Is there something special about the way music communicates feelings? Theorists since Meyer (1956) have attempted to explain how music could stimulate varied and subtle affective experiences by violating learned expectancies, or by mimicking other forms of social interaction. Our proposal is that music speaks to the brain in its own language; it need not imitate any other form of communication....

Brain oscillations are one of the core mechanisms underlying episodic memory. However, while some studies highlight the role of synchronized oscillatory activity, others highlight the role of desynchronized activity. We here describe a framework to resolve this conundrum and integrate these two opposing oscillatory behaviors. Specifically, we argue that the synchronization and desynchronization...

The brain adapts to dynamic environments by adjusting the attentional gain or precision afforded to salient and predictable sensory input. Previous research suggests that this involves the regulation of cortical excitability (reflected in prestimulus alpha oscillations) before stimulus onset that modulates subsequent stimulus processing (reflected in stimulus-bound gamma oscillations). We prese...

It has recently been suggested that dyslexia may manifest as a deficit in the neural synchrony underlying language-based codes (Goswami, 2011), such that the phonological deficits apparent in dyslexia occur as a consequence of poor synchronisation of oscillatory brain signals to the sounds of language. There is compelling evidence to support this suggestion, and it provides an intriguing new de...

The cerebral cortex is a vastly complex structure consisting of multiple distinct populations of neurons residing in functionally specialized cortical compartments. A fundamental goal in systems neuroscience is to understand the interactions among cortical neurons and their relationship to behavior. It is hypothesized that dynamic activity patterns, such as oscillations in global neuronal activ...

Numerous empirical evidences suggest that planetary tides may influence solar activity. In particular, it has been shown that: (1) the well-known 11-year Schwabe sunspot number cycle is constrained between the spring tidal period of Jupiter and Saturn, 9:93 year, and the tidal orbital period of Jupiter, 11:86 year, and a model based on these cycles can reconstruct solar dynamics at multiple tim...

In most cognitive neuroscience experiments there are many behavioral and experimental dynamics, and many indices of brain activity, that vary from trial to trial. For example, in studies of response conflict, conflict is usually treated as a binary variable (i.e., response conflict exists or does not in any given trial), whereas some evidence and intuition suggests that conflict may vary in int...

All cool stars with outer convective zones have the potential to exhibit stochastically excited stellar oscillations. In this work, we explore layers of less massive than Sun. particular, computed a set models raging from 0.4 0.9 $M_\odot$ aim at determining impact on oscillations two physical processes occurring in envelopes these stars. Namely, partial ionisation chemical elements and electro...

On 12 March 1996, during the commissioning phase of the SOHO mission, we obtained observations of the quiet Sun with the SUMER instrument. The observations were sequences of 15-20 second exposures of ultraviolet emission line profiles and of the neighboring continua. These data contain signatures of the dynamics of the solar chromosphere that are uniquely useful because of wavelength coverage, ...

Motivated by recent Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) observations of damped oscillations in coronal loops, we consider analytically the motion of an inhomogeneous coronal magnetic tube of radius a in a zeroplasma. An initially perturbed tube may vibrate in its kink mode of oscillation, but those vibrations are damped. The damping is due to resonant absorption, acting in the inhomo...