • 12% of the survey population of 18- to 25-year-olds reported current abuse of prescription opioids.
  • For this population, prevalence of previous substance use was 57% for alcohol, 56% for cigarettes, and 34% for marijuana.
  • In young men, previous abuse of all three substances was associated with an increased likelihood of subsequent opioid abuse during young adulthood, but only previous marijuana use carried this association among young women.
The Yale study could lead to much more targeted efforts at prevention. “Given that there are now an estimated three and a half million young adults who abuse prescription opioids and this number is growing, our study of the data shows that efforts to target early substance use may help to curb this increasing abuse of prescription opioids,” said lead author Dr. Lynn Fiellin, associate professor of medicine at Yale.
Provided by Yale University
"Teens who smoke and drink may be more likely to abuse prescription opioids later." August 21st, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-teens-abuse-prescription-opioids.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Unconscious emotional memory remains intact during alcohol intoxication, may impact prevention and intervention




(Medical Xpress) -- Although certain memory processes are impaired during alcohol intoxication, the brain does appear to retain emotionally charged images, particularly in unconscious memory processes, a new study in the September issue of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs suggests. This finding may have implications for improving alcohol education and treatment programs.
The study looked at two types of memory: explicit (or conscious memory, such as answering a question about yesterday’s weather) and implicit (or unconscious memory, such as performing the steps involved in driving a car or having a conditioned emotional response to a frightening situation).
Acute alcohol intoxication often disrupts explicit memory for emotionally neutral cues, while leaving implicit memory intact.
Further, explicit memory has consistently shown to be improved by emotional content, but emotion’s effect on implicit memory has been less thoroughly examined, says Suchismita Ray, an assistant research professor at the Center of Alcohol Studies at Rutgers University and one of the lead study authors.
The study was designed to examine whether acute alcohol intoxication disrupts memory for emotionally valenced and neutral picture cues using an explicit recall and an implicit repetition priming task. This study is the first to examine how implicit memory priming for emotional cues is affected by acute alcohol intoxication.
The study involved 36 men and women, ages 21–24. All participants consumed a placebo, a nonalcoholic beverage, or an alcoholic beverage designed to create a blood alcohol level of .08 (near the national limit for legal driving). They then viewed emotionally negative, emotionally positive, and emotionally neutral images. During the explicit memory test, participants were asked to recall as many images as they could in detail. For the implicit memory test, participants were shown 360 images (images they had already seen and new images) and had to determine whether each was a real picture or a “non-real” picture (an electronically distorted image). The participants’ speed in making this decision is a measure of implicit memory.
Alcohol intoxication impaired explicit recall of all three types of images, although participants were still able to recall more emotionally charged images (positive or negative) than neutral ones even when intoxicated. In contrast, implicit memory priming was not affected by alcohol intoxication. Whether intoxicated or not, participants made faster decisions about all images they had previously seen compared with new images. This was especially true for previously seen negative images.
“Alcohol dampens overall emotional reactivity, but the brain still allocates more neural resources for emotional cues compared to neutral ones,” says Ray. “And with good reason - emotional memories are important for survival.”
It’s this emotion–memory connection that Ray says can help improve alcohol treatment programs.
“If explicit memory processes for emotional cues are affected by alcohol intoxication and implicit processes are not, it’s very important to develop ways for future treatment and prevention programs to exploit these intact implicit memory processes,” she says. “If alcohol cues are linked to relaxation or fun, we can’t totally delete these links, but perhaps increasing the strength of implicit links between alcohol cues and negative emotional consequences of use could be used to help people in the future. Those implicit memory links would still be available to individuals during intoxication and, thus, may help to reduce drinking when explicit memory for negative consequences is impaired by alcohol.”
Interventions that involve some forms of implicit memory may be especially useful for alcohol treatment because they do not rely primarily on the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for learning new information. In addition to acute alcohol intoxication effects, long-term alcohol and drug use damages certain parts of the brain including the hippocampus, so people may not be able to remember new facts that they learn during the treatment process.
Provided by Rutgers University
"Unconscious emotional memory remains intact during alcohol intoxication, may impact prevention and intervention." August 21st, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-emotional-memory-intact-alcohol-intoxication.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

New study uncovers brain's code for pronouncing vowels




Scientists have unraveled how our brain cells encode the pronunciation of individual vowels in speech. The discovery could lead to new technology that verbalizes the unspoken words of people paralyzed by injury or disease.
Diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease at 21, British physicist Stephen Hawking, now 70, relies on a computerized device to speak. Engineers are investigating the use of brainwaves to create a new form of communication for Hawking and other people suffering from paralysis. -Daily Mail
Scientists at UCLA and the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology, have unraveled how our brain cells encode the pronunciation of individual vowels in speech. Published in the Aug. 21 edition of Nature Communications, the discovery could lead to new technology that verbalizes the unspoken words of people paralyzed by injury or disease.
"We know that brain cells fire in a predictable way before we move our bodies," explained Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "We hypothesized that neurons would also react differently when we pronounce specific sounds. If so, we may one day be able to decode these unique patterns of activity in the brain and translate them into speech."
Fried and Technion's Ariel Tankus, formerly a postdoctoral researcher in Fried's lab, followed 11 UCLA epilepsy patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains to pinpoint the origin of their seizures. The researchers recorded neuron activity as the patients uttered one of five vowels or syllables containing the vowels.
With Technion's Shy Shoham, the team studied how the neurons encoded vowel articulation at both the single-cell and collective level. The scientists found two areas—the superior temporal gyrus and a region in the medial frontal lobe—that housed neurons related to speech and attuned to vowels. The encoding in these sites, however, unfolded very differently.
Neurons in the superior temporal gyrus responded to all vowels, although at different rates of firing. In contrast, neurons that fired exclusively for only one or two vowels were located in the medial frontal region.
"Single neuron activity in the medial frontal lobe corresponded to the encoding of specific vowels," said Fried. "The neuron would fire only when a particular vowel was spoken, but not other vowels."
At the collective level, neurons' encoding of vowels in the superior temporal gyrus reflected the anatomy that made speech possible–specifically, the tongue's position inside the mouth.
"Once we understand the neuronal code underlying speech, we can work backwards from brain-cell activity to decipher speech," said Fried. "This suggests an exciting possibility for people who are physically unable to speak. In the future, we may be able to construct neuro-prosthetic devices or brain-machine interfaces that decode a person's neuronal firing patterns and enable the person to communicate."
Provided by University of California, Los Angeles
"New study uncovers brain's code for pronouncing vowels." August 21st, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-uncovers-brain-code-pronouncing-vowels.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Srikanth Talk About Shirdi Sai Movie

Practicing music for only few years in childhood helps improve adult brain: research




A little music training in childhood goes a long way in improving how the brain functions in adulthood when it comes to listening and the complex processing of sound, according to a new Northwestern University study.
The impact of music on the brain has been a hot topic in science in the past decade. Now Northwestern researchers for the first time have directly examined what happens after children stop playing a musical instrument after only a few years -- a common childhood experience.
Compared to peers with no musical training, adults with one to five years of musical training as children had enhanced brain responses to complex sounds, making them more effective at pulling out the fundamental frequency of the sound signal.
The fundamental frequency, which is the lowest frequency in sound, is crucial for speech and music perception, allowing recognition of sounds in complex and noisy auditory environments.
"Thus, musical training as children makes better listeners later in life," said Nina Kraus, the Hugh Knowles Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Communication Sciences at Northwestern.
"Based on what we already know about the ways that music helps shape the brain," she said, "the study suggests that short-term music lessons may enhance lifelong listening and learning."
"A Little Goes a Long Way: How the Adult Brain is Shaped by Musical Training in Childhood" will be published in the Aug. 22 edition of theJournal of Neuroscience.
"We help address a question on every parent's mind: 'Will my child benefit if she plays music for a short while but then quits training?'" Kraus said.
Many children engage in group or private music instruction, yet, few continue with formal music classes beyond middle or high school.
But most neuroscientific research has focused on the rare and exceptional music student who has continued an active music practice during college or on the rarer case of a professional musician who has spent a lifetime immersed in music.
"Our research captures a much larger section of the population with implications for educational policy makers and the development of auditory training programs that can generate long-lasting positive outcomes," Kraus said.
