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6 Ways To Heal Faster
Remedies from your home, drugstore, and doctor repair your cuts, aches, and bones faster than ever
By Sarah Mahoney
When animals are sick or injured, they slink off to the comfort of their nest or lair until they're all better. And you? Dream on. You usually have to make breakfast, show up at work, and retrieve the dry cleaning—no matter how you feel. Getting better is just one more entry on your checklist of things to do.
Fortunately, researchers have identified steps you can take immediately to bounce back faster. For starters, you should get adequate sleep, a good 8 to 9 hours each night. During the first 2 hours of sleep, your body experiences a spike in the production of growth hormone, which is vital to all the body's healing processes, says Elizabeth G. Motyka, MD, coauthor of The Rapid Recovery Handbook. She also advises a nurturing diet rich in lean proteins, vitamin-packed produce, and healthy fats.
To move even faster down the road to recovery, though, add these more-surprising, but equally effective, strategies. Whether you're scheduled for surgery or trying to recover from a muscle strain, these six speed healers can shave days—even weeks—off your downtime.
1. Honey
The proof: On superficial wounds, such as cuts and burns, honey acts as an antibacterial agent, rapidly cleaning out and preventing further infection, according to an analysis of nearly two dozen studies by New Zealand researchers. One found that burns treated with honey healed, on average, in 11 days—4 days less than burns treated without it. The sweet stuff also reduced swelling and minimized scarring.
Try it: Researchers used Manuka honey from New Zealand (available in both pure and ointment forms at manukahoneyusa.com), but any locally farmed product (as opposed to commercial brands; heat used during production reduces antibacterial strength) will be just as effective. To get the fastest results, follow the researchers' method: Put some honey on sterile gauze, apply to the wound, and change the dressing every 24 hours.
2. Hubby harmony
The proof: A rough patch in your marriage can actually slow your recovery from illness or injury, while a strong relationship may speed your repair, says Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at Ohio State University College of Medicine. In an experiment, she found that small blisters on couples whose interactions were more hostile healed at only 60% the rate of friendlier couples. The culprit: the stress hormone cortisol. The relationship is clear-cut between the two. The more conflict, the more cortisol; and the more cortisol, the slower the healing. This means the opposite is true, too: When your relationships are strong and positive, healing proceeds faster.
Try it: Mending an up-and-down marriage takes time (and sometimes, a commitment to therapy). For now, just do your best to handle disagreements as calmly as possible, removing any element of hostility and nastiness so neither of you feels under personal attack. Watch for cortisol-triggering communication styles: Studies have found that couples tend to produce more cortisol when their conflicts include demanding, negative comments on the part of the wife and the husband withdrawing.
More from Prevention: 12 Ways To Fix Your Marriage
[pagebreak]
3. Massage
The proof: Pulled a muscle? Strained a tendon? Hop on the masseuse's table. Sure, a good rub feels great, but massage also helps relieve overworked muscles by alleviating soreness and reducing swelling. Australian researchers say that, if tended to within 3 hours of the onset of pain, a strained muscle will be about a third less sore and swollen 3 days later than it would be without the therapy.
Try it: A single session can help muscles bounce back faster, the Australian study found. Ask your health club to recommend a massage therapist or search the American Massage Therapy Association's website.
4. Hypnosis
The proof: You are getting sleepy...and better! Hypnosis may accelerate recovery from serious injuries and surgeries. A Harvard Medical School study showed that the fractured bones of patients who received regular hypnotherapy were fusing at an advanced rate—6 weeks after the break, their bones appeared to have been healing for 8 1/2 weeks. A separate Harvard study also found that the incision wounds of women who were hypnotized before and after breast-reduction surgery healed more quickly. The hypnotized women also had less pain.
Try it: Don't worry—no one will make you bark like a dog. Hypnosis is just a state of heightened awareness in which suggestions for change and healing may be more easily absorbed. You can find a qualified professional through the National Board for Certified Clinical Hypnotherapists.
Or try these self-hypnosis CDs at home: Rapid Recovery from Injury (health journeys.com) or Smooth Surgery, Rapid Recovery: A Systematic Hypnotic Approach (hypnosisnetwork.com), both by Carol Ginandes, PhD.
5. Natural Relaxation
The proof: Have you ever been so involved in an activity—painting, practicing music, even polishing the silver—that you felt your worries and concerns drift away and your mind go pleasantly blank? That's called the relaxation response—and it's good for whatever ails you.
"Your heart rate, blood pressure, and metabolism decrease, and the amount of nitric oxide, which dilates blood vessels, increases," says Herbert Benson, MD, the legendary mind-body research pioneer at Harvard Medical School and the president of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Chestnut Hill, MA. His studies have shown that people who regularly elicit this natural physical response shave weeks off the time it takes to recover from any disorder caused or exacerbated by stress, such as insomnia, PMS, and hot flashes.
Try it: "It doesn't matter if you meditate with a one-word mantra, say the Rosary, work in the garden, or knit," says Benson, "as long as it breaks the train of everyday thought." Aim for a 10- to 20-minute state of relaxation once or twice a day.[pagebreak]
The proof: By improving circulation and lowering stress, just about any kind of exercise promotes recovery. But yoga may be better. University of Washington researchers say yoga eases lower-back pain faster than conventional exercises.
Try it: Yoga classes are everywhere, but if you can't stand the chanting or lugging around a yoga mat, buy an introductory DVD at collagevideo.com or search through our yoga routines.
More from Prevention:8 Natural Ways To Beat Pain
Tune In and Heal Faster
Move to Heal Faster
The Crazy Way To Heal Faster
Healing Moves
6 Timeless Remedies Experts Still Love
Feel Better Faster


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#SmallBusinessThatRocks: MEE Photography
Something every small business website needs is original photography. Unique images create a brand for a company, as well as help them stand out to new visitors and build new SEO opportunities. You shouldn't trust your smartphone's camera to do the job properly, but who can you turn to for pictures that match your business…
What Is Position Zero?
Getting the number one ranking on Google is the ultimate compliment to a website. But leave it to the world's largest search engine to find a way to make quick browsing more convenient. Recent innovations now provide small companies with another chance to earn a coveted spot, one that's more helpful for both the user…
Why WordPress Is The Best Choice For Small Businesses
WordPress is well-known as one of the best blogging platforms online. But since its founding in 2003, the site has become one of the leading content management systems (CMS) online. Millions of businesses around the world use it to build their website, and your small business could be next!
#SmallBusinessThatRocks: Her Stories Co.
Vanessa Rempel is the founder of Her Stories Co., a website and local television show that celebrates women in our community and their achievements. She interviews them and lets them share their past struggles, successes, and what makes them unique. Each week, Vanessa talks with local women to share their stories and give others motivation.…
Variable vs. Fixed Costs: Why They Matter
Clarifying the differences between the costs that don't change and the costs that do is very important for small businesses. Bills, shipping, packaging, and all the other important expenses should be classified in two ways: variable costs and fixed costs. This helps with budgeting and when making break-even analysis every year. But where does marketing…
What Was The First Social Media Site?
When people talk about social media, most of us think of Facebook. The site has gone from a curiosity to a regular part of our lives, all thanks to pushing the right buttons in our brains. Facebook became so powerful so quickly that it's easy to forget that the concept was tried a couple of…
How Long Does It Take To Build A WordPress Site?
Small businesses making the online leap might have a few questions about the process. The main question we get is, "how soon will I be online?" It's a good question that depends on how the site is being built. Our team builds WordPress sites, a website you might know better as a blogging platform. The…

