Overlap of musical and linguistic syntax processing: intracranial ERP evidence.

The present study investigated the co-localization of musical and linguistic syntax processing in the human brain. EEGs were recorded from subdural electrodes placed on the left and right perisylvian cortex. The neural generators of the early potentials elicited by syntactic errors in music and language were localized by means of distributed source modeling and compared within subjects. The combined results indicated a partial overlap of the sources within the bilateral superior temporal gyrus, and, to a lesser extent, in the left inferior frontal gyrus, qualifying these areas as shared anatomic substrates of early syntactic error detection in music and language.

Stripe patterns in the magnetic reorientation of a glass-forming nematic liquid crystal.

We study spontaneous pattern formation in a glass-forming nematic liquid crystal during the magnetically induced dynamic Fréedericksz transition. Pattern growth rates and wavelengths as functions of the magnetic field are extracted from optical transmission textures of thin planar cells. The characteristics of the observed stripe pattern can be related to viscoelastic parameters of the nematic by means of a linear stability analysis of director fluctuation modes. The viscous properties of the material allow to vary the time scales of the experiment with temperature by orders of magnitude, leaving the spatial structure of the pattern essentially unchanged. We find that the ratios of shear and rotational viscosity coefficients relevant for the pattern wavelength selection remain constant in the temperature range investigated, whereas their absolute values change by almost two orders.

Comment on "Corresponding states of periodic structures in nematic liquid crystals".

Palangana, Simões, Evangelista, and Arrotéia [Phys. Rev. E 56, 4282 (1997)] (PSEA) propose a general scaling model for periodic wall patterns in the magnetic twist Fréedericksz transition of nematics, performing an elastic energy analysis. We demonstrate that this model is incorrect because it does not consider consistently the hydrodynamic wavelength selection of the observed structures, but is based on the assumption of inappropriate model functions instead. It is shown that experimental data actually contradict the proposed theory. The approach of PSEA is particularly not suited to determine elastic constant ratios of nematic liquid crystals.