【推荐1】You are walking down a busy street on your way to work. You pass a busker (艺人) playing a song you haven’t heard in years. Suddenly, you’re mentally reliving the first time you heard the song. The music takes you right back to where you were, who you were with and the feelings associated with that memory. This experience is known as a music-evoked autobiographical memory. It’s a common experience and it just comes to mind spontaneously. Amazing, isn’t it?

Research has recently begun to explore the connections between music and evoking memories. First, music tends to accompany many distinctive life events, such as celebrations, graduations, weddings and funerals, so it can play an important role in reconnecting us with these self-defining moments. Music also often arrests our attention, due to the way it affects our minds, bodies and emotions. When music draws our attention, this increases the likelihood that it will be encoded in memory together with details of a life event. And this then means it is able to serve as an effective reminder of this event years later.

Another recent study found that more familiar music evokes more memories and brings memories to mind more subconsciously. And the reason is that we typically reengage with songs more often over our lifetime compared to films, books or TV shows.

Indeed, the power of music to connect us with our past shows how music, memories and emotions are all linked—and it seems certain songs can act as a direct line to our younger selves.

“It seems then that music appears to have the ability to reconnect us with more emotionally positive moments from our pasts. This suggests that using music therapeutically may be particularly fruitful. That will be great news for some patients.” says Kelly Jakubowski, Assistant Professor in Music Psychology, Durham University.

【推荐2】Depending on your view, the recorder (竖笛) is an instrument of “incredible functions” or a tool of annoyance that has bothered primary schools for too many generations. But now, it faces extinction, with one of the UK’s top music schools reporting an 80% decline in the number of young people playing it in the last 10 years.

The instrument’s future is so imperilled that the European Recorder Teachers Association is trying to bring it back to life again so it does not go the way of the lute. The ERTA argues that if the recorder was good enough for the Beatles, it has a place in modern music today. Tom Redmond, the principal of Chetham’s school of music in Manchester, said only three of its pupils practised the recorder, compared with 15 a decade ago. “More pupils were taking up the piano or other instruments,” said Redmond. “The ones that became really popular are the ones students spend more time playing alone. With the instruments being more socially or orchestral based, there has been a decline.”

Redmond also said that this problem extended “beyond the recorder itself” and was a mirror of the future of music. “Like removing any plant or animal from an ecosystem, removing the recorder has a huge ripple effect (连锁反应) beyond just the instrument. You need these instruments to create the inspiration for music, and without that, there is less excitement for it and to learn music,” he said. Chris Orton, a recorder tutor and chair of the ERTA, is leading the fight against the instrument’s extinction. He said, “The recorder is increasingly overlooked by students, and yet it has a rich history and incredible attractions. As well as making beautiful sounds, it’s an accessible instrument in that it is low-cost compared to other woodwind instruments, and it’s light and easy to carry.”

【推荐1】Bonobos (倭黑猩猩) display responsibility toward grooming (梳理) partners, which is similar to that of people working together on a task, a new study suggests. Until now, investigations have shown that only humans can work collaboratively toward a common goal supposed to require back and-forth exchanges and an appreciation of being responsible for a partner.

Biologist Raphael a Hessen of Durham University in England and colleagues studied 15 of the endangered great apes at a French zoological park. The researchers interrupted 85 instances of social grooming, in which one ape cleaned another’s fur, and 26 instances of self-grooming. Interruptions consisted either of a keeper calling one bonobo in a grooming pair to come over for a food reward or a keeper rapidly opening and closing a sliding door to an indoor enclosure, which typically signaled mealtime and thus attracted both bonobos.

Social grooming resumed (恢复), on average, 80 percent of the time after food rewards and 83 percent of the time after sliding door disruptions. In contrast, self-grooming or playing alone was resumed only around 50 percent of the time, on average.

Bonobos generally resumed social grooming with the same partner within one minute of an interruption, usually near the original grooming spot. Groomers frequently took up where they had left off on a partner's body. And bonobos more often cried, gestured or otherwise communicated when restarting social grooming if they had been the one responsible for staring the session or interrupting it for a food reward. That was especially true of higher-ranking bonobos in the community, suggesting some awareness of having broken a common commitment and wanting to signal friendly intentions when rejoining lower-ranking grooming partners. Still, it’s likely that bonobos think in less complex ways than people do about joint commitments. In previous studies, even 3-year old children were much less willing to interrupt joint tasks for rewards than bonobos were in the new experiments.

