The popular view that music enhances creativity has been challenged by researchers who say it has the opposite effect.

Psychologists from the University of Central Lancashire, University of Gävle in Sweden and Lancaster University investigated the impact of background music on performance by presenting people with verbal insight problems that are believed to tap creativity.

They found that background music “significantly impaired” people’s ability to complete tasks testing verbal creativity – but there was no effect for background library noise.

For example, a participant was shown three words (e.g., dress, dial, flower), with the requirement being to find a single associated word (in this case “sun”) that can be combined to make a common word or phrase (i.e., sundress, sundial and sunflower).

The researchers used three experiments involving verbal tasks in either a quiet environment or while exposed to:

Background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics
Instrumental music without lyrics
Music with familiar lyrics
Dr Neil McLatchie of Lancaster University said: “We found strong evidence of impaired performance when playing background music in comparison to quiet background conditions.”

Researchers suggest this may be because music disrupts verbal working memory.

The third experiment – exposure to music with familiar lyrics- impaired creativity regardless of whether the music also boosted mood, induced a positive mood, was liked by the participants, or whether participants typically studied in the presence of music.

However, there was no significant difference in performance of the verbal tasks between the quiet and library noise conditions.

Researchers say this is because library noise is a “steady state” environment which is not as disruptive.

“To conclude, the findings here challenge the popular view that music enhances creativity, and instead demonstrate that music, regardless of the presence of semantic content (no lyrics, familiar lyrics or unfamiliar lyrics), consistently disrupts creative performance in insight problem solving.”

Scientists from the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg and from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) have been able to rejuvenate stem cells in the brain of aging mice. The revitalised stem cells improve the regeneration of injured or diseased areas in the brain of old mice. The researchers expect that their approach will provide fresh impetus in regenerative medicine and facilitate the development of stem cell therapies.

Their results were published today in the journal Cell. All cells making up our organs originate from stem cells. They divide and the resulting cells develop into specific tissue cells, forming the brain, lungs or bone marrow. With age, however, the stem cells of living organisms lose their ability to proliferate. Many of them lapse into a permanent state of quiescence.

In order to create as accurate as possible computational models of stem cell behaviour, the LCSB’s Computational Biology Group led by Prof. Antonio del Sol applied a novel approach. “Stem cells live in a niche where they constantly interact with other cells and extra-cellular components. It is extremely difficult to model such a plethora of complex molecular interactions on the computer. So we shifted perspective. We stopped thinking about what external factors were affecting the stem cells, and started thinking about what the internal state of a stem cell would be like in its precisely defined niche.”

The novel approach led to in a new computational model developed by Dr. Srikanth Ravichandran of the Computational Biology Group: “Our model can determine which proteins are responsible for the functional state of a given stem cell in its niche – meaning whether it will divide or remain in a state of quiescence. Our model relies on the information about which genes are being transcribed. Modern cell biology technologies enable profiling of gene expression at single cell resolution.”

It was previously unknown why most of the stem cells in the brain of old mice remain in a state of quiescence. From their computational model, the researchers at the LCSB identified a molecule called sFRP5 that keeps the neuronal stem cells inactive in old mice, and prevents proliferation by blocking the Wnt pathway crucial for cell differentiation.

A rejuvenation for cells

Then the long-standing expertise in neural stem cells of the collaborators at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) came in: Studying stem cells first in a dish and then later directly in mice, they could experimentally validate the computational prediction. When neutralising the action of sFRP5, the quiescent stem cells did indeed start proliferating more actively. Thus, they were available again to be recruited for the regeneration processes in the aging brain. “With the deactivation of sFRP5, the cells undergo a kind of rejuvenation,” del Sol says: “As a result, the ratio of active to dormant stem cells in the brain of old mice becomes almost as favourable as in young animals.”

“Our results constitute an important step towards the implementation of stem cell-based therapies, for instance for neurodegenerative diseases,” Antonio del Sol says. “We were able to show that, with computational models, it is possible to identify the essential features that are characteristic of a specific state of stem cells.” This approach is not limited to studying the brain. It can also be used to model stem cells of other organs in the body. “The hope is that this will open avenues for regenerative medicine,” says del Sol.

Researchers Rejuvenate Stem Cells In the Aging Brain: Mouse Study

What do you think of when you think of a rainbow? If you’re sighted, you’re probably imagining colors arcing through the sky just after the rain.

But what about someone who can’t see a rainbow? How does a congenitally blind person’s knowledge of a rainbow — or even something as seemingly simple as the color red — differ from that of the sighted?

The answer, Alfonso Caramazza said, is complicated: There are similarities but also important differences.

The Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology, Caramazza is the co-author, with postdoctoral fellow Ella Striem-Amit and Xiaoying Wang and Yanchao Bi from Beijing Normal University, of a new study that suggests that, although they experience them differently, the sighted and the blind are still able to share a common understanding of abstract visual phenomena like rainbows and color. The study is described in a December paper published in Nature Communications.