For the study, young adults with varying amounts of past musical training were tested by measuring electrical signals from the auditory brainstem in response to eight complex sounds ranging in pitch. Because the brain signal is a faithful representation of the sound signal, researchers are able to observe how key elements of the sound are captured by the nervous system and how these elements might be weakened or strengthened in different people with different experiences and abilities.
Forty-five adults were grouped into three age- and IQ- matched groups based on histories of musical instruction. One group had no musical instruction; another had 1 to 5 years; and the other had to 6 to 11 years. Both musically trained groups began instrumental practice around age 9 years, a common age for in-school musical instruction to begin. As predicted, musical training during childhood led to more robust neural processing of sounds later in life.
Prior research on highly trained musicians and early bilinguals revealed that enhanced brainstem responses to sound are associated with heightened auditory perception, executive function and auditory communication skills.
"From this earlier research, we infer that a few years of music lessons also confer advantages in how one perceives and attends to sounds in everyday communication situations, such as noisy restaurants or rides on the "L," Kraus said.
A running theme in Kraus' research is "your past shapes your present."
"The way you hear sound today is dictated by the experiences with sound you've had up until today," she said. "This new finding is a clear embodiment of this theme."
In past research, Kraus and her team examined how bilingual upbringing and long-term music lessons affect the auditory brain and how the brain changes after a few weeks of intensive auditory experiences, such as computerized training. Their current research is investigating the impact of socioeconomic hardships on adolescent brain function.
"We hope to use this new finding, in combination with past discoveries, to understand the type of education and remediation strategies, such as music classes and auditory-based training that might be most effective in combating the negative impact of poverty," she said.
By understanding the brain's capacity to change and then maintain these changes, the research can inform the development of effective and long-lasting auditory-based educational and rehabilitative programs.
Provided by Northwestern University
"Practicing music for only few years in childhood helps improve adult brain: research." August 21st, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-music-years-childhood-adult-brain.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Spirituality on the way to globalisation




Spirituality on the way to globalisationPeople gathering in New York City's Times Square to salute the sun at the summer solstice. Ancient spiritual teachings such as yoga are very popular in the western world. But many of its spiritual elements and ideas have disappeared on the way to modernity. © Corbis
(Phys.org) -- Spirituality is not what it once was – that much is certain, according to anthropologist Peter van der Veer. Working at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, he has examined the significance of the spiritual and its transformation processes in modern societies using the example of China and India. He has found that contradictions to the concept of spirituality are part of this and have by no means stood in the way of an international career. However, many of the modern trends contradict the original idea of spirituality.
Recently, when several thousands of people gathered in Times Square at the summer solstice to salute the sun, it was very clear just how much yoga has become a Western mass movement. But Peter van der Veer doubts whether such events in fact have anything to do with the original ideas of spirituality: "The critical elements, like those to be found in the spiritual ideas at the beginning of the 20th century, are missing."
For Peter van der Veer, spirituality, along with other secular ideas of nation, equality, the middle class, democracy and justice, is one of the core elements in the history of modernity, which were directed against the traditional social systems and moral concepts. "The spiritual and secular arose at the same time in the 19th century as two related alternatives to institutionalised religion in the Euro-American modern age", is one of the Holland-born researcher’s core theories. With this, he also rejects the commonly held view that the cradle of spirituality lies in India, in the realm of modern myths. "There isn’t even a word for spirituality in Sanskrit", he adds.
Nor was there any mention of Hinduism, Taoism or Confucianism in Asia prior to the encounter with Western imperialism. They only changed to an "-ism" as a result of the intellectual interaction with the West. Van der Veer is convinced that this flourishing spiritual exchange between East and West is a key element in the development of modernity in general and its spirituality in particular. "For me, it is part of a process that I call interactional history", explains the Director at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen.
In fact, the exchange of the new revolutionary ideas is not restricted to just communication between the US and Europe. In the search for alternatives to the institutionalised religions, Western intellectuals, artists and other social progressive thinkers had, at an early stage, turned their attention to the traditions of the East. The list of those who referred in their works or letters to Indian progressive thinkers reads like a Who’s Who of the European intellectual world, ranging from Voltaire, Herder, Humboldt, Schlegel and Novalis through to Schopenhauer and Goethe who, among other things, incorporated special theatre techniques from Sanskrit in his Faust.
