Category Archives: Science / Philosophy

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Most of us, despite our best efforts, feel out-of-sync, or balance, at times. This is, perforce, normal in the troubled times that we now live in — or, what our ancients articulated as their own essence of ‘troubled’ times. Whatever the epoch, a sense of a creeping, eerie feeling for adversity, or difficulty, […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The expanding realm of neuroscience has spurred a luminous surge — scientists have turned their compass and radar to brain activity that represents our emotional ‘flow.’ So, what in more ways than one, did not so much engage our ancients has, thus, undergone a huge sea-change. As neurologists define emotions as a brain […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Abraham Maslow, the noted psychologist and celebrated visionary, once wrote, “Life is moving far more rapidly now than ever before… in the rate of growth of facts, knowledge, techniques, and inventions.” He also added, “We need a different kind of human being, able to live in a world which changes perpetually, who has […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Most of us feel that our observations are often a precise interpretation of things. We also believe that such annotations are outcomes of verified interpretations. Picture this — for a person with no knowledge of using the stethoscope, the consequence of what each heart beat conveys is inconsequential. It takes a physician to […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The tropical rain forest is mankind’s lungs. Though the Earth cannot live without the rain forest — nature’s ‘automaton’ that turns carbon dioxide into oxygen — one alarming fact is apparent. About 50,000 hectares of rain forest are destroyed each day by burning to making way for beef farmers and fields for arable […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR “Blessings on him, who first invented sleep,” eulogised Miguel de Cervantes, the legendary writer. Yet, the irony is there is a distinct, also alarming, lack of awareness about sleep in the community — general and medical. Many physicians, for instance, continue to simply miss, or ignore, the ever-cascading, veritable surplus of sleep-related disorders. […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The use of antibiotics is based on the paradigm there is a battle in progress in the body and it must be resolved — and, that the body is not capable of success without drug support. Antibiotics ‘kill’ microorganisms related to a given illness or disease, all right; they also impede their duplication. […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR When Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity ‘toppled’ Sir Isaac Newton’s model which was dominant since the Renaissance, it led to a new resurgence — that the fundamentals of scientific discernment were not a fixed, or inflexible, set of edicts. Rather, such models were elucidations of certain composite portents reliant on societal norms, just […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The idea of being conscious and having sensory qualities, or perception, are independent of each other. This is autonomous of the sensory qualities that we all know — physical stimulus, physiological response, communication, psychological, or emotional experience. What does this signify? That our sensory qualities, whatever their character, or essence, are distinctive of […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR You are what you are isn’t as simple as it sounds. This is because who we are is based not just on our identities, but also our dreams, hopes, intelligence, memories, the world around us, and neurobiology. Neurobiology is the study of the nervous system and how the brain works, its anatomy, physiology, […]