As Oscar Wilde puts it, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.    1    (give) him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Art provides a way to communicate experiences when people lack verbal skills. They develop art as an expressive skill for solving problems. Art therapy     2    (found) on the assumption    3     everyone is creative and capable of self-expression.

As a restorative practice, art therapy allows people to express themselves in non-verbal ways, such as drawing and painting. Even a 45-minute creative activity can change a person's mental state. In recent studies, working with an art therapist    4    (prove) to significantly enhance positive moods and boost measures of well-being.

When drawing and singing and dancing, young children typically get    5    (worried) about their abilities. Adults, however, often have complex feelings about art and art making. They begin to evaluate the quality of their art     6    focusing on self-expression itself,    7     benefits are thus lost. However, art therapists can guide people in expressing themselves without concerning     8     their artwork is technically brilliant,     9    they can connect or reconnect with the artworks that help them deal with life challenges.

What are art therapists’ superpower? They can channel dangerous thoughts into imaginative artworks. For instance, people with violent tendencies might let out their anger by hitting another human being. However, with art therapists’ help, their energy could be changed into creative products. These artistic choices satisfy the brain's desire for novelty    10     compromising personal safety.

We all know that music is a powerful influencer. A movie without a soundtrack doesn’t arouse the same________ journey. A workout without a pump-up anthem can feel like a drag. But is there a way to________ these reactions? If so, could they be reverse-engineered and put to use?

In a paper, researchers at the University of Southern California mapped out how things like rhythm cause different types of brain activity, ________ reactions, and emotions, and how machine learning could use those relationships to predict people’s response to a new piece of music.

The research is part of the lab’s broader goal to understand how different forms of media, such as films and________ as well as music, affect people’s bodies and brains. “Once we understand how media can affect various emotions, then we can try to productively use it for actually supporting or ________ human experiences,” says Shrikanth, a professor at USC and the principal investigator.

The researchers first combed music streaming sites for songs with very few________, tagged either “happy” or “sad”. (They wanted to avoid familiar songs to minimize any confusing variables.) Through a series of human testers,   pieces for each emotion were narrowed down to a final list of three: two that reliably caused sadness and one that reliably caused happiness. One hundred participants who hadn’t heard the songs before________ two groups, listened to all three pieces, and either took an fMRI scan or wore pulse, heat, and electricity sensors on their skin and rated the ________ of their emotions on a scale of 0 to 10.

The researchers then________ the data, along with 74 features for each song, such as harmony, into several machine-learning algorithms and examined which ones were the strongest predictors of responses. They found,________, that the brightness of a song and the strength of its beat were both among the best predictors of how a song would affect a listener’s heart rate and brain activity.

The result is still in very early stages, and it will be a while before more powerful machine- learning models will be able to predict the mental and physical reaction to a song with any________. But the researchers are excited about how such models could be applied: to design music for specific individuals, or to help patients with mental health challenges stimulate specific parts of their brain. The lab is already working with________ treatment clinics to see how other forms of media could   help patients. They want to start incorporating________ therapies as well.

More simply, the research could be used to________ playlists. “You wouldn’t want to listen to a song that’s gonna to make your heart rate shoot up right before bedtime, but maybe you do if you’re going on a long________ and you haven’t had much coffee,” says Greer.

Today China is the world’s biggest consumer of wheat. But it wasn’t always that way.

Wheat only came to the area now known as northern China toward the end of the Neolithic (新石器) period, some 4,600 years ago. Initially, wheat didn’t seem to be so delicious and had been treated as a crop of desperation rather than a cooking delight. The first farmers of northern China primarily grew millet (粟), starting as early as 11,500 years ago. By the time of the Tang dynasty, wheat had replaced millet, becoming a major crop. But relatively little was known about exactly why this shift occurred.

In an attempt to track the answer, I accumulated (积累) a collection of nearly 1,200 data points covering more than 50 sites from the mid-Neolithic, about 9,000 years ago, to the collapse of the Eastern Han dynasty in 220 AD. The sites were across 8 modern provinces, ranging from Gansu province in the northwest to Shandong province in the east.

One possible explanation is a major climate shift, called the Holocene Event 3, which happened 4,000 to 4,500 years ago. At that time, the climate became colder and drier across continents, causing damage to crop production.

On top of this, the late Neolithic period was also a time of rapid population growth around the world. With an ever-increasing population and unsteady crop production, it is reasonable to assume that Neolithic farmers in northern China were struggling.

Wheat, it turns out, actually needs more water than millet, making it seem a poor choice for a dry period of history. But importantly, it can be sowed after millet has been harvested. That, we think, is the most likely reason why the people across northern China started to grow wheat.

From more extreme weather to changing coastlines, climate change has always brought unexpected and sometimes dramatic changes to societies. In this instance, the consequence of the Holocene Event 3 in northern China proved, eventually, delicious.