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Review: Its star shines as Playhouse on Park nails the spirit of 'Santaland Diaries'
By Christopher Arnott
Sam Massaro in "The Santaland Diaries" at Playhouse on Park. (Playhouse on Park)
"The Santaland Diaries" at Playhouse on Park is better than good. It's unexpectedly good.
The play has always been so-so. It's a solid but unexceptional stage version of the essay that made David Sedaris a literary superstar. It chronicles the then-down-and-out writer's adventures as one of Santa's elves during the bustling, bruising holiday shopping season at the flagship Macy's department store in New York City.
Sedaris' original essay holds up well. The author's memorable reading of an abridged version of the story on NPR's "Morning Edition," and later on "This American Life," is easy to find online. The play exists mainly for those who need something to look at while listening to the story.
The problem you find with a lot of renditions of the play is that they take Sedaris' straightforward satirical tone and translate it to vivacious gay snarkiness, with an elegantly coiffed elf nursing a vodka martini.
That's the "Santaland Diaries" we've all come to expect — a hollow queer stereotype that turns Sedaris' wry, anxious insights into catcalls and whoops.
Playhouse on Park's "Santaland Diaries" is something else altogether. It honors Sedaris' story of a poor guy trying to earn a living and keep his sanity, and finds honest, natural ways to liven it up.
The most natural aspect is star Sam Massaro. He's effortlessly amusing, a boyish slacker type with a mischievous grin, like Jack Black in "School of Rock." He acknowledges the audience, but slyly, as if he knows we're watching but he's just going to go ahead and do what he feels like.
Sam Massaro, becoming an elf, in "The Santaland Diaries." (Playhouse on Park)
Massaro glides smoothly through the rather disjointed and digressive script, finding fluidity in its strung-together observations of the human condition. He convincingly shares his embarrassment at being a 33-year-old man whose best job prospect is elf.
[From CTNow] Review: Something for everyone at HSO's excellent 'Four Seasons' concert »
Unlike so many other "Santaland Diaries," you believe this guy really needs that elf job, and that he really could have written that diary.
Where Massaro (and director Harris) is especially skillful is in letting this unlikely elf's attitude build from amusement to bafflement to exasperation and finally anger. The observations get stranger, from making fun of Macy's customers to observing, while sipping booze from a covert flask, that "Santa" is an anagram of "Satan."
The adventures may seem (and often are) random, but there's an emotional arc here that mirrors one's anticipation of, and ultimate letdown over, the holiday season. This production nails that.
Sedaris' original "Santaland Diaries" essay was first broadcast in 1992, first published in 1994 and first staged in 1996. Director Sean Harris firmly sets this Playhouse on Park production in 1999. It's a smart move to keep it in the '90s, since the play no longer has a universal feel. It's of its time, a time when one shopped at Macy's and not online, when soap operas still ruled the afternoon TV airwaves and when one committed one's personal experiences to a diary and not Twitter or YouTube.
Massaro sports a ratty 1992 Clinton/Gore T-shirt. He speaks knowingly and reverently of Victoria Buchanan and other characters on "One Life To Live." He sniffs at the cultural phenomenon that is Phil Collins. The effect is somewhere between nostalgia and a weird dream.
Playhouse on Park's big square floor-level stage works beautifully for this show, since it resembles the sort of boxy, spacious, tackily decorated rooms where Santas are situated at some department stores. Massaro has room to wander, sidestepping giant fake wrapped Christmas gifts and other colorful elements of the set design.
[From CTNow] Grant allows Hill-Stead to provide free field trips to to students east of the river »
Massaro is not attempting to play David Sedaris. That's not how this play works. The character does have the name David, he has a sister named Amy, and he's apparently gay, but the play simply would not work if it required a slavish Sedaris impersonation.
For one thing, the story is heavily physicalized. It's fully acted out, with props and doorways and a big chair where Santa is meant to sit. The actor changes into his elf clothes before our eyes. He does funny voices for the people he's talking about. Sedaris himself, in his popular speaking tours, doesn't do that.
What Massaro does is tell a long Christmas story in a way that is funny to listen to and funny to watch without beating you up with how funny it thinks it is. He's affable and engaging from the get-go. You know from his first few moments onstage that you're in good hands.
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The only place where this "Santaland Diaries" comes up short is at the very end of the show. Sedaris' tale, and thus the script, ends rather abruptly and, some might feel, arbitrarily. The audience isn't sure that it's time to start clapping until Massaro starts bowing.
Since applause here is sincere, not that rote exercise of something we always do before we get our coats and leave the theater, the awkwardness of that final exit is unfortunate. Massaro deserves all the applause an audience can muster. He's the elf that's made Christmas happen.
THE SANTALAND DIARIES, directed by Sean Harris and starring Sam Massaro, runs through Dec. 21 at Playhouse on Park, 244 Park Road, West Hartford. Performances are Tuesday through Thursday at 7:30 p.m. and Friday at Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25. 860-523-5900, playhouseonpark.org.
Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com.
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Not what they expected…
Photo credit: Germany's national football team cover their mouths in protest against FIFA's ban on the 'One Love' LGBTQ+ armband during the World Cup in Qatar | Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images
I've just posted on my Patreon tier called 'Behind the scenes with Fiona'. In the wake of yet another shooting in the US it can seem hard to find the joy. Join my tier for my most intimate thoughts.
Sylvester is watching me post this. He's reading back that last paragraph and sniggering. He really can be quite coarse, you know.
A day of Remembrance?
"And on today… Trans Day Of Remembrance…we have even more to mourn." – Lenni
I try to keep things light on here, but following the tragedy in Colorado Springs I had to post something. With 5 dead and 25 wounded we have much to think about.
Continue reading "A day of Remembrance?"
I wrote this two weeks ago and it now looks like a prophesy.
I was very sad to see what was happening at twitter a couple of weeks ago, so I wrote this piece. Jules Sanderson recorded it and it went live 10 days ago.
According to the news this morning it now seems like a prophesy. Have a listen.
RIP Michael Nesmith
I know I, and the many other daydream believers out there you brought so much joy to, will miss you. Let's make a point today to remember those that leave this world a slightly better place for their presence.
Michael Nesmith, singer, guitarist and songwriter with 1960s pop group The Monkees, has died at the age of 78. Pic. Getty Images.
Ben Carson gets into testy exchange over transgender access to homeless shelters.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson got into a testy exchange Wednesday with a Democratic lawmaker who pressed him on the department's position on access to homeless shelters for transgender people, https://t.co/Av2RJeCOY7
— AshleyCD4 (@Cd4Ashley) March 6, 2020
Washington (CNN)- Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson got into a testy exchange Wednesday with a Democratic lawmaker who pressed him on the department's position on access to homeless shelters for transgender people, with the lawmaker appearing to accuse the secretary of enabling discrimination at facilities.The dust-up came during a House Appropriations Committee hearing in which Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois asked Carson about a rule proposed by HUD last year that would allow federally funded homeless shelters that have single-sex facilities or areas separated by sex — like bathrooms and sleeping quarters — to establish policy that could result in transgender people being barred or mistreated. (
https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/politics/ben-carson-transgender-housing-policy-homelessness/index.html )
Kamala Harris attends Pride parade in San Francisco
Kamala Harris at Pride parade: We want champions for equality https://t.co/zYiAD1mY1q #trans #transgender
— Fiona Dobson (@FionaDobson_CD) July 1, 2019


