Showing posts with label mind games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mind games. Show all posts

Monday, August 19, 2024

Music is the Math of Feelings


Whether you're a scientist or a musician, there's something semi-sacrilegious about studying the science of music. Music is spiritual, it's secretive, it's a folk art encompassing amateurs and experts alike. It's not supposed to be a bunch of cold hard math or esoteric entropic distribution matrices, that kind of takes the fun out of it. On the other hand, it's irresistible to think you could find laws of human behavior hiding in there, even laws of the universe! 

Music found to cause similar emotions and bodily sensations across cultures
Jan 2024, phys.org

  • Happy and danceable music was felt in the arms and legs
  • Tender and sad music was felt in the chest
  • Music with a clear beat was found happy and danceable
  • Dissonance in music was associated with aggressiveness

via University of Turku and University of Aalto in Finland and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China: Vesa Putkinen et al, Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2308859121

Mostly unrelated image credit: AI Art - Graffiti Typography - 2024 And is that f*cking "pinterest watermark"??


Live music emotionally moves us more than streamed music, show researchers
Feb 2024, phys.org

  • Live performances trigger a stronger emotional response than listening to music from a device.
  • Concerts connect performers with their audience, which may also have to do with evolutionary factors.
  • A pianist changed the live music he or she was playing to intensify the emotional reactions in the amygdala.
  • Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to measure the activity in the amygdala of 27 listeners as well as the performer in real time.
  • Based on these measurements, the pianist then immediately adapted his performance to intensify the audience's emotions further.
  • Listeners were played a recording of the same music performed by the same musician but without the neurofeedback loop.
  • Pleasant and unpleasant emotions performed as live music elicited much higher and more consistent activity in the amygdala than recorded music. 
  • The live performance also stimulated a more active exchange of information in the whole brain, which points to strong emotional processing in the affective and cognitive parts of the brain.
  • A strong synchronization between subjective emotional experience and the auditory brain system was only observed when the audience was listening to the live performance.
  • Only live music showed a strong and positive coupling between features of the musical performance and brain activity.

via University of Zurich: Trost, Wiebke et al, Live music stimulates the affective brain and emotionally entrains listeners in real time, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2316306121.


Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive since 1980, study finds
Mar 2024, phys.org

They analyzed the lyrics of 12,000 English-language rap, country, pop, R&B, and rock songs (2,400 songs per genre) released between 1980 and 2020, with additional analyses of 12,000 song lyrics on the online song lyric platform Genius:

  • Lyrics have become simpler and easier to understand over time
  • The number of different words used within songs has decreased
  • The number of words with three or more syllables has increased in rap songs since 1980
  • General increases in the repetitiveness of lyrics may have led to lyrics becoming simpler overall
  • Lyrics have tended to become more emotional and personal over time
  • Both emotionally positive and negative words increased in rap songs
  • Emotionally negative lyrics increased for R&B, pop and country songs
  • All genres showed an increase in the use of anger-related words
  • The lyrics of older rock songs tend to be viewed more than those of newer rock songs
  • The lyrics of newer country songs tend to be viewed more than those of older country songs

via Department of Music Pedagogy at Nuremberg University of Music, Department of Computer Science at University of Innsbruck, Human-centered AI Group at Linz Institute of Technology, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence: Eva Zangerle, Song lyrics have become simpler and more repetitive over the last five decades, Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-55742-x.


Why some types of music make people want to dance more than others
Mar 2024, phys.org

They discovered what they believe to be the mechanism in the brain that controls the desire to dance when prompted by music.

60 adult volunteers listened to 12 melodies with different degrees of syncopation and rated each based on their desire to get up and dance.

They found that melodies with a medium degree of syncopation caused the strongest desire to dance.

29 adults wore magnetoencephalography helmets while they listened to different kinds of music. 

The researchers found that the auditory cortex primarily focused on rhythm, while the dorsal auditory pathway appeared to match the rhythm to the beat.

This, the researchers suggest, indicates that the music-prompted desire to dance likely happens within that pathway, from which it is then passed on to motor areas that act on the impulse.

Final thought - The researchers suggest their work cumulatively shows that the sudden desire to dance prompted by music with a medium amount of syncopation is the brain's attempt to anticipate beats among the syncopation — it causes the body to literally lean forward repeatedly. (You mean like Rain Man?)

via Aix Marseille Université in France and the University of Connecticut: Arnaud Zalta et al, Neural dynamics of predictive timing and motor engagement in music listening, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adi2525


Body mapping links responses to music with degree of uncertainty and surprise
Apr 2024, phys.org

Researchers asked 527 participants to map where they felt sensations in their bodies and the emotions they had while listening to 92 unique chord progressions with varying degrees of uncertainty and surprise.

