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"Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century, but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what Dr. Kyriakakis calls the "ground truth" - to replicate the original in every respect. "We remove the room," he said, "so the ground truth can be delivered." Dr. Kyriakakis, an electrical engineer at U.S.C. and the founder and chief technical officer of Audyssey Laboratories, a Los Angeles-based audio firm, could not achieve his results without modern sound filters and digital microprocessors. But the basis of his technique is rooted in the science of psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception by the human auditory system. "It's about the human ear and the human brain, and understanding how the human ear perceives sound," Dr. Kyriakakis said. Psychoacoustics has become an invaluable tool in designing hearing aids and cochlear implants, and in the study of hearing generally. "Psychoacoustics is fundamental," said Andrew J. Oxenham, a psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota. "You need to know how the normally functioning auditory system works - how sound relates to human perception." "

"A well-known psychologist in the Netherlands whose work has been published widely in professional journals falsified data and made up entire experiments, an investigating committee has found. Experts say the case exposes deep flaws in the way science is done in a field, psychology, that has only recently earned a fragile respectability. The scandal, involving about a decade of work, is the latest in a string of embarrassments in a field that critics and statisticians say badly needs to overhaul how it treats research results. In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny. Outright fraud may be rare, these experts say, but they contend that Dr. Stapel took advantage of a system that allows researchers to operate in near secrecy and massage data to find what they want to find, without much fear of being challenged. "The big problem is that the culture is such that researchers spin their work in a way that tells a prettier story than what they really found," said Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "It's almost like everyone is on steroids, and to compete you have to take steroids as well." "

"Fear can distort our perceptions, psychological research indicates, and creepy-crawly spiders are no different. People who are afraid of spiders see the arachnids as bigger than they actually are, recent experiments have shown. Researchers asked people who had undergone therapy to address their fear of spiders to draw a line representing the length of a tarantula they had just encountered in a lab setting. "On average, the most fearful were drawing lines about 50 percent longer than the least fearful," said Michael Vasey, lead study researcher and professor of psychology at Ohio State University. "We have seen participants draw lines that are at least three times as long as the actual spider." [What Scares You? (Infographic)] After undergoing exposure therapy - in which people confront something they fear, in this case, spiders - 57 people with spider phobia were given the task of approaching a spider in an aquarium, then using a 4-inch (10.2 centimeter) probe to nudge it around the tank. They repeated this encounterfive times with different species of spider over eight weeks. "

"Modern art is an explosion of colors, smooth lines, flat portraits - and it turns out, neuroscience. It also once triggered some strong psychology. A pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public," the criticCamille Mauclair, said in outrage over a Paris showing of the artist Henri Matisse's vibrant works. His condemnation today seems more colorful than the paintings themselves, many now hanging in museums all over the world. What was really going on at the turn of the last century to excite such controversy? Brain researchers have increasingly turned their eyes on artists, in an effort to enrich our understanding of how we see art and of the time when paintings could shake society. "When we look at a picture and feel rewarded, we know something is occurring in our brain," says neuroscientist and artist Bevil Conway of Wellesley (Mass.) College. Conway and other neuroscientists, such as Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel, author of the just-released The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, represent the latest voices among brain researchers taking a look at art. "By closely examining artists' paintings and practices, we can discover hints to how the brain works, and achieve insight into the discoveries and inventions of artists and their impact on culture," Conway writes in the current Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, looking at color in the paintings of Matisse , Paul Cezanne and Claude Monet . Public domain Montross Gallery 1915 exhibition catalogue image of 'Gold Fish' by Henri Matisse. Color depends on more than the wavelength of light reaching your eye. Five decades ago, brain researchers thought only the cone-shaped "photoreceptor" cells in the retina determined what colors we see. But we now know that starting from the retina and proceeding through at least five brain regions, our perception of color is shaped not so much by the redness of the paint used to hang an apple from a tree, but

"Nothing is more morbidly intriguing, more chillingly compelling than an account of a malfunctioning mind, as medical writers have learned to their great profit. The victims of mental disease or brain damage are fascinating, not simply as exhibits in a neurological sideshow but also as stark demonstrations of how fragile reality can be. Most people agree, within limits, on the objective character of the world around them. Yet while the victims of mental disorders are certainly conscious and aware, their worlds are profoundly different from those of most of us. What can it possibly feel like, we wonder, to live without emotion, to be crippled without realizing it, to re-experience an event from the distant past complete with the fears that originally surrounded it? As neurologists, psychologists and biologists have zeroed in more and more precisely on the physical causes of mental disorders, they have found themselves addressing a much deeper mystery, a set of interrelated conundrums probably as old as humanity: What, precisely, is the mind, the elusive entity where intelligence, decision making, perception, awareness and sense of self reside? Where is it located? How does it work? Does it arise from purely physical processes-pulses of electricity zapping from brain cell to brain cell, helped along their way by myriad complex chemicals? Or is it something beyond the merely physical-something ethereal that might be close to the spiritual concept of the soul?"

