🟢Why elephants never forget?

#TED_Ed #Education #Animals #Animation #Brain #Memory

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🟢Why elephants never forget?

It's a common saying that elephants never forget, but these magnificent animals are more than giant walking hard drives. The more we learn about elephants, the more it appears that their impressive memory is only one aspect of an incredible intelligence that makes them some of the most social, creative, and benevolent creatures on Earth.
Unlike many proverbs, the one about elephant memory is scientifically accurate. Elephants know every member in their herd, able to recognize as many as 30 companions by sight or smell. This is a great help when migrating or encountering other potentially hostile elephants. They also remember and distinguish particular cues that signal danger and can recall important locations long after their last visit.
But it's the memories unrelated to survival that are the most fascinating. Elephants remember not only their herd companions but other creatures who have made a strong impression on them. In one case, two circus elephants that had briefly performed together rejoiced when crossing paths 23 years later. This recognition isn't limited to others of their species. Elephants have also recognized humans they've bonded with after decades apart.
All of this shows that elephant memory goes beyond responses to stimuli. Looking inside their heads, we can see why. The elephant boasts the largest brain of any land mammal, as well as an impressive encephalization quotient. This is the size of the brain relative to what we'd expect for an animal's body size, and the elephant's EQ is nearly as high as a chimpanzee's. And despite the distant relation, convergent evolution has made it remarkably similar to the human brain, with as many neurons and synapses and a highly developed hippocampus and cerebral cortex.
It is the hippocampus, strongly associated with emotion, that aids recollection by encoding important experiences into long-term memories. The ability to distinguish this importance makes elephant memory a complex and adaptable faculty beyond rote memorization. It's what allows elephants who survived a drought in their youth to recognize its warning signs in adulthood, which is why clans with older matriarchs have higher survival rates. Unfortunately, it's also what makes elephants one of the few non-human animals to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The cerebral cortex, on the other hand, enables problem solving, which elephants display in many creative ways. They also tackle problems cooperatively, sometimes even outwitting the researchers and manipulating their partners. And they've grasped basic arithmetic, keeping track of the relative amounts of fruit in two baskets after multiple changes.
The rare combination of memory and problem solving can explain some of elephants' most clever behaviors, but it doesn't explain some of the things we're just beginning to learn about their mental lives. Elephants communicate using everything from body signals and vocalizations, to infrasound rumbles that can be heard kilometers away. And their understanding of syntax suggests that they have their own language and grammar. This sense of language may even go beyond simple communication. Elephants create art by carefully choosing and combining different colors and elements. They can also recognize twelve distinct tones of music and recreate melodies. And yes, there is an elephant band.
But perhaps the most amazing thing about elephants is a capacity even more important than cleverness: their sense of empathy, altruism, and justice. Elephants are the only non-human animals to mourn their dead, performing burial rituals and returning to visit graves. They have shown concern for other species, as well. One working elephant refused to set a log down into a hole where a dog was sleeping, while elephants encountering injured humans have sometimes stood guard and gently comforted them with their trunk. On the other hand, elephant attacks on human villages have usually occurred right after massive poachings or cullings, suggesting deliberate revenge.

When we consider all this evidence, along with the fact that elephants are one of the few species who can recognize themselves in a mirror, it's hard to escape the conclusion that they are conscious, intelligent, and emotional beings. Unfortunately, humanity's treatment of elephants does not reflect this, as they continue to suffer from habitat destruction in Asia, ivory poaching in Africa, and mistreatment in captivity worldwide. Given what we now know about elephants and what they continue to teach us about animal intelligence, it is more important than ever to ensure that what the English poet John Donne described as "nature's great masterpiece" does not vanish from the world's canvas.

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حضور کریس رونالدو به همراه خانوادش در فنلاند برای تعطیلات کریسمس.🎄🇫🇮❄️

در فنلاند، شنا در اب یخ زده یک فعالیت پرطرفدار است که برای بسیاری از افراد به عنوان یک روش برای رفع استرس و بالابردن روحیه استفاده می‌شود که معمولا قبل ان از سونا استفاده میکنند. همچنین این فعالیت در فنلاند به عنوان جشنواره ملی شنا در اب یخ زده هر ساله در هفته اول فوریه برگزار می‌شود.

🟢Why you don't like the sound of your own voice?

#Hearing #TEDx #Sound #Human_Body #Humanity #Science #Self #Communication #Music

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🤖اموزش رایگان زبان از طریق بات تلگرام

🟢Why you don't like the sound of your own voice?

