— Nietzsche

— Lama Yeshe

from ‘This is Your Mind on Music’, Daniel Levetin (highly recommended reading).

so apart from being fun, beautiful, inspiring, sexy, haunting, sad…

Cosmides and Tooby (1989) argue that music’s function in the developing child is to help prepare its mind for a number of complex cognitive  and social activities, exercising the brain so that it will be ready for the demands placed on it by language and social interaction. The fact that music lacks specific referents makes it a safe symbol system for expressing mood and feeling in an non confrontational manner. Music helps infants to prepare for language; it may pave the way to linguistic prosody, even before the childs developing brain is ready to process phonetics. music for the developing brain is a form of play, an exercise that invoked higher - level integrative processes that nurture exploratory competence, preparing the child to eventually explore generative language development through babbling, and ultimately more complex linguistic and paralinguistic productions.

learning - dentate gyrus.

came across another cool website - http://thebeautifulbrain.com have a look.

I’m pretty partial to rainbows, and brains.. so you can imagine I got pretty excited when skim reading (yeah yeah guilty.. there is sooo much to know!) and saw the word ‘brainbows’ which is a term coined by Jeff Lichtman (lightman in german.. really? hahaha).. anyway I get a bit excited when i see stuff like this so I am going to copy what Sam McDougle has so succinctly written about this biz >

“Fluorescent microscopy works by labeling cells with specific markers that cause them to glow certain colors when bathed in a special wash of chemical agents (fluorophores).  These “markers” are usually genetic markers, and by tinkering with the genome of a host animal, the markers – and thus the colors produced by cells under the microscope – can be altered.  Driven by a desire to map the vast web of neural connections in the mouse brain,  Jeff Lichtman and his team at Harvard developed a fluorescent staining technique affording them a sizeable palette with which to paint neurons.

The genetic system they used is called the Cre/lox system. Cre is an enzyme responsible for deleting sections of DNA that are adjacent to lox alleles.  By splicing in a handful genetic markers that are responsible for different fluorescent colors (green, yellow, red, etc) in various places near the lox sites, a game of genetic roulette was played – depending on the position of different fluorescent color-producing genes in relation to the lox enzymes, a myriad of colors would ultimately be produced in the target neurons (i.e. red green green yellow, red red red green, red yellow yellow yellow, etc)..”

and when you do that you get stuff like this.. apparently?!

my favourites are these two -

and these pictures are of a part of the brain called the dentate gyrus, which meant very little to me.. so I googled it.. and found out that it lived here.

It is one of the few places in the body where neurogensis (the birth of new neurons) takes place in the adult brain.. maybe playing a role in the formation of new memories, (to me this explains the neurogenesis??) and ‘they’ also believe the dentate gyrus might have a functional role in stress and depression.. if only the depressed and stressed could see how lovely their brain would look with a bunch of coloured genetic markers, might make em feel better.