You may want to write these down!
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Kid Brother Writhes Again: Netanyahu's failed coup attempt
March 15, 2006 by Don Radlauer 9 Comments
Earlier this week, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu met secretly with Avigdor Lieberman, head of the Yisrael Beiteinu ("Israel, Our Home") party, and separately with Eli Yishai, chairman of Shas ("Sephardi Torah Guardians"). His goal? Nothing less than to steal the upcoming Israeli elections, which he appears to have despaired of winning the conventional way. Yishai and Lieberman, both of whom can perform simple arithmetic, listened politely (more or less) to Kid Brother's proposal, thought for a millisecond or two, sent Bibi away empty-handed, then revealed all (or enough, anyway) to the press.
Bibi's brilliant idea was to form such a firm alliance among the three parties (and presumably the combined National Union / National Religious Party as well) that after the election, he could be presented to Israeli President Moshe Katzav as the leader best able to form a governing coalition – even though the Likud is expected to be only the third-biggest party in the next Knesset. While there is no law against such a maneuver, it would be a complete violation of the tradition that the largest party in the new Knesset is invited to make the first attempt at forming a coalition.
According to current polls, the new Knesset is expected to look something like this:
Kadima 37 seats
Labor 18 seats
Likud 16 seats
National Union / National Religious (NU/NRP) 10 seats
Shas 10 seats
Yisrael Beiteinu 9-10 seats
Arab parties 8-9 seats
United Torah Judaism (UTJ) 6 seats
Meretz 5 seats
So a right-wing coalition consisting of Likud, NU/NRP, Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu, and UTJ would control around 51 seats. According to Netanyahu's logic, if the Right could improve these numbers a little, they could conceivably manage to get up to 61 seats – the minimum needed to form a government. Assuming (A) that the polls consistently underestimate support for the Right, and (B) that a substantial number of Kadima voters could be persuaded to switch allegiance to one of the right-wing parties, it would be possible to cobble together a right-wing government with Bibi as Prime Minister.
Now there's nothing wrong with a little pre-election scheming and plotting; after all, if the parties didn't prepare the ground before elections, it would take forever to set up governing coalitions afterwards. Further, Israeli voters are smart enough to adjust their votes based on how the various political parties are positioning themselves as potential coalition members. But unless the polls are far less accurate this time around than they've been before previous Knesset elections, Netanyahu's scheme was bound to create a disaster – either for his own reputation as a political leader and strategist, or for Israel if he happened, by some dark miracle, to succeed.
Since we know how it turned out – Netanyahu got a lecture from his former subordinate Lieberman about "stress and panic" not being helpful to a politician trying to win a national election, while Eli Yishai told him, "Yeah, right – see you after the votes are counted" – it's obvious that the affair was a disaster for Bibi. He was caught trying to subvert the Israeli electoral system, and (by implication) admitted that his rump Likud is headed for a resounding defeat. Worse, he looks like a fool, since his idea was an obvious non-starter from the beginning:
The scheme would work only if every party to the right of Kadima participated and refused to enter a Kadima-led coalition. The problem is that this broad, cooperative, united right-wing community is a figment of the far-Right's imagination. Shas, for example, despises Netanyahu's economic policies, as does United Torah Judaism – both represent Haredi ("ultra-Orthodox") constituencies that are undergoing considerable hardship due to Netanyahu's slashing of government support for large families. Both Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu have expressed willingness for some form of territorial compromise with the Palestinians, and even more willingness to participate in a coalition government with Kadima. So while all the right-wing parties might be willing to join a coalition if the Likud actually won the election, only the NU/NRP can be relied upon to join a third-place Likud in trying to block the formation of a Kadima-led coalition.
While Netanyahu's plan wasn't actually illegal, it was enough of a departure from normal procedure that President Katzav would almost certainly have refused to go along with it, even if Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu had signed on.
Just when the Likud is struggling to maintain its position as a mainstream force in Israeli politics, Bibi's scheme would have frightened away whatever moderate center-Right voters were still loyal to the party. By positioning the Likud only as the leader of a right-wing-to-ultra-right-wing coalition and not as a potential partner to Kadima, Netanyahu has made it very clear that a vote for Likud is, in essence, a vote for the National Union. Anyone who wants a moderate-right-wing voice in government but doesn't want the NU extremists to run the show would be forced to vote for Shas or Yisrael Beitenu; others might bolt to Kadima and hope that Ehud Olmert veers to the right after the elections, or else just stay home and spend the Election Day holiday hiding under the covers.
If Netanyahu's scheme had worked, Israel would have been in trouble indeed – quite apart from considerations of whether the Right's policies are correct. Even under the most optimistic scenario (barring major miracles, at least) the coalition envisioned by Kid Brother would be barely large enough to govern. The departure of any one of Netanyahu's four coalition partners would bring his government crashing down – and he would not have any way of cobbling together a new coalition, since there would be no "reserve parties" in the Knesset willing to join Bibi's government. (This is in contrast to Ariel Sharon's coalition with Labor, when Shinui was ready to re-enter the coalition or support the Disengagement from outside, or a possible Kadima-Labor-Shas coalition that could draw on Yisrael Beiteinu or Meretz at need.)
Netanyahu's previous term as Prime Minister demonstrated that he is completely incapable of exercising effective leadership with a fractious coalition like this; every coalition party would have an effective veto on everything the government attempted to do, and Bibi does not have the force of personality to subdue the extortionists. If Bibi seems to be twisting in the wind now, it's nothing compared to what his life would be like if his little scheme had worked!
(This post can also be found at the Guns and Butter Blog.)
Categories: Netanyahu, Likud, Israel, Elections.
westbankmama says
I don't agree with your analysis that this was a bad move for Bibi. He showed undecided voters that both Shas and Lieberman want to get into the coalition more than they want a strong right-wing showing in the Knesset – which may swing voters to vote for the Likud.
Palaments were made for moves such as this. Whether or not he can effectively govern such a coalition remains to be seen.
Considering the biased of most of the media and elite institutions in Israel for the last several years. And the unmittigated hatred shown to those of faith, his move was not only prudent but necessary.
To qualify my above comments, I have included the URL to a video of the Amona expulsion. Taken on the ground, it is somewhat different from the Disney Land version of the main stream press.
http://msmedia.a7.org/arutz7/eng-video/06/mar/perm/amona-arutz7.wmv
The source is Israel National TV, Arutz Sheva.
Don Radlauer says
Hi WBM –
Your point is an interesting one – although I don't think it's actually correct, as both Shas and Lieberman had already made it abundantly clear that (A) they were willing to see Israel give up substantial parts of the West Bank under certain circumstances, and (B) they would be quite happy to participate in a Kadima coalition. So I don't think either party will lose many supporters, since nothing really has changed there.
This is unsurprising for Shas, since they've always been flexible on territorial issues and they much prefer being inside coalitions (where they can funnel money to their own institutions, including their school network) than in "principled opposition". It would have been more surprising for "the old Lieberman", who was considered more of a right-wing ideologue; but if you look at how he has been positioning himself for this campaign, there is no question that he wants to be able to fit his party in as part of a right-wing or a center-Left coalition. As one of the commentators on Galei Tzahal yesterday morning put it, Netanyahu's pitch to Lieberman might have made sense five or six years ago, but it didn't make sense today.
Paul, I fail to see the connection between Israeli media/institutional bias and Netanyahu's attempt to make a victory out of an anticipated third-place showing in the election. There seems to be a missing middle premise here. Is it your contention that a right-wing victory is so important that it justifies subversion of our political system? How does the Amona incident justify what Netanyahu tried to do?
The point here is not that Netanyahu shouldn't try to set up a right-wing coalition. That's perfectly OK. What's dangerous is trying to get around the requirement of winning the election first! I get very nervous when third-place finishers try to take over countries: after all, the Nazi's came in third in the 1933 German elections, and look what happened! Not that Netanyahu is Hitler, of course; but subverting democracy is a very dangerous business.
Caitlyn says
I don't know if you've seen the Geocartographia poll taken after the raid on Jericho. The new poll numbers after what Ha'aretz termed "the Jericho effect" look like this:
Kadima 43
Likud 16
Avoda 14
Yisrael Beytenu 11
NU/NRP 9
Shas 9
Yehudat HaTorah 7
Arab parties 7
Ale Yarok 2
If Prime Minister Olmert really can pull 43 mandates there is no way anyone else can form a government. It would have been nearly impossible with the numbers you posted as well.
Why Palestinians Usually Get It Wrong says
Palestinians Humiliate Themselves
In a March 16 editorial in the New York Times titled, As If That Fire Needed Fuel, the Times writes:
"Israeli Army officials ordered inmates to strip to their underwear [see photo below], which many did, marching out with clothing on their heads, an embarrassing and completely unnecessary provocation that trampled the dignity of any Palestinian watching that spectacle.
Given the humiliations that ordinary Palestinians suffer merely by trying to get through Israeli checkpoints every day, the prison raid just reinforced the already degrading reality of living under foreign occupation."
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stated, "What happened without a doubt is an ugly crime which can not be forgiven and a humiliation for the Palestinian people."
Palesinians should feel humiliated. A majority of Palestinians living in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem support suicide terrorism. A 2001 poll by Dr. Nabil Kukali and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion (PCPO), found, "a substantial majority [of Palestinians] (76.1%) support suicidal attacks like that of Netanya [in May, 2001], whereas 12.5% oppose, and 11.4% express no opinion." A 2006 poll taken by the Jerusalem Media & Communication Center after the recent Hamas political victories found, "56.2% [of Palestinians] strongly or somewhat support suicide bombing operations against Israeli civilians whereas 40.7% oppose such operations."
Considering that the majority of Palestinians support suicide terror, and considering that Israel prevents suicide killings on a daily basis, it should come as no surprise that captured Palestinians are asked to remove their clothes during the process of incarceration. Why should any Israeli take a chance of being blown up? Why should Israel present Palestinians with opportunities to commit suicide killings?
Palestinians should feel humiliated about their culture of death and they should be asked to strip naked during the process of incarceration as long as their population continues to support, condone, and commit suicide killings.
http://whypalestiniansgetitwrong.blogspot.com/
Jameel @ The Muqata says
What Bibi tried to do is peanuts for Israel. Its not illegal at all.
And if you want to talk "moral" — it was far worse for Ariel Sharon to call for a Likud party referendum on the Disengagement, lose by a landslide, and then spit in the face of the party membership and do what he felt like.
Jameel, I believe I already wrote that Kid Brother's idea was not (as far as I know) illegal; it was, however, a fairly radical departure from normal procedure, in which the largest Knesset party is asked to form a governing coalition. Had Bibi succeeded in his scheme (which, in my opinion, was never very likely), an awful lot of Israelis would have felt that he stole the election. I don't think that would have constituted "peanuts".
On the other hand, if Netanyahu manages to put together a "blocking coalition" – such that Ehud Olmert can't recruit 61 MK's without inviting the Israeli Arab parties into his coalition – that would be completely legitimate. There's absolutely nothing wrong with making life difficult for the party attempting to form a governing coalition! The problem was that Netanyahu was trying not just to make Olmert's life difficult, but actually to deny him the opportunity to try to form a government even if Kadima came first in the election.
As far as Ariel Sharon's referendum thing goes, I think it was one of his biggest mistakes in office – not necessarily immoral, but inept and fundamentally undemocratic even if he had won the referendum. I don't think a referendum of any sort was called for – after all, when exactly was the referendum that enabled Israeli governments to establish settlements across the Green Line? – but a referendum of paid-up members of a particular political party has no legal basis whatsoever as a means of making (or authorizing) government decisions. Had Sharon won the Likud referendum, it wouldn't have legitimized the Disengagement any more than his losing it de-legitimized the Disengagement.
Clearly what Sharon was trying to do was to give the Disengagement a "democratic" stamp of approval, a sort of "referendum lite". But since the paid-up Likud membership is not an accurate representative of the electorate as a whole (as no political party's membership is in Israel – and as you know, the vast majority of voters here are not members of any party) or even of the people who voted Likud in the last election, the whole idea was silly. If Sharon wasn't prepared to conduct a real national referendum, there was no reason (and no justification) to perform a "mini-referendum" of a non-representative group.
That said, why does Sharon's mistake – or misdeed, if you insist – have anything to do with Kid Brother's attempt to pre-empt a Kadima victory? I don't see any real connection here, other than an attempt to say that one bit of political sleaziness in support of a decision you didn't like justifies any amount of political sleaziness in support of political positions that you do like.
Soccer Dad says
I'm pretty certain that in 1987 Shamir was asked to form the government even though Labor was a larger faction. In the end Shamir couldn't put together a government and it ended up being a national unity government.
And Bibi when he defeated
Peres in 1996 also presided over a smaller faction. That isn't a good model, because that year there was a direct election of the PM.
Hi David –
I've just done a little checking, and I haven't been able to confirm or refute your claim. One thing is for sure: there was no election in 1987! There was an election in 1984 after which neither Labor nor Likud was able to form a conventional coalition, and thus wound up forming a national-unity government with rotating Prime Ministers. While I haven't (so far) found details of the seats won by each party in that election, the fact that Shimon Peres got the first two-year crack at being Prime Minister leads me to think that Labor must have been the slightly larger of the two factions.
The next elections were in 1988, and Likud beat Labor by a single Knesset seat. The two parties again formed a national-unity government after Likud was unable to form a conventional coalition.
Please check on which election you're talking about, and see if you can find a link to verify the business about the smaller faction being asked to form a coalition; I'm somewhat skeptical, but I'm always open to learning things I didn't expect to learn!
As you say, Netanyahu in 1996 isn't a good example – since that election was under a different system. As I think I've mentioned somewhere, Netanyahu's reputation as a "winner" seems to be based mostly on that single victory, a razor-thin one over Israel's world-champion election-loser.


The minor student reported the incident, and it was CONFIRMED to have happen.
The two deans involved acknowledged they received the report, and believed that the incident did happen. Yet these deans believed they were not required to report the incident to the property authority (insert "Duh" expression here). At least that is what the deans are stating publicly.
The Rockingham County Attorney is wrong, and this reeks of impropriety.
This entry was posted in Justice, Media, New Hampshire News, News and tagged Conway, Exeter, NH, Phillips, Rockingingham, Sexual by jeffchidester. Bookmark the permalink.


