Brain Quiz

What's the connection between Bach, beta and alpha brain states and Baroque music???

Throughout each day, you function in four brain wave states:  beta, alpha, theta, and delta.  Beta is a high-speed state.  Most of the time, during your daily activities, your brain is in beta.  It's the "doing state" which gives you the energy to go about your business and get things done.  The alpha state is slower and more relaxed.  It's the reflecting state, which gives you access to your most creative ideas and insights.  It allows you to imagine, to invent, and to originate.  (Theta is a dreamlike state you are in just before sleep.  Delta is the state of sleep.)

Bach, a German composer of music during the Baroque period, is assumed to intuitively known how to balance alpha and beta states.  When listening to Bach's compositions, the brain shifts back and forth between the alpha and beta brain states.

Playing music from the Baroque period, and especially compositions by Bach, and Mozart, will enhance learning.  It also helps anchor information more firmly in long-term memory.

Lefty or Righty??

The right and left sides of the cerebrum have entirely different functions.   Generally, the left hemisphere is responsible for analytical skills, like logic, language, and math, while the right side controls artistic ability and visual skills, like colors, shapes and patterns.

TRY THIS!  Time yourself as you balance a ruler on end in each hand.  Then time yourself while balancing the ruler in each hand AND talking.  Compare the results.

Most righties find that talking interferes with their right-hand performance but not their left.  Why?  Language and right-hand abilities are in the same hemisphere and that side of the brain is overworked while talking and using that hand.  Lefties can have language in either, or both, hemispheres.  A lefty with right-side language would be better with the right hand;  one with left-side language would be better with the left hand.  A lefty with language use controlled in both sides would be able to balance the ruler equally well in either hand.

Ones' Brain, Another's Pain

When you empathize with a friend who has just hit her thumb with a hammer, it is this empathy neurological equivalent to the emotion you feel when you hit your own thumb?

The answer appears to be yes, according to a study in the February 20, 2004 issue of the journal Science.  Tania Singer and her co-leagues at the University College of London show that some of the same brain regions activated when we experience pain also light up when a loved one is exposed to a painful stimulus.

Excerpt from  BrainWork: the Neuroscience Newsletter, Dana Foundation (May-June 2004)

"An Autism Risk Gene"?

The causes of autism remain a great mystery, though researches have come to agree that genes play a major role in susceptibility to the disorder.  Genetic clues have been slow in forthcoming, but a study published in the April issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry has yielded a promising candidate.

Unlike previous studies, which identified rare mutations associated with autism in single families, the current one by Joseph Buxbaum and his colleagues at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City focused on risk genes in 411 families with a history of autistic spectrum disorders.  They found that slight changes in a particular gene doubled the likelihood of having autism.  A bonus finding is that this gene is already known to biologists.

Excerpt from BrainWork: the Neuroscience Newsletter, Dana Foundation (May-June 2004)