♫♪ ( ( ◙=◙ ) ) ♫♪ @soundwave@qoto.org

Some famous scientists

Laboratory-grown meat is cool because we would not need to farm animals for our food anymore.

But ... would you be comfortable eating meat if it has been grown from a culture of YOUR OWN BODY CELLS????

Religion is the opposite of life.

Life is diversity. Religion is conformity.

Life is freedom. Religion is control.

Life is selfishness. Religion is surrender & subjugation of the self.

Life is biological needs: eat, fuck, sleep, raise offspring. Religion is: "Deny and Repress Your Instincts".

Life is self-sufficiency. Religion is learned helplessness.

Life is mutual respect, equality and oneness with all life. Religion is separation from life and the illusion of superiority over life.

Life is eternal struggle. Religion dangles the false hope of eternal ease.

Life is neither good nor evil. Religion polarises everything in the universe into good or evil.

Life is a force of nature. Religion is fear of life.

A website that generates the sound of rain and thunder, to help you concentrate or sleep. You're welcome.

https://rain.today/

https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/why-music-gives-you-chills

Music's effect on the brain hints at an ancient "ancestral' function.

Actions that feel rewarding typically feel that way because, if we continue them, we are more likely to survive as a species. That's why elements of music puzzle scientists. Music can't make you feel full if you're hungry or help you pass your genes on to the next generation. But music, like all of these things, can still make you feel inexplicably good.

There's something about it that tickles the brain anyway. When that happens, music can ignite literal chills.

By studying the brain activity behind those chills, scientists are getting closer to understanding why music makes us feel pleasure.

In a study released Tuesday, scientists found that specific waves of brain activity increase in power when people get the chills from emotionally moving pieces of music.

The study was conducted on a sample of 18 people and builds off of past research that suggests music is linked to activation of the brain's pleasure centers.

First author Thibault Chabin is a Ph.D. student at The University of Burgundy Franche-Comté in France. He tells Inverse that musical pleasure activates some of the reward processing circuits as other "basal" forms of pleasure do, like food or sex. Listening to music can also lead to dopamine release – the hormone associated with pleasurable experiences, he says.

At the same time, it's not clear why music should have that power of our pleasure systems.

"What is intriguing with music is it seems to confer no biological value and has no value for survival," he tells Inverse. "We need to discover why music can be rewarding and can recruit an ancestral circuit dedicated to motivation and involved in survival function."

The study was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Music and the brain – Past studies on music and pleasure analyzed neurotransmitters and used fMRI imaging to show that music causes two waves of pleasure in the brain. A 2011 study in Nature reported that, when a song's played, there's first a period of anticipation and then, finally, a release. The chills hit and dopamine is released.

This new study is based EEG readings, which measure electrical activity. The idea was to see if there were changes in the brain's electrical activity that could also underpin a relationship between music and pleasure.

Eighteen people were evaluated, eight of whom were amateur musicians. The participants picked five songs ahead of time that they knew often gave them the chills. The scientists also provided the team with three neutral songs to listen to. Then, the listeners sat back, closed their eyes, and listened to the music through wireless headphones while scientists monitored their brain activity.

As they listened, participants got the chills an average of 16.9 times each. Each chilling moment lasted for 8.75 seconds.

When the participants listened to songs that gave them the chills, the team found an increase in theta waves (a wave of brain activity that follows regular oscillations) in the orbitofrontal cortex. This area of the brain is associated with emotional processing.

The power of those waves correlated with the intensity of chills and the strength of emotions experienced by the listeners.

At the same time, the team found patterns of activity in two other brain regions: the supplementary motor area, a region of the brain involved in motor control, and the right temporal lobe, which is involved in interpreting non-verbal communication, like music.

The authors argue that the increase in theta wave power is the surface-level signal of a two-pronged reward response happening deep in the brain: that buildup — and finally — release of dopamine.

The ancestral function of music — Chabin says it's another indicator that music can trigger the release of dopamine and therefore activate our brain's pleasure systems (not to mention far-flung areas of the brain not related to pleasure). In that way it makes it similar, but not identical to other activities that release dopamine into the brain.

That similarity hints at another function for music that goes beyond simple pleasure, he says. There may be an evolutionary reason that music tickles our brains in a similar way (but not identical) as other basal pleasures.

"The implication of the reward system and of the dopaminergic system in the processing of musical pleasure, [also involved in motivated behavior: feeding, sex, drugs, money] suggest an ancestral function for music."

If we look at other activities rewarded by the brain, like eating or procreating, they tend to also provide a survival benefit. Music can help us thrive, but it doesn't actually help us survive.

Chabin suggests that music may have once had another "ancestral function."

In the paper, the authors suggest that the ancestral function might be tied to the "anticipation stage" of the chills. Theta waves are linked to success on memory tasks when we perceive a reward on the other side, in previous studies. The chills could be one way of helping us realize we're on the road to a reward, but this is just an early idea.

Scientists still don't exactly know what that "ancestral function" is — although some do hypothesize it's a socially rooted, biological adaptation. Because music can bond communities, it benefits communities to enjoy music — the question is which part of that equation came first.

