nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
Children who take music lessons develop a larger corpus callosum, the bridge between the two halves of the brain, and the change is permanent. A 2005 review in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences found that early music training produces structural brain changes that persist into adulthood, even if the person stops playing.
The review was led by Gottfried Schlaug at Harvard Medical School, one of the leading researchers on music and the brain. He found that children who started instrumental training before age seven had a significantly larger anterior corpus callosum than non-musicians, and the size difference was still visible in adults who had not touched an instrument in years.
The corpus callosum carries signals between the left and right hemispheres. A larger one means faster, richer communication between the two sides, and the effect shows up in tasks that have nothing to do with music: spatial reasoning, verbal memory, and the ability to process multiple streams of information at once. The music built the highway, and the brain uses it for everything.
Schlaug also found that musicians had larger cerebellums, the region involved in timing and motor coordination, and more grey matter in the areas that process sound. The brain had physically reorganised itself around the demands of the instrument, and the reorganisation was visible on a scan.
The age window matters. Children who started before seven showed the largest changes. Children who started after ten showed smaller ones. Adults who took up an instrument for the first time showed the least structural change, though they still showed some. The brain is most willing to be rebuilt by music during the years when most parents are debating whether to sign their child up for lessons. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1659…
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
Earlier today I asked whether you supported defunding the RNLI.
The responses came thick and fast.
I’ve used some of them in my latest article.
But this story starts long before small boats. For me, it starts on my 21st birthday.
kayburley.substack.com/p/the…
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
With the heroes of the @RNLI under attack again, I’m reminded of this passage from Bill Bryson.

ALT I had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people - teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub - drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, imperilling their own lives, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that? The RNLI - I looked this up later - is an organization run by volunteers, supported entirely by public donations. It maintains 233 stations around the coast of Britain and averages twenty-two call-outs per day. It saves 350 lives a year on average.
Hi @thameswater We’ve all had a hosepipe ban for weeks, yet there has been a water leak at junction of Trinity Rd and South Pk Rd SW19 for weeks now. Why hasn’t it been fixed please? @MertonLibDems
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
Ballerina water fountain in Poznan. Poland. It’s so beautiful.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Unmarkiertes KI-Video, wie man z.B. am langsamen Öffnen der Arme während der Drehung erkennt, oder beim Vergleich mit dem Original:
whitemad.pl/de/prima-balle…
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
Somewhere a therapist is trying to get people to "live in the moment" while this girl is already three levels deep into a made up game that only exists in her head and involves real trains.
The world needs more pointless whimsy.
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
Something very significant here - the government has permitted itself to very quickly publish a 7 page unformatted pdf that sets out its views, gets straight to the point and doesn't waste months of civil service time.
You can just do things.
One of the most significant government publications in decades.
With strong leadership from the PM, the powerhouse team in Number 10 North & work with colleagues across govt, we are going to set our country on different & better path.
gov.uk/government/publicatio…
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
Families in London temporary housing told they cannot use in-built air conditioning | Society | The Guardian theguardian.com/society/2026…
I wish @Merton_Council would be more proactive on this issue
Today I've called the big dockless bike operators to a summit at @CityWestminster to help run this system more efficiently. Thousands of dockless bikes are in use daily - but when they're carelessly parked it's a pain for everyone. We fine operators, but more action is needed.
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
Parents: please, please, please don’t let your kids under 16 use e-scooters or e-bikes. We’re seeing an epidemic of serious injuries in children using these vehicles.
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
Look how they have romanticised this headline. Woman dies days after her partner is found dead.
Only when you read the article does it tell you Zoe Marie Dixon was bludgeoned with a hammer by her partner and it took her 6 days to die in hospital
He ran off and killed himself
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
i'm obsessed with AI DIY projects
my favorite one right now is this guy who built an AI system that listens for birds outside his apartment, figures out what species they are, and paints them on his wall.
here's how the whole thing works:
1. a cheap usb mic on his balcony listens for birdsong 24/7
2. BirdNET, Cornell's AI model trained on 6,000+ species, names each bird species from the sound alone (no camera needed)
3. every time it hears one, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image paints that exact bird in the style of an Edo-period japanese woodblock print
4. the new painting drops into a live collage of everything that's been singing outside in the last 24 hours
5. and it all shows up on a framed e-ink display on his wall that reads "heard today" like a little museum placard for his neighborhood
knowing which birds visit you used to take a field guide, a trained ear, plus years of patient practice.
teddy just glances at the frame on his wall and sees the cardinal came back this morning
honestly i'm highly tempted to build one myself haha
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
Hello, we are Jonathan and Abigail - unashamed pedants who want to bring this affliction to bear on all things public policy and practice.
We believe that details matter, especially in public administration. This is why today we are founding quibble: a campaign to fix the small stuff.
Think, for example, about the cookie banner that we click on every webpage. Each instance is not a big deal, so we just put up with it. But its cumulative impact adds up - on average we press it 5 times per day. The European Commission estimates that it costs EU citizens 343 million hours per year.
And who is there to represent the impacts of seemingly minor issues like this in a systematic way? We want quibble to be the answer. In the case of the cookie banner, lots of advocacy has rightly focused on privacy, but has this meant that user experience has taken a backseat? We believe there are ways to improve user experience without compromising on privacy. We will share more about this soon.
Consider another example. Did you know that in some government-run car parks you can be fined for a minor keying error, such as accidentally typing a zero instead of an “o”? Again, we will come to the detail of this quibble in the coming weeks, but for now just consider again the question: who? Who is there currently to systematically represent the interests of the parker who is given an unfair ticket?
An inherent feature of consumer interests is that those who have them rarely have enough other things in common to make collective organisation and representation feasible. This is the gap that quibble seeks to fill. Now of course excellent consumer interest groups exist. But understandably quibbles might not be at the top of their lists. Our hope is that quibble will be complementary; picking up the bottom-of-the-list issues faced by various groups - the stuff they are almost too embarrassed to raise because they are too small.
We are not embarrassed about detail. If you’ve ever had a splinter, you know small things can have a big impact. This is what quibble is committed to tackling, and our wider hope is that by doing so we will also incentivise policy makers to be even more careful about detail.
Check out our website here, including our first four campaigns: quibble.org.uk
It’s great that cycling is so popular in #wimbledon, but, if @limebike doesn’t collect its bikes, there’s nowhere for proper cyclists to park securely @merton_council @AJ_Fairclough
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
We'll enforce weight limits on residential roads to reduce the number of speeding & noisy HGVs, and carry out speed surveys to make our roads safer.
mertonlibdems.org.uk/our-pla…
nicola Schofield 💙 @nicscho.bsky.social retweeted
long shot, but someone has left their national gallery bag here in Waterloo (London) and i would really like it to come back to its rightful owner!! ive attached pics of the nearest bus stop and the building it was found on. pls dm me if it’s yours, ill post it to you!
