If you ask evolutionary biologists when did humans become humans, some of them will say that, well, at some point we started standing on our feet, became biped and became the masters of our environment. Others will say that because our brain started growing much bigger, that we were able to have much more complex cognitive processes. And others might argue that it's because we developed language that allowed us to evolve as a species. Interestingly, those three phenomena are all connected. We are not sure how or in which order, but they are all linked with the change of shape of a little bone in the back of your neck that changed the angle between our head and our body. That means we were able to stand upright but also for our brain to evolve in the back and for our voice box to grow from seven centimeters for primates to 11 and up to 17 centimetres for humans.
And this is called the descent of the larynx. And the larynx is the site of your voice. When baby humans are born today, their larynx is not descended yet. That only happens at about three months old. So, metaphorically, each of us here has relived the evolution of our whole species. And talking about babies, when you were starting to develop in your mother's womb, the first sensation that you had coming from the outside world, at only three weeks old, when you were about the size of a shrimp, were through the tactile sensation coming from the vibrations of your mother's voice.
So, as we can see, the human voice is quite meaningful and important at the level of the species, at the level of the society -- this is how we communicate and create bonds, and at the personal and interpersonal levels -- with our voice, we share much more than words and data, we share basically who we are. And our voice is indistinguishable from how other people see us. It is a mask that we wear in society. But our relationship with our own voice is far from obvious. We rarely use our voice for ourselves; we use it as a gift to give to others. It is how we touch each other. It's a dialectical grooming.
But what do we think about our own voice? So please raise your hand if you don't like the sound of your voice when you hear it on a recording machine.
Yeah, thank you, indeed, most people report not liking the sound of their voice recording. So what does that mean? Let's try to understand that in the next 10 minutes. I'm a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, part of the Opera of the Future group, and my research focuses on the relationship people have with their own voice and with the voices of others. I study what we can learn from listening to voices, from the various fields, from neurology to biology, cognitive sciences, linguistics. In our group we create tools and experiences to help people gain a better applied understanding of their voice in order to reduce the biases, to become better listeners, to create more healthy relationships or just to understand themselves better.
And this really has to come with a holistic approach on the voice. Because, think about all the applications and implications that the voice may have, as we discover more about it. Your voice is a very complex phenomenon. It requires a synchronization of more than 100 muscles in your body. And by listening to the voice, we can understand possible failures of what happens inside. For example: listening to very specific types of turbulences and nonlinearity of the voice can help predict very early stages of Parkinson's, just through a phone call. Listening to the breathlessness of the voice can help detect heart disease. And we also know that the changes of tempo inside individual words is a very good marker of depression.

Your voice is also very linked with your hormone levels. Third parties listening to female voices were able to very accurately place the speaker on their menstrual cycle. Just with acoustic information. And now with technology listening to us all the time, Alexa from Amazon Echo might be able to predict if you're pregnant even before you know it. So think about --
Think about the ethical implications of that. Your voice is also very linked to how you create relationships. You have a different voice for every person you talk to. If I take a little snippet of your voice and I analyze it, I can know whether you're talking to your mother, to your brother, your friend or your boss. We can also use, as a predictor, the vocal posture. Meaning, how you decide to place your voice when you talk to someone. And you vocal posture, when you talk to your spouse, can help predict not only if, but also when you will divorce.
So there is a lot to learn from listening to voices. And I believe this has to start with understanding that we have more than one voice. So, I'm going to talk about three voices that most of us posses, in a model of what I call the mask. So when you look at the mask, what you see is a projection of a character. Let's call that your outward voice. This is also the most classic way to think about the voice, it's a way of projecting yourself in the world. The mechanism for this projection is well understood. Your lungs contract your diaphragm and that creates a self-sustained vibration of your vocal fold, that creates a sound. And then the way you open and close the cavities in you mouth, your vocal tract is going to transform the sound.
So everyone has the same mechanism. But voices are quite unique. It's because very subtle differences in size, physiology, in hormone levels are going to make very subtle differences in your outward voice. And your brain is very good at picking up those subtle differences from other people's outward voices. In our lab, we are working on teaching machines to understand those subtle differences. And we use deep learning to create a real-time speaker identification system to help raise awareness on the use of the shared vocal space -- so who talks and who never talks during meetings -- to increase group intelligence.
And one of the difficulties with that is that your voice is also not static. We already said that it changes with every person you talk to but it also changes generally throughout your life. At the beginning and at the end of the journey, male and female voices are very similar. It's very hard to distinguish the voice of a very young girl from the voice of a very young boy. But in between, your voice becomes a marker of your fluid identity. Generally, for male voices there's a big change at puberty. And then for female voices, there is a change at each pregnancy and a big change at menopause. So all of that is the voice other people hear when you talk. So why is it that we're so unfamiliar with it? Why is it that it's not the voice that we hear? So, let's think about it.

