What are the secrets of an ‘ugly’ voice? Steps towards answers were provided in 2006 by Professor Johan Sundberg, (personal Chair (Emeritus) in Music Acoustics at the department of Speech Music and Hearing KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm), in his paper for Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 2006 • volume 2 • no 2-3 • […]
Tag: ugly
fMRI and meaningless lower-face acts
Improbable can find but one formal scientific study which features investigations of fMRI monitored responses to meaningless lower-face acts (a.k.a. ‘gurns’). Experiments carried out in year 2000, under the protocols of the UK’s Bethlem Royal and Maudsley Hospital Research Ethics Committee, were designed to answer the question: ‘Can the cortical substrates for speechreading be distinguished […]
The End (and Aftermath) of Big Ugly Education
Investigator Jim Cowdery writes: As far as I can tell, the Big Ugly Community Center is neither big nor ugly. The history, they say is that “In 1993, the Big Ugly Elementary School was shut down and left empty. The community gained access to the vandalized building, they hauled water, scrubbed out the mold and […]
Aesthetic Judgment of Beauty (1)
“Neural Correlates of Beauty,” Hideaki Kawabata and Semir Zeki, Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 91, 2004, pp. 1699–1705 (http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1152 /jn.00696.2003). The researchers, at University College, London, report: A comparison of ugly versus beautiful produced activity in the motor cortex bilaterally, whereas the contrast ugly versus neutral produced no activity. Thus the areas that are involved […]