With hard hats and neon vests, students from Fresno State's Lyles College of Engineering geared up early Saturday morning to clean up one of Fresno's major highways.
The college took part in the "Adopt-A-Highway" program with the State of California's Department of Transportation as a final touch to National Engineer Week, said Hernan Maldonado, director of student services for the Lyles College.
"National Engineers Week is a way to bring awareness to the community about what engineering disciplines are about and how they contribute to society in general to really make the world a better place," Maldonado said.
Maldonado, who coordinated the event, said he contacted Caltrans for a one-day consent to clean up a portion of Highway 168 between McKinley and Shields avenues. Several engineering students met up about 7:30 a.m. Saturday before heading to the cleanup sites.
Elizabeth Yelton, a public information officer for Caltrans, said common litter found along the highways is paper, cans and even furniture.
While Caltrans does have scheduled cleanups, the "Adopt-A-Highway" program is a way for more people to get involved in the efforts to clean up the community, Yelton said.
Maldonado didn't just organize students for the cleanup efforts. He also brought two of his daughters to help. He said he was glad to represent Fresno State and give back to the local community.
"It feels good to see that there's students interested in cleaning up the area. There's so much plastic that we need to clean up, it's such a huge contaminator to the environment," Maldonado said.
The volunteers worked from 8 to 11 a.m. By the end of it, multiple bags of garbage had been filled. Students who participated in the cleanup were also entered into a raffle for a special incentive – the use of Lyles College dean Ram Nunna's parking space for a week.
Mechanical engineering student Karina Meza was the lucky winner. Though, she said it wasn't all about the prize.
"It seemed like a good opportunity to help out the community, especially since we take a lot from just driving here to school and whatnot, so a little helping out doesn't hurt anyone," Meza said.


text:
Management needs to set the right tone at the station.
Let's call out what WEEI is really doing: Co-hosts are paid to shock, because controversy is good for ratings.
Sports talk radio is notoriously offensive, but even for WEEI a line has been crossed with an ever-growing list of on-air talent tagged with suspensions: Kirk Minihane, Alex Reimer, and now Christian Fauria.
As a Chinese-American, I am seething over what Fauria did on Friday, when he mocked sports agent Don Yee by speaking in a stereotypical Asian accent. Yee, who was born in the United States, speaks perfect English. Fauria knew that, because they played audio of the real Yee later on.
It was a joke gone awry that became a gratuitous put-down of a respected sports agent whose clients include Patriots star Tom Brady and Jimmy Garoppolo of the San Francisco 49ers.
The accent was completely unnecessary when the butt of his joke was supposed to be Boston Herald sports columnist Ron Borges, who was duped by a prankster pretending to be Yee.
WEEI suspended Fauria for five days. Fauria — a former Patriots tight end and co-host of the midday "Ordway, Merloni & Fauria" show — apologized to Yee and his audience on Twitter.
And now we're supposed to move on — until something like this happens again. And it will.
Apologies are hollow. Everyone knows how to say "I'm sorry," even #metoo poster boys Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, and Mario Batali.
But does anyone mean it?
Now some of you are already asking: Why does it matter to me? I can just turn off the radio. I don't even listen toWEEI, but their vile comments — whether it's about women or people of color — give license to listeners to offend.
It no longer becomes a bunch of guys mouthing off in front of a microphone but building a culture of hate and acceptance of the unacceptable. It explains how locker room talk can elect a president.
I'm not espousing theories here. Look what happened when I tweeted out the Globe's story about Fauria's suspension. I thought the station didn't go far enough and should have suspended co-hosts Glenn Ordway and Lou Merloni, as accessories to an offense. Listen to the tape: Their laughing egged Fauria on.
Many people told me I need to lighten up — and they were polite about it. Others decided to respond like a WEEI host:
Chris Johnson @CMJ171717
shirley u r a pathetic human, laugh a little you guys cant drive either
glen stewart@glen4plmg
Shut up Ching chang
tyrone@tyrone90176227
Sum ting wong Shirley?
Then there were tweets attacking me for a being a woman who speaks her mind. I will spare you those.
On Saturday, the New England chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association issued a statement condemning Ordway, Merloni, and Fauria for perpetuating "harmful, inaccurate and insensitive stereotypes about Asian Americans."
The group went on to commend WEEI for taking disciplinary action but urged management to "take steps to ensure that racial stereotyping will never be broadcast on its airwaves and that the station's on-air personalities have a true understanding of why the segment was so offensive."
This is what should happen. Ordway, Merloni, and Fauria should come to an event in Chinatown. They should replay the 3½-minute audio of Fauria's impersonation while the other hosts laughed. Then I want all them to look into the eyes of Asian Americans gathered in the room and hear firsthand why that joke is so offensive.
Here's what they'll hear: That many of us are born in America, yet because we're not blond and blue-eyed we'll always be treated as foreigners. Our parents were immigrants, and they reinforced this notion that we would never be truly accepted. That's why we needed to work hard and get a college education — and maybe, just maybe, we could succeed.
That accent reinforces a stereotype that we will never belong, even though we have the same rights as a white baby born here.
I had hoped I could raise my two sons in a world different than the one I grew up in, but it seems America by the day is going backward, not only for immigrants but for people who look like immigrants.
What more can management do? A lot. WEEI hosts are obnoxious for a reason. Their bosses know it's good for ratings and the bottom line.
WEEI is owned by Entercom Communications, one of the largest radio broadcasters in the country. Real change will come only when management and ownership do more than pay lip service to offensive remarks made on the air.
I reached out to Mark Hannon, the Entercom executive who oversees WEEI and other local stations. Crickets.
If management can't set the right tone, that means advertisers need to step up and take their money elsewhere until the culture changes. That means the Patriots and Red Sox — the teams that have relationships with the station — need to say something, to do something.
Brady did so when WEEI host Alex Reimer disparaged the Patriots quarterback's 5-year-old daughter, which led to his suspension. I suspect Brady was behind Fauria's suspension, too.
WEEI hosts are entitled to free speech, and so are their listeners, but the station routinely crosses a line that makes Boston a hostile place to live.
Tune them out? No, we need to stop the vitriol.
Shirley Leung is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com.


text:
package org.hibersap.generation;

import org.hibersap.HibersapException;
import org.hibersap.configuration.AnnotationConfiguration;
import org.hibersap.generation.bapi.BapiClassFormatter;
import org.hibersap.generation.bapi.ReverseBapiMapper;
import org.hibersap.mapping.model.BapiMapping;
import org.hibersap.session.SessionManager;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Map;

public class HibersapGenerator {

    public void generate( final String outputDir, final String packagePath, final String bapiName ) {
        String packageDir = packagePath.replace( '.', File.separatorChar );
        File outputDirFile = new File( outputDir + File.separator + packageDir );
        outputDirFile.mkdirs();

        AnnotationConfiguration cfg = new AnnotationConfiguration();
        SessionManager sessionManager = cfg.buildSessionManager();
        ReverseBapiMapper mapper = new ReverseBapiMapper();
        BapiMapping bapiMapping = mapper.map( bapiName, sessionManager );
        BapiClassFormatter formatter = new BapiClassFormatter();
        Map<String, String> classForName = formatter.createClasses( bapiMapping, packagePath );

        for ( String className : classForName.keySet() ) {
            String fileName = className + ".java";
            String content = classForName.get( className );
            writeToDisk( outputDirFile, fileName, content );
        }
    }

    private void writeToDisk( final File outputDir, final String fileName, final String content ) {
        try {
            File file = new File( outputDir, fileName );
            FileWriter writer = new FileWriter( file );
            writer.append( content );
            writer.close();
        } catch ( IOException e ) {
            throw new HibersapException( "File " + fileName + " could not be written to file system.", e );
        }
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


The human brain's ongoing activity is characterized by intrinsic networks of coherent fluctuations, measured for example with correlated functional magnetic resonance imaging signals. So far, however, the brain processes underlying this ongoing blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signal orchestration and their direct relevance for human behavior are not sufficiently understood. In this study, we address the question of whether and how ongoing BOLD activity within intrinsic occipital networks impacts on conscious visual perception. To this end, backwardly masked targets were presented in participants' left visual field only, leaving the ipsi-lateral occipital areas entirely free from direct effects of task throughout the experiment. Signal time courses of ipsi-lateral BOLD fluctuations in visual areas V1 and V2 were then used as proxies for the ongoing contra-lateral BOLD activity within the bilateral networks. Magnitude and phase of these fluctuations were compared in trials with and without conscious visual perception, operationalized by means of subjective confidence ratings. Our results show that ipsi-lateral BOLD magnitudes in V1 were significantly higher at times of peak response when the target was perceived consciously. A significant difference between conscious and non-conscious perception with regard to the pre-target phase of an intrinsic-frequency regime suggests that ongoing V1 fluctuations exert a decisive impact on the access to consciousness already before stimulation. Both effects were absent in V2. These results thus support the notion that ongoing slow BOLD activity within intrinsic networks covering V1 represents localized processes that modulate the degree of readiness for the emergence of visual consciousness.
Intrinsic brain networks, characterized by coherent patterns of slowly fluctuating ongoing activity, constitute a fundamental organization principle of the human brain (Damoiseaux et al., 2006; Raichle, 2010). In the last decade, a wealth of studies has shown an association between such patterns of ongoing brain activity and the brain's normal and, in case of pathology, abnormal functions (Greicius et al., 2004; Biswal et al., 2010; Smith et al., 2012; Fox et al., 2014). As such networks have traditionally been investigated in the resting state, however, there is still a lack of understanding regarding the underlying processes and their relevance for human cognition, behavior, and perception (see Keilholz, 2014, for a review). To address this point, the present study focuses on ongoing blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) activity in occipital areas V1 and V2 and its relevance for emerging conscious visual perception.
Evidence for the behavioral relevance of ongoing BOLD activity comes from studies of behavioral variability in the face of invariant task requirements. The contribution of ongoing activity at about 0.1 Hz to trial-to-trial variability in motor responses, for example, has been successfully demonstrated by Fox et al. (2007). These authors showed that fluctuations of activity in the ipsi-lateral somatomotor cortex during button presses account for a significant fraction of trial-to-trial variability in evoked contra-lateral BOLD responses. Importantly, those fluctuations were also found to predict fluctuations in right-hand button press strength. Several studies provide similar results from the analysis of trial-to-trial variability in BOLD activity by showing direct relations to variability in cognition, behavior, or perception, regarding for example ratings of pain intensity or performance in a working memory task (Pessoa et al., 2002; Boly et al., 2007; Fox et al., 2007; Eichele et al., 2008).
Such a relevance of ongoing BOLD activity has also been shown with regard to variability in visual processing. The correct as compared to the incorrect perception of visual gratings, for example, has been associated with higher ongoing BOLD activity at the peak time of the BOLD response in the stimulated V1 (Schölvinck et al., 2012). Interestingly, studies of higher visual areas have shown that the access to visual consciousness can be predicted already before stimulation. Pre-stimulus activity in the fusiform face area, for example, was found to predict face perception for Rubin's ambiguous face-vase pictures (Hesselmann et al., 2008a). Likewise, pre-stimulus activity in the right occipito-temporal cortex was found to be higher when coherent visual motion in a dynamic random dot display was detected as compared to missed (Hesselmann et al., 2008b).
More hints at the impact of pre-stimulus brain states on visual perception have been provided by electroencephalographic (EEG) studies. Busch et al. (2009), for example, showed that the detection probability of at-threshold stimuli is dependent on the pre-stimulus phase in the theta and alpha bands. Furthermore, pre-stimulus slow cortical potentials (SCPs), reflecting frequencies below 0.1 Hz, were found to be more negative in trials of perceived stimuli as opposed to trials of non-perceived stimuli (Devrim et al., 1999). Interestingly, such slow fluctuations in electrophysiological activity seem to be systematically related to ongoing BOLD activity, particularly within intrinsic brain networks (He and Raichle, 2009; Schölvinck et al., 2013; Hiltunen et al., 2014).
To this end, we propose that ongoing BOLD activity in early visual areas immediately before stimulation as well as at the peak time of stimulus-evoked activity impacts on the emergence of conscious visual perception. In our study, perception was assessed on a trial-to-trial basis in a backward masking paradigm, using subjective ratings of confidence as a proxy for consciousness. This operationalization followed previous recommendations (Dehaene and Changeux, 2011) and has been successfully employed in imaging studies before (Lau and Passingham, 2006; Britz et al., 2014). By stimulating exclusively one visual hemifield, only one brain hemisphere experienced direct input from the visual task paradigm. Ongoing BOLD activity in brain regions of active visual processing (i.e., contra-lateral) could therefore be approximated by activity in functionally connected voxels of the non-stimulated (i.e., ipsi-lateral) hemisphere (Fox et al., 2007; Schölvinck et al., 2012). Selected voxels were taken from two bilateral intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) in the early visual cortex, which were derived from spatial high-resolution resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and could be associated with visual areas V1 and V2 respectively. In a first analysis, we assessed whether conscious visual perception is associated with the ipsi-lateral BOLD signal magnitude after (see Schölvinck et al., 2012) as well as before target presentation. As visual perception has been proposed to operate in periodic cycles of alternating cortical excitability and cortical inhibition (Busch et al., 2009), we subsequently band-pass filtered the ipsi-lateral BOLD activity to the peak frequency of an additional resting-state fMRI run, thereby getting rid of any remaining task effects in ipsi-lateral voxels, and assessed whether this signal's phase affects an imminent target's access to consciousness.
All procedures performed in this study were in accordance with the ethical standards of the TUM School of Medicine of the Technical University of Munich and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Sixteen healthy participants (21–28 years old, 11 females) took part in this study. Informed consent was obtained from all participants. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
The backward masking paradigm is summarized in Figure 1. Stimuli for target and mask were comparable to those used by Haynes et al. (2005). Targets consisted of a honeycomb pattern in which either the top or the bottom comb was missing. A subsequently presented negative image of the complete honeycomb pattern served as the mask. Participants had to report in two binary-choice questions, first, the location of the missing comb and, second, whether they were sure or guessed the answer. Confidence therefore was used as a proxy for the access to consciousness on a trial-to-trial basis (Lau and Passingham, 2006; Dehaene and Changeux, 2011; Britz et al., 2014). Timing parameters were chosen such that masking produced error rates of above 30% on average, which was extensively tested in behavioral experiments previous to the study. The center of the screen was marked by a fixation cross. Participants were asked to maintain fixation throughout the task, which was monitored by an eye-tracker. Importantly, to enable the measurement of a proxy of early visual cortex ongoing activity during visual stimulation, targets were shown exclusively in the left visual field. Stimulation pseudo-randomly occurred at two positions either in the upper or in the lower left quadrant, covering visual angles between 7° and 10° outside foveal vision. To ensure that stimulation of the occipital system was not affected by preceding trials, the inter-trial interval (ITI) between two targets was 28 ± 6 s (mean ± standard deviation, median: 28 s, minimum: 14 s, maximum: 38 s). A sound cue (monotone, 25 ms) was presented before the target to ensure that participants fixated the central cross after these relatively long ITIs. The cue occurred at three different cue-target stimuli onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 2, 4, and 6 s to modulate temporal attention. Spatial attention was modulated by either indicating the stimulation quadrant via the cue tone's pitch in half of the runs or by providing no information via a neutral, intermediate pitch in the other half. Attentional effects are not evaluated here but were controlled for in the analyses.
FIGURE 1. Experimental paradigm. Each trial started with an auditory cue, which carried information about the target's location in half of the runs. After a variable interval of 2, 4, or 6 s, the target -a honeycomb pattern with one missing comb either at the top or at the bottom- appeared for 16.5 ms. After another 66 ms, a negative image of the complete pattern was presented for 16.5 ms, serving as the mask. Both target and mask appeared exclusively in the left visual field. Participants had to report in two binary-choice questions, first, which comb was missing and, second, whether they were sure or had guessed the answer.
Stimuli were presented using the Presentation Software (NeuroBehavioral Systems1) and the VisuaStim Digital goggle system (Resonance Technology, Inc.2) with an integrated ViewPoint EyeTracker system (Arrington Research, Inc.3).
In total, the visual perception task consisted of four runs. Each run had a duration of 15.5 min and contained 20 targets, resulting in 13.3 events per attention condition and participant before the exclusion of events due to ratings from the eye-tracker data evaluation. Participants underwent one training session of the paradigm in the week before scanning and were familiar with the task and the cue tones.
A box with a diagonal of 7° was created around the center of the screen. Signal time courses of trials were only included in the analyses if the gaze position was within this box at the time point of target presentation. The median of the number of trials removed per participant was 1 (minimum: 0, maximum: 25).
In order to verify that the variable ITI, necessary for the analysis of BOLD effects, did not introduce systematic behavioral effects, we analyzed the dependence of both response classes ('correct'/'incorrect' and 'sure'/'unsure') on the ITI with two different procedures: For each class, we first compared the median ITI per participant between the two response options with a Wilcoxon signed rank test. Second, we calculated regressions of the overall fraction of 'correct' responses and 'sure' responses on the 11 ITI values realized by the design.
Imaging data were acquired on a Philips 3T Achieva Quasar Dual with an 8-channel phased-array head coil. Data consisted of the following sequences: (i) To define visual ICNs, 6 min of spatial high-resolution resting-state fMRI with 240 echo planar imaging (EPI) scans and a limited field of view focusing on the occipital cortex was conducted (TE = 35 ms, TR = 1500 ms, flip angle = 82°, FoV = 196 mm × 48 mm × 220 mm, matrix = 112 × 108, 22 slices, slice thickness = 2 mm, and 0.2 mm interslice gap). (ii) To realize the backward masking task, we performed four runs of 460 whole-brain gradient EPI scans of 15.5 min each (TE = 35 ms, TR = 2000 ms, flip angle = 82°, FoV = 220 mm × 128 mm × 220 mm, matrix = 80 × 80, 32 slices, slice thickness = 4 mm, and no interslice gap). (iii) To control for potential task design influences on ongoing BOLD activity (see Section "Frequency-Selective Analysis of the BOLD Phase"), additional 6 min of whole-brain resting-state fMRI were collected [for parameters, see (ii)]. (iv) To co-register the fMRI data, a high-resolution T1-weighted anatomical scan was recorded for each participant (TE = 4 ms, TR = 9 ms, TI = 100 ms, flip angle = 5°, FoV = 240 mm × 240 mm, matrix = 240 × 240, 170 slices, voxel size = 1 mm × 1 mm × 1 mm).
High-resolution resting-state fMRI data were preprocessed using statistical parametric mapping (SPM5; Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging4). Preprocessing included slice-timing and motion correction, co-registration to the whole-brain EPI series, spatial normalization, and spatial smoothing with a 2 mm × 2 mm × 2 mm Gaussian kernel (for more details concerning high-resolution resting-state fMRI data analysis, see Pasquini et al., 2014). A voxel-wise Z-transformation was applied to the time course data to render sensitivity for variance correlation independent of variance magnitude. Subsequently, data were entered into a group-level independent component analysis (ICA) in GIFT (Medical Image Analysis Lab, The MIND Research Network5). Out of 35 spatially independent components (IC), six ICs had an activity pattern centered in the occipital cortex. Figure 2A shows the spatial distribution of back-reconstructed individual occipital ICs for a randomly selected single participant.
FIGURE 2. Regions of interest. (A) The occipital intrinsic networks defined via back-reconstruction after ICA on spatial high-resolution resting-state fMRI data for a randomly selected single participant, superimposed onto this participant's normalized anatomical image. Networks were identified as posterior icnV1 (red), anterior icnV1 (blue), icnV2 (green), icnV3 (magenta), icnV4 (yellow), and icnV5 (turquoise). (B) Regions of interest (ROIs) for data extraction of one single participant. Coordinates are given in MNI space (for visual inspection only as non-normalized data is depicted). The ipsi-lateral ROIs for icnV1 (green) and icnV2 (yellow) are depicted along with the activation peaks within the contra-lateral hemisphere (red) for upper left visual quadrant stimulation. Magenta and purple arrows indicate the attribution of these peaks to icnV1 and icnV2, respectively. An overlay of the contra-lateral ROIs for stimulation of the upper and the lower visual quadrant within V1 (magenta) and V2 (purple) with networks icnV1 (green) and icnV2 (yellow) is shown in (C), constructed from the average of the single-subject ROIs (normalized to MNI standard space for display purposes only). Voxels within 6 mm of the interhemispheric gap were not included in the ROIs to avoid carry-over effects caused by spatial smoothing of the data. The parts of the networks included as ipsi-lateral ROIs are opaque.
Using the Anatomy Toolbox for SPM (Eickhoff et al., 2005), we assessed the spatial overlap of these ICs with cytoarchitectonically defined occipital areas hOC1, hOC2, hOC3v, hOC4, and hOC5, which correspond well with the functionally defined retinotopic areas V1, V2, V3v, V4, and V5 (Wohlschläger et al., 2005; Wilms et al., 2010). With respect to regions of interest, two ICs covered hOC1/V1 (amount of IC1 covering the area: 78%; IC2: 52%), while one IC overlapped substantially with hOC2/V2 (IC3: 49%). IC1 overlapped with posterior parts and IC2 with anterior parts of hOC1/V1. Such a distinction of anterior and posterior parts of early visual areas by spatial ICA on fMRI data has been described previously (Smith et al., 2012). Since we did not find significant task-associated activity in the contra-lateral IC2, we focused on IC1 and IC3 as surrogates for icnV1 and icnV2.
Individual participant images were back-reconstructed, masked (Tzourio-Mazoyer et al., 2002) and morphed into single-subject space using the inverse of the original normalization transformation. For each participant, maps of icnV1 and icnV2 were constructed by only including voxels that deviated positively from the image mean by more than 1.5 standard deviations. Image erosion and size thresholding steps created largely contiguous masks with minimal overlap. Remaining overlapping regions between masks were attributed to the mask with the highest z-score before binarization. These maps served as a common basis for the construction of regions of interest (ROIs) in the ipsi-lateral (non-stimulated) as well as in the contra-lateral (stimulated) hemisphere.
IcnV1 and icnV2 maps were masked by a left hemisphere mask including only areas more than 6 mm to the left of the inter-hemispheric gap to rule out carryover effects of signal smeared out from the contra-lateral hemisphere. The resel-size estimate of the general linear model (GLM) analysis with SPM on the smoothed images was 6 mm × 6 mm × 6 mm. The size of the ROIs in units of voxels (number of signal time courses, voxel size = 2.3 mm × 2.3 mm × 4 mm) was: icnV1: 113 ± 52 (mean ± standard deviation)/111 (34-205) [median (minimum–maximum)], icnV2: 143 ± 46/143 (61–219).
Sites of significant activation by the target within icnV1 and icnV2 were detected in each participant and small spherical ROIs were created. Approximate size and position of the resulting ROIs is also indicated in Figure 2C.
First, MNI-coordinates of significant activation by the target covering all retinotopic areas were defined in each participant. To do this, task-fMRI data were preprocessed using SPM including motion correction, co-registration of the anatomical image, and spatial smoothing with a 4 mm × 4 mm × 4 mm Gaussian kernel. A GLM analysis in single-subject space was performed including regressors coding for stimulation in the lower and upper visual quadrant as well as their temporal derivatives to allow for shifts in the timing of the BOLD response peak. T-maps of the contrasts between the stimulation quadrants were combined with those of the contrasts of the respective derivatives by a maximum operation.
Second, peaks within icnV1 and icnV2 were selected. For this, four peak coordinates of stimulus-related activity were determined, within the two areas icnV1 and icnV2 and at the two sites for upper and lower visual field stimulation. To do this, the combined t-value maps of the stimulation quadrant contrasts were masked by the binary maps of icnV1 and icnV2 and a right hemisphere mask for each participant. After automatically finding the coordinates of highest t-values, the positions super-imposed onto the anatomical images of the participants were checked by three raters with the following criteria: (i) Activation for upper visual field stimulation should be located in the lower occipital cortex and vice versa. (ii) Activation attributed to V1 should be located in the grey matter of the calcarine sulcus. Overall, 23 out of 128 peak coordinates were replaced by the coordinates of the second highest peaks. To further assure that activation was actually related to the stimulation, only those peaks were included into further analyses which had a t-value > 3.73 (pu < 0.0001). This threshold was more liberal than pSVC < 0.05, small volume corrected for right icnV1 or icnV2, respectively. If the t-value was lower, the location was not accepted as a stimulation position for the respective retinotopic area and participant and was excluded from task-ROI-analyses. ROIs of 4 mm radius were created. It has to be noted that contra-lateral ROIs were only about 1/10th of the size of ipsi-lateral ROIs.
Signal time courses of preprocessed but non-smoothed task-fMRI data were extracted from the two ROIs of the ipsi-lateral hemisphere, the four ROIs of the contra-lateral hemisphere, and from individual white matter and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) masks for the construction of confound regressors. For each time course, the mean signal y across the ROI was computed by averaging all values within the ROI at a given time point. y was translated into percent signal change yPSC, with yPSC = (y – b)/b∗100. b was calculated as a run average over the last several time points starting 14 s after target presentation until the next target presentation. Equally transformed white matter and CSF signals were regressed out and the signal was high-pass filtered to frequencies above 128 s wave length.
Event-related time courses were constructed for each target onset by taking into account 2 TRs (4 s) before and 7 TRs (14 s) after target presentation. The relationship between the BOLD signal in the ipsi-lateral ROIs and conscious visual perception of the target was assessed pre- and post-target presentation. For this, data of 2 and 4 s before (PRE-stimulus) or after (PEAK-response) target presentation were averaged and used as dependent variables in the statistical models. Concerning the PEAK-response definition, one should note that a period of about 4 s after target presentation coincides with the peak of the BOLD response found in this study in the contra-lateral hemisphere and corresponds to the typical temporal delay of BOLD responses to stimulation (Bandettini et al., 1992; Logothetis, 2002; Buxton et al., 2004). The factor of interest, 'conscious visual perception,' was determined directly from participants' second button press ('sure'/'unsure'), but trials which were rated as 'sure' with nevertheless wrongly detected targets were excluded from the analysis. Also excluded were those trials with negative eye-tracker ratings.
As changes of BOLD percent signal change in the occipital cortex are assumed to be comparable across participants, we chose a fixed-effects approach. Overall, this resulted in four analysis of variance (ANOVA) models for the ipsi-lateral ROIs: 'icnV1 PRE-stimulus' [degrees of freedom (df) = 905], 'icnV1 PEAK-response' (Id.), 'icnV2 PRE-stimulus' (Id.), and 'icnV2 PEAK-response' (Id.). P-values reported are Bonferroni-corrected by the number of ANOVAs, i.e., by a factor of 4. As a control analysis for unexpectedly high impact of between-subject variability, an additional analogous mixed-effects analysis was performed on the data, employing the same dependent variables, the same factors of interest, and the same factors of no-interest, which are described in the following paragraph.
In order to account for effects of different kinds of cueing, attentional conditions were modeled as independent variables along with the factor of interest. The model consisted of factors (i) 'conscious visual perception', (ii) temporal attention (at three levels with cue 2, 4, or 6 s before target), and (iii) spatial attention (spatial information in the cue present or absent). Pair-wise interactions of the factors were calculated. There were on average 76.3 trials per condition (median: 79.5, minimum: 50, maximum: 116).
For an analysis of the relationship of task-related BOLD signals and conscious visual perception, an entirely analogous procedure with ROIs in the contra-lateral hemisphere was performed. Here, an additional regressor was included in the models, coding the visual quadrant of stimulation ('upper left' or 'lower left'). Again, we created four ANOVA models: 'icnV1 PRE-stimulus task' (df = 390), 'icnV1 PEAK-response task' (Id.), 'icnV2 PRE-stimulus task' (df = 724), and 'icnV2 PEAK-response task' (Id.). P-values reported are Bonferroni-corrected by a factor of 4. Df were smaller than in the analysis of the ipsi-lateral signal because the additional regressor coding for position of stimulation was used and because the task activation peak could not be detected reliably in some of the participants, resulting in smaller trial numbers. Average trial numbers per condition were for icnV1: 16.7 (median: 14.5, minimum: 8, maximum: 29) and for icnV2: 30.6 (median: 32, minimum: 14, maximum: 63).
Finally, a correlation of PRE-stimulus ipsi-lateral signal and PEAK-response contra-lateral signal was analyzed using Pearson's correlation analysis. The correlation was calculated within each participant for whom a significant task peak had been detected. Significance was calculated across the group via t-tests on the Fisher-Z-corrected correlation coefficients.
To assess the signal phase in a frequency-selective way, we analyzed the frequency spectrum of the BOLD signal within ipsi-lateral icnV1 and icnV2 from the whole-brain resting-state as well as the task-fMRI runs. From the resting-state spectrum, we derived the frequency of peak power. Using the task data, we then calculated the signal phase immediately before target presentation selectively at the peak frequency of the resting-state spectrum.
More specifically, time courses of the whole-brain rest-fMRI run were created in an entirely analogous procedure from the same ipsi-lateral ROIs as used in the task-fMRI runs. Time courses of the four task runs and the rest run were then entered as a whole-per-session into a Fourier analysis (MATLAB6). For both the task runs and the rest run, frequency spectra were created separately and averaged across participants (and runs, in case of the task-fMRI). For the rest-fMRI spectra of icnV1 and icnV2, the position of the absolute amplitude peak was then determined. A tight frequency band of 5∗10-3 Hz width around this peak ('intrinsic-frequency regime') was constructed and signal time courses of all task runs were band-pass filtered to this regime by a fifth-order Butterworth filter. The derived time courses were subjected to a Hilbert transform to construct time courses of the signal phase. The phase one TR before target presentation within this 'intrinsic-frequency regime' was averaged per participant, ROI, and consciousness category. For ipsi-lateral icnV1 and icnV2 separately, it was finally tested with a Wilcoxon signed rank test whether there were significant phase differences between consciousness categories.
Additionally, it was tested whether the phase was dependent on any of the attentional cue types by mutual Wilcoxon signed rank tests.
Spatial high-resolution resting-state fMRI and data-driven ICA revealed ICNs in the occipital cortex which largely overlapped with anatomical maps of retinotopic areas V1–V5 (Figure 2A). This result is in line with previous findings about the intrinsic organization of the occipital cortex (Cohen et al., 2008; Kiviniemi et al., 2009; Allen et al., 2011; Craddock et al., 2012; Dawson et al., 2013).
We analyzed behavioral responses in order to assure that our realization of backward masking was effective. As can be seen in Figure 3, participants gave correct responses on the relevant target property in 76 ± 15% (median ± standard deviation) of trials and reported to be sure in 60 ± 24% (median ± standard deviation) of trials. There were significantly more correct responses when participants reported being sure than when they were uncertain ('sure' 84% (median), 'unsure' 65% (median), p < 0.001, N = 16, Wilcoxon signed rank test). The backward masking task thus efficiently enabled the desired manipulation of visual consciousness.
FIGURE 3. Behavioral data. The proportion of trials in which participants were 'sure' as well as those in which they were 'unsure.' The proportion of correct responses is shown in green for each consciousness category. Median and standard deviation are displayed.
In order to rule out that the variation of ITIs introduced systematic behavioral effects, we next analyzed the dependence of responses on ITI length. With regard to task performance ('correct'/'incorrect'), we found no significant difference of the median ITI per participant between responses (p = 0.162, N = 16, Wilcoxon signed rank test). A regression of the fraction of correct responses against ITI yielded no significant correlation (R = 0.22, F = 0.45, p = 0.521, N = 11). Similarly, there was no significant difference (p = 0.609, N = 16, Wilcoxon signed rank test) or dependence (R = 0.24, F = 0.53, p = 0.484, N = 11) for responses 'sure'/'unsure.' The variability of trial spacing in time did therefore not impact significantly on behavioral responses.
There was a significant effect of the attention conditions, p < 0.001 for spatial attention, and p = 0.026 for temporal attention, with no significant interaction (p = 0.120) on the rating 'sure' vs 'unsure'.
Next, we examined the relationship between the BOLD magnitude in the ipsi-lateral ROIs and conscious visual perception on a trial-to-trial basis (all F- and p-values assembled in Table 1). As can be seen in Figures 4A,B, the BOLD magnitude in icnV1 as well as in icnV2 prior to stimulation was lower when participants consciously perceived the target, reaching significance only in icnV2 (p = 0.048, Bonferroni-corrected). At the time of PEAK-response, the BOLD magnitude was significantly higher for consciously perceived targets in icnV1 (p < 0.001, Bonferroni-corrected).
TABLE 1. Ipsi-lateral BOLD activity in V1 and V2.
FIGURE 4. Stimulus-locked activity in the intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) covering V1 and V2. Time courses (mean and standard error of the mean) of the blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) percent signal change for categories 'sure' (blue) and 'unsure' (red) from (A) the ipsi-lateral icnV1, (B) the ipsi-lateral icnV2, (C) the contra-lateral icnV1, and (D) the contra-lateral icnV2 are plotted. Data were corrected for the effects of temporal attention, spatial attention, and stimulated visual quadrant. The time windows for which statistical tests were performed are indicated by squares containing the respective means and standard errors of the mean and by dashed lines. The asterisks label significant differences at pc < 0.05 for ANOVA.
We next tested whether the ipsi-lateral BOLD magnitude was influenced by our attentional manipulations. At the time of PEAK-response, BOLD activity in icnV1 and icnV2 was affected by temporal attention, with higher percent signal change at shorter cue-target SOAs (icnV1: p < 0.001, icnV2: p < 0.001, Bonferroni-corrected). Importantly, there were no significant interactions or trends for interactions in the BOLD magnitude between consciousness categories and any of the attentional conditions (Table 1). Our main findings did thus not depend on particular attentional configurations.
Mixed-effects analyses, which were performed in parallel, were in agreement though less significant. The following results were obtained with regard to BOLD magnitude differences between consciousness categories: (i) V1 PRE-stimulus t = 2.31, p = 0.021, (ii) V2 PRE-stimulus t = 2.72, p = 0.007, (iii) V1 PEAK-response t = -1.78, p = 0.076, and (iv) V2 PEAK-response t = -0.40, p = 0.693. Explicitly testing for a BOLD magnitude increase in icnV1 for conscious target perception (see Schölvinck et al., 2012) resulted in a significant effect (one-tailed; V1 PEAK-response t = -1.78, p = 0.038). All df = 907. p-values are not Bonferroni-corrected.
We subsequently examined the relationship between the BOLD magnitude in stimulated ROIs of the contra-lateral hemisphere and conscious visual perception. Corresponding F- and p-values are assembled in Table 2. As can be seen in Figures 4C,D, the BOLD magnitude at the time of PEAK-response was higher for consciously perceived targets, both in icnV1 and in icnV2. This relation was statistically significant (icnV1: p = 0.011; icnV2: p = 0.003, Bonferroni-corrected). During stimulation, conscious visual perception was thus clearly associated with the BOLD magnitude in the contra-lateral ROIs.
TABLE 2. Contra-lateral BOLD activity in V1 and V2.
Regarding our attentional manipulations, there was a significant effect of temporal attention on the BOLD signal change in the contra-lateral icnV2 at the time of PEAK-response (p = 0.016, Bonferroni-corrected), with higher BOLD magnitudes at shorter cue-target SOAs. At the site of stimulus processing in the first higher-tier area V2, uncorrected p-values (Table 2) indicate a trend in the interaction of access to consciousness and temporal attention after target presentation (Bonferroni-corrected: p = 0.204). This might be explained by stimulus processing within contra-lateral V1, which experiences influences from ongoing fluctuations as well as attention manipulation at the same time.
We further investigated whether ongoing activity, approximated by the ipsi-lateral BOLD signal before stimulation, influenced the percentage of contra-lateral BOLD signal change during stimulation. To do so, we calculated the correlation of ipsi-lateral PRE-stimulus activity with contra-lateral PEAK-response activity. As depicted in Figure 5, PRE-stimulus ipsi-lateral activity correlated significantly with PEAK-response contra-lateral activity in icnV1 (R: median = -0.13, Fisher-Z transformed R: mean ± standard deviation = -0.15 ± 0.12, p = 0.004, N = 10), but not in icnV2 (R: median = 0.05, Fisher-Z transformed R: mean ± standard deviation = 0.03 ± 0.21, p = 0.630, N = 15). This correlation was negative, as expected from the reduced PRE-stimulus ipsi-lateral activity and increased PEAK-response contra-lateral activity in icnV1 associated with conscious visual perception (see Figure 4).
FIGURE 5. Relation between contra-lateral and ipsi-lateral blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) percent signal change. The correlation of the contra-lateral PEAK-response signal and the ipsi-lateral PRE-stimulus signal is shown for (A) icnV1 and (B) icnV2. Blue dots refer to trials of the category 'sure', whereas red dots indicate trials of the category 'unsure'. p-values were calculated from t-tests across participants on Fisher-Z-transformed single-subject correlation coefficients. Significant p-values are marked by ∗.
Figure 6 shows results of a frequency-based analysis of the BOLD signals from ipsi-lateral icnV1 and icnV2. Spectra from task data are depicted along with spectra from a whole-brain resting-state fMRI measurement. The task data revealed a clear fingerprint of the task in icnV1 and icnV2 activity as illustrated by the white arrow in Figure 6A. The stimulation frequency of 0.0334 Hz was associated with the highest spectral amplitude in both ICNs. In contrast, spectra of fMRI data acquired under resting-state conditions prior to the task runs revealed that the highest amplitude for ongoing BOLD activity was located at lower frequencies (0.0234 Hz for icnV1 and 0.0215 Hz for icnV2). In icnV1, this peak was preserved within the task data spectrum. In icnV2, however, the task spectrum did not contain a similarly pronounced peak within the 'intrinsic-frequency regime' as at rest. There were thus clear spectral differences between ipsi-lateral activity during task and rest.
FIGURE 6. The relevance of signal phases for visual consciousness. (A) Amplitude spectra as mean and standard error of the mean for ipsi-lateral icnV1 (green) and ipsi-lateral icnV2 (yellow), calculated from the whole-brain resting-state run (upper panels) and the task runs (lower panels). The peak corresponding to the task stimulation frequency is highlighted in the lower panels by a white arrow. Also highlighted are the regimes of intrinsic frequency (red) and task frequency (blue), which were used for further calculations of frequency-specific phases. (B) Phase values (median and 50% confidence intervals) prior to target presentation in the task runs for ipsi-lateral icnV1 (green) and icnV2 (yellow), separately for each frequency regime (intrinsic: red, task: blue) and each consciousness category ('Sure,' 'Unsure'). Δ illustrates the median and 50% confidence interval of the individual phase differences between consciousness categories. Phases φ range from -π to π and translate into signal by φ = 0 meaning signal peak and φ = π or -π meaning signal trough. Significant deviations from an average phase of zero and non-zero Δ are marked by ∗, trends by (∗).
Phases before target presentation were therefore assessed separately for the 'intrinsic-' and the 'task-frequency regime' as well as for ipsi-lateral icnV1 and icnV2 and the two consciousness categories (see Figure 6B). Regarding the 'task-frequency regime,' phases in both consciousness categories did not deviate from a mean value of 0 in icnV1 ('sure': p = 0.421, 'unsure': p = 0.535, N = 16, Wilcoxon signed rank test), while they took significantly positive values in icnV2, representing periods of predominant signal decay ('sure': p = 0.008, 'unsure': p = 0.011, N = 16, Wilcoxon signed rank test). In neither of the ICNs within the 'task-frequency regime' did the average phase value differ significantly with respect to the consciousness category (icnV1: p = 0.449, icnV2: p = 0.368, N = 16, Wilcoxon signed rank test), suggesting that the previously described effects of BOLD magnitude differences did not originate from this frequency regime.
Importantly, there were no significant differences between intrinsic phase values of the different attention conditions, neither in icnV1 (temporal attention: p = 0.877 (2–4 s), p = 0.278 (2–6 s), p = 0.234 (4–6 s), spatial attention: p = 0.469, N = 16, Wilcoxon signed rank tests) nor in icnV2 (temporal attention: p = 0.679 (2–4 s), p = 0.877 (2–6 s), p = 0.959 (4–6 s), spatial attention: p = 0.196, N = 16, Wilcoxon signed rank tests). The lack of statistically detectable differences in this exploratory analysis further substantiates the absence of task effects in our ongoing BOLD signal.
The present study provides evidence that bilateral ongoing BOLD activity, approximated by fluctuations in ipsi-lateral parts of intrinsic occipital networks, is strongly associated with an incoming stimulus' access to visual consciousness. In particular, consciously perceived stimuli were characterized by a significantly higher ipsi-lateral BOLD magnitude after stimulus presentation in V1. Phase analyses revealed that this effect was most likely caused by stronger declines of the ongoing BOLD signal previous to stimulation in the case of non-conscious stimuli. Finally, our results highlight the role of intrinsic networks covering V1 as opposed to those covering V2 with respect to conscious visual perception.
Our results are in line with previous studies exploring signal fluctuations in non-stimulated parts of an ICN and their relation to performance (Fox et al., 2007; Schölvinck et al., 2012). All of these studies indicate that ongoing BOLD activity accounts for trial-to-trial differences in the BOLD magnitude at the site of direct task stimulation. Such differences in turn can be associated with task measures such as conscious visual perception (see Figure 4). As these findings reflect trial-to-trial variability in response to identical stimuli, they cannot be explained by task-evoked differences in BOLD activity. The variability over and above task-locked effects therefore is likely to reflect intrinsic, ongoing processes. In our case, none of the systematic variations on single trials did interact with this effect. Our results finally go beyond previously published accounts by providing evidence that processes underlying the pre-stimulus ipsi-lateral BOLD signal bear importance for the subsequent access to visual consciousness.
Leaving the left hemisphere without direct stimulation and defining ROIs both in an intrinsic network-wide way and independently from the experiment proper (Figure 2) offered the possibility to characterize proxies for ongoing activity of the entire ICNs V1 and V2 and thus to avoid influences of focal effects such as attentional top-down effects on specific retinotopic positions (Tootell et al., 1998a; Brefczynski and DeYoe, 1999; Saygin and Sereno, 2008). Yet, one might argue that our proxies for ongoing BOLD activity were not completely free of task effects. In line with previous findings, there was indeed a clear imprint of the task in the signal we used (Tootell et al., 1998b; Smith et al., 2004). This imprint is depicted in Figures 4A,B as a BOLD signal drop after target presentation and results in the task-related peaks in Figure 6A. Figure 6B confirms this finding by showing a dominance of decreasing phases in the 'task-frequency regime' of icnV2. Such an effect has previously been interpreted as a consequence of attentional shifts to the stimulated hemisphere or alternatively as blood stealing (Tootell et al., 1998b; Smith et al., 2004). As the target in our task was preceded by a cue, the described effect could possibly reflect a reaction to this cue event (Ress et al., 2000) within the 'task-frequency regime.' Importantly, no comparable task imprints were observed in the 'rest-frequency regime,' indicating that our main results can indeed be attributed to ongoing BOLD activity.
Finally, it cannot be excluded that top–down feedback of the elicited consciousness-related processes on the time scale of milliseconds caused the magnitude difference between the two consciousness categories. The putative increased relevance of top–down feedback in V2 as compared to V1, however, renders this explanation less likely (e.g., Melloni et al., 2012).
To our knowledge, this is the first study describing a relation of ongoing BOLD signal phases and a performance measure. Our study suggests that predominant signal decay prior to stimulation is indicative of failed access to consciousness (Figure 6B, left panel). The influence of the task paradigm on this phase-performance relation can be ruled out because band-pass filtering was employed to the regime of ongoing BOLD fluctuations at rest. Phase effects of this kind are well known from electrophysiology studies (Devrim et al., 1999). Furthermore, these findings are in agreement with our results on BOLD magnitudes. High BOLD magnitudes seconds before stimulation tended to decline prior to the target and were consequently associated with a reduced likelihood of conscious awareness. During the chosen period of observation, the signal thus evolved qualitatively differently depending on the subsequent access to consciousness. Notably, this oscillatory signal was of frequencies below 0.08 Hz, which exactly characterize the dynamics of ongoing BOLD fluctuations (Fox et al., 2005; Fox and Raichle, 2007).
BOLD fluctuations within ICNs have been directly linked to electrophysiological SCPs (Hiltunen et al., 2014). Both signals are thought to be relevant for the coordination of activity states between more distant brain regions, possibly by modulating local high-frequency processes via phase-amplitude coupling (Khader et al., 2008; He and Raichle, 2009; Thompson et al., 2014). Interestingly, He and Raichle proposed that both BOLD and SCP fluctuations in the visual system contribute critically to processes of visual consciousness (He and Raichle, 2009). Several studies indeed report correlations between the SCP phase and behavioral performance (Birbaumer et al., 1990; Devrim et al., 1999; Monto et al., 2008). In particular, Devrim et al. (1999) found a significantly increased visual detection rate during states with negative as opposed to positive cortical potential shifts in the range of SCPs at occipital electrodes. Our data provide further evidence for this model by linking the phase of slow BOLD fluctuations in V1 directly to conscious visual perception.
Regarding the translation of electrophysiological effects to fMRI results, a sluggishness of the BOLD response in the range of seconds has to be taken into account. Further studies have to clarify whether a falling BOLD signal, as detected in our 'unsure' category, could be reflecting a rising SCP amplitude.
We detected a higher relevance of ipsi-lateral BOLD fluctuations within V1 as opposed to V2 for the access to visual consciousness. In line with these findings, previous studies point at V1 as an important prerequisite for conscious visual experience (Crick and Koch, 1995; Tong, 2003; Persaud and Lau, 2008; Weiskrantz, 2009; Ffytche and Zeki, 2011; Aru et al., 2012; Leopold, 2012). Tse et al. (2005), for example, found an elevated BOLD signal throughout V1 (and V2 to a lesser extent) to be related to visual awareness in a masking paradigm, though they did not compare stimulated and non-stimulated sites. With regard to the significant link between ongoing ipsi-lateral and task-evoked contra-lateral activity in V1 (see Figure 5A), our results correspond well with other studies suggesting a contribution of ongoing fluctuations to visual task-evoked BOLD activity in early visual areas (Arieli et al., 1996; Bianciardi et al., 2009; Cardoso et al., 2012; Schölvinck et al., 2012).
Finally, four methodological considerations regarding our experimental design and data analyses should be mentioned.
(i) Operationalization of consciousness. The access to consciousness in our study was operationalized by means of subjective ratings (Dehaene and Changeux, 2011). Within a two-point rating scale, participants were asked whether they were sure or guessed the answer (Lau and Passingham, 2006). These ratings thus involved confidence as a measure for consciousness. As states in which participants had a "weak glimpse" (Andersen et al., 2016) of the target were most likely attributed to the 'unsure' category, the rate of correct responses in this category was increased above chance level. A finer grading in further studies could improve event classification and attribution of occipital activity to the different consciousness categories.
(ii) Definition of ongoing BOLD activity. As discussed above, the present study used an aggregate signal from non-stimulated ipsi-lateral parts of occipital ICNs as the proxy for ongoing BOLD activity. This assures that a substantial part of those regions is considered which routinely interact within the bilateral ICNs but receive no direct stimulation. A number of studies certify an imprint of a visual task in the ipsi-lateral part of the visual cortex (Tootell et al., 1998b; Smith et al., 2004; Sylvester et al., 2007; Chang et al., 2012; He, 2013). Within our study, task effects have been controlled for by (i) explicitly focusing on trial-to-trial variability, (ii) ruling out interaction effects of the task paradigm's attentional conditions, and iii) concentrating on the 'intrinsic-frequency regime' while also analyzing the 'task-frequency regime,' which yielded qualitatively different results.
(iii) Statistical analysis of BOLD magnitudes. As the BOLD percent signal change in a primary sensory cortex such as the occipital cortex is assumed to be comparable across participants, we used a fixed-effects model for group analyses. However, no population inferences can be made from such a model and future studies are needed to examine whether these inferences are possible. An additional mixed-effects model analysis provided supporting results.
(iv) The applied criterion for exclusion of trials due to eye movements was generous, but allowed for exclusion of eye blinks and assured participants did not purposefully or accidentally observe the target position. Data analysis was performed on an averaged signal within the whole areas of ipsi-lateral icnV1 and ipsi-lateral icnV2 (more than 6 mm away from the inter-hemispheric gap). This assured a certain degree of robustness towards regional effects in single events when fixation would not be absolute. The additional analysis in small spherical contra-lateral ROIs showed that significant activations were elicited on distinct sites in retinotopic contra-lateral icnV1 and icnV2. This serves as confirmation that the stimulation happened at specific sites of the retina and that eye movements were minor within the included events.
In summary, our results provide evidence for the significant and specific relation of slowly fluctuating ongoing V1 activity and the emergence of visual consciousness.
AW, VR, and CS were involved in the conception and design of the study. AW, JD, LK, VR, and CS developed the methods. JD, LK, VR, and CS acquired the data. AW, SG, JS, JD, LK, and SL performed the analyses. AW, SG, VR, and CS wrote the manuscript.
This work was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Grant 01EV0710.
Copyright © 2016 Wohlschläger, Glim, Shao, Draheim, Köhler, Lourenço, Riedl and Sorg. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.


As Social networking sites become more popular, one site wants to make sure it's users are reporting suspicious behavior. Facebook is aiming to help prevent suicide. The social networking web site is launching a program today that enables users to instantly connect with a crisis counselor through Facebook's chat messaging system. Here's how it works. If a friend spots a suicidal thought on someone's page, he can report it to Facebook by clicking a link next to the comment. Facebook will then send an e-mail to the person that posted the suicidal comment, encouraging them to call a hot-line or click on a link to begin an instant, confidential chat. Pamela Vinson, Program Director at River Edge Prevention Resource Center in Macon says, there are things you can do to help a friend or loved one who might need help.
"There is always hope even though the situations may seem hopeless but it's not. Just make sure you let them know that you are there and that you care about Them, said Vinson.


Coastal Bend College will close on Tuesday, December 17, 2013 at 5 p.m. for the winter holiday break. The college will reopen on Thursday, January 2, 2014 at 8 a.m. Faculty will return on Monday, January 6, 2014.
The last day to register for spring 2014 classes is January 10, 2014. Students with no holds may register at any time at www.coastalbend.edu via Campus Connect until then, even over the holiday break. Classes begin on January 13, 2014, but students are encouraged to register as soon as possible because some classes fill quickly.
Financial aid is still available for those who qualify, and interested applicants are encouraged to submit their free application for federal student aid (FAFSA) as soon as possible online at www.fafsa.gov. Students should use CBC's school code of 003546 to ensure the application is ready for processing when the college reopens. For more information about registering for classes at CBC, visit http://www.coastalbend.edu/future.


So you want a sofa, a three-seater, in green velvet, with no back but two tall armrests. Oh, and you want the armrests to be in the shape of Mimsy, your wheaten terrier. Such customization generally requires small-scale production—but maybe not for long.
"We believe the time for widespread, profitable mass customization may finally have come, the result of emerging or improved technologies that can help address economic barriers to responding to consumers' exact needs in a more precise way," write Anshuk Gandhi, Carmen Magar and Roger Roberts, all of McKinsey, in an article on the company's website.
As for progress on that front, it was not swift: "No such plant exists today. No one can yet build it," Drucker noted. Predicting it would be common by the year 1999 also proved to be a little optimistic.
But perhaps the world of manufacturing is finally ready to make major moves toward customization, as Drucker envisioned a decade and a half ago and McKinsey envisions now. Something to ponder over your triple-shot, no-foam, decaf, skim latte with one and a half sugars.