ECoG high gamma activity reveals distinct cortical representations of lyrics passages, harmonic and timbre-related changes in a rock song

Listening to music moves our minds and moods, stirring interest in its neural underpinnings. A multitude of compositional features drives the appeal of natural music. How such original music, where a composer's opus is not manipulated for experimental purposes, engages a listener's brain has not been studied until recently. Here, we report an in-depth analysis of two electrocorticographic (ECoG) data sets obtained over the left hemisphere in ten patients during presentation of either a rock song or a read-out narrative. First, the time courses of five acoustic features (intensity, presence/absence of vocals with lyrics, spectral centroid, harmonic change, and pulse clarity) were extracted from the audio tracks and found to be correlated with each other to varying degrees. In a second step, we uncovered the specific impact of each musical feature on ECoG high-gamma power (70–170 Hz) by calculating partial correlations to remove the influence of the other four features. In the music condition, the onset and offset of vocal lyrics in ongoing instrumental music was consistently identified within the group as the dominant driver for ECoG high-gamma power changes over temporal auditory areas, while concurrently subject-individual activation spots were identified for sound intensity, timbral, and harmonic features. The distinct cortical activations to vocal speech-related content embedded in instrumental music directly demonstrate that song integrated in instrumental music represents a distinct dimension in complex music. In contrast, in the speech condition, the full sound envelope was reflected in the high gamma response rather than the onset or offset of the vocal lyrics. This demonstrates how the contributions of stimulus features that modulate the brain response differ across the two examples of a full-length natural stimulus, which suggests a context-dependent feature selection in the processing of complex auditory stimuli

The economics of density: evidence from the Berlin Wall

This paper develops a quantitative model of internal city structure that features agglomeration and dispersion forces and an arbitrary number of heterogeneous city blocks. The model remains tractable and amenable to empirical analysis because of stochastic shocks to commuting decisions, which yield a gravity equation for commuting flows. To structurally estimate agglomeration and dispersion forces, we use data on thousands of city blocks in Berlin for 1936, 1986 and 2006 and exogenous variation from the city’s division and reunification. We estimate substantial and highly localized production and residential externalities. We show that the model with the estimated agglomeration parameters can account both qualitatively and quantitatively for the observed changes in city structure. We show how our quantitative framework can be used to undertake counterfactuals for changes in the organization of economic activity within cities in response for example to changes in the transport network

IMUNIDADE PARLAMENTAR: ANÁLISE SOBRE A RELEVÂNCIA E A NECESSIDADE NO MUNDO JURÍDICO

Entende-se por imunidade parlamentar como prerrogativa necessária oferecida para oexercício da função de representante do povo, para o fortalecimento e independênciado Poder Legislativo. O estudo mostrou uma breve exposição histórica sobre osurgimento dessa prerrogativa, percebendo que não há um posicionamento unânimeacerca da sua origem. As garantias parlamentares foram objeto de questionamentospelos mais diversos setores da sociedade e estão presentes em diversos países,sejam nos regimes econômico-capitalista ou socialista, nos regimes de governopresidencialista ou parlamentarista, no sistema de república ou das monarquias, nosEstados unitários ou federativos, mesmo que sejam apenas simbólicas. A doutrinaidentifica duas espécies de imunidades: a imunidade material, responsável por garantira liberdade de expressão ao parlamentar e a imunidade formal, responsável porresguardar a liberdade pessoal. O objetivo da elaboração dessas prerrogativas não foipara benefício pessoal do parlamentar, mas da Instituição a qual ele representa. Oparlamentar representante do povo, tem o dever de agir respeitando as regras legais emorais, realizando sua função corretamente, visando o bem comum. A partir disso, éjulgado se a imunidade parlamentar é um privilégio ou uma prerrogativa

The Berlin Brain-Computer Interface: Progress Beyond Communication and Control

The combined effect of fundamental results about neurocognitive processes and advancements in decoding mental states from ongoing brain signals has brought forth a whole range of potential neurotechnological applications. In this article, we review our developments in this area and put them into perspective. These examples cover a wide range of maturity levels with respect to their applicability. While we assume we are still a long way away from integrating Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) technology in general interaction with computers, or from implementing neurotechnological measures in safety-critical workplaces, results have already now been obtained involving a BCI as research tool. In this article, we discuss the reasons why, in some of the prospective application domains, considerable effort is still required to make the systems ready to deal with the full complexity of the real world.EC/FP7/611570/EU/Symbiotic Mind Computer Interaction for Information Seeking/MindSeeEC/FP7/625991/EU/Hyperscanning 2.0 Analyses of Multimodal Neuroimaging Data: Concept, Methods and Applications/HYPERSCANNING 2.0DFG, 103586207, GRK 1589: Verarbeitung sensorischer Informationen in neuronalen Systeme

The deep look onto the hard X-ray sky: The Swift - INTEGRAL X-ray (SIX) survey

The super-massive black-holes in the centers of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are surrounded by obscuring matter that can block the nuclear radiation. Depending on the amount of blocked radiation, the flux from the AGN can be too faint to be detected by currently flying hard X-ray (above 15 keV) missions. At these energies only ~1% of the intensity of the Cosmic X-ray Background (CXB) can be resolved into point-like sources that are AGNs. In this work we address the question of the undetected sources contributing to the CXB with a very sensitive and new hard X-ray survey: the SIX survey that is obtained with the new approach of combining the Swift/BAT and INTEGRAL/IBIS X-ray observations. We merge the observations of both missions. This enhances the exposure time and reduces systematic uncertainties. As a result we obtain a new survey over a wide sky area of 6200 deg^2 that is more sensitive than the surveys of Swift/BAT or INTEGRAL/IBIS alone. Our sample comprises 113 sources: 86 AGNs (Seyfert-like and blazars), 5 galaxies, 2 clusters of galaxies, 3 Galactic sources, 3 previously detected unidentified X-ray sources, and 14 unidentified sources. The scientific outcome from the study of the sample has been properly addressed to study the evolution of AGNs at redshift below 0.4. We do not find any evolution using the 1/V_max method. Our sample of faint sources are suitable targets for the new generation hard X-ray telescopes with focusing techniques.Comment: ApJS accepte

The Berlin Brain–Computer Interface: Non-Medical Uses of BCI Technology

Brain–computer interfacing (BCI) is a steadily growing area of research. While initially BCI research was focused on applications for paralyzed patients, increasingly more alternative applications in healthy human subjects are proposed and investigated. In particular, monitoring of mental states and decoding of covert user states have seen a strong rise of interest. Here, we present some examples of such novel applications which provide evidence for the promising potential of BCI technology for non-medical uses. Furthermore, we discuss distinct methodological improvements required to bring non-medical applications of BCI technology to a diversity of layperson target groups, e.g., ease of use, minimal training, general usability, short control latencies

Correction to: The LUCID study: living with ulcerative colitis; identifying the socioeconomic burden in Europe.

From Europe PMC via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: ppub 2021-12-01, epub 2021-12-15Publication status: Publishe