When you wear a mask, you actually don't see the mask. And when you try to observe it, what you will see is inside of the mask. And that's your inward voice. So to understand why it's different, let's try to understand the mechanism of perception of this inward voice. Because your body has many ways of filtering it differently from the outward voice. So to perceive this voice, it first has to travel to your ears. And your outward voice travels through the air while your inward voice travels through your bones. This is called bone conduction. Because of this, your inward voice is going to sound in a lower register and also more musically harmonical than your outward voice. Once it travels there, it has to access your inner ear. And there's this other mechanism taking place here. It's a mechanical filter, it's a little partition that comes and protects your inner ear each time you produce a sound. So it also reduces what you hear. And then there is a third filter, it's a biological filter. Your cochlea -- it's a part of your inner ear that processes the sound -- is made out of living cells. And those living cells are going to trigger differently according to how often they hear the sound. It's a habituation effect. So because of this, as your voice is the sound you hear the most in your life, you actually hear it less than other sounds.
Finally, we have a fourth filter. It's a neurological filter. Neurologists found out recently that when you open your mouth to create a sound, your own auditory cortex shuts down. So you hear your voice but your brain actually never listens to the sound of your voice. Well, evolutionarily that might make sense, because we know cognitively what we are going to sound like so maybe we don't need to spend energy analyzing the signal. And this is called a corollary discharge and it happens for every motion that your body does. The exact definition of a corollary discharge is a copy of a motor command that is sent by the brain. This copy doesn't create any motion itself but instead is sent to other regions of the brain to inform them of the impending motion. And for the voice, this corollary discharge also has a different name. It is your inner voice.
So let's recapitulate. We have the mask, the outward voice, the inside of the mask, your inward voice, and then you have your inner voice. And I like to see this one as the puppeteer that holds the strings of the whole system. Your inner voice is the one you hear when you read a text silently, when you rehearse for an important conversation. Sometimes is hard to turn it off, it's really hard to look at the text written in your native language, without having this inner voice read it. It's also the voice that refuse to stop singing the stupid song you have in your head.

And for some people it's actually impossible to control it. And that's the case of schizophrenic patients, who have auditory hallucinations. Who can't distinguish at all between voices coming from inside and outside their head. So in our lab, we are also working on small devices to help those people make those distinctions and know if a voice is internal or external.
You can also think about the inner voice as the voice that speaks in your dream. This inner voice can take many forms. And in your dreams, you actually unleash the potential of this inner voice. That's another work we are doing in our lab: trying to access this inner voice in dreams. So even if you can't always control it, the inner voice -- you can always engage with it through dialogue, through inner dialogues. And you can even see this inner voice as the missing link between thought and actions.
So I hope I've left you with a better appreciation, a new appreciation of all of your voices and the role it plays inside and outside of you -- as your voice is a very critical determinant of what makes you humans and of how you interact with the world.
Thank you.

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🤖اموزش رایگان زبان از طریق بات تلگرام

🟢How memories form and how we lose them?

#TED_Animations #Consciousness #Health #Memory #Psychology #Brain #Mental_health #TED_Ed #Education

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🤖اموزش رایگان زبان از طریق بات تلگرام

🟢How memories form and how we lose them?

