Music has long been considered a uniquely human concept. In fact, most psychologists agree that music is a universal human instinct. Like any ability, however, there is great variation in people's musical competence. For every brilliant pianist in the world, there are several people we refer to as ‘tone deaf’. It is not simply that people with tone deafness (or ‘amusia’) are unable to sing in tune; they are also unable to discriminate between tones or recognize familiar melodies. Such a ‘disorder’ can occur after some sort of brain damage, but recently research has been undertaken in an attempt to discover the cause of congenital amusia (when people are born with the condition), which is not associated with any brain damage, hearing problems, or lack of exposure to music.

According to the research of Dr. Isabelle Peretz of the University of Montreal, amusia is more complicated than the inability to distinguish pitches. An amusic (a person who has the condition of amusia) can distinguish between two pitches that are far apart but cannot tell the difference between intervals smaller than a half step on the Western diatonic scale, while most people can easily distinguish differences smaller than that. When listening to melodies that have had a single note altered so that it is out of key with the rest of the melody, amusics do not notice a problem. As would be expected, amusics perform significantly worse at singing and tapping a rhythm along with a melody than do non-amusics.

The most fascinating aspect of amusia is how specific to music it is. Because of music’s close ties to language, it might be expected that a musical impairment may be caused by a language impairment. Studies suggest, however, that language and music ability are independent of one another. People with brain damage in areas critical to language are often still able to sing, despite being unable to communicate through speech. Moreover, while amusics show deficiencies in their recognition of pitch differences in melodies, they show no deficiencies in tonal languages, such as Chinese, and do not report having any difficulty discriminating between words that differ only in their intonation. The linguistic cues inherent in speech make discrimination of meaning much easier for amusics. Amusics are also successful most of the time at detecting the mood of a melody, can identify a speaker based on his or her voice, and can discriminate and identify environmental sounds.

Recent work has been focused on locating the part of the brain that is responsible for amusia. The temporal lobes of the brain, the location of the primary auditory cortex, have been considered. It has long been believed that the temporal lobes, especially the right temporal lobe, are most active when processing musical activity, so any musical disability should logically stem from here as well. Because it has been shown that there is no hearing deficit in amusia, researchers moved on to the temporal neocortex, which is where more sophisticated processing of musical cues was thought to take place. New studies, however, have suggested that the deficits in amusics are located outside the auditory cortex. Brain scans of amusics do not show any reaction at all to differences smaller than a half step. When changes in tones are large, their brains overreact, showing twice as much activity on the right side of the brain as a normal brain hearing the same thing. These differences do not occur in the auditory cortex, indicating again that the deficits of amusia do not lie in hearing impairment, but in higher processing of melodies.

So what does this all mean? Looking only at the research of Peretz in the field of the neuropsychology of music, it would appear that amusia is some sort of disorder. As a student of neurobiology, however, I am skeptical. Certainly, the studies by Peretz that have found significant differences between the brains of so-called amusics and normal brains are legitimate. The more important question now becomes one of normality. Every trait-from skin color to intelligence to mood-exists on a continuum; there is a great deal of variation from one extreme to the other. Just because we recognize that basic musical ability is something that the vast majority of people have, it doesn’t mean that the lack of it is abnormal.

What makes an amusic worse off than a musical prodigy? Musical ability is culturally valued and may have been a factor in survival at one point in human history, but it does not seem likely that it is being selected for on an evolutionary scale any longer. Darwin believed that music was adaptive as a way of finding a mate, but who needs to be able to sing to find a partner in an age when it is possible to express your emotions through a song on your iPod?

While the idea of amusia is interesting, it seems to be just one end of the continuum of innate musical ability. Comparing this ‘disorder’ to learning disorders like specific language impairment seems to be going too far. Before amusia can be declared a disability, further research must be done to determine whether a lack of musical ability is actually detrimental in any way. If no disadvantages can be found in having amusia, then it is no more a disability than having poor fashion sense or bad handwriting.

