Category: Brain

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Do You Get Goosebumps Listening to Music? You Might Just Have a Different Kind of Brain

When you listen to music, do you connect to it on an emotional level? Do certain songs and certain moments in them send shivers down your spine and give you goosebumps? For me, there are a bunch of tunes that take me to another place and spark a specific memory in my head. For example, this is one of my favorite songs of all time.

Every time I hear it I get goosebumps, and I flash back to myself driving around Lawrence, Kansas when I was about 20-years-old. Experiencing these kinds of emotions from music is pretty rare. A study from 2016 examined this phenomenon to see how getting chills and goosebumps from music is triggered.

10 people who do experience the aforementioned emotions and 10 who do not participated in a study by Matthew Sachs, a former undergraduate at Harvard. Sachs discovered that people who connect to music emotionally and physically have different brain structures than those who don’t. These folks tend to have a denser volume of fibers that connect the auditory cortex and areas that process emotions, resulting in the two areas communicating better with each other.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Sachs believes that a strong attachment to music means a person has stronger overall emotions. He is currently conducting more research that focuses on how music that causes certain reactions affects brain activity. Sachs’ ultimate goal is to use his research to help treat psychological disorders. Sachs says, “Depression causes an inability to experience pleasure of everyday things. You could use music with a therapist to explore feelings.”

Photo Credit: Facebook,artboho

h/t: indy100

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A Lot of People Are Curious About Brain Fingerprinting Because of ‘Making a Murderer’

Making a Murderer became an overnight sensation when it was released back in December 2015. True crime fans couldn’t help but binge the fascinating deconstruction of our criminal justice system as it related to the case of Steven Avery. Now, the Netflix show is now back for a second season, and the debate is once again raging over whether Avery murdered photographer Teresa Halbach in 2005 in Wisconsin.

Photo Credit: Netflix

Sketchy evidence and the unsteady testimony of Avery’s nephew and alleged co-conspirator have caused many to believe that Avery is being railroaded by the justice system for a crime he didn’t commit.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Season Two of the series is an examination that Avery’s defense attorney Kathleen Zellner suggested he submit to. In episode two of the new season, Avery wears a head-mounted sensor and goes through a test known as the Farwell Brain Fingerprinting test.

Photo Credit: Netflix

The test was first used in a criminal investigation in 1999 and is designed to look for a surge of electrical activity in the brain roughly 300 milliseconds after a person see something familiar. In Avery’s case, he was put through the test and was given details of the crime that he’s accused of to see if his brain registered familiarity and pointed toward his guilt in the case.

The forensics community is divided on whether brain fingerprinting is reliable. Larry Farwell, the man who created the test, says that his research has been supervised by the FBI, the U.S. Navy, and the CIA and that those organizations have confirmed its accuracy. Farwell also points to the case of Terry Harrington, a man who spent 24 years in prison for murder and was eventually exonerated following a brain fingerprint test and an eyewitness recanting their testimony.

Photo Credit: Facebook, Larry Farwell

Critics of the technique say that Farwell’s peer-reviewed study sample size is too small (only 30 people) and that guilty subjects are able to pass the test by simply not paying attention to the images that are presented to them to trigger a response. Also, there have only been a few tests given to known guilty parties so far.

For now, Farwell’s brain fingerprinting device is not admissible in court and more tests need to be done to prove how accurate the test is. As for Steven Avery, he passed the past.

The post A Lot of People Are Curious About Brain Fingerprinting Because of ‘Making a Murderer’ appeared first on UberFacts.

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This illusion tricks your brain into time travel

Science Alert claims this illusions mimics time travel in the brain: In the Illusory Rabbit, the middle flash never happens, but most people still think they saw three flashes to match three beeps. In the Invisible Rabbit, it’s the middle beep that is missed – and the brain usually thinks there was no middle flash […]

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Recalling a memory more often…

Recalling a memory more often makes the memory less accurate.That’s because instead of remembering the actual memory, you’re recalling the memory of the last time you remembered it and any mistakes that might have been introduced there. 00

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A man born premature with cerebral palsy…

A man born premature with cerebral palsy, was unable to swallow on his own until the age of 1, is blind, was unable to speak or walk until the age of 16, began playing Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No.1 on piano in the middle of the night at age 16. He now can play any song after […]

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We hear songs that get stuck in our head while…

We hear songs that get stuck in our head while performing tasks that require a “low cognitive load”, such as showering or getting dressed. Our brain uses these songs as a “screen saver” to keep us entertained while our brain is essentially idle.