“The question here is how do we represent things that don’t have an external physical reality — something we can’t touch or smell?” Caramazza said. “If you think about it, this is not just a problem for the blind; it’s a problem anyone has when they hear a word like ‘ion’ or ‘quark,’ for example. Most of us have only a very vague understanding of what those things actually are. If you talk to physicists they can give you theoretical, mathematically precise descriptions, but none of the things they associate with those things have a concrete, physical correspondence.”

With no way to directly experience what something like quarks actually are, Caramazza said, people lean heavily on language to understand or describe them — using words like “strange” and “charm” to describe quarks’ “flavors.”

And the same, he said, is true for blind people seeking to understand color.

“You can use language to describe things that are physical,” he explained. “If you were blind and I wanted to describe a cup to you, I could say it’s a hard object that’s concave and it’s nonporous, so you can put liquids in it. Those descriptions are things you have some physical experience of, so you can piggyback on that experience. But there are some concepts for which you cannot do that. Color is a surface property of an object, but there’s no way for me to tell a blind person what that sensory experience is, because it’s a purely visual experience. So the way they learn about red is the way you and I learn about quarks, or about concepts like justice or virtue — through a verbal description or use in verbal contexts.”

Though scientists have known for decades that abstract and concrete concepts are represented in different parts of the brain, Caramazza said that understanding how the blind experience and understand visual concepts like color can help shed new light on how the brain is organized.

One hypothesis for how knowledge is organized in the brain proposes that representations of the things we know are optimally connected to other parts of the brain that are necessary for processing that information.

“For example,” Caramazza said, “knowledge of something I can see will be organized in a part of my brain that is easily connected with the visual system. But what about color in the blind? It cannot be represented in an area that’s connected to visual processing. Because they learn about it through language, it will be organized in an area that is especially well-connected with language processing. So if the question is where does a blind person store a representation of a rainbow in their brain, they store it in the same area where a sighted person would store a representation of a concept like justice or virtue.”

To see that process in action, Caramazza and his colleagues recruited both blind and sighted volunteers and used fMRI scanners to track activity in their brains as they performed various tasks, including answering questions about rainbows and colors.

“We found that, in the congenitally blind, the neural responses for red were in the same areas as the neural responses for justice,” he said. “The abstractness of something like red in the blind is the same as the abstractness of virtue for the sighted, and in both cases that information is represented in a part of the brain where information is obtained through linguistic processes.”

While the study’s findings suggest there are similarities between how the blind and the sighted interpret concepts like color, Caramazza said the answer is still far from definitive.

“What we are showing is that the organization of concepts in the brain is determined by different principles, one of which is how the information is acquired,” he said. “But the question of whether the blind and the sighted actually have different concepts of red — that’s the hard problem. That’s a philosophical question at this stage. It’s not something we know how to address scientifically, because we’re talking about personal, private experience.”

What is remarkable, Caramazza said, is that despite those differences in how the blind experience colors and how they are represented differently in their brain, the blind and the sighted are able to understand color in similar ways. “You could be talking to a blind person, and if you didn’t know they were blind, you would never suspect that their experience of red is different from yours, because in fact they do know what red means. They know what it means in the same way you come to know what justice means.”

Making Sense of How the Blind ‘See’ Color

Breakdancing is one of four additional sports expected to be included at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris along with surfing, sport climbing and skateboarding, sources indicated Wednesday.

The list of additions is due to be revealed by the local organising committee (OCOG) on Thursday and must be signed off on by the International Olympic Committee.

Their inclusion would come on top of the 28 sports already on the programme, although the Paris 2024 committee did not confirm the reports to AFP.

Breakdancing, an acrobatic style of street dance typically set to hip-hop or funk music, would be making its first appearance in the Olympics, while the three other sports will all be introduced at the 2020 Games in Tokyo.

Karate and baseball/softball, all part of the Tokyo programme, are also candidates, as well as squash, which has been repeatedly rebuffed, and petanque.

At least 20 disciplines from federations recognised by the IOC have applied for inclusion.

Local organisers must submit the recommended list to the IOC which will make a decision in December 2020, following the Tokyo Games.

Breakdancing appeared at last year’s Summer Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires, in the form of “battles” — or duels — decided by judges, and falls under the auspices of the World Dance Sport Federations (WDSF).

The IOC and OCOG have already said the number of participating athletes will be capped at 10,500, a reduction from the Tokyo maximum, for the 2024 Games, limiting the hopes of team sports.

Local organisers also suggested the need for the construction of new permanent venues would likely count against sports pushing to be included.

The University of Oxford and Harrington Discovery Institute at University Hospitals have announced a new affiliation to advance therapies for rare diseases. The joint program combines capabilities to improve treatment options globally for patients with rare diseases.

