› added 7 years ago

245

Imagine yourself at a concert hall looking at a symphonic orchestra on stage. Have you ever noticed that high-pitched strings sit left of low-pitched strings? Going from left to right, one usually sees violins, violas, cellos and double basses. That is, one moves from high pitches on the left to low pitches on the right. Why? The orchestra’s arrangement is not a cultural oddity, like driving on the right side of the road. Rather, it is due to our own biological makeup.

Higher pitches tend to be better processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, while lower pitches tend to be better processed by a similar region in the right hemisphere. This organisation is thought to have repercussions far beyond music, perhaps even helping to explain why language is mostly processed in the left hemisphere. So the part of my brain that better processes high sounds sits where the higher-pitched instruments sit: on the left. But that’s not the end of the story.

Read more aeon.co

WBd8 TIL the Mayor of Lake Worth, FL swam across the Lake Worth Lagoon in 1998 to raise awareness of how dirty it had become. After completing the swim, he spent three days in the hospital and nearly died.
BgKLk TIL that the second most expensive painting ever sold was ‘Interchange’, an oil by abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. In 1955 the artist sold it for $40,000, and 60 years later it sold for $300M.
XEePR TIL Dead Birds were a common theme on Victorian Christmas cards
6ENyW TIL that each day about 3.75 kilograms of plant must be grown to produce the oxygen that 1 human uses
E1nLP TIL of Mohamed Bzeek, a Libyan-born Muslim living in Azusa, California, a foster father who takes in only terminally ill children. Bzeek, who has been fostering such children since 1989, is the only foster parent in Los Angeles County who will do this.