06 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Paradigm Shift: Everyone Will have a Timeline
In 10 years, every human connected to the Internet will have a timeline. It will contain everything we’ve done since we started recording, and it will be the primary tool with which we administer our lives. This will fundamentally change how we live, love, work, and play. And we’ll look back at the time before our feed started — before Year Zero — as a huge, unknowable black hole.
This timeline — beginning for newborns at Year Zero — will be so intrinsic to life that it will quic...
1 The ubiquitous tracking of so much data on everyone means we are entering a new age.
21 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Sound Localization
One trick our brains use to figure out the location of a sound is to compare the time it takes to reach each ear. For example, sound waves emanating from a wind chime located to your right will reach your right ear a few milliseconds earlier than they reach your left ear, and the brain uses this small timing difference to compute exactly how far to your right the chime is located. Researchers have capitalized on this timing difference to test sound localization, using a special experimental t... 1 
notes
notesHow the brain localizes the origin of a sound by calculating the difference in time between the soundwaves hitting one ear versus the other.
18 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
What Newborns Hear and Learn in the Womb
Another experiment, however, proves that babies really do imprint on auditory experiences while still in the womb. In this case, mothers were asked to read a particular story aloud, twice a day, during the last six weeks of pregnancy. The story was by Dr. Seuss again, this time The Cat in the Hat, and it was estimated that the babies spent a total of about five hours listening to it in the womb. Shortly after birth, they were tested to see whether they preferred listening to their mothers rea... 1 notes
notesThe mother's voice, stories read to them, and sounds from their environment; with the exception of the father's voice, to which the infant grows habituated very soon after birth.
29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
How the Mother-Infant Bond Grows Over Time
Evidence that there is some sort of heightened awareness by mothers, caused either by biology or emotions, is seen in a mother's ability soon after birth to recognize her infant by smell and voice alone. In several studies, mothers who had spent only a few hours with their newborns were able to smell out their babies when comparing their shirts with the shirts worn by other babies. Mothers are also pretty good at hearing their infants. Women with new infants in wards usually sleep through the...Mothers grow more attached to their babies as their interactions grow so that the mother can better identify her baby and respond to its cry.
29 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
The Invention of "Insufficient Milk Syndrom"
Even when women do decide to breast-feed, they sometimes feel they are thwarted by their own bodies. "Insufficient milk" is cited as a major reason women in the West terminate breast-feeding after a few days or weeks. The syndrome is fascinating because it is a clear example of a disease being "invented," defined, and then perpetuated by culture at large. In only about 5 percent of the cases is there something making it physically impossible for a woman to breast-feed. Before bottle-feeding c...
1 A problem that did not exist before the introduction of bottle-feeding.
