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Hearing and Musicians’ Recent Findings on Hearing Health and Auditory Enhancement
Published in Stavros Hatzopoulos, Andrea Ciorba, Mark Krumm, Advances in Audiology and Hearing Science, 2020
Sávia Leticia Menuzzo Quental, Maria Isabel Ramos do Amaral, Christiane Marques do Couto
Regardless of the style or instrument in which a musician specializes, perception of acoustic aspects is fundamental: rhythmic characteristics, involving the division of time and the speed of the music, as well as the duration of notes and pauses, are related to the perception of temporal aspects of sound. Identification of musical notes and tuning, as well as identification of timbre, are related to frequency perception. Furthermore, discrimination of intensity is related to tactile perception of the instrument. Therefore, in addition to involving motor and visual skills, tasks performed while learning and practicing music theory and instrumental technique are directly associated with hearing abilities.
Norms and Scores
Published in Lucy Jane Miller, Developing Norm-Referenced Standardized Tests, 2020
The primary advantage of age norms is that they are easily understood. However, many variables cannot be expressed meaningfully using age norms. For example, acuity of vision does not change during childhood. If a 20-year-old has 20/20 vision (which is normal for a 10-year-old also) it is not meaningful to say that the 20-year-old has an age equivalency score of 10–0. In addition, for many factors the age norms are only appropriate within a certain period of growth. For example, on a test of tactile perception, a 16-year-old might receive an age equivalent score of 8–0 because certain tactile perceptual abilities mature in the 6- to 8-year range (e.g., performance of a 6- to 8-year-old would be comparable to performance of an adult). If the score of the 16-year-old were written out in age equivalents as 8–0, it would appear as dysfunction, when in fact it represents normal abilities.
Empirical Evidence on the Difference Between Left and Right Hemispheres in Perceptual Processes
Published in Robert Miller, Axonal Conduction Time and Human Cerebral Laterality, 2019
Three studies used a “delayed matching to sample” task with tactile perception. Witelson (1976) used as subjects boys and girls aged 6-13 years who had to palpate two different nonsense shapes, one in each hand, for 10 sec. They were then asked to choose a match to each from a visual display of 6 shapes. Boys showed a left hand advantage, while girls up to the age of 13 performed equally with either hand. Milner and Taylor (1972) tested commissurotomy patients, head injury patients, and normal controls in a task where wire figures had to be recognised by touch. The task was very easy for normals and those with head injury but intact commissures (the figures were quite large compared to Braille characters), and in these groups showed no asymmetry of performance. In the commissurotomy patients, performance with either hand was inferior to that shown by the other groups, but was significantly better in the left than the right hand. The authors suggested that both hemispheres normally contribute to performance of this task, communication between the hemispheres therefore being important. Comparing single hemispheres in isolation however, the right played a dominant role. Bottini et al. (1995) have confirmed, in brain-injured subjects, the right hemisphere advantage in matching nonsense objects by shape. They add the contrasting fact that tactile matching of objects of the same category, but different shapes (e.g. different-shaped rings) gives a left hemisphere advantage, presumably mediated by an implicit verbal key to the category.
Motor imagery as a method of maintaining performance in pianists during forced non-practice: a single case study
Published in Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 2021
Anna Christakou, Georgios Vasileiadis, Eleni Kapreli
As much as limb no use or even immobilization is an essential component of rehabilitation after an injury, its consequences could be devastating for a musician. Performing music at a professional level demands the combination of multimodal sensory and motor information processing. In the motor domain, immobilization induces severe muscle atrophy, in addition to changes in the: motor cortex excitability (Facchini, Romani, Tinazzi, and Aglioti, 2002); firing rates of motor units (Seki, Taniguchi, and Narusawa, 2001a); and contractile properties of skeletal muscles (Seki, Taniguchi, and Narusawa, 2001b). Considerable alterations due to immobilization and non-use are not limited to the motor system; moreover, tactile perception is impaired in conjunction with a diminished activation in the somatosensory cortex (Lissek et al, 2009). Therefore, cessation of practice and immobilization could lead to performance deterioration and delay of return-to-play.
Phantom Penis: Extrapolating Neuroscience and Employing Imagination for Trans Male Sexual Embodiment
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2020
We know from the RHI that visual perception more strongly entices the brain than does tactile perception. But for the trans man, visual perception of the prosthetic is not always available or pleasant. During penetrative sex, when the penis is hidden from view, only tactile perception is present or chosen. This does not impede functionality because, like the amputated person using a prosthetic leg, the trans man does not need to see his embodied penile prosthetic to know where it is. The concrete prosthetic’s contact with other body surfaces facilitates proprioceptive sensation, which aids its embodiment. Moreover, the trans man’s inclusive penis involves the kinesthetic feelings of weight produced by the dangling penile prosthetic, movement as it swings, and muscle contractions as it thrusts. The trans man can append these dynamics of the inclusive penis by imagining his penis’s erection, its swelling, stiffening, pulsating, and ejaculating. In his study of trans men viewers of XTube, Edelman (2015) reported how trans men “phenomenologically manage” their genitals to “destabilize hegemonic notions of maleness” (p. 150), for example, by “framing vaginal secretions in the same manner as ejaculation” (p. 157). As Gallese (2016) explains, “Motor imagery does qualify as a further form of embodied simulation, since it implies reusing our motor apparatus to imagine actions that are not actual, and to simulate situations that are not real” (p. 241). Feeling-as and motor imagination grant steadfastness to the volitional phantom penis.
Depression, anxiety and acute pain: links and management challenges
Published in Postgraduate Medicine, 2019
Athena Michaelides, Panagiotis Zis
A case-controlled study investigating 735 depressed patients and 456 controls showed no difference in pain thresholds after adjusting for confounders but found significantly higher pain sensitivity in depressed patients [27]. Another case-controlled study by Marsala et al. measured tactile thresholds, pain thresholds and pain tolerance by experimentally inducing electrical impulses to 27 patients and 27 age matched healthy controls. Results showed no difference in tactile perception, but significantly lower pain threshold and pain tolerance in depressed patients than in controls [26]. A recent study by Nitzan et al. investigating 25 patients and 25 age and gender matched-controls, found that depressed patients had a lower thermal threshold when experimental noxious heat stimuli was applied. This was concluded to be due to a higher attention being given to initial pain stimuli. A decreasing attention with every subsequent stimulus applied causing a decreased sensitivity to pain [28].