Everyone already knows that romantic love requires sexual attraction, that’s a given. The second component is almost as well known. It’s called attachment, and its part of the show in both romantic and all other kinds of love, including love within families. Attachment is found in other mammal besides us humans: our cats Mischa and Wolfie have become attached to me and my wife, and we are attached to them.

Attachment gives a physical sense of a connection to the beloved. The most obvious cues to attachment are missing the beloved when they are away, and contentment when they return. Loss of that person invokes deep sadness and grief. Another less reliable cue is the sense of having always known a person whom we have just met. This feeling can be intense when it occurs, but it also may be completely absent.

Attachment accounts for an otherwise puzzling aspect of “love”: one can “love” someone that one doesn’t even like. (…)

Finally, there is a third component that is much more complex and subtle than attraction or attachment. It has to do with the lover sharing the thoughts and feelings of the beloved. The lover identifies with the loved person at times, to the point of actually sharing their thoughts their feelings. He or she feels their pain at these times, or joy, or any other feeling, as if it were her or his own. Two people can be attuned, at least at times, to each others’ thoughts and feeling.

It is important to note however, that to qualify as genuine love, the sharing need be balanced between self and other. One shares the others thoughts and feelings as much as one’s own, no more and no less. (…)

The definition of romantic love proposed here involves three components, the three A’s: Attraction, Attachment, and Attunement.

{ New English Review | Continue reading }

bonus:

One in five teenagers in America can’t hear rustles or whispers, according to a study published in August in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

These teenagers exhibit what’s known as slight hearing loss, which means they often can’t make out consonants like T’s or K’s, or the plinking of raindrops. The word “talk” can sound like “aw.”

The number of teenagers with hearing loss — from slight to severe — has jumped 33 percent since 1994.

Many researchers attribute this widespread hearing loss to exposure to sound played loudly and regularly through headphones. (Earbuds, in particular, don’t cancel as much noise from outside as do headphones that rest on or around the ear, so earbud users typically listen at higher volume to drown out interference.)

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The number of financial fraud cases put before the UK’s courts reached record levels in 2010, a report suggests. (…)

KPMG also highlighted the case of a group of men who were accused of using stolen credit card details to buy their own songs on iTunes, generating almost half a million pounds in royalties.

The men targeted the Apple and Amazon sites with 20 songs which they sold through the websites.

It is thought they then stole approximately 1,500 credit cards to buy the songs, and claimed back just under £469,000 in royalties.

{ BBC | Continue reading | via Chris Charfin/prefix }

photo { Moyra Davey }

{ Mark Ronson & The Business Intl - Bang Bang Bang }

{ Mozart’s 140 causes of death and 27 mental disorders }

The documents of Mozart’s life — letters, memoirs of friends, portraits, bureaucratic files — have long been scrutinized at a microscopic level. So when his name was discovered two decades ago in a Viennese archive from 1791, it caused a stir.

The archive showed that an aristocratic friend and fellow Freemason, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, had sued Mozart over a debt and won a judgment of 1,435 florins and 32 kreutzer in Austrian currency of the time (nearly twice Mozart’s yearly income) weeks before the composer died.

The entry was a mystery. No other information about the judgment has come to light, although scholars have generally assumed that it concerned a loan connected with a trip the two men made to Berlin.

Now a Mozart scholar, Peter Hoyt, has come up with a theory about the details: that the judgment stemmed from a loan of 1,000 thalers in Prussian currency made on May 2, 1789, the day the prince and his coach departed Berlin without Mozart, leaving him in need of money for his own transportation.

If true, the conclusion could add depth and texture to our understanding of Mozart’s anxieties over financial problems at the end of his life and of his reception during one of his last journeys.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Have you ever heard a song on the radio that you recognize but you can’t pinpoint the name of the song? (…) It is common for people to recognize a song but how much or how little of the song do you need to hear to recognize it? Do you think you could recognize a song if you just heard a fragment of the song, the rhythm or if you just heard the notes played for you without any rhythmic information?

