Exciting concertos (协奏曲) from Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons can boost mental alertness, according to research from Northumbria University.

The findings, which are published in Experimental Psychology, show that the exciting first movement, in particular, is capable of enhancing attention and memory.

In the experiment a group of 14 young adults were given a mental concentration task to perform. They were asked to press the space bar on a keyboard when a green square appeared on screen and ignore different colored circles and squares that appeared at intervals. The participants carried out this task both in silence and while listening to each of the four concertos while their brain activity was measured using EEG brain imaging.

Results showed that participants responded correctly faster when listening to the exciting Spring concerto. When listening to the concerto, the average response time in performing the task was 393.8 millisecond as opposed to 408.1 milliseconds when the task was carried out in silence. This response time rose to 413.3 milliseconds when they listened to the slower and sadder Autumn music, therefore showing a decrease in mental capacity.

Psychologist Dr. Leigh Riby said, “The Spring movement enhanced overall activity within the brain but had an exaggerated effect on the area of the brain that’s important for emotional processing. It seemed to give rise to particular imagery in the brain and evoke positive, contented feelings which translated into higher levels of cognitive functioning.”

Dr. Riby suggests that the Spring movement is particularly special and could be used in therapy and is, in fact, quite a familiar piece to most people as it has been used successfully in marketing to induce mood and influence behavior.

He also found that the key in which the music was written had no impact on brain performance. While the Spring concerto, which is written in a major key enhanced cognitive function, the Autumn movement, which is also written in a major key, did not.

He added, “This experiment shows that cognitive capacity is enhanced when pleasant and arousing stimuli are introduced.”

The great flight of the Chinese astronaut (宇航员) Yang Liwei in 2003 made China the third country in the world to send a person into space. His journey of 600, 000 kilometres took one day. But the training of astronauts like Yang Liwei takes years and is very hard.

As a basic requirement, trainee (受训者) astronauts must be fighter pilots with over 600 hours of flying. This means that they have experience of flying at high speed and dealing with changes in air pressure. As well, they must have at least 4 years of college education and must be very strong and healthy. A normal trainee is 25-35 years old, weighs 55-70 kilogrammes and is 1. 60-1. 72 metres tall.

Pilots with the basic requirements then go through a long period of examination to see if they are fit for training. They stay in hospital for a month of tests, which check for any kind of physical (生理的) weakness. Moreover, they have to sit in a chair which turns around at high speed for 15 minutes, to find out how their body works. There are also mental tests to find out how they will deal with living in a very small room, and how well they will respond to dangers and solve problems.

Once they are chosen, the pilots go through a five-year course to prepare them for space flights. At the end of the five-year programme, there are final tests for the trainees. After passing these tests, they have succeeded in becoming real astronauts.

It may be made possible for computers and robots to "read" human personalities by reading human eye movements.

The eyes are really the windows to the soul. That is the result of a new study on the connection between eye movements and personality, conducted by neuroscience researchers based at the University of South Australia and Published in the scientific Journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. And if that is true, computers and robots powered by sophisticated algorithms (算法) may soon have the ability to peer into your soul.

"Eye movements during an everyday task predict aspects of our personality," wrote the researchers, led by Tobias Loetscher, whose team followed 42 study subjects around the university campus recording their eye movements, then determined their personality traits (特点) with "well-established questionnaires" for determining personality type, and unfolded some kind of connections between eye movements and personality, according to a summary of the study published by the site Science Daily.

The researchers expected that with the data fed into their algorithms computers running the algorithms were able to record human eye movements and immediately determine a person's major personality traits, such as "neuroticism, extraversion (外向)，agreeableness, conscientiousness, as well as perceptual curiosity", the scientists wrote.

"The new finding might help improve the way human beings interact with their computers and other high-tech devices, even robots, allowing for more natural and realistic social interactions with machines," Loetscher said.

"People are always looking for improved, personalized services. Today's robots and computers are not socially aware so they cannot adapt to non-verbal information," Loetscher said in a statement quoted by Indian Express. "This research provides opportunities to develop robots and computers that can become more natural, and better at interpreting human social signals."

The study revealed previously undiscovered relations between specific personality characteristics and specific eye movement tendencies, according to a summary in Britain's Daily Mail newspaper.