Music Music Music

Musical Hallucinations Of Lost Memories - A Case Study

A new case study outlines the instance of a 60-year-old woman who suddenly began hearing music, as if a radio were playing at the back of her head.


She couldn't identify the music but when she hummed or sang the tunes, her husband was able to recognize them. She didn't know the songs but she was hallucinating music familiar to people around her. 

Neurologists Danilo Vitorovic and José Biller of Loyola University Medical Center say the case raises "intriguing questions regarding memory, forgetting and access to lost memories."

Musical hallucinations are a form of auditory hallucinations, in which patients hear songs, instrumental music or tunes, even though no such music is actually playing. Most patients realize they are hallucinating, and find the music intrusive and occasionally unpleasant. There is no cure.


I love great art no matter the medium

The Marijuana Wars

Kerfuffle Over Marijuana Claim

WIKIMEDIA, HUPU2Marijuana law reform has been in the air lately. Last November, Colorado and Washington voted to legalize recreational weed use in their states, and Illinois recently became the latest state to legalize the drug for use as a medicine. In a speech at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting this month, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal government would no longer seek harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders that had no ties to gangs, violence, or trafficking—though he drew the ire of medical marijuana proponents for failing to mention the drug specifically once during the speech. Now, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has weighed in on what appears to be a rising tide of pro-marijuana sentiment.

In response to an advertisement sponsored by the pro-pot group Marijuana Policy Project, which called marijuana “less toxic” than alcohol, NIDA wrote in an e-mail to watchdog group PolitiFact: "Claiming that marijuana is less toxic than alcohol cannot be substantiated since each possess their own unique set of risks and consequences for a given individual." PolitiFact, which fact-checks claims made by politicians, pundits, and special interest groups, surmised the claim that marijuana is less toxic than alcohol was “mostly true,” citing numbers from the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics. According to the CDC, more than 41,000 deaths were tied to alcohol in 2010 (almost 16,000 attributed to alcoholic liver disease and more than 25,000 to alcohol-related accidents and homicides), while zero were reportedly linked to marijuana. In addition, the CDC lists “1.2 million emergency room visits and 2.7 million physician office visits due to excessive drinking” on its website, as PolitiFact pointed out Thursday (August 15).

Just a few days before PolitiFact’s analysis of the “less toxic” claim ran online, NIDA released a statement on its own website, reaffirming its commitment to studying the effects of marijuana as a drug of abuse and addiction. “NIDA funds a wide range of research on and related to marijuana (cannabis); its main psychoactive ingredient, THC; and chemicals related to THC (cannabinoids),” the statement read. “This includes understanding patterns of use, its effects on the brain and behavior, and developing prevention and treatment interventions.”

Notably absent from the federal government’s marijuana research funding portfolio are studies that look into the supposed medicinal benefits of the smoked form of the drug. As The Scientist reported last year, several researchers who would like to study the medicinal properties of marijuana are stymied by the fact that the US government blocks access to federal stores of the drug and funding to conduct such research.

I love great art - no matter the medium..

Just a trip!

Several associative studies have drawn vastly different conclusions about the connections between psychedelic drugs and mental health. Today (August 19) the field gets even hazier, as researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) suggest that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), “magic” mushrooms, and peyote do not increase a person’s risk of developing mental health problems—and report that psychedelic drug use was actually linked to fewer such issues, according to their recent investigation.

In a study appearing in PLOS ONE, the Norwegian team analyzed health data on more than 130,000 people chosen at random from the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s 2001–2004 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, of which 22,000 said they had used psychedelics at least once. The researchers found no links between the self-reported use of psychedelic drugs and a range of mental health problems, including general psychological distress, anxiety disorders, mood disorders, and psychosis.

“After adjusting for other risk factors, lifetime use of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, or peyote, or past-year use of LSD, was not associated with a higher rate of mental health problems or receiving mental health treatment,” NTNU psychologist Pål-Ørjan Johansen said in a statement.

In fact, Johansen and his coauthor found that lifetime use of psilocybin—the psychedelic compound in“magic” mushrooms—or mescaline—the psychedelic agent in peyote—and past-year use of LSD were instead associated with reduced rates of serious psychological distress. They also found that lifetime use of LSD was associated with reduced rates of outpatient mental health treatment and fewer prescriptions for psychiatric drugs.


I love great art no matter the medium

Power and love

Life is like that. There's always more, always a reveal."

Cheryl Strayed

I contemplate suicide now and again. Not as much as I used to, in college, back before people knew how dangerous higher education was and a safety net/mental health infrastructure was required, and the decade thereafter, when I was trying to find myself in a world that rarely squared with my conception of it.

