Capítulos de libros

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Browsing Capítulos de libros by browse.metadata.categoriaods "03 Salud y bienestar"

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    2 Golden rats and sick empires: portraying medicine, poverty, and the bubonic plague in La Peste
    (Manchester University Press, 2022) Ragas Rojas, José Frank; Palma Maturana, Patricia Nataly; González Donoso, Guillermo Adrián
    With a ten-million-euro budget and 400 extras on set, La Peste (The Plague) – a ten-episode TV show produced by Spanish communication conglomerate Movistar and aired in January 2018 – became not only the most ambitious production in Spanish television history but also an overnight sensation among viewers and critics. This chapter examines how La Peste combines historical accuracy and fiction to portray the role of medicine, health agents, and population around a late sixteenth-century epidemic outbreak. Its release coincided with the centennial of the Spanish flu that killed twenty to fifty million people around the globe. In placing the epidemic at the core of the narrative, the show unveils the multiple yet contradictory ways people from various social groups and backgrounds reacted to the pandemic: either to save their own lives, procure a cure for others, or to take advantage of the crisis. The chapter highlights what makes La Peste a relevant case to study. As part of its marketing campaign, the production team deliberately sought to trespass the screen and insert the narrative into people’s daily lives. This team designed in advance of the TV series an interactive website with digital resources on the history of medicine and historical sites. Furthermore, in the days prior to the launch, several golden rats appeared in the streets of Seville to announce the show. While some viewers expressed their discomfort with the crude scenes depicting poor living conditions, others engaged with the campaign. As a result of this, La Peste constitutes a fascinating example of the possibilities offered by TV shows as vehicles for disseminating historical medical knowledge to a vast audience.
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    Chapter 5 - Imagination and mind wandering: two sides of the same coin? A brain dynamics perspective
    (2020) Villena González, Mario; Cosmelli, Diego; D. Preiss, David; Cosmelli, Diego; Kaufman, James C.
    The renewed interest in mind wandering has produced a wealth of knowledge about brain mechanisms underlying the generation of spontaneous thoughts and stimulus-independent cognition. However, how this phenomenon relates to the more classically defined imagination, with which it shares several key phenomenological and psychological features, remains largely unexplored. Here, we discuss whether and how imagination relates to mind wandering and whether they depend on similar brain mechanisms. We pay particular attention to the spontaneous/deliberate contrast in both these phenomena and the importance of considering thought contents, modality, temporality, and emotional valence when studying stimulus-independent cognition. We draw from recent advances in brain connectivity studies to analyze the role that the brain's default mode network (DMN) might have in articulating these two pervasive aspects of human mental life. It appears that such an integrative process is likely to depend on a highly dynamical DMN, one that cannot be reduced simply to a resting state or self-related network. Ultimately, this challenges the idea that mind wandering and imagination are substantially different processes and suggests that it might be worth looking at them as part of the same type of self-generated mental activity.
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    Microglia Function in the Normal Brain
    (2016) Heredia, María Florencia; Muñoz Reyes, Paola Cecilia; Salgado Cortés, Nicole Andrea; Von Bernhardi Montgomery, Rommy Edth B.
    The activation of microglia has been recognized for over a century by their morphological changes. Long slender microglia acquire a short sturdy ramified shape when activated. During the past 20 years, microglia have been accepted as an essential cellular component for understanding the pathogenic mechanism of many brain diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases. More recently, functional studies and imaging in mouse models indicate that microglia are active in the healthy central nervous system. It has become evident that microglia release several signal molecules that play key roles in the crosstalk among brain cells, i.e., astrocytes and oligodendrocytes with neurons, as well as with regulatory immune cells. Recent studies also reveal the heterogeneous nature of microglia diverse functions depending on development, previous exposure to stimulation events, brain region of residence, or pathological state. Subjects to approach by future research are still the unresolved questions regarding the conditions and mechanisms that render microglia protective, capable of preventing or reducing damage, or deleterious, capable of inducing or facilitating the progression of neuropathological diseases. This novel knowledge will certainly change our view on microglia as therapeutic target, shifting our goal from their general silencing to the generation of treatments able to change their activation pattern.