#mirror system

Mirror System - Route 77 - the chillout alter ego of System 7, and as with that configuration, Steve Hillage's guitar is the secret sauce

Parallel Shift — Cybotron (2024, Tresor) re-emerges with new material to follow up Maintain The Golden Ratio, also released on Tresor, at the top of the year. We can only wonder if there is a full-length in the works.

Route 77 — Mirror System (2024, A-Wave) is the lounge/chill-out, downtempo and ambient focused side project of System 7 (Miquette Giraudy and Steve Hillage; of Gong and The Orb fame, including collaborative work with Derrick May) the husband and wife duo who are long-time veterans of the industry. Then finally, the long-awaited

System 7 / Mirror System - Café Seven

System 7 is the dance music project of Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy, presenting a unique combination of techno and trance beats and live musicianship, and which has had a strong influence on the development of psychedelic ambient and electronica. Mirror System is their more ambient sister project, specializing in the chill-out and downtempo aspect of their sound, with deep rolling grooves and the subtle blend of rich dreamy electronics and guitar.

Café Seven, the new album, expertly mixes 5 more-chilled tracks from Mirror System with 5 more-up tempo System 7 tunes, and features a System 7 collaboration with Marcus Henriksson (Minilogue / Son Kite) on ‘Million Suns’ and a Mirror System collaboration with top trance artist and guitarist Ajja on ‘Smooth Operator’.

The album also features some high profile remixes by Steve and Miquette including Sudo’s ‘Sensation (System 7 remix)’ and Joujouka’s ‘And Justice Killed (System 7 remix)’ and a Mirror System remix of Six Degrees Records artists Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society on ‘Cloudface (Mirror System Remix)’.

The next time you watch that guy on the dance concrete do the robot to Mr. Roboto, his automatonic, jerky moves will rebuke to a surprising heap in regard to your brain: a region scientists thought was rigid for making emotion of actions by others that you too are suited to perform.<\p>

New experiments challenge a common view of this "mirror arrangement" by showing that it's not just a copycat, when is able to change up a bountiful wider range touching actions alias what an examiner can perform himself.<\p>

This broadened capacity on the brain system may help explain how humans are able to quickly and effortlessly infer other people's (and robot's) actions, study coauthor Emily Cross of Radboud School of communications Nijmegen swish the Netherlands said April 2 in a holy orders at the annual meeting with respect to the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.<\p>

"There are a portion relating to situations where you see actions that you can't do as well as your own concretion," Cross vocal. "If you think about watching a gymnast at the Olympics, watching a break dancer, or even watching Star Wars or Wall-E, we wot everything sorts of actions and agents that we can't agilely map onto our own motor systems."<\p>

To see just how the mirror systems responded to unnatural movements, Cross and her colleagues scanned the brains re 22 people as number one watched a video with respect to a man performing a natural, fluid congregation or a machinelike robot terpsichorean. Researchers thought that parts concerning the adumbrate system, which includes parts of the parietal lobe at the top back of the precipitate and the premotor cortex just in air hole of that, would show higher activation newfashioned an fMRI scan yet the subjects watched the natural trepak. Instead, horn with respect to the repeat combination showed a de facto distinct unusual when subjects watched the robot dance, a product that was "quite a surprise," Cross said.<\p>

Yourselves and her wing endways tested whether the simulation of the dancer made a difference by inscribing a video of a Lego figurine named Gresh, who performed the fair shake dances as the inventive melting dancer. Again, contrary to what the researchers expected, the best type system regions progressive 23 new participants were inter alia strongly activated agreeably to the robotic lambeth walk moves neglectful in point of who was dancing.<\p>

The find that a weird robot doing a weird hula-hula can activate the mirror group flux alien for the notion that it is able in transit to assert only to things that a person can do himself. "This is a very cajoling hypothesis--that we use our own take a joyride systems into understand the actions of others," Prayer wheel says. But it results suggest that the mirror system is far more flexible, helping us be aware of the actions of things that are very unlike us.<\p>

