Lifeboat Foundation

When listening to music, the human brain appears to be biased toward hearing and producing rhythms composed of simple integer ratios—for example, a series of four beats separated by equal time intervals (forming a 1:1:1 ratio).

However, the favored ratios can vary greatly between different societies, according to a large-scale study led by researchers at MIT and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and carried out in 15 countries. The study included 39 groups of participants, many of whom came from societies whose traditional music contains distinctive patterns of rhythm not found in Western music.

“Our study provides the clearest evidence yet for some degree of universality in music perception and cognition, in the sense that every single group of participants that was tested exhibits biases for integer ratios. It also provides a glimpse of the variation that can occur across cultures, which can be quite substantial,” says Nori Jacoby, the study’s lead author and a former MIT postdoc, who is now a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany.

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Shop Closer To Truth merchandise and support the show with your purchase: https://bit.ly/3P2ogjeSome claim consciousness, our inner awareness, is part of a ‘…

Researchers at CHU Sainte-Justine and Université de Montréal have discovered a new mechanism involved in the expression of Down syndrome, one of the main causes of intellectual disability and congenital heart defects in children. The study’s findings were published today in Current Biology.

Down syndrome (SD), also called trisomy 21 syndrome, is a genetic condition that affects approximately one in every 800 children born in Canada. In these individuals, many genes are expressed abnormally at the same time, making it difficult to determine which genes contribute to which differences.

Professor Jannic Boehm’s research team focused on RCAN1, a gene that is overexpressed in the brains of fetuses with Down syndrome. The team’s work provides insights into how the gene influences the way the condition manifests itself.

Saint Louis University associate professor of health management and policy in the College for Public Health and Social Justice, SangNam Ahn, Ph.D., recently published a paper in Journal of Clinical Psychology that examines the relationship between childhood adversity, and psychiatric decline as well as adult adversity and psychiatric and cognitive decline.

His team discovered that just one instance of adversity in childhood can increase cases of mental illness later in life, and adverse events in adults can lead to a greater chance of both mental illness and cognitive decline later in life.

“Life is very complicated, very dynamic,” Ahn said. “I really wanted to highlight the importance of looking into the lasting health effect of adversity, not only childhood but also adulthood adversity on health outcomes, especially physical health and psychiatric and cognitive health. There have been other studies before, but this is one of the first that looks into these issues comprehensively.”

Johns Hopkins Medicine neuroscientists say they have found a new function for the SYNGAP1 gene, a DNA sequence that controls memory and learning in mammals, including mice and humans.

The finding, published in Science, may affect the development of therapies designed for children with SYNGAP1 mutations, who have a range of neurodevelopmental disorders marked by intellectual disability, autistic-like behaviors, and epilepsy.

In general, SYNGAP1, as well as other genes, control learning and memory by making proteins that regulate the strength of synapses—the connections between brain cells.

Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) have found that the Snhg11 gene is critical for the function and formation of neurons in the hippocampus. Experiments with mice and human tissues revealed that the gene is less active in brains with Down syndrome, potentially contributing to the memory deficits observed in people living with the condition. The findings are published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Traditionally, much of the focus in genomics has been on protein-coding genes, which in humans constitute around just 2% of the entire genome. The rest is “dark matter,” including vast stretches of non-coding DNA sequences that do not produce proteins but are increasingly recognized for their roles in regulating gene activity, influencing genetic stability, and contributing to complex traits and diseases.

Snhg11 is one gene found in the dark matter. It is a long non-coding RNA, a special type of RNA molecule that is transcribed from DNA but does not encode for a protein. Non-coding RNAs are important regulators of normal biological processes, and their abnormal expression has been previously linked to the development of human diseases, such as cancer. The study is the first evidence that a non-coding RNA plays a critical role in the pathogenesis of Down syndrome.

Auricular acupuncture, recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) and offered as an integrative practice since 2006 by the SUS (Sistema Única de Saúde), Brazil’s national health service, is safe for patients with depression and effectively reduces symptoms of this mental health disorder, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the University of Southern Santa Catarina (UNISUL).

The results of the study are reported in an article published in the journal JAMA Network Open. They confirm the efficacy of auricular acupuncture as an alternative treatment for depression, a mood disorder for which rising numbers are seeking care from the SUS, judging from data provided by the Ministry of Health.

Depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, according to the WHO. In Brazil, the lifetime prevalence of depression is 15.5%, one of the highest globally, and depressive disorders account for 10.3% of years of life lost (YLL), a measure of premature mortality calculated by subtracting the age at death from the longest possible life expectancy for a person at that age.

Inspired by human brain for multi-task continual learning, a generalized photonic neuromorphic architecture (L2ONN) is proposed to model physical-driven light sparsity and parallelism, towards reconfigurable and scalable lifelong learning.