Reading Test 16
Australian artist Margaret Preston
Margaret Preston was born Margaret Rose McPherson in Port Adelaide, South Australia in 1875, the daughter of David McPherson, a Scottish marine engineer and his wife Prudence Lyle. She and her sister were sent at first to a private school, but when family circumstances changed, her mother took the girls to Sydney where Margaret attended a public high school. She decided early in life to become an artist and took private art lessons. In 1888, she trained for several months with Sydney landscape painter William Lister, and in 1893 enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, where she studied for just over four years.
In 1898, after her father died, Margaret returned to Adelaide to study and then teach at the Adelaide School of Design. Her early artwork was influenced by the German aesthetic tradition, in which subjects of the natural world were depicted in a true-to-life manner. Margaret’s first visit to Europe in 1904, and her studies in Paris, France had little impact on the naturalism that dominated her work from this early period. However, some eight years later, after returning to Paris, she began to recognise the decorative possibilities of art.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Margaret travelled to England, where she held exhibitions and continued her studies of art. She was a student of pottery, but at some time developed her interest in various techniques of printmaking and design. In England’s West Country, she taught basket weaving at a rehabilitation unit for servicemen. It was on board a boat returning to Australia that she met wealthy businessman William Preston, whom she married in 1919. Together Margaret and William settled in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman. The most characteristic prints from her early years in Sydney are views of boats floating on Sydney Harbour and of houses clustered on foreshore hills. Although Sydney was their home, the couple travelled regularly, both overseas and within Australia.
Her first major showing in Australia was with her friend Thea Proctor, in exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney in 1925. Many of Preston’s prints were hand-coloured in rich scarlet reds, blues and greens, and all of them were set in Chinese red lacquer frames. Harbour views were again prominent, but in comparison with earlier artworks, they were compact and busy, using striking contrasts of black and white combined with elaborate patterns and rich tones. Other prints from this period featured native flora. It was with these still-life subjects that she convinced the public that Australian native flowers were equal in beauty to any exotic species.
From 1932 to 1939, Preston moved away from Sydney and lived with her husband at Berowra, on the upper reaches of the Hawkesbury River. The area was one of rugged natural beauty, and for the first time Preston found herself living in a home surrounded by bush. For the first time, the native flowers that featured in her paintings and prints had been purchased from local florists; they now grew in abundance around her home. Preston’s prints became larger, less complex and less reliant on the use of bright colours. Flowers were no longer arranged in vases, and Preston began to concentrate instead on flowers that were growing naturally.
While living at Berowra, and undoubtedly prompted by the Aboriginal ‘rock’ engravings found near her property, Preston also developed what was to be a lifelong interest in Aboriginal art. On her return to Sydney in 1939, she became a member of the Anthropological Society of New South Wales, and later provided the important Aboriginal images which influenced so much of her later work. In addition, she committed herself to creating a national body of art that reflected the vast and ancient continent of Australia.
During the 1940s, symbols used by Aboriginal people, together with dried, burnt colours found in traditional Aboriginal paintings, became increasingly prominent in her prints. The artist’s titles from this period frequently acknowledge her sources and reveal the extent to which she drew inspiration from traditional Aboriginal art to create her own art.
It was in 1953, at the age of 78, that Preston produced her most significant prints. The exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney included 29 prints made using the ancient technique known as stencilling. Many of the artworks in the exhibition incorporated her fusion of Aboriginal and Chinese concepts. Preston had admired Chinese art since 1915, when she acquired the first of her many books on the subject, and she had visited China on two occasions. Chinese elements may be found in several of her earlier paintings.
However, in her prints of the 1950s, Preston combined Chinese ideas with her understanding of the ‘Dreamtime’ creation stories of Aboriginal Australians. Preston did not let age alter her habit of working hard. As she got older, her love of painting, printmaking and travel continued. By the time of her death in 1963, when she was 88, she had produced over 400 paintings and prints. In a career spanning almost 60 years, she created a body of work that demonstrates her extraordinary originality and the intensity of her commitment to Australian art.
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Mind Music
A
Ever had a song stuck in your head, playing on an endless loop? Scientists call them ‘involuntary musical images’, or ‘earworms’, and a wave of new research is shining light on why they occur and what can be learned from them. Some neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists are studying earworms to explore the mysteries of memory and the part of the brain that is beyond our conscious control. The idea that we have full control over our thought processes is an illusion,’ says psychologist Lauren Stewart, who founded the master’s program in music, mind and brain at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, where recent research has taken place. Researchers haven’t been able to watch what happens in the brain when earworms occur, because they happen unpredictably. Much of what is known about them comes from surveys, questionnaires, diaries and lab experiments.
B
A Goldsmiths study published in the journal Memory and Cognition this year showed that the singing we hear in our heads tends to be true to actual recordings. Researchers had 17 volunteers tap to the beat of any earworm they heard during a four-day period while a device attached to their wrist recorded their movements. The tapping tempos were within 10% of the tempos of the original recordings. Another Goldsmiths study, published this year in Consciousness and Cognition, found that people who report hearing earworms often, and find them most intrusive, have slightly different brain structures, with more grey matter in areas associated with processing emotions.
C
Studies also show that the music in our heads often starts playing during times of ‘low cognitive load’, such as while showering, getting dressed, walking, or doing chores. Dr Stewart likens earworms to ‘sonic screensavers’ that keep the mind entertained while it is otherwise unoccupied. She and her colleagues tested that theory by having volunteers listen to songs and giving them various tasks afterwards. The volunteers who sat idle for the next five minutes were the most likely to report hearing the music in their heads. Dr Stewart observed that the more challenging the activity, the less likely the volunteers were to hear the music. Diary studies also show songs tend to match people’s moods and therefore they are not random. If you are energized and upbeat, an earworm that occurs is likely to be uptempo too.
D
Songs that are earworm fixes are usually those that have been exposed to recently, surveys show, which is why tunes getting heavy radio play frequently top the earworm charts. Even tunes you may have heard but didn’t pay attention to can worm their way into your consciousness, says Ira Hyman, a psychologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, USA. In an unpublished study there, participants who listened to music while doing other tasks were more likely to report that the songs returned as earworms later on, compared with participants who simply listened.
E
Some earworms are just fragments of a song that repeat like a broken record. So, when the mind has a part of a song it can’t remember, it loops back rather than moving on. That could make an earworm even more entrenched, Dr Hyman says. According to a theory known as the Zeigarnik effect, named for a Soviet psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, unfinished thoughts and activities weigh on the mind more than completed ones. The researchers found that this was indeed accurate, although experiments exposing students to interrupted songs have yielded mixed results.
F
Researchers say they can’t pinpoint a spot in the brain where earworms live. Imaging studies by Andrea Halpern at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, USA, have shown that deliberately imagining music and actually listening to music activate many of the same neurological networks. Dr Halpern’s earlier studies showed that when subjects listened to the first few notes of familiar music, areas in the right frontal and superior temporal portions of the brain became activated, along with the supplementary motor area at the top, which is typically involved in remembering sequences. When the same subjects listened to unfamiliar music and were asked to recall it, there was activity in the left frontal portions of the brain instead.
G
One factor that makes some songs stick might be repetition. ‘Repetition leads to familiarity which leads to anticipation, which is satisfied by hearing the song,’ says John Seabrook, author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, about how producers pump pop songs full of aural ‘hooks’, the punchy melodic phrases designed to target the brain and leave it wanting more. The researchers are comparing the melodic structure of 100 often-mentioned songs with 100 similarly popular songs that weren’t cited as earworms, to assess the difference. Songs with earworm potential appear to share certain features: a repeating pattern of ups and downs in pitch, and an irregular musical interval.
H
The researchers plan next to test their results in reverse, and play ringtones from songs of both the earworm and non-earworm variety for volunteers several times a day to see which ones get stuck. Drs Stewart and Halpern are now working together to recruit survey participants for a study looking at whether people at different stages of life experience earworms differently. ‘You can argue that older people might get them more often because they know more songs,’ Dr Halpern says. ‘But the few responses we have so far indicate that they have earworms less often. It could be that they don’t play music as often as younger people do.’
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Yawning
How and why we yawn still presents problems for researchers in an area which has only recently been opened up to study
When Robert R. Provine began studying yawning in the 1960s, it was difficult for him to convince research students of the merits of ‘yawning science’. Although it may appear silly to some, Provine’s decision to study yawning was a logical extension of his research in developmental neuroscience. The verb to yawn is derived from the Old English ganian or grinian, meaning to gape or open wide. But in addition to gaping jaws, yawning has significant features that are easy to observe and analyse. Provine ‘collected’ yawns to study by using a variation of the contagion response*. He asked people to ‘think about yawning’, and once they began to yawn he depressed a button and that would record from the start of the yawn to the exhalation at its end.
