Oliver Sacks explains how your brain does music

Posted by Cory Doctorow, on Boing Boing September 25, 2007 10:23 PM

Oliver Sacks has an interview in the latest Wired, talking about his new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain with Steve Silberman. This sounds like a fantastic book -- a real Sacks-ian exploration of all the wild and illuminating ways the brain has of dealing with music.

Hume wondered whether one can imagine a color that one has never encountered. One day in 1964, I constructed a sort of pharmacological mountain, and at its peak, I said, "I want to see indigo, now!" As if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall -- the color of heaven. For months after that, I kept looking for that color. It was like the lost chord.

Then I went to a concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, they played the Monteverdi Vespers, and I was transported. I felt a river of music 400 years long running from Monteverdi's mind into mine. Wandering around during the interval, I saw some lapis lazuli snuffboxes that were that same wonderful indigo, and I thought, "Good, the color exists in the external world." But in the second half I got restless, and when I saw the snuffboxes again, they were no longer indigo -- they were blue, mauve, pink. I've never seen that color since.

It took a mountain of amphetamine, mescaline, and cannabis to launch me into that space. But Monteverdi did it too.

Link

Don't Bring Home the Bacon, Print It

Don't Bring Home the Bacon, Print It
By Bill Christensen

posted: 03 February 2006
12:51 pm ET

Ink-jet printing has come a long way; we used to use it for what was called "hard copy." Soon, you will be able to use a modified ink-jet printer to make yourself some breakfast.

Tissue engineers like Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina, and Thomas Boland of Clemson University, have been printing biomaterials with modified ink-jet printers.

The cartridges are washed out and refilled with suspensions of living cells; the software that controls the characteristics of the ink is reprogrammed and you're good to go. Boland and Mironov use layers of "thermo-reversable" gel to build up three-dimensional structures like tubes—capillaries, to use the medical term. When the tiny droplets, or clumps, of cells came together closely, they fused; the gel can be easily removed, leaving a tube of tissue.

Just as printers contain inks of different colors, so tissue printers could contain different cell types to create complex structures.

Now, it seems to me that a tube or complex living organ is a pretty complicated structure. Why not practice with a simpler, more two-dimensional form of muscle tissue—like bacon, for instance? Nothing like fresh bacon.

Dolphins play at least 317 different games

Two researchers in Mississippi observed dolphins at play and cataloged 317 different game-like behaviors:
The captive dolphins "produced 317 distinct forms of play behavior during the five years that they were observed," they wrote.
One calf became adept at "blowing bubbles while swimming upside-down near the bottom of the pool and then chasing and biting each bubble before it reached the surface," the researchers continued. "She then began to release bubbles while swimming closer and closer to the surface, eventually being so close that she could not catch a single bubble."

"During all of this, the number of bubbles released was varied, the end result being that the dolphin learned to produce different numbers of bubbles from different depths, the apparent goal being to catch the last bubble right before it reached the surface of the water."

"She also modified her swimming style while releasing bubbles, one variation involving a fast spin-swim. This made it more difficult for her to catch all of the bubbles she released, but she persisted in this behavior until she was able to almost all of the bubbles she released. Curiously, the dolphin never released three or fewer bubbles, a number which she was able to catch and bite following the spin-swim release."

The dolphin may have been keeping her play interesting by blowing more bubbles than she could easily catch and bite, the researchers wrote.

Link: www.world-science.net/exclusives/051107_dolphinfrm.htm

Welcome to my Cabinet.

Originating in the Renaissance (although certain medieval lords such as John of Gaunt developed them much earlier), Cabinets of Curiosities flourished throughout Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Also known as Wonder Rooms, they were filled with the strange, the beautiful, the marvelous, the horrible, but always things of interest.

Of course, that depends a lot on one's interests...the collections were often decidedly warped, depending on the proclivities of the collector. Welcome to my Cabinet. I hope you will find some things that interest you.