#hemisphere

[thefirststarr]

What's that at the end of the road? The Sun. Many towns have roads that run east-west, and on two days each year, the Sun rises and sets right down the middle. Yesterday, in some parts of the world (today in others), is one of those days: an equinox. Not only is this a day of equal night and day time, but also a day when the sun rises precisely to the east and sets due west. Displayed here is a picturesque rural road in Alberta, Canada that runs approximately east-west. The featured image was taken during the September Equinox of 2021, but the geometry remains the same every year. In many cultures, this March equinox is taken to be the first day of a season, typically spring in Earth's northern hemisphere, and autumn in the south.

Image Credit & Copyright: Alan Dyer, Amazingsky.com, TWAN

[wearytaco]

Blessed be, y'all

[shepherds-of-haven]

the post about the seasons has me thinking-- are there different hemispheres in blest? is winter in ygrath equivalent to summer in like, conte?

There are hemispheres in Blest, but the entirety of the Continent and its surrounding lands take place in the northern hemisphere! Once you cross the Myrros Sea, the Nysos Sea, and then the Dyer Oth to reach the southern landmass, you would be crossing the "equator" into the southern hemisphere. So while winter in Conte looks extremely different to winter in Haven, where the weather is still warm, bright, and sunny, it still shares a common hemisphere so the seasons aren't actually reversed, they're just different because of the different biomes and regions!

[travelnew]

Have you ever seen a #sunset from #Mumbai where the Sun actually touches the #horizon?

[knitposting]

An in-joke. It was Ice-Free.

[jcmarchi]

For people who speak many languages, there’s something special about their native tongue

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/for-people-who-speak-many-languages-theres-something-special-about-their-native-tongue/

For people who speak many languages, there’s something special about their native tongue

A new study of people who speak many languages has found that there is something special about how the brain processes their native language.

In the brains of these polyglots — people who speak five or more languages — the same language regions light up when they listen to any of the languages that they speak. In general, this network responds more strongly to languages in which the speaker is more proficient, with one notable exception: the speaker’s native language. When listening to one’s native language, language network activity drops off significantly.

The findings suggest there is something unique about the first language one acquires, which allows the brain to process it with minimal effort, the researchers say.

“Something makes it a little bit easier to process — maybe it’s that you’ve spent more time using that language — and you get a dip in activity for the native language compared to other languages that you speak proficiently,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

Saima Malik-Moraleda, a graduate student in the Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology Program at Harvard University, and Olessia Jouravlev, a former MIT postdoc who is now an associate professor at Carleton University, are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

Many languages, one network

The brain’s language processing network, located primarily in the left hemisphere, includes regions in the frontal and temporal lobes. In a 2021 study, Fedorenko’s lab found that in the brains of polyglots, the language network was less active when listening to their native language than the language networks of people who speak only one language. 

In the new study, the researchers wanted to expand on that finding and explore what happens in the brains of polyglots as they listen to languages in which they have varying levels of proficiency. Studying polyglots can help researchers learn more about the functions of the language network, and how languages learned later in life might be represented differently than a native language or languages.

“With polyglots, you can do all of the comparisons within one person. You have languages that vary along a continuum, and you can try to see how the brain modulates responses as a function of proficiency,” Fedorenko says.

For the study, the researchers recruited 34 polyglots, each of whom had at least some degree of proficiency in five or more languages but were not bilingual or multilingual from infancy. Sixteen of the participants spoke 10 or more languages, including one who spoke 54 languages with at least some proficiency.

Each participant was scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they listened to passages read in eight different languages. These included their native language, a language they were highly proficient in, a language they were moderately proficient in, and a language in which they described themselves as having low proficiency.

They were also scanned while listening to four languages they didn’t speak at all. Two of these were languages from the same family (such as Romance languages) as a language they could speak, and two were languages completely unrelated to any languages they spoke.

The passages used for the study came from two different sources, which the researchers had previously developed for other language studies. One was a set of Bible stories recorded in many different languages, and the other consisted of passages from “Alice in Wonderland” translated into many languages.

Brain scans revealed that the language network lit up the most when participants listened to languages in which they were the most proficient. However, that did not hold true for the participants’ native languages, which activated the language network much less than non-native languages in which they had similar proficiency. This suggests that people are so proficient in their native language that the language network doesn’t need to work very hard to interpret it.

“As you increase proficiency, you can engage linguistic computations to a greater extent, so you get these progressively stronger responses. But then if you compare a really high-proficiency language and a native language, it may be that the native language is just a little bit easier, possibly because you’ve had more experience with it,” Fedorenko says.

Brain engagement

The researchers saw a similar phenomenon when polyglots listened to languages that they don’t speak: Their language network was more engaged when listening to languages related to a language that they could understand, than compared to listening to completely unfamiliar languages.

“Here we’re getting a hint that the response in the language network scales up with how much you understand from the input,” Malik-Moraleda says. “We didn’t quantify the level of understanding here, but in the future we’re planning to evaluate how much people are truly understanding the passages that they’re listening to, and then see how that relates to the activation.”

