Music Training Has Biological Impact on Aging Process

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Music Training Has Biological Impact on Aging Process
Aging-related hearing loss is not set in stone, study finds
January 30, 2012 | by Wendy Leopold
EVANSTON — Age-related delays in neural timing are not inevitable and can be avoided or offset with musical training, according to a new study from Northwestern University. The study is the first to provide biological evidence that lifelong musical experience has an impact on the aging process.
Measuring the automatic brain responses of younger and older musicians and non-musicians to speech sounds, researchers in the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory discovered that older musicians had a distinct neural timing advantage.
“The older musicians not only outperformed their older non-musician counterparts, they encoded the sound stimuli as quickly and accurately as the younger non-musicians,” said Northwestern neuroscientist Nina Kraus. “This reinforces the idea that how we actively experience sound over the course of our lives has a profound effect on how our nervous system functions.”
Kraus, professor of communication sciences in the School of Communication and professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is co-author of “Musical experience offsets age-related delays in neural timing” published online in the journal “Neurobiology of Aging.”
“These are very interesting and important findings,” said Don Caspary, a nationally known researcher on age-related hearing loss at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. “They support the idea that the brain can be trained to overcome, in part, some age-related hearing loss.”
“The new Northwestern data, with recent animal data from Michael Merzenich and his colleagues at University of California, San Francisco, strongly suggest that intensive training even late in life could improve speech processing in older adults and, as a result, improve their ability to communicate in complex, noisy acoustic environments,” Caspary added.
Previous studies from Kraus’ Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory suggest that musical training also offset losses in memory and difficulties hearing speech in noise — two common complaints of older adults. The lab has been extensively studying the effects of musical experience on brain plasticity across the life span in normal and clinical populations, and in educational settings.
However, Kraus warns that the current study’s findings were not pervasive and do not demonstrate that musician’s have a neural timing advantage in every neural response to sound. “Instead, this study showed that musical experience selectively affected the timing of sound elements that are important in distinguishing one consonant from another.”
The automatic neural responses to speech sounds delivered to 87 normal-hearing, native English-speaking adults were measured as they watched a captioned video. “Musician” participants began musical training before age 9 and engaged consistently in musical activities through their lives, while “non-musicians” had three years or less of musical training.
Kraus, who co-authored the study with Northwestern researchers Alexandra Parbery-Clark, Samira Anderson and Emily Hittner, is available at nk****@**********rn.edu or at (847) 491-3181. For more about the work of Kraus’ Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory on music perception and learning-associated brain plasticity, visit http://www.soc.northwestern.edu/brainvolts/.
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/01/kraus-neural-timing.html
 

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Circadas 17 year Journey arrives June 2013!

The Circadas are Comming at the end of May / June

Here comes Swarmageddon! The name is a direct derivation of the Latin cicada, meaning “tree cricket” The 17-year cicadas are found mainly in the northern, eastern, and western part of their range.
Cicadas, large, ugly, noisy bugs that can be devastating to vegetation but are harmless to people. Cicadas are benign to humans under normal circumstances and do not bite or sting in a true sense, but may mistake a person’s arm or other part of their body for a tree or plant limb and attempt to feed,
In January 1912, when New York’s state entomologist issued a report on the appearance of the insects in 1911, he was nearly breathless: “The large size of the insects, their immense numbers, the accompanying roar, the spectacular injury and unique life history, all combine to excite popular interest in the periodical visitations of this remarkable species.”
 

Ciracadas are good to eat.

Experts say that the best way to eat cicadas is to collect them in the middle of the night as they emerge from their burrows and before their skins harden. When they are in this condition—like soft-shell crabs—they can be boiled for about a minute. It is said they taste like asparagus or clam-flavored potato.
Mature cicadas should be boiled while still alive to kill any bacteria, and already-dead cicadas should never be harvested because they could be decomposing. Also, anyone with allergies to shellfish, which belong to the same family as cicadas, should avoid the bugs altogether.
– Cicadas sautéed in butter and garlic.
– Dipped in chocolate for a sweet, crunchy snack.
Ice cream laced with cicadas is not illegal to serve to the public are boiled bugs were covered with brown sugar and milk chocolate, then mixed in with an ice cream base of brown sugar and butter