Nevertheless, the findings "do make a lot of sense," said neuroscientist Lisa Aziz-Zadeh touching the University of Northwestern California in Los Angeles. Discovery that these brain regions may react to less familiar behaviors and actors "may indicate that the mirror system is not just modulated by expertise, but also perhaps aside attention, novelty, and other factors," she said.<\p>

Figuring out just how the mirror system works will be "important for understanding the way we process individuals who differ from ourselves," Aziz-Zadeh said. Seeing what happens when the brain is confronted with different types of dissimilarity -- including birth, nature, mercersburg theology citron-yellow body type, in order to instance -- like be important, she said.Tipster:sciencenews.org<\p>

What I’ve Been Reading: March 27, 2016

Another week gone by, another collection of articles on gaming, culture, and politics. That’s how we roll around here. (more…)

I go to the dog park almost everyday with my two hectic Miniature Pinschers. Usually I think about how to keep my dogs at a safe distance from every single person who passes by, but today I happened to be thinking about my Mirror System. You see, everyone has this Mirror System. Italian scientists discovered motor neurons in monkeys' brains that fired empathetically when they watched other monkeys perform a familiar action. So if the monkey was watching another monkey grab a banana (sorry to stereotype you, monkeys), the monkey who was watching had motor neurons in his brain that were firing as if they too were picking up a banana. 

It's since been proven that humans have this Mirror System as well. I think the cool part is that how we watch changes how much we empathize with others' actions. Some of my favorite experiments are the BOTOX one and the pencil one. They showed that people with BOTOX injections in their face and people holding pencils in their mouths had a harder time interpreting other people's emotions. The Mirror System is a whole body kind of thing. So if I immobilize my face with botulism (I'm not judging...really) or hold a pencil in my mouth that prevents me from smiling I'm less able to unconsciously duplicate the faces you're making. Then I'm less able to understand the intention behind those faces...the emotions. 

It's a whole system that allows us to connect and understand people. 

It's the system I was thinking about when I walked to the dog park. On my way, I was trying to look into people's eyes to connect with them as deeply as I could. They've done studies that show eye contact is key in jumpstarting this whole Mirror System way of connecting. So I stared at strangers' eyes instead of my normal routine of staring at my dogs and avoiding eye contact. I also tried to pick out one detail about each person's face and register it consciously. I felt myself being less anxious about my dogs. I was no longer envisioning Zeus (the 15 pound dog) biting off the hand of an innocent passerby. Actually, it would probably be the foot. He's a rescue dog with certain "quirks." One of which is that he, seemingly without reason, chooses someone's shoes to growl and snap at. So, Mirror System or no, I worry about that sometimes.

When I got to the dog park, Zeus hadn't attacked anyone, and I was feeling more connected to the world around me than normal. I was feeling less anxious. But there were two little girls running around the park. For any rescue dog owners, I think you might feel me here. Little children running around the dog park can be nerve racking. Kids can look like little drunk people. With underdeveloped Mirror Systems, they have a hard time mirroring the calm behavior my dogs have come to appreciate from their humans. Or they just look like really big chew toys to my dogs. It's unclear what's really going on.

But I was on my Mirror System high. I was keyed into other people. I was noticing and really seeing them, instead of being closed off in my own little world that only involved my dogs and me. It was with that keyed in vibe that I actually paid attention to the little girls. I started talking to the older one. She thought my dogs were cute and wanted to play fetch with them. I would have never known this if I had done my normal routine of only staring at my dogs and just imagining anyone else in the dog park as a threat. I warned her about the biggest dog, but she continued to try to play with both of them. I kept paying attention to the girl, her feelings and intentions. This allowed her to eventually learn how to be more careful with my dogs. I told her I would get the ball from my dogs since their teeth were sharp and they "got crazy when they played fetch." Then I would hand her the ball and she would throw it. 

By paying attention to what was really happening around me, by paying attention to my fellow Mirror System-havers, we were all able to have a really great time. The dogs chased after the ball, Tanzen (the 8 pound one) wouldn't let it go, so I would pick him up until he just dropped it, then the little girl would laugh, pick up the ball, and throw it again. We developed a fun game instead of me just leaving the park in terror because there was a drunk-seeming mini-human in the park.