The researchers also found that a brain network known as the multiple demand network, which turns on whenever the brain is performing a cognitively demanding task, also becomes activated when listening to languages other than one’s native language.

“What we’re seeing here is that the language regions are engaged when we process all these languages, and then there’s this other network that comes in for non-native languages to help you out because it’s a harder task,” Malik-Moraleda says.

In this study, most of the polyglots began studying their non-native languages as teenagers or adults, but in future work, the researchers hope to study people who learned multiple languages from a very young age. They also plan to study people who learned one language from infancy but moved to the United States at a very young age and began speaking English as their dominant language, while becoming less proficient in their native language, to help disentangle the effects of proficiency versus age of acquisition on brain responses.

The research was funded by the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Simons Center for the Social Brain.

[gaycactusscoundrel]

Song of the Day 12/07/2023

[mercoglianotrueblog]

mass surveillance versus individual freedoms

#Hemisphere/#DAS secret #POTUS unauthorized surveillance spies targeted people& who communicated with

govts(#Poland #Italy #Spain #US) spy using private co.s to circumvent laws

Italy #HackingTeam,Germany #FinFisher private #spyware'pioneers

see #appendix

https://salvatoremercogliano.blogspot.com/2023/11/mass-surveillance-versus-individual.html?spref=tw

[moviesandmania]

HEMISPHERE (2023) Reviews of sci-fi mystery thriller plus trailers

‘You can’t hide from it’ Hemisphere is a 2023 American sci-fi mystery thriller about two young female astronauts facing off against merciless space hijackers. Written and directed by Chris Maes (short: Dead Air). The Trujillo Creek Pictures production stars Julie Kashmanian, Paige Rion and Eduardo José Paco Mateo. Plot: Forensic investigator Sandra Ramirez (Paige Rion) accepts a mission to…

[tweedstoat]

I gotta say the Orwell quotes are getting way less snappy these days.

"the pandemic is over but covid is a leading cause of death" isnt as good of a soundbite as "war is peace freedom is slavery ignorance is strength"

[mishalogic]

May be the Earth's "northern" hemisphere

is getting warmer!

Because,

the Earth is changing its axis tilt,

which is facing more to the sun!

or maybe even

The Sun is getting LARGER according to Science! ... Misha

[warmglowofsurvival]

[libnadalex]

I’m looking for my copy of “Atlas of Global Strategy.” Luckily it’s available on Internet Archive! https://archive.org/details/atlasofglobalstr00free/page/n5/mode/2up

[chrismcshell]

these guys know whats up !!!!

[jcmarchi]

A foreign language is transforming the brain - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-foreign-language-is-transforming-the-brain-technology-org/

A foreign language is transforming the brain - Technology Org

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have unearthed fascinating evidence that the brain undergoes important changes in wiring when we embark on the journey of learning a new language in adulthood. They organized a large intensive German learning program for Syrian refugees. They studied their brains using advanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), uncovering dynamic modulations in the wiring of crucial language regions that enabled them to communicate and think in the new language.

MRI image of neuronal pathways involved in language learning on the computer. Image credit: MPI CBS

Over six months, Xuehu Wei and the research team, led by Alfred Anwander and Angela Friederici, meticulously compared the brain scans of 59 native Arabic speakers engaged in intensive German learning. By taking high-resolution MRI images at the beginning, middle and end of the learning period, the researchers deciphered changes in connectivity between brain areas using a tractography technique, which allows the reconstruction of neuronal pathways.

These images showed the strengthening of white matter connections within the language network, as well as the involvement of additional regions in the right hemisphere during second language learning. “The connectivity between language areas in both hemispheres increased with learning progress”, explained Xuehu Wei, first author of the study. “Learning new words strengthened the lexical and phonological subnetworks in both hemispheres, especially in the second half of the learning period, the consolidation phase.”

Less connechtions between hemispheres

Brain map illustrating the altered wiring in the brains of adult native Arabic speakers learning German. Image credit: MPI CBS

Intriguingly, the study also revealed a reduction in connectivity between the two hemispheres, suggesting a crucial role of the corpus callosum – a bridge-like structure that connects the left and the right side of the brain. This reduction suggests that a decreased control of the language-dominant left hemisphere over the right hemisphere during second language acquisition, feeing up resources in the right side of the brain to integrate the new language.

“The dynamic changes in brain connectivity were found to be directly correlated with the increase in performance in the language test of the Goethe-Institute,” emphasized Alfred Anwander, the study’s last author. “This underlies the importance of neuroplastic adaptations of the network to process the newly learned language and the use of regions in the right hemisphere that were previously untapped for language processing. More generally, this study sheds light on how the adult brain adapts to new cognitive demands by modulating the structural connectome within and across hemispheres.”

As one of the first large and well-controlled projects documenting changes in brain connectivity during second language learning, this research may pave the way for a deeper understanding of how first and second languages are learned and processed. Beyond language acquisition, the study opens new avenues for understanding brain function and the effects of experience-dependent structural plasticity. In addition, the language learning project has implicitly opened the door for Syrian refugees to integrate into German society.

Source: MPG

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