"Prediction and uncertainty affect heart and abdominal sensations"
  • Certain chord progressions sparked sensations in the heart while others were felt more in the stomach
  • Certain chords evoked aesthetic appreciation, leading to a decline in negative emotions of awkwardness and anxiety
  • More predictable chord progressions brought on feelings of calmness, relief, satisfaction, nostalgia, and empathy

I wonder what chord progressions they're looking at, but they created an algorithm for chord progression, and as an untrained musician, it doesn't translate for me, although someone with a better understanding might get it.

Here's the algorithm:

These chord progressions were generated using a statistical-learning model to compute the Shannon information content and entropy, based on transitional probabilities of each chord using a corpus of 890 pop songs from the US Billboard.

Here's two samples of their chord progressions:

(1) sLuL-sLuL sequence (Figure 1A) representing the condition where the 1st–3rd chords have low surprise and uncertainty and the 4th chord has low surprise and uncertainty.

(2) sLuL-sHuL sequence (Figure 1B) representing the condition where the 1st-3rd chords have low surprise and uncertainty and the 4th chord has high surprise and low uncertainty.

(There are 8 progressions in total, with variations on this theme)

On entropy, from the paper itself:

Entropy gauges the perceptual uncertainty a listener feels in predicting an “upcoming” chord based on prior chords, while information content quantifies the surprise experienced upon hearing the actual chord.
^This is the old Anatomy of a Joke formula.

via University of Tokyo: Bodily Maps of Uncertainty and Surprise in Musical Chord Progression and the Underlying Emotional Response, iScience (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2024.109498.


Sad music study tests the direct effect hypothesis of 'pleasurable negative emotion'
Apr 2024, phys.org

Yeah this is weird

Participants were asked to imagine if their sadness could be "removed" when listening to the music - which the majority self-reported they could do.

"We know that many people are quite apt when it comes to thought experiments, so it's a reasonable approach to use and, at worst, it should produce no results"

After the imagined removal of sadness, participants were asked if they liked the piece of music any differently: 82% said that removing the sadness reduced their enjoyment of the music.

"Experiencing a wide range of emotions in a more or less safe environment could help us learn how to deal with what we encounter in the world."

"Previous studies refer to an 'indirect effect hypothesis,' which means that people may experience sadness, but it is something else they enjoy - being moved."

via University of New South Wales: Emery Schubert et al, Liking music with and without sadness: Testing the direct effect hypothesis of pleasurable negative emotion, PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0299115

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Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Good Science vs Bad Science


Top science publisher withdraws flawed climate study
Aug 2023, phys.org

Retraction Watch -- a blog that tracks withdrawals of academic papers, counted 5,000 such cases in 2022 -- about a tenth of a percent of the total number of studies published, its co-founder Ivan Oransky told AFP.

Top science publisher Springer Nature said it has withdrawn a climate change study by
four Italian scientists* in the European Physical Journal Plus, published by Springer Nature, because it manipulated data, cherry picked facts and ignored others that would contradict their assertions. The study had drawn positive attention from climate-skeptic media.

The paper had been freshly reviewed and found "not suitable for publication and that the conclusions of the article were not supported by available evidence or data provided by the authors".

*Notice it says here that the Italian scientists and not climate scientists. The four experts writing a climate science paper are in fact three physicists and an agricultural meteorologist, two of whom are also signatories on the World Climate Declaration, a text that "repeated various debunked claims about climate change". Furthermore, the study was not published in a climate journal; "This is a common avenue taken by 'climate skeptics' in order to avoid peer review by real experts in the field."

via Agence France-Presse AFP: Gianluca Alimonti et al, RETRACTED ARTICLE: A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming, The European Physical Journal Plus (2022). DOI: 10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-02243-9

Post Script: (To explain the rise of article fraud) "Experts pointed to widespread concerns about peer-review standards in the lucrative academic publishing industry." And one has to ask, why is the academic publishing industry so lucrative in the first place? (And one has to answer with a chart showing the amount of money that goes into government lobbying or overall public psychological operations campaigns by big business such as Big Oil's Climate Footprint (climate change is your fault), Big Tobacco's Throat Soothing (smoking is good for a sore throat), Big Dairy's Drink Milk (regardless of whether you're lactose tolerant or not), Big Tech's Move Fast Break Things (including federal safety regulations and basic human rights), or you name it.