Ideas came from India as the centre of spirituality and mysticism, and the birthplace of ancient philosophical traditions that can fill the gaps that had arisen for many since the Enlightenment. "These, in turn, also led to fertile ground in India itself ", explains the researcher about the reciprocal dynamics of the streams of thought. Religious movements primarily in India adopted the Western discourse on Eastern spirituality. Soon, political undertones also entered into the discussion. "Many emphasised that Hindus are the true Indians whose civilisation is threatened by decline due to Muslim rule", the Göttingen-based anthropologist says, describing the burgeoning national feeling that has become part of the debate. Others saw the West and in particular British colonial power as dangers for Hindu culture and civilisation, and turned to spirituality to recover or safeguard their own identity.
As the different concepts of spirituality show, they combine a series of contradictions and contrasts. In this vein, spirituality appears as a universal thought which, at the same time, can be linked to national concepts. As an example of this, van der Veer cites the leader of the Indian independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi. "According to Gandhi, no one who was born into a certain tradition and civilisation should be evangelized or converted", explains the researcher. Instead, each person should seek the truth in his own traditions. In this sense, Gandhi was able to argue for a spiritual nation that overcomes international religious differences. "In view of the fact that the tensions between Muslims and Hindus are part of the biggest problems facing the Indian sub-continent, the idea of such a universal, all-embracing spirituality is of exceptional political significance", says van der Veer.
Gandhi’s interpretation of spirituality is also interesting in another respect, as its basic characteristics can apply to the total concept. Again he considers the ideas a good example of the fact that spirituality is in no way the opposite of secularity. "Gandhi’s spirituality was very much linked with it when he argued that all religions should be treated equally and the State should have a neutral attitude towards them." These spiritual principles still apply in India and demonstrate the continuity between the colonial and post-colonial situation. "This could be termed Indian secularism", in van der Veer’s opinion.
Nor does van der Veer see a simple opposition of spirituality and materialism. "In fact, they often imply one another", the researcher has observed, using developments in China and India. Only as the result of liberalization of liberalising the economy under the influence of global capitalism have traditional spiritual ideas and practices such as tai chi, feng shui and qi gong again become socially acceptable in China, a country that replaced Confucianism with an aggressive secularism that had vigorously attacked religions, temples and priests. This linking of spirituality and materialism in the wake of economic globalisation can also be seen in India. In the case of India, the impetus came from the well-educated middle class which, in the 1970s and 1980s, had gone to the US in search of jobs in the medical and technical professions. "There, they were confronted by the aggressive marketing of Indian spirituality that was offered in a market for health, sports or management training", reports van der Veer. It did not take long before this practice was also imported to India.
The researcher in Göttingen considers the perhaps most interesting part of the link with neoliberal capitalism to be the global business practices in which spirituality is a means for increasing chances of success. Certainly China’s isolation between 1950 and 1980 delayed the introduction of Chinese spirituality onto the world market, but in the meantime they have followed up the global massive success of yoga with tai chi, qi gong and feng shui.
Evidently, meditation techniques and spiritual experiences fit in extremely well with the lifestyle and zeitgeist of the modern working population on the path to self-optimisation for the market and the economy. Experimental styles of having a spiritual life offer an alternative to the many secular and religious lives that appear empty. "Looking at it from the outside, they allow people within disciplining institutions to pursue their goals in their career and life without undue stress or depression", van der Veer believes. Instead of dealing with the challenges of their own life, they manage comfortably with the spiritual experience, produced in many different ways.
However, if yoga, tai chi or qi gong today serve as products of the wellness industry of a body culture to increase the efficiency of a disciplined, well-balanced workforce in a capitalist society, the movement oriented in its beginnings against established churches or against colonialism or capitalism proceeds ad absurdum.
More information: Spirituality in Modern Society, Social Research 76: 4, 2009, 1097-1120. Translated into Chinese by Dan Smyer Yu,Northwestern Journal of Ethnology, no.75, Spring 2012, pp.115-124.
