How did the face of an angry samurai appear on a crab shell? Detailed answer

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How did the face of an angry samurai appear on a crab shell? Detailed answer

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How did the face of an angry samurai appear on a crab shell?

In 1185, on the Inland Sea of Japan near the town of Dannoura (the coastal part of the present city of Shimonoseki), a decisive battle took place between the fleets of two samurai clans - Taira and Minamoto. The samurai of the Taira clan suffered a crushing defeat, most of them died in battle, and the rest preferred death in the depths of the sea to captivity.

Fishermen say that Taira samurai still roam the bottom of the sea, turning into crabs. Sometimes crabs are caught here, on the shell of which strange reliefs are found that resemble the face of an angry samurai. The appearance of the face of a warrior on the crab shell is considered by biologists to be the result of artificial selection, unconsciously produced by Japanese fishermen.

Perhaps by pure chance, among the distant ancestors of the crab, there was one on whose shell the outlines of a human face appeared, albeit vaguely. Even before the battle at Dannoura, fishermen, having caught the descendants of this crab, quite often superstitiously threw them into the sea, thus starting the evolutionary process. If you are a crab with an ordinary shell, people will eat you, and there will be fewer offspring in your hereditary line. If your shell bears the image of a human face, you will be thrown out, and you will leave behind more offspring.

The fate of crabs was made dependent on the pattern on the shell. Centuries passed, generations of crabs and fishermen were replaced, more and more crabs survived, whose shell pattern looked like the face of a samurai. Gradually, the drawing began to resemble not just a human face, and not even just the face of a Japanese, but the face of an angry warrior. In the end, there were a lot of such "samurai" crabs.

Author: Kondrashov A.P.

Random interesting fact from the Great Encyclopedia:

Who said: Let them eat cake?

You probably remember that history lesson in school like it was yesterday. 1789 The French Revolution is in full swing. The Parisian poor riot because the people have no bread, and Queen Marie Antoinette - insensitively indifferent, trying to joke or just out of natural stupidity - finds nothing better than to suggest that they eat cakes instead of bread.

Problem number one is that they weren't cakes, they were brioches (the original French text is Qu'ils mangentde la brioche). According to Alan Davidson and his Oxford Culinary Guide, "Brioche in the XNUMXth century was only a slightly enriched (with a modest amount of butter and eggs) roll, essentially not far removed from good white bread." So the proposal of the queen can be considered an attempt to do a good deed: they say, if the people want bread, give them what is better.

And everything would be fine, only Marie Antoinette did not say anything like that. The phrase has been actively circulating in the press since 1760 - to illustrate the decomposition of the aristocracy. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau generally claimed to have heard it back in 1740.

The last of Marie Antoinette's biographers, Lady Anthony Fraser, attributes this statement to a completely different queen - Marie Theresa, wife of Louis XIV, the "Sun King", although in reality anyone could say it: the eighteenth century did not lack noble ladies . It is also possible that the famous phrase was generally coined for propaganda purposes.

Another story is known, according to which it was Marie Antoinette who introduced France to the croissants allegedly brought from her native Vienna. To us, this myth also seems unlikely, since the first mention of croissants in France refers only to the 1853 year.

Interestingly, around the same time, itinerant Austrian confectioners brought the puff pastry recipe to Denmark. Since then, the famous "Danish buns" are known in this country as wienerbrod ("Viennese bread").

In Vienna, they are called Kopenhagener (that is, "Copenhagen" (German).).

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Stimulation of the temporal cortex improves memory 21.02.2018

Psychologists from several US universities have proposed a new method of electrical stimulation of the temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex. It proved to be more effective than previously proposed. Such stimulation is designed to activate the reproduction of information deposited in memory.

The fact that the temporal cortex is involved in the formation and storage of memories has been known for a long time. In fact, it turned out with the help of an accident: the American Henry Molaison, long known as a GM patient, was forced to undergo an operation to remove the right and left hippocampus. It was there that he had foci of abnormal cell activity that caused him powerful epileptic seizures that did not respond to drug therapy. Since the hippocampi are located under the temporal lobes of the cortex, when they were removed, they were also damaged. Molaison lost the ability to remember new information for more than a few minutes. Thus, it was revealed that the temporal lobes of the cortex of both hemispheres, as well as the hippocampus (this is also a paired formation), play a key role in long-term memory.

Patients with epilepsy also took part in the study in question. But they didn't have their hippocampi removed, but instead implanted electrodes in their temporal cortex to stimulate certain brain cells and thus prevent seizures. Using the same electrodes, the scientists also stimulated the lateral part of the temporal lobes of the subjects when they performed a series of tasks for memorizing facts and names. At the same time, the participants in the study actually retained information better in memory. This effect was especially pronounced in cases where the lateral temporal cortex was stimulated in the left hemisphere.

Stimulation of the temporal lobes of the cortex has also been used to improve memory, but the electrodes were placed in its medial (i.e., central) part, and not in the lateral (lateral). This was done because the medial temporal cortex and the hippocampus were considered the main brain structures for remembering. Activating the lateral temporal lobe of the left hemisphere is, in a sense, more convenient: it is easier to get to this part of the brain than to the medial temporal cortex and the hippocampus.

A new way of stimulating the temporal cortex could, in theory, help improve memory for those who have partially lost it, such as those suffering from Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia.

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