Kostic and Clearly conducted four different experiments to understand what parts of a song are essential for you to remember hearing it. (…)

The findings from this study reveal that there really is not just one aspect of a song that makes you recognize it as familiar. You can hear a distorted fragment of a song and recognize it. You can hear just the notes of the song played in order and recall that you heard the song before. You can hear the rhythm of the song and still remember it. Finally, you could hear the notes of a song played at a different speed and still recognize it. This speaks to the variety of things we attend to when we are listening to a song.

{ Cognition & the Arts | Continue reading }

sculpture { Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Cloud Prototype No.1, 2003 | fiberglass and titanium alloy foil }

The secret behind the beautiful songs that birds sing has been decoded and reproduced for the first time.

One of the great challenges in neuroscience is to explain how collections of neural circuits produce the complex sequences of signals that result in behaviours such as animal communication, birdsong and human speech.

Among the best studied models in this area are birds such as zebra finches. These enthusiastic singers produce songs that consist of long but relatively simple sequences of syllables. These sequences have been well studied and their statistical properties calculated.

It turns out that these statistical properties can be accurately reproduced using a type of simulation called a Markov model in which each syllable is thought of as a state of the system and whose appearance in a song depends only on the statistical properties of the previous syllable. (…)

But other birds produce more complex songs and these are harder to explain. One of these is the Bengalese finch whose songs vary in seemingly unpredictable ways and cannot be explained a simple Markov model. Just how the Bengalese finch generates its song is a mystery.

Until now. (…) Instead of the simple one-to-one mapping between syllable and circuit that explains zebra finch song, they say that in Bengalese finches there is a many-to-one mapping, meaning that a given syllable can be produced by several neural circuits. That’s why the statistics are so much more complex, they say.

This type of model is called a hidden Markov model because the things that drives the observable part of the system–the song–remains hidden.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

related { New research suggests that our brains have a built-in bias against people whose accents don’t sound like our own }

The way you dance can reveal information about your personality, scientists have found.

Using personality tests, the researchers assessed volunteeers into one of five “types”. They then observed how each members of each group danced to different kinds of music. They found that:

* Extroverts moved their bodies around most on the dance floor, often with energetic and exaggerated movements of their head and arms.

* Neurotic individuals danced with sharp, jerky movements of their hands and feet – a style that might be recognised by clubbers and wedding guests as the “shuffle”.

* Agreeable personalities tended to have smoother dancing styles, making use of the dance floor by moving side to side while swinging their hands.

* Open-minded people tended to make rhythmic up-and-down movements, and did not move around as much as most of the others.

* People who were conscientious or dutiful moved around the dance floor a lot, and also moved their hands over larger distances than other dancers.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

Everyone knows someone who likes to listen to some music while they work. Maybe it’s one of your kids, listening to the radio while they try to slog through their homework. (…)

It’s a widely held popular belief that listening to music while working can serve as a concentration aid, and if you walk into a public library or a café these days it’s hard not to notice a sea of white ear-buds and other headphones. Some find the music relaxing, others energizing, while others simply find it pleasurable. But does listening to music while working really improve focus? It seems like a counterintuitive belief – we know that the brain has inherently limited cognitive resources, including attentional capacity, and it seems natural that trying to perform two tasks simultaneously would cause decreased performance on both.

The currently existing body of research thus far has yielded contradictory results. Though the results of most empirical studies suggest that music often serves more as a distraction than a study aid, a sizable minority have displayed some instances in which music seems to have improved performance on some tasks.

