Neuromancer49

joined 2 years ago
[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 10 points 4 days ago

Night and day difference for me, thanks for upgrading!

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm a tall guy that fenced in college. You're a monster. But every fencer consents for this torture, so you can keep on keepin' on.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 43 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

PhD in neuroscience here. I didn't specifically study musicology, but i did study the neuroscience of music.

The theory that holds the most water, in my opinion, is that music activates all the same parts of the brain as motor processing. It makes us want to move, and to make predictions about what's coming next. People like makimg predictions. It's also a pro-social activity that encourages bonding and communication. These are typically positive experiences.

Edit: you mentioned we like the breaking of patterns in music. Very true, we love syncopation. But we don't tap our foot to the rhythm, we groove to the beat.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 12 points 1 week ago

I'm jealous. I have a hard time getting it to the table, but when it's there I'm living my best life.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 44 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

I studied parts of the basal ganglia, part of the dopaminergic circuits of motor control. I'm not sure if it's a poorly written (news) article or the scientist was overstating his position - I don't know any neuroscientists who think dopamine is "sprayed" across the brain.

Edit: The paper is a breakthrough because it's reporting the first-ever direct imaging of dopamine signaling. But the news article mischaracterizes it.

Unironically one of the best King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard bootleg songs.

https://youtu.be/-7MGeeMLPSY

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Have you tried learning Japanese / English after learning the other? I studied Japanese and learned how to pronounce the /r/ in Japanese correctly.

For some people, the difficulty is less in production, and more in interpretation for someone who is native Japanese speaking and later learned English.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 32 points 2 weeks ago (7 children)

Chiming in with more context, my PhD was in neuroscience and I worked in a language lab. As others have stated, there is a critical window for learning a language. The biology behind it is fascinating.

As early as about 9 months of age, your brain begins to decide what speech sounds are important to you. For example, in Japanese the difference between /r/ and /l/ sounds doesn't matter, but in English it does. Before 9 months, most babies can tell the difference between the two sounds, but babies living in Japanese-speaking environments (without any English) LOSE this ability after 9ish months!

Language is more than just speech sounds, though. Imagine all these nuances of language - there are critical moments where your brain just decides to accept or reject them, and it's coded somewhere in your DNA.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 15 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

At three months, my son started smiling. That's when it got way easier. The post partum spouse care can be so hard - especially when there are complications.

Do you have any family (parents, siblings, in laws) you can ask for help? We basically had live in help for the first two months, I don't know if I could have done it without them.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 2 points 2 weeks ago

It proved there were benefits, read the article.

[–] Neuromancer49@midwest.social 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Very few things are proved definitively in science. You test a hypothesis with statistics, which always carries a margin of error. Usually, it's 5% - the probability that your data randomly supports your hypothesis, even though there's no true relationship.

Personally, I prefer when journalists coach their language to avoid overstating the truth.

 

Taken with my mediocre phone camera through the lens of my adequate binoculars.

 

Mingus is one of my favorites.

 

I got into an interesting discussion at work about an MRI sequence I've never used before. For context, I did a bunch of brain imaging in grad school, and now at work I'm encountering things that aren't the brain. Shocking.

The technique in question is trying to look at the amount of cartilage in a joint. I assumed the best way to identify potential problems with the MRI is to use a phantom like this one: https://www.truephantom.com/product/adult-knee/. We did this in grad school, but our phantom was basically an expensive jug of fancy water, which, apparently, looks enough like a brain to calibrate the machine.

It turns out the hospital just takes a random resident, puts them in the MRI, and takes MRIs of their joints. I'm assuming it's because the hospital doesn't want to pay $10k for a fancy fake knee.

So now I'm curious, if the radiologists and radiology-adjacent folks are out there, how many different phantoms do your teams own?

 

 

Taken through the lens of my very basic binoculars with my mediocre phone camera.

view more: next ›