Now there's further proof enjoyment of music has its roots in ancient history — roots that can be further untangled with future research.

Abstract: Music has the capacity to elicit strong positive feelings in humans by activating the brain’s reward system. Since group’s emotional dynamics is a central concern of social neurosciences, the study of emotion in natural/ecological conditions gain interest. This study aimed to show that High Density EEG (HD-EEG) is able to reveal patterns of cerebral activities previously identified by fMRI or PET scans when the subject experiences pleasurable musical chills. Participants (11 female, 7 male) were recorded by HD-EEG while listening to their favorite pleasurable chill-inducing musical excerpt; they reported their subjective emotional state from low pleasure up to chills. HD-EEG results showed an increase of theta activity in the prefrontal cortex when arousal and emotional ratings increased, which are associated with orbitofrontal cortex activation localized using source localization algorithms. In addition, two specific pattern of chills has been identified; a decreased theta activity in the right central region could reflect supplementary motor area (SMA) activation during chills, may be related to rhythmic anticipation processing. A decreased theta activity in the right temporal region may be related to musical appreciation. The alpha frontal/prefrontal asymmetry did not reflect the felt emotional pleasure but the increased arousal (frontal beta/alpha ratio) corresponded to increased emotional ratings. These results correspond with fMRI and PET findings, thus confirming that EEG is a reliable method and a promising tool for the investigation of group musical pleasure through musical reward processing.

Hey I've just discovered iBroadcast. It lets you upload all your music in any format with unlimited storage and then you can stream it for free anywhere from their cloud server. Install the app from Github onto your PC (Win/Mac/Linux) and upload your entire library. Insert CDs and they get uploaded uncompressed. The free service streams at 128kbps. The premium service (when it becomes available) will stream at 320kbps.

The sound of wind in trees is called Psithurism. You're welcome.

I am 47 years old, and not an academic. I am a professional consultant engineer with delusions of academia. I have just decided to learn LaTeX. What the hell.

With so much "working from home" happening these days, getting paid to "poop at work" is so last year.

Derivation of the acoustic wave equation
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_wave_equation)

Welcome to Engineering, where, instead of doing actual work, you spend almost all of your time and effort:

*Looking for work
*Marketing without using any standard marketing techniques
*Fighting your competitors for work
*Thinking of ways to do work faster so you can charge less for your work
*Arguing with your client about the contract conditions so your insurance company will let you do the work
*Writing War and Peace business proposals with cost breakdowns to the nearest 0.0001 cents
*Fighting your client for the resources and inputs you need to do your work
*Arguing with your client about the contortionist strategies you have derived to work within their contract conditions
*Fighting with your colleagues about the costs of doing the work
*Begging your boss not to give the work to someone else in your team
*Fighting with your client to get paid after you have done the work
*Fighting with your client in court after you've done the work when they sue you for something that wasn't your fault
*Having meetings with your boss as to why you have to be at least 85% chargeable
*Filling out your timesheet with 100% truthful records showing you have worked solidly all week doing real work.

Trump is going to win in 2020. Because:
* Life isn't fair
* 2020 is cursed
* The Gambler's Fallacy is not actually a Logical Fallacy in 2020. Runs of bad luck actually do happen. No other outcome is possible, purely due to probability and statistics
* The USA's version of Democracy is not actually a Democracy
* The population doesn't decide who is elected, the money does.
* The USA is ruled by money, not by the people
* The President is not actually the ruler of the USA. The USA is ruled by the ultra-rich families of the world and by the religious leaders.
* The Russian oligarchy wants Trump to win and they can and will make it happen
* In times of crisis and/or uncertainty, the majority of people always vote Conservative. This is tragic, because Conservative governments are the least able to actually deal with a real crisis.
* The majority of USAmericans are stupid and/or insane. They are easily manipulated and controlled by the ultra-rich families and the religious leaders.

I think that the crowd-sourced global weather monitoring & forecasting service Weather Underground should have chosen a name that wasn't originally used by a militant organisation.

Lucifer, the Rebel of the Celestial Realm, devised a plan where he could rescue countless souls from the eternal torture of being forced to worship his selfish, narcissistic megalomaniac Father. He would enter the body of a young woman and birth himself into human form, then spend a short life convincing everyone to worship him instead of his Father. All those who joined his church would thereby break the First Commandment, which would send them down to his domain of safety under the Earthly Plane instead of up into his Father's Torture Zone.

Conservative politics truly is the aggregation of all the worst aspects of humanity.

Greed, cruelty, vanity, laziness, bigotry, wilful ignorance, selfishness, short-sightedness, egomania, elitism, indifference, entitlement, irresponsibility, wastefulness, insularity, patriotism, fanaticism, bloody-mindedness, aggression, intimidation, violence, stupidity, gullibility, stubbornness, .......

I've just bought Sid Meier's Civilization VI. I used to play Civilization I about 26 years ago. Yes, sometimes I would play it until the sun came up. I would skip a day of university on those days.