Provine’s early discoveries can be summarized as follows: the yawn is highly stereotyped but not invariant in its duration and form. It is an excellent example of the instinctive ‘fixed action pattern’ of classical animal-behaviour study, or ethology. It is not a reflex (short-duration, rapid, proportional response to a simple stimulus), but once started, a yawn progresses with the inevitability of a sneeze. The standard yawn runs its course over about six seconds on average, but its duration can range from about three seconds to much longer than the average. There are no half-yawns: this is an example of the typical intensity of fixed action patterns and a reason why you cannot stifle yawns. Just like a cough, yawns can come in bouts with a highly variable inter-yawn interval, which is generally about 68 seconds but rarely more than 70. There is no relation between yawn frequency and duration: producers of short or long yawns do not compensate by yawning more or less often. Furthermore, Provine’s hypotheses about the form and function of yawning can be tested by three informative yawn variants which can be used to look at the roles of the nose, the mouth and the jaws.
i) The closed nose yawn
Subjects are asked to pinch their nose closed when they feel themselves start to yawn. Most subjects report being able to perform perfectly normal closed nose yawns. This indicates that the inhalation at the onset of a yawn, and the exhalation at its end, need not involve the nostrils – the mouth provides a sufficient airway.
ii) The clenched-teeth yawn
Subjects are asked to clench their teeth when they feel themselves start to yawn but allow themselves to inhale normally through their open lips and clenched teeth. This variant gives the sensation of being stuck midway. This shows that gaping of the jaws is an essential component of the fixed action pattern of the yawn, and unless it is accomplished, the program (or pattern) will not run to completion. The yawn is also shown to be more than a deep breath, because unlike normal breathing, inhalation and exhalation cannot be performed so well through the clenched teeth as through the nose.
iii) The nose yawn
This variant tests the adequacy of the nasal airway to sustain a yawn. Unlike normal breathing, which can be performed equally well through mouth or nose, yawning is impossible via nasal inhalation alone. As in the clenched-teeth yawn, the incomplete yawn produces the unfulfilling sensation of being stuck in mid-air. Exhalation, on the other hand, can be accomplished equally well through nose or mouth, and it has been experimentally demonstrated that inhalation through the airway and the gaping of jaws are necessary for normal yawns. The motor program for yawning will not run to completion without feedback that these parts of the program have been accomplished.
But yawning is a powerful, generalized movement that involves much more than airway maneuvers and jaw-gaping. When yawning you also stretch your facial muscles, tilt your head back, narrow or close your eyes, produce tears, salivate, open the Eustachian tubes of your middle ear and perform many other unspecified cardiovascular and respiratory acts. Perhaps the yawn shares components with other behaviour. For example, in the yawn a kind of ‘slow sneeze’ or is the sneeze a ‘fast yawn’? Both share common respiratory and other features including jaw gaping, eye closing and head tilting.
Yawning and stretching share properties and may be performed together as parts of a global motor complex. Studies by J. J. P. de Vries et al. in the early 1980s, charting movement in the developing foetus using ultrasound, observed a link between yawning and stretching. The most extraordinary demonstration of the yawn-stretch linkage occurs in many people paralyzed on one side of their body because of brain damage caused by a stroke. The prominent British neurologist Sir Francis Walshe noted in 1923 that when these people yawn, they are startled and mystified to observe that their otherwise paralyzed arm rises and flexes automatically in what neurologists term an ‘associated response’. Yawning apparently activates undamaged, unconsciously controlled connections between the brain and the motor system, causing the paralyzed limb to move. It is not known whether the associated response is a positive prognosis for recovery, or whether yawning is therapeutic for prevention of muscular deterioration.
Provine speculated that, in general, yawning may have many functions, and selecting a single function from the available options may be an unrealistic goal. Yawning appears to be associated with a change of behavioral state, switching from one activity to another. Yawning is also a reminder that ancient and unconscious behavior linking us to the animal world lurks beneath the veneer of culture, rationality and language.
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