It is not only a piece of matter that moves but also a universe of meanings and contexts. For philosophers, the word Meaning is everything but trivial. In a crowded street, you may point the location of the closest train station by extending your arm at speed in the direction of someone else’s head – […]
Another busy day unfolds through dozens of medical visits, prescriptions, and auscultations. The next patient, a medication-resistant chronic back pain case, enters the office and asks the doctor whether acupuncture has something to do with placebos. The physician feels like the artful and evidence-based bedrocks of his medical praxis are called into a tug-of-war. A […]
Ethics • Health • Psychology
Almost desperate, Rodrigo – the name is fictitious- visits his doctor seeking a solution for a chronic back pain he has been suffering for the last three years. After trying five different medications, none of them with effect, he receives an unexpected suggestion from his uncle, who encourages him to try acupuncture. He himself has […]
He was a man of insatiable curiosity and a hallmark of modern multidisciplinarity. Yet he was born on an April day six centuries ago. He never attended university, and still he authored masterpieces in the history of art and cultivated a broad range of interests and skills. Distant domains such as painting, sculpture, technology and […]
New York, Madrid, London, Susa, Dikwa, Kuwait, Paris, Ankara, among many others…, and now Brussels. A disturbingly long list of cities that have suffered the appalling hit of terrorist attacks in recent years. And while passing over the shock, we can hardly avoid asking ourselves about what are the causes of such destructive behaviours. Beyond […]
Intense flavors imprint our palate at every spoonful of Asturian fabada, an unquestionable cultural hallmark of Northern Spanish cuisine. Because of the present United Nations´ international year of pulses, we are visiting here some bits of the science about a food regime particularly rich in them. Beans, lentils, and chickpeas are feeding building blocks for […]
It is a crystalline description of how stubborn mental biases can be. Perhaps Albert Einstein, the alleged author, would have agreed with the proverb: “ it is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom ”. But ironically and paradoxically, it hides itself a bias behind. Einstein likely never said the sentence. Why so many […]
People , like cats, are curiosity-driven creatures that manifest unique inclinations towards certain stimuli. Curiosity´s unavoidability has been immortalized in the proverb of the cat. Could we be so extremely pulled by this impulse to the level of endangering ourselves for the mere sake of its satisfaction? The flip side of the coin is an […]
You have probably heard this sentence: “the brain is the most complex organ in the universe”. Let´s dive inside such assertion to get a deeper feeling. The human brain contains around 86.000 million of neurons distributed across a bunch of brain areas ( roughly 190 ). That´s one thing, not everything. Even more complex is […]