Provided by Max Planck Society
"Spirituality on the way to globalisation." August 21st, 2012. http://phys.org/news/2012-08-spirituality-globalisation.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Dont get mad, get creative: Social rejection can fuel imaginative thinking, study shows



 
It's not just in movies where nerds get their revenge. A study by a Johns Hopkins University business professor finds that social rejection can inspire imaginative thinking, particularly in individuals with a strong sense of their own independence.
"For people who already feel separate from the crowd, social rejection can be a form of validation," says Johns Hopkins Carey Business School assistant professor Sharon Kim, the study's lead author. "Rejection confirms for independent people what they already feel about themselves, that they're not like others. For such people, that distinction is a positive one leading them to greater creativity."
Social rejection has the opposite effect on people who value belonging to a group: It inhibits their cognitive ability. Kim says numerous psychological studies over the years have made this finding. With her co-authors, Lynne Vincent and Jack Goncalo of Cornell University, she decided to consider the impact of rejection on people who take pride in being different from the norm. Such individuals, in a term from the study, are described as possessing an "independent self-concept."
"We're seeing in society a growing concern about the negative consequences of social rejection, thanks largely to media reports about bullying that occurs at school, in the workplace, and online. Obviously, bullying is reprehensible and produces nothing good. What we tried to show in our paper is that exclusion from a group can sometimes lead to a positive outcome when independently minded people are the ones being excluded," says Kim, who earned her Ph.D. in organizational behavior from Cornell. She joined the Carey Business School faculty in 2011.
Kim states that the paper has practical implications for business because of the desire among managers to employ imaginative thinkers who can maximize creativity. A company might want to take a second look at a job candidate whose unconventional personality might make him an easy target for rejection, but whose inventiveness would be a valuable asset to the organization.
In the long term, Kim adds, the creative person with an independent self-concept might even be said to thrive on rejection. While repeated rebuffs would discourage someone who longs for inclusion, such slights could continually recharge the creativity of an independent person. The latter type, says Kim, "could see a successful career trajectory, in contrast with the person who is inhibited by social rejection."
More information: The paper, titled "Outside Advantage: Can Social Rejection Fuel Creative Thought?," was recently accepted for publication by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (psycnet.apa.org/ps… 2-21656-001/). It also received a best paper award at the Academy of Management (AOM) conference held this month in Boston. It can be read online at digitalcommons.ilr… ext=articles .
Provided by Johns Hopkins University
"Dont get mad, get creative: Social rejection can fuel imaginative thinking, study shows." August 21st, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-dont-mad-creative-social-fuel.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Looking one cell at a time in the brain to better understand pain, learning, memory




Working with units of material so small that it would take 50,000 to make up one drop, scientists are developing the profiles of the contents of individual brain cells in a search for the root causes of chronic pain, memory loss and other maladies that affect millions of people.
They described the latest results of this one-by-one exploration of cells or "neurons" from among the millions present in an animal brain at the 244th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
Jonathan Sweedler, Ph.D., a pioneer in the field, explained in a talk at the meeting that knowledge of the chemistry occurring in individual brain cells would provide the deepest possible insights into the causes of certain diseases and could point toward new ways of diagnosis and treatment. Until recently, however, scientists have not had the technology to perform such neuron-by-neuron research.
"Most of our current knowledge about the brain comes from studies in which scientists have been forced to analyze the contents of multiple nerve cells, and, in effect, average the results," Sweedler said. He is with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and also serves as editor-in-chief of Analytical Chemistry. "That approach masks the sometimes-dramatic differences that can exist even between nerve cells that are shoulder-to-shoulder together. Suppose that only a few cells in that population are changing, perhaps as a disease begins to take root or starts to progress or a memory forms and solidifies. Then we would miss those critical changes by averaging the data."
However, scientists have found it difficult to analyze the minute amounts of material inside single brain cells. Those amounts are in the so-called "nanoliter" range, units so small that it would take 355 billion nanoliters to fill a 12-ounce soft-drink can. Sweedler's group spent much of the past decade developing the technology to analyze the chemicals found in individual cells — a huge feat with a potentially big pay-off. "We are using our new approaches to understand what happens in learning and memory in the healthy brain, and we want to better understand how long-lasting, chronic pain develops," he said.