I'm not exactly a happy camper today, but things are going pretty good. I think it's got partly to do with getting older, you understand the game, you realize those who think they know...don't. I'd never want to be President. CEO of the giant corporation known as the USA? Sounds like a crappy job to me.

But every once in a while I get frustrated. Not only when I hit a metaphorical brick wall, but when I realize I haven't changed or am encountering the same damn problem once again. It's like an episode of "Groundhog Day," but without the reward at the end.

But it's quotes like these that keep me going.

Because life is truly a mystery. Better than any book or movie. You're just bouncing along and the strangest thing happens, especially if you put yourself in play.

And you should.

"WE ARE FAMILY: When a book saturates the culture as pervasively as Cheryl Strayed's 'Wild' - at No. 15 on the combined nonfiction list after 56 weeks - it can be hard to imagine there are readers left who haven't encountered it. But when a Pennsylvania woman checked 'Wild' out of her local library recently, she was surprised to find far more than the travel adventure she was expecting. 'I often get e-mails,' Strayed wrote on Facebook last month, 'from readers who tell me we're connected because their lives are so very much like mine - similar childhoods, similar losses, similar struggles. This experience has been a great reminder to me how very connected we are, in spite of our differences. As I read one such e-mail recently I thought I was reading the usual until I came to the part about how the e-mailer sat bolt upright in bed as she read "Wild" because halfway into Chapter 1 she realized we have the same father. My half sister, who came upon my book by chance, who knew of my existence but not my name, found me.' Strayed told me she had made efforts over the years to locate her half sister and brother, but online searches turned up nothing. But when her half sister started 'Wild,' she 'knew just enough about me and my siblings that she put it together. She read the rest of the book and then she wrote to me. She was stunned. I was, too, and yet I always knew our paths would cross. Life is like that. There's always more, always a reveal.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/books/review/inside-the-list.html

Cookies, cake and fat!

Why One Cream Cake Leads to Another

A chronic high-fat diet is thought to desensitize the brain to the feeling of satisfaction that one normally gets from a meal, causing a person to overeat in order to achieve the same high again. New research published today (August 15) in Science, however, suggests that this desensitization actually begins in the gut itself, where production of a satiety factor, which normally tells the brain to stop eating, becomes dialed down by the repeated intake of high-fat food.

“It’s really fantastic work,” said Paul Kenny, a professor of molecular therapeutics at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida, who was not involved in the study. “It could be a so-called missing link between gut and brain signaling, which has been something of a mystery.”

While pork belly, ice cream, and other high-fat foods produce an endorphin response in the brain when they hit the taste buds, according to Kenny, the gut also sends signals directly to the brain to control our feeding response.

This dopamine surge occurs in response to feeding in both mice and humans. But evidence suggests that dopamine signaling in the brain is deficient in obese people.

Oleoylethanolamide levels are also reduced in fasting animals and increase in response to eating, communicating with the brain to stop further consumption once the belly is full. Indeed, oleoylethanolamide is a known satiety factor. Therefore, when chronic consumption of high-fat food diminishes its production, the satisfaction signal is not achieved, and the brain is essentially “blind to the presence of calories in the gut,” said Araujo, and thus demands more food.

But once the vicious cycle starts, it is hard to break because the brain is receiving its information subconsciously. “We eat what we like, and we think we are conscious of what we like, but I think what this [paper] and others are indicating is that there is a deeper, darker side to liking—a side that we’re not aware of,” Piomelli said. “Because it is an innate drive, you can not control it.” Put another way, even if you could trick your taste buds into enjoying low-fat yogurt, you’re unlikely to trick your gut.

I love great art no matter the medium

Streaming is good!

And as soon as we stop vilifying these streaming services and start trumpeting their metrics, the sooner the rest of the world will take music seriously, the sooner artists will realize that there's a ton of money in music and it's worth it to take the risk as opposed to play the game because you can go straight to your audience and people are hungry for something new and different.

I love great art no matter the medium

Andy Summers says -and I agree

I've spoken to many bands who find this early time, when everything is open, really exciting.
Summers: It's a cliché, but when you think back on bands, always the really great time is the first couple of years. Certainly I look back with the most affection about the Police with the first couple of years when we were going like a rocket. It was all so new, and we were going so successful. Five or six years in, we're monsters. You start to get into the five-star hotel, private jet thing, and you get more jaded about it. It's always the first bit because it's new and you're proving it.

I love great art no matter the medium