Facts: Only the males sing.
Circada Roar
Cicada song
Cicadas in Greece
A single Cicada calling
The females are lured to the sound and fly nearer. A female responds to a male with a flick of her wings. The two gradually draw close to one another until they meet for mating.
• In China male cicadas are kept in cages in people’s homes so that the homeowners can enjoy the cicadas’ songs.
Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg is playing in a musical celebration 17 years in the making: the emergence of the cicadas. This summer, these noisy insects will come out in droves to molt and mate—filling the air with their characteristic buzzing. Explore the extraordinary mating rituals of these and other six-legged creatures to find out what their songs are saying, why they’re saying it, and how this knowledge is impacting our understanding of communication, behavior, and the ecosystem in Cicada Serenades: Music, Mating, and Meaning.
Most authors are agreed that the cicada was used by the Chinese as a symbol of rebirth, although a few suggest additional (17, 18) or alternative meanings (3) such as “harvest time,” “autumn,” “fertility and abundance,” or “life giving principle.”
The depictions of cicadas on the early bronzes vary from quite realistic (6) to highly stylized (13, 16, 17, 22, 24) and almost leaflike (16). In some cases they are associated with another beast. Munsterberg (17) says that “in several instances the tiger is shown spitting out a cicada.” Later he says that “the t’ao t’ieh daemon is also frequently shown with a cicada on his outstretched tongue.” Bachhofer (2) refers to dragons in moderate relief, “their bodies… covered with a diminutive cicada pattern.” Speaking of bronze vessels he states that the heads of serpents are identical with the heads of cicadas. Certainly the “snake-head” with a “tongue” that rattles, terminating handle of a ritual bronze sword shown on page 39 in Fontein and Wu (13), looks more like a cicada than a snake head. Could the rattle have even been an imitation of a cicada’s call? Even a rattlesnake does not rattle with its head, and in this case there is apparently no snake body, only the “head.” The rattle mechanism looks like a wing, not a snake’s tongue.
In addition to bronzes, cicadas have been found decorating Shang white pottery ware (2). Laufer (16) reproduces (from ancient manuscripts) cicadas on ceremonial jade axes, jade cups, and a jade buckle which also includes a mantis.
These “sacred animal symbols” (17), cicadas, were used during the Han period (202 B.C. – 220 A.D.) or earlier as jade carvings (9), variously called “funeral jades,” “amulets of death,” “tongue amulets,” or “Han y?,” meaning “placed in the mouth,” according to Burling and Hart (3), who note that the term does not mean “made in the Han dynasty,” as some students assume, but that the items so designated “may date from many centuries earlier or later.”

GREAT #RIAA group’s financial power is weakening!

RIAA Makes Drastic Employee Cuts as Revenue Plummets

• Ernesto • May 22, 2013
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-makes-drastic-employee-cuts-as-revenue-plummets-130522/
New tax records reveal that the RIAA has made heavy employee cuts after revenue dropped to a new low. Over the past two years the major record labels have cut back their membership dues from $33.6 to $23.6 million. RIAA staff plunged from 107 to 60 workers in the same period. The IRS filing further shows that the music industry group paid $250,000 to the six strikes anti-piracy system. The RIAA has submitted its latest tax filing to the IRS, covering the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012. The figures follow the trend we spotted last year and show a massive decline in revenue for the music group. In just two years overall revenue has reduced from to $34.8 to $24.8 million.
For decades the RIAA has been the anti-piracy bastion of the music industry, but the new numbers show that the group’s financial power is weakening.
The drop in income can be solely attributed to lower membership dues from the major music labels. Over the past two years label contributions have dropped to $23.6 million, and over a three-year period the labels cut back a total of $30 million, which is more than the RIAA’s total income today. The cutbacks are not immediately apparent from the salaries paid to the top executives.
RIAA Chairman and CEO Cary Sherman, for example, earned $1.46 million compared to $1.37 million the year before. Senior Executive Vice President Mitch Glazier also saw a modest rise in income from $618,946 to $642,591.
A lot of the revenue decline has translated into employee cuts. Over a two year period the number of RIAA employees has been slashed almost in half from 107 to just 60. The reduction in legal costs is even more significant, going from to $6.4 million to $1.2 million in two years.
In part, this reduction was accomplished by no longer targeting individual file-sharers in copyright infringement lawsuits, which is a losing exercise for the group. Looking through other income we see that the RIAA received $196,378 in “anti-piracy restitution,” coming from the damages awarded in lawsuits against Limewire and such. Finally, the tax filing also reveals that the RIAA paid $250,000 to the Center of Copyright Information for the “six strikes” scheme.
Together with the MPAA the RIAA coughs up half of the CCI budget, but since the fiscal year ended March 2012 it’s probably not the full year payment
. Overall the filing appears to suggest that the major labels believe that the RIAA can operate with fewer funds. This is a trend that has been going on for a few years and it will be interesting to see how long it continues.
KNOW YOUR JURY RIGHTS DEFEAT THE RIAA IN COURT DEFEND YOURSELF IN COURT FROM THE RIAA THE JURY ACTS AS THE FOURTH BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT The Principle of Jury Nullification.
ISP ILLEGAL DOWNLOADING WARNINGS
LEARN MORE ABOUT WHY FILE SHARING IS NOT THEFT AND THE FALSE CLAIMS OF THE RIAA DUE TO P2P
MUSIC LAW: CONTRACTS AND MUSIC DEALS
FAIR USE Learn more about why file sharing is not theft and the false claims of the RIAA due to P2P, From the Educational CyberPlayGround.