Controlling people's thoughts is a lucrative business, that's why.

Post-Post: I watched the movie Andromeda Strain, was impressed by the scientific credibility of the premise (and the infrared FLIR gun that has apparently been around since the 70's), and I had to look up Michael Crichton, the writer.

But that's where things went wrong. I got lost in a wiki-hole on the Gell-Mann Effect, and discovered that Michale Crichton was a climate denier, heavy in the aughts, when Big Fossil was funding a global misinformation campaign. Problem is, he's a trained medical scientist. Not a climate scientist or even an environmental scientist. But the entry that brought me here is literally a famous quote of his, Michael Crichton, about how experts fail to maintain a critical stance when reading mainstream media about topics they are not experts in. 

Completely unrelated image credit: AI Art - Four Polished Females Wearing Glittering Bronze Holographic Bodysuits on a Mansion Lawn - 2023


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Mind Reading Is Real Now And Also Your Brain Is Controlled by Lasers



Brain activity decoder can reveal stories in people's minds
May 2023, phys.org

Semantic decoder can translate a person's brain activity -- while listening to a story or silently imagining telling a story -- into a continuous stream of text to help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again.

Does not require subjects to have surgical implants (ie noninvasive, holy grail of brain stuff).

Brain activity is measured using an fMRI scanner after extensive training of the decoder, in which the individual listens to 15 hours of podcasts in the scanner. 

Later, provided that the participant is open to having their thoughts decoded, their listening to a new story or imagining telling a story allows the machine to generate corresponding text from brain activity alone.

Back to reality: 

The result is not a word-for-word transcript. Instead, researchers designed it to capture the gist. Decoding worked only with cooperative participants who had participated willingly.Results for individuals on whom the decoder had not been trained were unintelligible.

If participants on whom the decoder had been trained later put up resistance -- for example, by thinking other thoughts -- results were similarly unusable. Tactics like thinking of animals or quietly imagining telling their own story let participants easily and completely thwart the system.

Afterthoughts:

So you need to insert yourself in an fMRI for this to work. You also need to give permission for it to read your thoughts. But if you think that advances in quantum materials isn't going to put fMRIs in your baseball cap within the next 20 years, then you better start reading "terms and conditions" more carefully from now on. They even mention their tech can be translated to a newer form of MRI called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a "portable brain-imaging system".

via University of Texas at Austin: Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings, Nature Neuroscience (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-023-01304-9



AI tool generates video from brain activity
May 2023, phys.org

On the heels of the UT Austin paper above, although I can't help but be skeptical of this one:

Watching 20 hours worth of movies in an fMRI, plus Stable Diffusion, gets you a dream recorder. 

Also, you heard it folks: Dream researcher Daniel Oldis, working with a colleague at the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the University of Texas, Austin.

Dream researcher.

via Researchers at the National University of Singapore and the Chinese University of Hong Kong: Zijiao Chen et al, Cinematic Mindscapes: High-quality Video Reconstruction from Brain Activity, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2305.11675

AI Art - Human brain carbon fiber cybernetic biomechanical cymatics 2 - 2023

40 Hz vibrations reduce Alzheimer's pathology, symptoms in mouse models
May 2023, phys.org

Non-invasive sensory stimulation of 40 Hz gamma frequency brain rhythms can reduce Alzheimer's disease pathology and symptoms, already shown with light and sound by multiple research groups in mice and humans, can now extend to tactile stimulation.

The MIT group is not the first to show that gamma frequency tactile stimulation can affect brain activity and improve motor function, but they are the first to show that the stimulation can also reduce levels of the hallmark Alzheimer's protein phosphorylated tau, keep neurons from dying or losing their synapse circuit connections, and reduce neural DNA damage.

"This work demonstrates a third sensory modality that we can use to increase gamma power in the brain" 

In case you were wondering:

To produce the vibration stimulation, the researchers placed mouse cages over speakers playing 40 Hz sound, which vibrated the cages. Mice received six weeks of vibration stimulation. 

