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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the music-to-code-by dept.

To Predict the Future, the Brain Uses two Clocks:

That moment when you step on the gas pedal a split second before the light changes, or when you tap your toes even before the first piano note of Camila Cabello's "Havana" is struck. That's anticipatory timing.

One type relies on memories from past experiences. The other on rhythm. Both are critical to our ability to navigate and enjoy the world.

New University of California, Berkeley, research shows the neural networks supporting each of these timekeepers are split between two different parts of the brain, depending on the task at hand.

"Whether it's sports, music, speech or even allocating attention, our study suggests that timing is not a unified process, but that there are two distinct ways in which we make temporal predictions and these depend on different parts of the brain," said study lead author Assaf Breska, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley.

The findings, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, offer a new perspective on how humans calculate when to make a move.

"Together, these brain systems allow us to not just exist in the moment, but to also actively anticipate the future," said study senior author Richard Ivry, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist.

[...] Both groups viewed sequences of red, white and green squares as they flashed by at varying speeds on a computer screen, and pushed a button the moment they saw the green square. The white squares alerted them that the green square was coming up.

In one sequence, the red, white and green squares followed a steady rhythm, and the cerebellar degeneration patients responded well to these rhythmic cues.

In another, the colored squares followed a more complex pattern, with differing intervals between the red and green squares. This sequence was easier for the Parkinson's patients to follow, and succeed at.

"We show that patients with cerebellar degeneration are impaired in using non-rhythmic temporal cues while patients with basal ganglia degeneration associated with Parkinson's disease are impaired in using rhythmic cues," Ivry said.

How about that? Background music can be helpful for concentration.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday December 01 2018, @10:57PM (2 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Saturday December 01 2018, @10:57PM (#768751) Homepage Journal

    My first job out of high school was pumping fuel serve at Fairfield Shell. For the most part this was a relaxing job, I could sit in a chair and read most of the day which led my manager Bill to come up with such chores for me as policing the lot and weeding our planters, but after I'd done both just once Bill just had to suffer in silence as I read books way beyond his grade level.

    I worked 6:00 AM - 2:00 PM; our morning and lunch time rushes were just like the flight deck of an air craft carrier in battle was once described on Usenet: "You had to have eyes on the back of your head".

    My assistant manager quite quickly taught me how to peg the precise - to within less than one cent of error - the _precise_ cost of gasoline that the customer requested:

    Towards the end of their fueling, keep a close eye on the price display; it helped that we had mechanical pumps so we could hear the pennies clicking by. Then start tapping your foot with the prices - fifty, sixty, seventy, seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five, ninety, one two three four five six seven eight nine... let go of the hose handle valve right about half-way between ninety-nine and one-hundred.

    While there was some finesse to getting just the right delay before one let go of the valve, because of the one-cent quantization of the price meter, it was not at all to learn that delay well enough to become muscle memory.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02 2018, @03:42AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02 2018, @03:42AM (#768804)

    Congratulations! You just realized the skills any decent musician has to employ every other measure of a performance, often in signficantly more complex patterns (not just let's count to 100).

    Astounding someone like you could manage it...