{ Cognition & the Arts | Continue reading }

artwork { Il Lee }

{ Skream, The Epic Last Song, 2010 }

{ The history of the “Amen Break,” a six-second drum sample from 1969 }

{ 10cc , I’m Not In Love, Making of documentary | Thanks Tim }

{ Whitest Boy Alive, Golden Cage (Fred Falke Remix), 2008 }

For the past ten years sales of recorded music have declined so steeply as to become a cautionary tale about the disruptive power of the internet. The rise of illegal file-sharing and the end of the digital “replacement cycle”, in which people bought CDs to replace tapes and records, caused spending to collapse. (…)

The rise in digital music-sales is scant compensation. People tend to buy tracks, not albums, from sites like Apple’s iTunes. They can obtain their favourite music much more cheaply than they could in the CD era. And even digital sales are now stalling. In Japan, mobile and online single-track sales rose only a shade during 2009. So far this year Americans have bought 841m digital tracks, mostly from Apple’s iTunes, according to Nielsen Soundscan—down from 847m at this point last year. Apple now offers plenty of other opportunities to spend money, from iPads to more than 250,000 apps. Music executives believe the company is cannibalising the musical part of its own business.

Yet the music business is surprisingly healthy, and becoming more so. Will Page of PRS for Music, which collects royalties on behalf of writers and publishers, has added up the entire British music business. He reckons it turned over £3.9 billion ($6.1 billion) in 2009, 5% more than in 2008. It was the second consecutive year of growth. Much of the money bypassed the record companies. But even they managed to pull in £1.1 billion last year, up 2% from 2008. A surprising number of things are making money for artists and music firms, and others show great promise. The music business is not dying. But it is changing profoundly.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

The Critique of Judgment, published in 1790, not only closes off Kant’s system as the end toward which Enlightenment thought had always tended, but also, in Deleuze’s interpretation, inaugurates Romanticism, (…) represents nothing less than “the foundation of Romanticism.”

{ Kant, Romantic irony, Unheimlichkeit | Cambridge University Press | Continue reading | PDF }

Kant (1724–1804) defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work The Critique of Pure Reason, which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. Kant asserts that experience is based both upon the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge.

The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), is the second of Kant’s three critiques, deals with his moral philosophy. While the first Critique suggested that God, freedom, and immortality are unknowable, the second Critique will mitigate this claim.

Kant’s contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of “judgments of taste.” After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58), Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

To understand the project of the Critique better, let us consider the historical and intellectual context in which it was written. Kant wrote the Critique toward the end of the Enlightenment, which was then in a state of crisis. Hindsight enables us to see that the 1780’s was a transitional decade in which the cultural balance shifted decisively away from the Enlightenment toward Romanticism, but of course Kant did not have the benefit of such hindsight.

The Enlightenment was a reaction to the rise and successes of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The spectacular achievement of Newton in particular engendered widespread confidence and optimism about the power of human reason to control nature and to improve human life. One effect of this new confidence in reason was that traditional authorities were increasingly questioned. For why should we need political or religious authorities to tell us how to live or what to believe, if each of us has the capacity to figure these things out for ourselves? (…)

Enlightenment is about thinking for oneself rather than letting others think for you. (…) The Enlightenment was about replacing traditional authorities with the authority of individual human reason, but it was not about overturning traditional moral and religious beliefs. (…)

So modern science, the pride of the Enlightenment, the source of its optimism about the powers of human reason, threatened to undermine traditional moral and religious beliefs that free rational thought was expected to support. This was the main intellectual crisis of the Enlightenment.

The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s response to this crisis. Its main topic is metaphysics because, for Kant, metaphysics is the domain of reason – it is “the inventory of all we possess through pure reason, ordered systematically” (Axx) — and the authority of reason was in question. Kant’s main goal is to show that a critique of reason by reason itself, unaided and unrestrained by traditional authorities, establishes a secure and consistent basis for both Newtonian science and traditional morality and religion. (…)

Hindsight enables us to see that the 1780’s was a transitional decade in which the cultural balance shifted decisively away from the Enlightenment toward Romanticism, but of course Kant did not have the benefit of such hindsight.

{ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Continue reading }

The Windmills of Your Mind, music written by Michel Legrand, with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman; lyrics by Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman; from the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair.

Noel Harrison performed the song for the film score. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1969 (Harrison’s father, the British actor Rex Harrison, had performed the previous year’s Oscar-winning “Talk to the Animals”).

The opening two melodic sentences were adapted from Mozart’s second movement from his Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Lyrics and guitar chord transcription | Listen | Download }