The 85 billion neurons in the brain are highly interconnected, forming an intricate communications network that makes the complexity of the Internet pale in comparison. The neural net's chemical signaling agents and electrical currents orchestrate a person's personality, thoughts, consciousness and memories. These connections are different from person to person and change over the course of a lifetime, depending on one's experiences. Even now, no one fully understands how these processes happen.
To get a handle on these complex workings, Sweedler's team and others have zeroed in on small sections of the central nervous system ― the brain and spinal cord ― using stand-ins for humans such as sea slugs and laboratory rats. Sweedler's new methods enable scientists to actually select areas of the nervous system, spread out the individual neurons onto a glass surface, and one-by-one analyze the proteins and other substances inside each cell.
One major goal is to see how the chemical make-up of nerve cells changes during pain and other disorders. Pain from disease or injuries, for instance, is a huge global challenge, responsible for 40 million medical appointments annually in the United States alone.
Sweedler reported that some of the results are surprising, including tests on cells in an area of the nervous system involved in the sensation of pain. Analysis of the minute amounts of material inside the cells showed that the vast majority of cells undergo no detectable change after a painful event. The chemical imprint of pain occurs in only a few cells. Finding out why could point scientists toward ways of blocking those changes and in doing so, could lead to better ways of treating pain.
More information:
Abstract
In the postgenomic era, one expects the suite of chemical players in a brain region to be known and their functions uncovered. The enormous biochemical complexity of nervous system, where even adjacent cells often have very different and dynamic metabolic profiles, necessitates development and application of technologies capable of characterizing the neurometabolome on the individual cell level. Here select brain tissues are sampled, their cells distributed on a slide and the cell locations determined. Next, the individual cells are interrogated via mass spectrometry imaging and their chemical profiles determined. Rare cells are found, and because most of the material remains on the target, these can be selected for information-rich follow-up studies. After a subtle biological perturbation, only a few cells in a large cell population respond; using this mass spectrometry imaging approach, such cells are located and characterized.
Provided by American Chemical Society
"Looking one cell at a time in the brain to better understand pain, learning, memory." August 21st, 2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-cell-brain-pain-memory.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek

Financial crisis to blame for increased number of suicides in Italy




Financial crisis to blame for increased number of suicides in Italy
(Medical Xpress) -- The global financial crisis has contributed to an increase in the rates of suicide and attempted suicide for economic reasons in Italy, new research shows.
A team of researchers, co-led by Roberto De Vogli, associate professor of health behavior and health education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health,
looked at data from 2000-10 and found an increase in suicides and attempted suicides for economic reasons during the entire period.
Using a regression model that compared time-trends for the crisis years (2008-10) against those of the pre-crisis years (2000-07), this study estimated that, between 2008 and 2010, there were 290 excess suicides and attempted suicides due to economic reasons attributable to the Great recession.
"These preliminary results have important policy implications. They suggest that, as seen in other European countries — for example, in Greece — the Great Recession and austerity packages designed to balance the budget deficit caused by the crisis, are causing significant human suffering in the general population," De Vogli said.
Research partners included Sir Michael Gideon Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London, and David Stuckler, university lecturer in sociology, University of Cambridge. The study was partly funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council.
In what the authors call "the first grassroots movement on mental health in Europe" widows of men who killed themselves had protested in May at tax offices in Bologna, Italy, claiming that, "austerity and tax collection put their husbands at risk." Yet, not all who heard their campaign believed in what some are calling "suicides by economic crisis", which prompted the team to analyze data compiled by the Italian Institute of National Statistics.
"Of course, these results need to be interpreted with caution. More research with better data is necessary to examine the impact of the crisis on suicides," De Vogli said. "However, trends in overall suicides in Italy are consistent with those of other European countries, where suicides were falling before the crisis and rapidly reversed upon the onset of the 2008 financial collapse."
De Vogli added that he and the team are in favor of prompt policy interventions to meet the social and economic needs of families and individuals who have lost their jobs, homes or business due to the 2008 financial crisis.
More information: The findings are detailed in "Excess suicides and attempted suicides in Italy attributable to the great recession," an article appears now in JECH Online First jech.bmj.com/conte… -2012-201607 and is to be published later in the print Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Provided by University of Michigan
"Financial crisis to blame for increased number of suicides in Italy." August 21st, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-08-financial-crisis-blame-suicides-italy.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek