Laser Crosswalk Concept

Lasers Make Everything Better-Laser Crosswalk Concept

The Guardian Crosswalk is designed to make street corners safer for both pedestrians and drivers. Designer Hojoon Lim’s ingenious concept uses lasers as a barrier to prevent over-eager

pedestrians from crossing and to ensure that cars stay out of crosswalks.

The Guardian Crosswalk functions a lot like a normal crosswalk. Lighted pillars alert pedestrians as to when they can and can’t cross. However, the key difference between contemporary crosswalks and the Guardian are the latter’s lasers. The lasers are active at all times and are used to either shield those crossing from cars or to keep pedestrians safely on the sidewalk as they wait to cross.

The Guardian Crosswalk puts a fresh and functional spin on a design that currently leaves a lot to be desired. Here’s hoping the lasers aren’t designed to function like lightsabers; Crossing early or late could be quite painful.

Synchronized Brains: Feeling Strong Emotions Makes People’s Brains ‘Tick Together’

Experiencing strong emotions synchronizes brain activity across individuals, a research team at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre in Finland has revealed.

                                       Experiencing strong emotions synchronizes brain activity across individuals.

(Credit: Image courtesy of Aalto University)

Human emotions are highly contagious. Seeing others’ emotional expressions such as smiles triggers often the corresponding emotional response in the observer. Such synchronization of emotional states across individuals may support social interaction: When all group members share a common emotional state, their brains and bodies process the environment in a similar fashion.

Researchers at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre have now found that feeling strong emotions makes different individuals’ brain activity literally synchronous.

The results revealed that especially feeling strong unpleasant emotions synchronized brain’s emotion processing networks in the frontal and midline regions. On the contrary, experiencing highly arousing events synchronized activity in the networks supporting vision, attention and sense of touch.

“Sharing others’ emotional states provides the observers a somatosensory and neural framework that facilitates understanding others’ intentions and actions and allows to ‘tune in’ or ‘sync’ with them. Such automatic tuning facilitates social interaction and group processes,” says Adjunct Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from the Aalto University, Finland.

“The results have major implications for current neural models of human emotions and group behavior. It also deepens our understanding of mental disorders involving abnormal socioemotional processing,” Nummenmaa says.

Participants’ brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they were viewing short pleasant, neutral and unpleasant movies.