Katherine Mansfield was a modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in New Zealand

Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was born in 1888, into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. She became one of New Zealand's best-known writers, using the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. The daughter of a banker, and born into a middle-class family, she was also a first cousin of Countess Elizabeth von Arnim, a distinguished novelist in her time. Mansfield had two older sisters and a younger brother. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, went on to become the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. In 1893, the Mansfield family moved to Karori, a suburb of Wellington, where Mansfield would spend the happiest years of her childhood; she later used her memories of this time as an inspiration for her Prelude story.

Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls7 High School magazine in 1898 and 1899. In 1902, she developed strong feelings for a musician who played the cello, Arnold Trowell, although her feelings were not, for the most past, returned. Mansfield herself was an accomplished cellist, having received lesion from Trowell's father. Mansfied wrote in her journals of feeling isolated to some extent in New Zealand, and, in general terms of her interest in the Maori people ( New Zealand's native people), who were often portrayed in a sympathetic light in her later stories, such as How Pearl Button was Kidnapped

She moved to London in 1903, where she attended Queen's college, along with her two sisters. Manfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed, during her time at Queen's, she would take up professionally. She also began contributing to the college newspaper, with such a dedication to it that she eventually became its editor. She was particularly interested in the works of the French writers of this period and on the 19th- century British writer, Oscar Wilde, and she was appreciated amongst fellow students at Queen's for her lively and charismatic approach to life and work. She met follow writer Ida Baker, a South African, at the college, and the pair became lifelong friends. Mansfield did not actively support the suffragette movement in the Uk. Women in New Zeland had gained the right to vote in 1893.

Mansfield first began journeying into the other parts of Europe in the period 1903-1906, mainly to Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England, she returned to her New Zealand home in 1906, only then beginning to write short stories in a serious way. She had several works published in Australia in a magazine called Native Comparison, which was her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her mind set on becoming a professional writer. It was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym "k.Mansfied".

Mansfield rapidly grew discontented with the provincial New Zealand lifestyle, and with her family. Two years later she headed again in London. Her father sent her an annual subsidy of €100 for the rest of her life. In later years, she would express both admiration and disdain for New Zealand in her journals.

In 1911, Mansfield met John Middleton Murry, the Oxford scholar and editor of the literary magazine Rhythm. They were later to marry in 1918. Mansfield became a co-editor of Rhythm, which was subsequently called The Blue Review, in which more of her works were published. She and Murry lived in various houses in England and briefly in Paris. The Blue Review failed to gain enough readers and was no longer published. Their attempt to set up as writers in Paris was cut short by Murry's bankruptcy, which resulted from the failure of this and other journals. Life back in England meant frequently changed addresses and very limited funds.

Between 1915 and 1918, Mansfield moved between England and Bandoi, France. She and Murry developed close contact with other well-known writers of the time such as DH Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley. By October 1918 Mansfield had become seriously ill; she had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and was advised to enter a sanatorium. She could no longer spend time with writers in London. In the autumn of 1918 she was so ill that she decided to go to Ospedale in Italy. It was the publication of Bliss and Other Stories in 1920 that was to solidify Mansfield's reputation as a writer.

Mansfied also spent time in Menton, France, as the tenant of her father's cousin at " The Villa Isola Bella". There she wrote she pronounced to be "...the only story that satisfies me to any extent".

Mansfield produced a great deal of work in the final years of her life, and much of her prose and poetry remained unpublished at her death in 1923. After her death, her husband, Murry, took on the task of editing and publishing her works. His efforts resulted in two additional volumes of short stories. The Doves' Nest and Something Childish, published in 1923 and 1924 respectively, the publication of her Poems as well as a collection of critical writings (Novels and Novelist) and a number of editions of Mansfield's previously unpublished letters and journals.

Gerry Marten and Dona Glee Williams report on reliance on the Indian village of Punukula, so nearly destroyed by reliance on pesticides.