Think back to a really vivid memory. Got it? Okay, now try to remember what you had for lunch three weeks ago. That second memory probably isn't as strong, but why not? Why do we remember some things, and not others? And why do memories eventually fade? Let's look at how memories form in the first place. When you experience something, like dialing a phone number, the experience is converted into a pulse of electrical energy that zips along a network of neurons. Information first lands in short term memory, where it's available from anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes. It's then transferred to long-term memory through areas such as the hippocampus, and finally to several storage regions across the brain. Neurons throughout the brain communicate at dedicated sites called synapses using specialized neurotransmitters. If two neurons communicate repeatedly, a remarkable thing happens: the efficiency of communication between them increases. This process, called long term potentiation, is considered to be a mechanism by which memories are stored long-term, but how do some memories get lost? Age is one factor. As we get older, synapses begin to falter and weaken, affecting how easily we can retrieve memories. Scientists have several theories about what's behind this deterioration, from actual brain shrinkage, the hippocampus loses 5% of its neurons every decade for a total loss of 20% by the time you're 80 years old to the drop in the production of neurotransmitters, like acetylcholine, which is vital to learning and memory. These changes seem to affect how people retrieve stored information. Age also affects our memory-making abilities. Memories are encoded most strongly when we're paying attention, when we're deeply engaged, and when information is meaningful to us. Mental and physical health problems, which tend to increase as we age, interfere with our ability to pay attention, and thus act as memory thieves. Another leading cause of memory problems is chronic stress. When we're constantly overloaded with work and personal responsibilites, our bodies are on hyperalert. This response has evolved from the physiological mechanism designed to make sure we can survive in a crisis. Stress chemicals help mobilize energy and increase alertness. However, with chronic stress our bodies become flooded with these chemicals, resulting in a loss of brain cells and an inability to form new ones, which affects our ability to retain new information. Depression is another culprit. People who are depressed are 40% more likely to develop memory problems. Low levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter connected to arousal, may make depressed individuals less attentive to new information. Dwelling on sad events in the past, another symptom of depression, makes it difficult to pay attention to the present, affecting the ability to store short-term memories. Isolation, which is tied to depression, is another memory thief. A study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that older people with high levels of social integration had a slower rate of memory decline over a six-year period. The exact reason remains unclear, but experts suspect that social interaction gives our brain a mental workout. Just like muscle strength, we have to use our brain or risk losing it. But don't despair. There are several steps you can take to aid your brain in preserving your memories. Make sure you keep physically active. Increased blood flow to the brain is helpful. And eat well. Your brain needs all the right nutrients to keep functioning correctly. And finally, give your brain a workout. Exposing your brain to challenges, like learning a new language, is one of the best defenses for keeping your memories intact.

#TED_Animations #Consciousness #Health #Memory #Psychology #Brain #Mental_health #TED_Ed #Education

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🔥چرا فنلاند 7 سال متوالی بعنوان شادترین کشور دنیا انتخاب شده است؟

فنلاند یکی از شفاف‌ترین حکومت‌های جهان را دارد
که اعتماد مردم به سیاستمداران و دولت را تقویت کرده است. قوانین شفاف این کشور به همه اجازه می‌دهد به اسناد دولتی دسترسی داشته باشند و فرآیند تصمیم‌گیری‌ها کاملاً روشن و قابل پیگیری است. سیاستمداران فنلاند به صداقت و پاسخگویی مشهور هستند و دولت با ارائه خدماتی نظیر آموزش رایگان، مراقبت‌های بهداشتی عمومی و حمایت اجتماعی قوی، رفاه و عدالت را برای همه شهروندان تضمین می‌کند.🇫🇮♥️

🇫🇮لطفا این پست رو برای دیگران هم ارسال کن🙏♥️

🟢What's the smartest age?

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🟢What's the smartest age?

What is the smartest age? Perhaps a day of friendly competition will lead us to the answer.
Tomorrow’s the annual Brain Clash— ten teams of two competing in a decathlon of mental challenges, trivia competitions, and puzzles. I’ve been training all year. I’ll need to pick the smartest, most capable teammate. I’ve narrowed down the roster.
First we have Gabriela. She may only be 8, but don’t underestimate her! She’s fluent in two languages and is the ultimate outside-the-box thinker.
Then there’s Ama. She can recite 100 digits of pi, designs satellites for a living, and bakes a perfect soufflé.
Or I could go with Mr. Taylor. He’s the best chess player in the neighborhood, not to mention he’s competed in over 20 Brain Clashes and is a five-time champion! I’m not sure who to pick! Who’s the smartest?
Which of these teammates should Amir choose for tomorrow's contest and why? Of course, it depends.
While intelligence is often associated with things like IQ tests, these assessments fail to capture the scope and depth of a person’s varied abilities. So instead, we’ll break down the idea of “smart” into categories like creativity, memory, and learning and explore when the brain’s best at each of them.
Let's start at the very beginning. In the first few years of life, your brain undergoes incredible rapid growth, called synaptogenesis, where more than 1 million new neural connections are formed every second.
As the brain develops, it goes through a pruning process. Based on your experience and environment, used connections are strengthened and unused connections are removed. Frequently used neuronal pathways are myelinated, wrapped in a layer of insulation, allowing information to travel faster. This creates a more efficient, fine-tuned brain. But this brain remodeling happens within and between brain regions at different times, allowing different skills to flourish at different ages.
For example, in childhood, brain regions involved in language learning develop quickly, which is why many children can learn and master multiple languages. Yet the prefrontal cortex, a brain region responsible for cognitive control and inhibition, is slower to develop. As a result, some young children may struggle with strategic games, such as chess or checkers, which require constant concentration, planning, and abstract thought. At the same time, children tend to be more flexible, exploration-based learners. They often use more creative approaches when finding solutions to riddles and are, on average, less afraid to make mistakes.
But adults have their own unique set of abilities. Adults benefit from a well-developed prefrontal cortex, allowing them to better execute skills that require learning, focus, and memory, making them quick and efficient puzzle solvers or crossword masters.
Late in adulthood, these same skills may decline as the brain’s memory center, known as the hippocampus, shrinks. But there’s a reason for the phrase “older and wiser.” After a lifetime of learning, older adults have more knowledge to recall and utilize, making them excellent trivia partners.
Other factors that Amir should consider are his own strengths. As an adolescent, the prefrontal cortical regions of your brain are more developed than in childhood. This allows you to better navigate logic and math puzzles. Simultaneously, deep inside the brain, regions that are important in motivation and reward are developing even faster, driving teenagers like Amir to be curious and adventurous learners.
In many ways, you can think of the teenager as a jack-of-all-trades, with brains wired to seek out new experiences and learn quickly. You’re at a dynamic stage, where the choices you make and the skills you focus on can actually guide the development of your brain.