The University of Oxford and University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio, have announced a multi-year affiliation to establish a global centre for rare diseases. The Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Centre will bring together the capabilities, resources and expertise of both institutions to deliver new treatments for rare diseases, for which therapeutic options are lacking.

More than 350 million people worldwide are living with a rare disease, and approximately 50 percent are children. There are about 7,000 known rare diseases, with new diseases being discovered every day. A rare disease affects one in 10 Americans, or 10 percent of the US population. Similarly, Europe has approximately 30 million people who suffer from a rare disease. The majority of all rare diseases are genetic in origin, which means they are present throughout a person’s life. Only five percent of rare diseases have a treatment approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and similar estimates have been made for treatments approved by the European Medicine Agency (EMA). Therefore, someone with a rare disease today faces a lifelong, often life-threatening, condition with little hope for a cure, or even an effective treatment option.

In this partnership, the University of Oxford and Harrington Discovery Institute commit to addressing unmet need in rare disease. Through their combined resources, the new Centre will set the science and innovation agenda to support cutting-edge breakthroughs across the UK and US with the greatest chance for clinical impact.

The University of Oxford has more than 250 Principal Investigator scientists working on over 350 rare diseases. The Oxford Rare Disease Initiative, established in 2012, is a collaboration between the University of Oxford and the Oxford University Hospitals Trust, which provides the opportunity to combine pre-clinical and clinical expertise in areas such as neurology, inflammation and immunology, hematology, cardiovascular and metabolic diseases and has created an extensive rare disease network.

Since its founding in 2012, Harrington Discovery Institute – part of The Harrington Project for Discovery & Development – has supported more than 100 drugs-in-the-making across disease areas and academic institutions, with a concentration in diseases where unmet need is greatest. The Harrington Project was established to advance scientific discoveries over the ‘Valley of Death’ – the stage in the drug development process when a new discovery is seen as promising, but is insufficiently validated to attract the funding necessary for clinical trials. Harrington Discovery Institute advances these promising discoveries towards the clinic by aligning, through mission and structure, scientific and drug discovery expertise into a new model for drug development.

‘Our partnership with Harrington Discovery Institute recognises the combined experience needed in world-class science and drug development if we are to change the rare disease landscape in a meaningful way – and Oxford is committed to doing so through this unique, open model supporting the most impactful innovation throughout the UK,’ said Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford.

‘Advancing breakthroughs in rare diseases will require bold, new approaches that can overcome scientific challenges and create new medicines. This affiliation represents a commitment to patients first and a tremendous opportunity to improve the health and outcomes of those living with a rare disease,’ said Jonathan S. Stamler, MD, President, Harrington Discovery Institute and Reitman Family Distinguished Chair of Cardiovascular Innovation at University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

The Oxford-Harrington Rare Disease Centre has been several years in planning through efforts of Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, and with the help of David U’Prichard, ex-Global Head of Pharma R&D and Advisor to The Harrington Project. The Centre will be headquartered both in Oxford, under the leadership of Professor Georg Holländer and Professor Matthew Wood, and in Cleveland within the Harrington Discovery Institute, and managed by its leadership. The Centre will be leveraged by researchers worldwide, and raise awareness for rare diseases.

‘Our family is thrilled to see the incredible evolution of the Harrington Project in only 7 years. Our US program has generated interest from disease foundations to biotech and pharma, and we are so pleased to see it extend to the UK. We are honoured and privileged to be collaborating with perhaps the most illustrious university in the world, and we welcome them as true partners in our efforts to cure disease,” said Ronald G. Harrington, whose family co-founded the Harrington Project with Dr. Stamler at University Hospitals.

“Our Centre promises to advance the best scientific breakthroughs not only at Oxford but also across the UK. This is a unique feature of our commitment to science and patients and one I am most proud of,” said Georg Holländer, Head of the Department of Paediatrics. Matthew Wood, Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Centre remarked, “The enormous challenge of bringing new medicines into the rare disease space requires not only scientific excellence but also mechanisms to share knowledge and ambitious approaches to translate this successfully into new drugs for patients. We are thrilled that the new Centre will partner with Harrington Discovery Institute and benefit directly from their extraordinary track record in new drug development and commitment to patients.’

‘This is a wonderful example of the synergy in science and innovation that is needed to move discovery forward, and it is gratifying to see our institutions in Cleveland and Oxford combine their strengths to this end,’ said University Hospitals CEO Thomas F. Zenty III.

The Centre is supported in part by a grant from the Cleveland Foundation. ‘This is a phenomenal opportunity for Cleveland to further distinguish itself as a leader in biomedical innovation,’ said Cleveland Foundation President and CEO Ronn Richard. ‘We are excited by the capabilities of Harrington Discovery Institute, which will support medical breakthroughs across the US and UK through its affiliation with one of the world’s premier medical institutions.’

http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-02-28-oxford-harrington-rare-disease-centre-research-rare-diseases-therapies