Around 20 years ago, a handful of families migrated from the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, south-east India, into Punukula, a community of around 900 people farming plots of between two and ten acres. The outsiders from Guntur brought cotton culture with them, and this attracted resident farmers by promising to bring in more hard cash than the mixed crops they were already growing to eat and sell, such as millet, mung beans, chilli and rice. But growing cotton meant using pesticides and fertilisers - until then a mystery to the mostly illiterate farmers of the community.

Local agro-chemical dealers obligingly filled the need for information and supplies. These'middlemen' sold commercial seeds, fertilisers and insecticides on credit, and guaranteed purchase of the crop. They offered technical advice provided by the companies that supplied their products. The farmers depend on the dealers. If they wanted to grow cotton - and they did - it seemed they had no choice.

A quick ‘high’ of booming yields and incomes hooked growers during the early years of cotton in the region. Outlay on insecticides was fairly low because cotton pests hadn't moved in yet. Many farmers were so impressed with the chemicals that they started using them on their other crops as well. The immediate payoffs from chemically-dependent cotton agriculture both ensured and obscured the fact that the black dirt fields had gone into a freefall of environmental degradation, dragged down by a chain of cause and effect.

Soon cotton-eaters, such as bollworms and aphids, plagued the fields. Repeated spraying killed off the most susceptible pests and left the strongest to reproduce and pass on their resistance to generations of ever-hardier offspring. As the bugs grew tougher and more abundant, farmers applied a greater variety and quantity of poisons, something mixing 'cocktails' of as many as ten insecticides. At the same time, cotton was gobbling up the nutrients in the soil, leaving the growers no option but to invest in chemical fertilisers.

By the time some farmers tried to break free of their chemical dependence, insecticides had already decimated the birds, wasps, beetles, and other predators that had once provided natural control of crop pests. Without their balancing presence, pests ran riot if insecticide was cut back. As outlays for fertilisers and insecticides escalated, the cost of producing cotton mounted. Eventually the expense of chemical inputs outgrew the cash value of the crop, and farmers fell further and further into debt and poverty.

Their vicious cycle was only broken by the willingness of a prominent village elder to experiment with something different. He had been among the first villagers to grow cotton, and he would be the first to try it without chemicals, as set out by a programme in Non-Pesticide Management (NPM). This had been devised for Punukala with the help of a Non-Government Organisation called SECURE that had become aware of the hardships caused by the pesticide trap.

It involved turning to neem, a fast-growing, broad-leaved evergreen tree related to mahogany. Neem protects itself against insects by producing a multitude of natural pesticides that have evolved specifically to defeat plant-eating insects. Thus they are generally harmless to human and other animals, including birds and insects that eat pests.

The plant is native to India and Burma, where it has been used for centuries to control pests and to promote health. To protect cotton, neem seeds are simply ground into a powder, soaked overnight in water, and sprayed onto the crop at least every 10 days. Neem cake applied to the soil kills insect pests and doubles as an organic fertiliser high in nitrogen. As neem grows locally and is easy to process, it is much less expensive than the chemical insecticides sold for profit by the dealers and their corporate suppliers.

Quick, short-term gains had once pushed Punukula into chemical-dependent agriculture. Now they found that similar immediate rewards were helping to speed change in the other direction: the harvest of the next 20 NPM farmers was as good as the harvest of farmers using insecticides, and they came out ahead because they weren't buying insecticides, instead of investing cash (in short supply) in chemicals, they invested time and labour in NPM practices.

By the end of 2000, all the farmers in Punukula village were using NPM rather than chemicals for cotton, and they began to use it on other crops as well. The was using it. The status and economic opportunities of women improved - neem change gathered momentum as NPM became even more effective once everyone became a source of income for some of them, as they gathered seeds from the surrounding area to sell for NPM in other villages. The improve situation meant that families could afford to put more land under cultivation.

In 2004, the panchayat (village government) formally declared Punukula to be a pesticide-free village. And they have big plans for the future, such as water purification. The village now serves as a model for disseminating NPM to other communities, with around 2000 farmers visiting each year.

What began as a few farmers desperate to find a way to farm without poisons has become a movement with the potential to pull an entire region back from ecological disaster.