From Cradle to Internet. The Social Nature of Personal Identity

Contrary to what Descartes argued many centuries ago, the self seems far from being a simple and indivisible entity, easily accessible to personal scrutiny. In this paper I will endorse an anti-Cartesian attitude, starting from two different perspectives. On the one hand, I will consider clinical and develop- mental studies showing how strongly interpersonal relations modulate the quality of introspective access. In this section, I will take into account Neisser's theory of self-knowledge and Gergely and Watson\u2019s con- structivist approach. On the other hand, I will consider the extended mind paradigm, a recent philosophi- cal model that seems compatible with the idea that some important aspects of the self may extend to the physical world. This latter point acquires special importance when considering how widespread certain electronic tools such as second generation search engines will be in the future

The Effect of Simple Melodic Lines on Aesthetic Experience: Brain Response to Structural Manipulations

This fMRI study investigates the effect of melody on aesthetic experience in listeners na \u308\u131ve to formal musical knowledge. Using simple melodic lines, whose syntactic structure was manipulated, we created systematic acoustic dissonance. Two stimulus categories were created: canonical (syntactically \u201ccorrect,\u201d in the Western culture) and modified (made of an altered version of the canonical melodies). The stimuli were presented under two tasks: listening and aesthetic judgment. Data were analyzed as a function of stimulus structure (canonical and modified) and stimulus aesthetics, as appraised by each participant during scanning. The critical contrast modified versus canonical stimuli produced enhanced activation of deep temporal regions, including the parahippocampus, suggesting that melody manipulation induced feelings of unpleasantness in the listeners. This was supported by our behavioral data indicating decreased aesthetic preference for the modified melodies. Medial temporal activation could also have been evoked by stimulus structural novelty determining increased memory load for the modified stimuli. The analysis of melodies judged as beautiful revealed that aesthetic judgment of simple melodies relied on a fine-structural analysis of the stimuli subserved by a left frontal activation and, possibly, on meaning attribution at the charge of right superior temporal sulcus for increasingly pleasurable stimul

The role of music in promoting health and wellbeing: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background: The higher disease burden and related costs due to an increasing aging population have placed tremendous pressure on the healthcare systems worldwide. Given that music, both listened and actively performed, promotes and maintains good health and wellbeing among the population, we sought to perform a systematic review that would assess its biopsychosocial effects on a population over 40 years of age. Methods: A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed articles up to April 2021 was conducted on six electronic databases (i.e. Cochrane, MEDLINE, PubMed, PsycINFO, Web of Science and Scopus). Our study population only included healthy adults of 40 years and older. A total of 11 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) matched the inclusion criteria and were therefore analyzed. Results: Despite the heterogeneity of the methodologies used in the selected studies, our findings suggest that active musical participation can lead to beneficial effects on both cognitive and psychosocial functioning, whereas the positive impact of listening to music seems to be predominantly restricted to the cognitive domain. Conclusions: Although our results are consistent with both active and passive music activities favouring health and wellbeing in individuals 40 years old and over, future prospective RCTs, employing more uniformed and sensitive measurements, should allow us to better gauge the role of music participation in healthy aging and longevity, especially in countries with a high population density of elderly people

Multicentre Italian study of SARS-CoV-2 infection in children and adolescents, preliminary data as at 10 April 2020

Data on features of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in children and adolescents are scarce. We report preliminary results of an Italian multicentre study comprising 168 laboratory-confirmed paediatric cases (median: 2.3 years, range: 1 day-17.7 years, 55.9% males), of which 67.9% were hospitalised and 19.6% had comorbidities. Fever was the most common symptom, gastrointestinal manifestations were frequent; two children required intensive care, five had seizures, 49 received experimental treatments and all recovered

Forms of vitality, mirroring and psychotherapy. A Daniel Stern’s Legacy

The exponential growth of neurosciences solicited psychotherapies to investigate extensively their epistemological bases and clinical practices. Affective dynamics and clinical dialogue have been reinterpreted in the light of theories concerning the caregiver-baby dyad, strengthening the idea that what happens during therapy can be better understood through the conceptual grid of the intersubjective paradigm. This paper promotes a conception of relational psychotherapy that stresses the role of vitality forms as a global organizer of interpersonal experience and transforming implicit memories into self-reflexive representations. By connecting Stern's theoretical construct to the intersubjective paradigm, we consider vitality forms to be a fecund construct in clinical settings. &nbsp

Political self-deception. Una prospettiva dalle scienze cognitive

L'artciolo contiene una recensione del libro Political self-deception di Anna Elisabetta Galeott