So, what’s the smartest age? There’s no single answer. It’s 8, 16, 25, 65, and everything in between; our brains have adapted to prioritize different skills at various ages to meet that stage of life’s challenges and demands. So no matter who Amir picks, having an age-diverse team is a good strategy.

#Memory #Education #Aging #Brain #TED_Ed #Animation

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🟢What does the world's largest machine do?

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🤖اموزش رایگان زبان از طریق بات تلگرام

🟢What does the world's largest machine do?

On February 7th, 1967, Homer Loutzenheuser flipped a switch in Nebraska and realized a dream more than five decades in the making. The power grids of the United States joined together, forming one interconnected machine stretching coast to coast. Today, the US power grid is the world's largest machine. It contains more than 7,300 electricity-generating plants, linked by some 11 million kilometers of powerlines, transformers and substations.
Power grids span Earth’s continents, transmitting electricity around the clock. They’re massive feats of engineering— but their functioning depends on a delicate balance. Their components must always work in unison, maintain a constant frequency throughout the grid, and match energy supply with demand. If there's too much electricity in the system, you get unsafe power spikes that can overheat and damage equipment. Too little electricity and you get blackouts.
So, to strike this balance, power grid operators monitor the grid from sophisticated control centers. They forecast energy demand and adjust which power plants are active, signaling them to turn their output up or down to precisely meet current demand.
By considering factors like the availability and cost of energy resources, grid operators create a “dispatch curve,” which maps out the order in which energy sources will be used. The grid defaults to using energy from the start of the curve first. Usually, the resources are ordered by price. Those at the start tend to be renewables because they have much lower production costs. Some grids, like those in Iceland and Costa Rica, run on more than 98% clean energy. But most dispatch curves contain more of a mix of carbon-free and carbon-emitting energy sources. This means that where your electricity is coming from— and how clean it is— varies throughout the day— as often as every few minutes.
Take the state of Kansas. Despite having plentiful wind resources, it regularly relies on carbon-emitting power plants. This is because wind energy is especially plentiful at night. But, this is also when there’s lower demand. So, Kansas’ is wind energy is actually regularly disposed of to prevent excess electricity from damaging the grid. And comparable scenarios add up to a big problem worldwide. Thankfully, dependence on renewables is rising. But power grids are often unable to make full use of them.
Many simply weren't designed around intermittent energy sources and can't store large amounts of electricity. Researchers are experimenting with unique storage solutions. However, this will take time and substantial investment. But hope is not lost. We have the opportunity to work with our existing power grids in a new way: by shifting some of our energy use to the times when there’s clean electricity to spare. Leaning into this concept, called “load flexibility,” we can help flatten the peaks in demand, which will place less stress on the grid and reduce the need for non-renewables.
So researchers are developing automated emissions reduction technologies that tap into energy use data and ensure that devices get electricity from the grid at the cleanest times. In fact, smart devices like this already exist. So, how big an effect could they have? If smart technologies like air conditioners, water heaters, and electric vehicle chargers were implemented across the Texas power grid, the state’s emissions could decrease by around 20%. In other words, simply coordinating when certain devices tap into the grid could translate to 6 million fewer tons of carbon released into the atmosphere annually from Texas alone. Now, imagine what this could look like on a global scale.

#Education #Energy #TED_Ed #Natural_Resources #Animation #Electricity #Renewable_Energy

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