Word: instrument
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...comes in several flavors and people willingly engage in colonic irrigation to get all the nasties out of their large intestines--and where otherwise smart folk habitually ignore all warnings and put Q-Tips too far into their ears. But apparently Q-Tips aren't quite enough. The newest instrument for getting the muck out of that pesky ear canal is a lighted candle...
...days before meeting Jovon Lee, our tutee, we divided our time between picking out which dorm he'd live in his freshman year at Stanford and determining which wind instrument he should play. At our first session, we spent most of the time telling our life stories and how they had led us to become paragons of selfless giving. Then we let him know just how cool we were. Eventually, I found myself saying things like, "I did some of the rap singing myself in seventh grade. I called myself the Rap King...
...biology of the nervous system. While music tends to be processed mostly in the right hemisphere of the brain, no single set of cells is devoted to the task. Different networks of neurons are activated, depending on whether a person is listening to music or playing an instrument, and whether or not the music involves lyrics...
...least, music can evidently trigger physical changes in the brain's wiring. By measuring faint magnetic fields emitted by the brains of professional musicians, a team led by Christo Pantev of the University of Muenster's Institute of Experimental Audiology in Germany has shown that intensive practice of an instrument leads to discernible enlargement of parts of the cerebral cortex, the layer of gray matter most closely associated with higher brain function...
...retrain the brain," says TIME medical correspondent Christine Gorman. As our understanding of the brain becomes more sophisticated, Gorman explains, we get further from the erroneous idea that the brain is static, or fixed. "Now we know that tasks like learning a language or playing a new instrument change the brain," Gorman says. And although the stroke therapy remains experimental, it offers renewed hope for even more dramatic and practical discoveries down the road...