And since this all sounds so dubious, we need some background:

In a series of papers starting in 2016, a collaboration led by Tsai's lab has demonstrated that light flickering and/or sound clicking at 40 Hz (a technology called GENUS for Gamma Entrainment Using Sensory stimuli), reduces levels of amyloid-beta and tau proteins, prevents neuron death and preserves synapses and even sustains learning and memory in a variety of Alzheimer's disease mouse models.

Upcoming: MIT spin-off company Cognito Therapeutics has launched stage III clinical trials of light and sound stimulation as an Alzheimer's treatment.

Reminder: You don't need FDA approval for tactile stimulation. (As opposed to light or sound pulses, and as opposed to all the Alzheimer's drugs out there trying to get to market...).

via Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Aging Brain Initiative at MIT: Ho-Jun Suk et al, Vibrotactile stimulation at gamma frequency mitigates pathology related to neurodegeneration and improves motor function, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience (2023). DOI: 10.3389/fnagi.2023.1129510


Exploring how psychedelic drugs affect a rat's brain
Aug 2023, phys.org

"Simultaneous Synchronization"

Researchers at Lund University have developed a technique for simultaneously measuring electrical signals from 128 areas of the brain in awake rats. They have then used the information to measure what happens to the neurons when the rats are given psychedelic drugs. The results show an unexpected and simultaneous synchronization among neurons in several regions of the brain.

But wait, because there's more:

Pär Halje and the research team was studying rats with Parkinson's disease that had problems with involuntary movements. The researchers discovered a tone -- an oscillation or wave in the electrical fields -- of 80 hertz in the brains of the rats with Parkinson's disease. It turned out that the wave was closely connected to the involuntary movements.

Now you know, 80 hertz. Although the above study said 40 hertz.

One important note on how this was done and why it's a big deal:

"For several of these areas, it is the first time anyone has successfully shown how individual neurons are affected by LSD in awake animals." 
We see that the neurons' activity synchronizes itself in a special way -- the waves in the brain go up and down essentially simultaneously in all parts of the brain where we are able to take measurements. This suggests that there are other ways in which the waves are communicated than through chemical synapses, which are relatively slow."

via Lund University: Ivani Brys et al, 5-HT2AR and NMDAR psychedelics induce similar hyper-synchronous states in the rat cognitive-limbic cortex-basal ganglia system, Communications Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s42003-023-05093-6


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Brainwasher

 

We're all dumb as hell.

Some people may be attracted to others over minimal similarities
Apr 2023, phys.org

Participants who scored high on self-essentialism were more likely to express an attraction to an individual who agreed with their position. 

So, simply believing that you are defined by an unchanging essence of self, and that our attraction to others depends on shared identities, beliefs, etc., leads you to use another person's identity to decide whether you like them or not, and sometimes it can be only one characteristic that triggers your decision to like someone.

But let's focus on the important part -- if you don't believe that your own sense of self can be described by a list of personal beliefs, then you're more discriminating about who you like.  

via Boston University Questrom School of Business: Self-Essentialist Reasoning Underlies the Similarity-Attraction Effect, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2023). DOI: 10.1037/pspi0000425

Image credit: AI Art - Blank - 2023. But look at the "mastercard logo" at the bottom, very nice


Placebo effect found to be growing stronger for transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy used for depression
Sep 2023, phys.org

Tests with placebo pills are now providing even more benefits than those that were used in the past. Some in the psychiatry field have suggested it is due to an increase in trust in the psychiatry profession.

In this new effort, the researchers wondered if a similar increase might be observed with transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy."

(It was).

via Shanghai Jiaotong University School of Medicine, Central South University and the Second Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, all in China: Yangting Xu et al, Growing placebo response in TMS treatment for depression: a meta-analysis of 27-year randomized sham-controlled trials, Nature Mental Health (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s44220-023-00118-9


Many Wordle users cheat to win, says mathematics expert
Sep 2023, phys.org

Dilger imported statistics covering four months of user guesses into an Excel spreadsheet and calculated that the odds of the 860 players randomly guessing one of the 2,315 5-letter words of the day at 0.043%. Yet, Times statistics show that the number of players making correct first guesses in each game never dipped below 4,000.

"We are baffled as to how first-word cheaters actually have fun playing," Dinger said, "but that does not diminish our enjoyment of the game."

via one curious professor from Stony Brook University in New York: James P. Dilger, Wordle: A Microcosm of Life. Luck, Skill, Cheating, Loyalty, and Influence!, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2309.02110

Post Script: The science of statistics is pure magic; its secrets are protected by the law of large numbers, which prohibits most humans from fully understanding. 


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