【推荐3】In studying how animals eat, researchers learned about the human diet in the process. They found that humans have five distinct appetites that work together to make sure we get the proper amount of nutrients our bodies need to work efficiently. “It is a mistake to think of appetite as a single, powerful drive to eat,” researchers David Raubenheimer and Stephen Simpson write in New Scientist. “We need separate appetites to keep track of various nutrients, and hence to construct a balanced diet.”

The five are for protein carbs (碳水化合物), fats, sodium, and calcium. “Those five have been singled out by evolution for good reasons,” they write. “One is that there is a limit to how complex biological systems can get and still operate efficiently. We couldn’t have specific appetites for dozens of nutrients. Another is that these nutrients are needed in very specific quantities. Third, some components, like sodium, were often rare in our ancestral environments and we needed dedicated machinery to seek them out, for example in mineral deposits.”

As researchers at the University of Oxford in the 1990s, they started their appetite experiment by putting 200 locusts (蝗虫) in individual boxes. They created 25 foods that were a combination of protein and carbs at different concentrations. Each locust was fed just one of the food combinations until they reached maturity. They were allowed to cat as much as they wanted.

The researchers found that although the locusts were on a limited diet, they tended to eat the ideal amount of protein. For those that were on a low-protein diet, they over ate carbs to get the protein they needed. For those that were on the high-protein diet, they ate too few carbs to keep their protein levels at the correct amount. “This showed that when locus are given imbalanced foods, the appetites for protein and carbs compete, and protein wins,” the researchers write.

The researchers repeated their work in a way with humans. Ten volunteers were broken in two groups. One group ate from a high-protein buffet, while the other chose from a low-protein, high-carbs, and high-fat buffet. Those on the low-protein diet ate more calories and carbs to get the protein they needed. Those on high-protein diets consumed fewer calories.

“Our modern lives are filled with ultra-processed products. Ultra-processed foods make us fat, but not because we have strong appetites for the fats and carbs they contain, as is often thought to be the case. Rather, it is because our appetite for protein is stronger than our ability to limit fat and carb intake. So, when protein is diluted (稀释) by fats and carbs, our appetite for it overwhelms (压倒，击败) the mechanisms that normally tell us to stop eating fats and carbs.”

【推荐2】A virtual reality headset has restored (修复) sight to people who are legally blind. While it didn’t cure the physical cause of their blindness, the device let people with severe macular degeneration (黄斑退化) go on with activities like reading and gardening — tasks they previously found impossible.

Macular degeneration is a common, age-related condition. It affects many people worldwide. It leaves people with a blind spot in the centre of their vision and causes legal blindness. The new system, called Iris Vision, uses VR headset to make the most of peripheral vision (周边视觉). It records the person’s surroundings and displays them in real time, and the user can widen the image as many times as they need for their peripheral vision to become clear. Doing so also helps to effectively reduce or remove their blind spot.

In a trial,30 people used the system for two weeks, filling out questionnaires on their ability to complete daily activities before and after the period. “They can do things that for years were not even a consideration,” says David Rhew at Samsung Electronics America. According to Rhew, the vision of participants was all but restored with the headset. “The baseline rate of vision in the individuals came in at 20/400, which is legally blind, and with the use of this technology it improved to 20/30, which is pretty close to 20/20 vision,” he says. Tom Peterson has serious macular degeneration. When he first started using the device, “It was an emotional experience. I sensed that I could see again and tears started coming,” he says.

The results were presented at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (眼科学) annual meeting. The headset is now being used in 80 ophthalmology centres around the US, and the next step is to adapt the software to work for other vision disorders. Some have commented that it is heavy for long periods of use. “Many people with macular degeneration regularly use eight to ten different tools, such as telescopes and magnifying glasses, to help them with daily life, but Iris Vision can replace them all,” says Perski.