"As neurologists, psychologists and biologists have zeroed in more and more precisely on the physical causes of mental disorders, they have found themselves addressing a much deeper mystery, a set of interrelated conundrums probably as old as humanity: What, precisely, is the mind, the elusive entity where intelligence, decision making, perception, awareness and sense of self reside? Where is it located? How does it work? Does it arise from purely physical processes-pulses of electricity zapping from brain cell to brain cell, helped along their way by myriad complex chemicals? Or is it something beyond the merely physical-something ethereal that might be close to the spiritual concept of the soul? Great thinkers have had no shortage of ideas on the subject. Plato was convinced that the mind must be located inside the head, because the head is shaped more or less like a sphere, his idea of the highest geometrical form. Aristotle insisted that the mind was in the heart. His reasoning: warmth implies vitality; the blood is warm; the heart pumps the blood. By the Middle Ages, though, pretty much everyone agreed that the mind arose from the brain -- but still had no clear idea how it arose. Finally, in the 17th century, the French philosopher Rena Descartes declared that the mind, while it might live in the brain, was a nonmaterial thing, entirely separate from the physical tissues found inside the head. Furthermore, said Descartes in one of history's most memorable sound bites, "Cogito, ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am). His point: consciousness is the only sure evidence that we actually exist. Until just a few years ago, unraveling the relationship of mind and brain was beyond the realm of observation and experimentation. But science has finally begun to catch up with philosophy. Using sensitive electrodes inserted deep into the gray matter of test animals, researchers have watched vision as it percolates inward from the eye's retina to the inner brain. Powerful te

We humans are such complex beasts. Why is it that we can be so wonderful and yet so awful, eccentric and prosaic, enigmatic and obvious, witty and dull, and all of these at once? All in the Mind, presented by Natasha Mitchell, is Radio National's weekly foray into all things mental - a program about the mind, brain and behaviour. From dreaming to depression, addiction to artificial intelligence, consciousness to coma, psychoanalysis to psychopathy, free will to forgetting - All in the Mind explores the human condition through the mind's eye. Our mental machinery remains one of the greatest mysteries of this or any other age, performing for us the most incredible feats of perception, cognition and coordination. Scientists, theologians, philosophers and armchair psychologists alike have long debated its form and function. And yet, the mind, in all its madness and brilliance, continues to elude us. All in the Mind brings together unexpected voices, themes and ideas and engages with both leading thinkers and personal stories. Psychology and human behaviour are only part of the equation. The program's scope is considerably broader and explores themes in science, religion, health, philosophy, education, history and pop culture, with the mind as the key focus.

"The NYT's new-look Sunday Review led this weekend with a big essay by Peter Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac. But for all its length and detail, it's very hard to read - at many points, doing so feels like listening to one half of a telephone conversation. Which makes sense when you consider Kramer's opening paragraphs: In terms of perception, these are hard times for antidepressants. A number of articles have suggested that the drugs are no more effective than placebos. Last month brought an especially high-profile debunking. In an essay in The New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, favorably entertained the premise that "psychoactive drugs are useless." Earlier, a USA Today piece about a study done by the psychologist Robert DeRubeis had the headline, "Antidepressant lift may be all in your head," and shortly after, a Newsweek cover piece discussed research by the psychologist Irving Kirsch arguing that the drugs were no more effective than a placebo. I've included, here, all of the links that Kramer provides. Which is exactly one, to the NYT topic page on antidepressants. If you want to find Angell's article, or the USA Today piece, or the Newsweek cover story, you're on your own: Kramer and the NYT won't help you. And Kramer, clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University, takes care not to even mention part two of Angell's two-part series, where she talks at length about how psychiatry has been captured by drug companies, who "are particularly eager to win over faculty psychiatrists at prestigious academic medical centers". (After reading Angell's second essay, you'll certainly wonder why Kramer doesn't disclose how much income he gets from pharmaceutical companies.)"

Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer "language confusion," which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish - or Mandarin - for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before. Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren't many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child. But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two. Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior - where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention - to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies' brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain. Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their

"Scientists paid a visit to a south London pub to conduct an experiment to find out whether the so-called 'beer-goggles' effect is real. The phrase refers to the phenomenon where drinking too much alcohol makes people attracted to someone they would not normally be attracted to when sober. Dr Lewis Halsey from Roehampton University got drinkers to look at photos to choose who they thought were the most attractive. "

"This study investigates eyewitness identification.You will be asked to study a face and to pick it out of a line up later. You will also be asked to answer a number of general knowledge questions and to reflect on how confident you are of your answers. This study is being conducted by Dr Michael Lewis from Cardiff University who can be contacted via the following email address: lewismb@cardiff.ac.uk. This study will take approximately 5 minutes to complete. Participation in this study will not involve any known risks and data gathered in the study will be confidential and for research purposes only. Note, however that there is a negligible possibility that your responses could be viewed by unauthorized third parties. You are free to withdraw from the study at any time without penalty or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. If you are 18 or over, understand the statement above and freely consent to participate in this study then click on the "I Agree" button to begin the study."