In 1584, shortly after his bar-mitzvah, the young Italian Jew Leon Modena (1571-1648) composed an eight-line poem so remarkable that it has never been rivalled in its own genre. Known as Kinah Shemor in Hebrew, Chi nasce muor in Italian, this elegy makes sense simultaneously in both languages. It stands at the head of a little-known tradition of short poems, fragments, and fragments of memories of short poems, often composed by Jews and operating at the borders between Hebrew and romance vernaculars, Jewish and Christian communities. More than merely bilingual or macaronic, for Modena the form seems to have existed somewhere between language and music. Yet for want of a formal name, this tradition has long slipped through the cracks of the critical canon.
Leon Modena’sKinah Shemor publishes the first critical edition and English translation of the poem to take into account all three of its primary witnesses. It places Kinah Shemor in Modena’s thought as a bridge between poetry and music and between Jewish and Christian religious communities, and describes the poem’s afterlife in relation to broader questions of genre theory, critical taxonomy, and the Christian study of Jewish literature in early modern Europe.
Groups of people in pain evoke our empathic reactions. Yet how does one empathize with a group? Here, we aim to identify psychological mechanisms that underlie empathic reactions to groups. We theorize that because empathy is an egocentric process routed through the self, people are strongly attuned to the impact on each individual, and less so to the number of individuals affected. In five pre-registered experiments, involving different types of stimuli and valences of the outcomes, we repeatedly find that participants’ level of empathy depends on the pain experienced by each individual, but not on the number of individuals in the group. The experiments support our hypothesis and rule out alternative explanations such as limited numeric ability and strategic regulation of negative emotions, providing valuable insights into the phenomenon of scope insensitivity. The findings also bear implications for the ongoing debate on the role of empathy in public policy decisions.
Empathy provides a cognitive and emotional bridge that connects individuals and promotes prosocial behavior. People empathize with others via two complementary perceptual routes: Cognitive Empathy or the ability to accurately recognize and understand others' emotional states, and Affective Empathy or the ability to 'feel with' others. This Element reviews past and current research on both cognitive and affective empathy, focusing on behavioral, as well as neuroscientific research. It highlights a recent shift towards more dynamic and complex stimuli which may capture better the nature of real social interaction. It expands on why context is crucial when perceiving others' emotional state, and discusses gender differences, biases affecting our understanding of others, and perception of others in clinical conditions. Lastly, it highlights proposed future directions in the field
Inflammation modifies the input-output properties of peripheral nociceptive neurons such that the same stimulus produces enhanced nociceptive firing. This increased nociceptive output enters the superficial dorsal spinal cord (SDH), an intricate neuronal network composed largely of excitatory and inhibitory interneurons and a small percentage of projection neurons. The SDH network comprises the first central nervous system network integrating noxious information. Using in vivo calcium imaging and a computational approach, we characterized the responsiveness of the SDH network in mice to noxious stimuli in normal conditions and investigated the changes in SDH response patterns after acute burn injury-induced inflammation. We show that the application of noxious heat stimuli to the hind paw of naïve mice results in an overall increase in SDH network activity. Single-cell response analysis reveals that 70% of recorded neurons increase or suppress their activity, while ∼30% of neurons remain nonresponsive. After acute burn injury and the development of inflammatory hyperalgesia, application of the same noxious heat stimuli leads to the activation of previously nonresponding neurons and desuppression of suppressed neurons. We further demonstrate that an increase in afferent activity mimics the response of the SDH network to noxious heat stimuli under inflammatory conditions. Using a computational model of the SDH network, we predict that the changes in SDH network activity result in overall increased activity of excitatory neurons, amplifying the output from SDH to higher brain centers. We suggest that during acute local peripheral inflammation, the SDH network undergoes dynamic changes promoting hyperalgesia.
As a social technology, the scenario differs from other techniques usually associated with managing future uncertainties. These draw mainly on the construct of risk and the related notion of risk management – that is, calculation and evaluation based on knowledge of past events, leading to possible control, prevention or prediction of unknowable futures. Scenarios create stories of the future neither to translate them into assessed possibilities nor to predict it in advance, but rather to destabilize perceived futures and to mitigate overreliance on existing knowledge and models when addressing the unknown future. This article addresses three questions through ethnographic insights: firstly, why do organizations create scenarios and use this technology? Secondly, does deliberately creating crisis events and tracking their cascades and responses help organizations encounter the future? Thirdly, can organizations …
Photosynthetic organisms transport and convert solar energy with near-unity quantum efficiency using large protein supercomplexes held in flexible membranes. The individual proteins position chlorophylls to tight tolerances considered critical for fast and efficient energy transfer. The variability in protein organization within the supercomplexes, and how efficiency is maintained despite variability, had been unresolved. Here, we report on structural heterogeneity in the 2-MDa cyanobacterial PSI-IsiA photosynthetic supercomplex observed using Cryo-EM, revealing large-scale variances in the positions of IsiA relative to PSI. Single-molecule measurements found efficient IsiA-to-PSI energy transfer across all conformations, along with signatures of transiently decoupled IsiA. Structure based calculations showed that rapid IsiA-to-PSI energy transfer is always maintained, and even increases by three-fold in rare conformations via IsiA-specific chls. We postulate that antennae design mitigates structural fluctuations, providing a mechanism for robust energy transfer in the flexible membrane.
