Take a look at this drawing. This is a “bust-up commission” of a character in an “anime art style”. Would you say a price around 40$ would be reasonable, under the assumption that an artist actually drew this? Most likely, you would say yes, or at the very least say something about the artist and/or their price, but at least have some good comments towards the process it took to reach this image. However, you must realize that all I had to do to receive this image was type

Historically, addiction has been viewed as a failure of one’s character or, simply, a lack of willpower and control in a person - a narrative heavily influenced by societal stigma. Due to this, instead of therapeutic solutions, punitive measures are taken against the individual, leading to isolation and massive obstacles to receiving medical care. However, modern neurobiology presents a vastly different reality. The initial decision to use a substance can be voluntary; howeve

Across the world’s communities and cultures, landscape preferences remain remarkably consistent, even among places that have never made contact with one another. This striking consistency can be explored through the world of evolutionary aesthetics, a field that uses Darwinian evolutionary studies to understand why some things appeal to humans and not others. Researchers studying this topic often look at beauty, art, sights, sounds, and shapes to connect aesthetic preferences

Hospitals are facilities where both physical and mental patients seek treatment, yet not every form of treatment is considered part of essential clinical care. Art therapy is one such example: it is often treated as a supplementary service rather than a necessary part of a patient's treatment plan, and as a result many hospitals do not include it as a consistently funded clinical service. But this raises an important question: should art therapy still be considered an optiona

Remember that overplayed song you now skip, or the Instagram aesthetic that became exhausting? There’s a name for this feeling: "aesthetic fatigue." It is the decline in pleasure from repeated exposure to art, music, or visual culture. But while the digital age has made this exhaustion feel overwhelming, it is not a new phenomenon. For over a century, researchers and curators have studied a nearly identical problem in the hallowed halls of art galleries: Museum Fatigue. Unde

Can what we hear actually change the way we see, imagine, and create? Have you ever noticed how listening to an intense movie soundtrack can make a simple scene feel terrifying? Or how playing a favorite playlist while walking down the street can suddenly make ordinary passersby feel like characters in a music video? We tend to think of our senses as neat, separate channels: eyes for seeing, ears for hearing, and skin for touching. But inside the brain, reality is far more bl

The placebo effect, one of medicine’s most fascinating phenomena, is often dismissed as ‘‘all in your head.” Whilst most people disregard it; research has shown that the power of a placebo effect to induce clinically meaningful neurobiological change is comparable to pharmacological therapies. Diverse processes mediate the placebo effect, which can influence physiological health outcomes; it is one of the most fascinating intersections of psychology, neuroscience, and biology

Imagine, you were at a museum and when you looked at a specific artwork it completely took your breath away. Or, picture yourself listening to a piece of music where each note glides into your ears like a soft spring breeze. This raises the question: why are we captivated by certain things so deeply? The root of this question lies within the concept of Neuroaesthetics, which is a field that merges the neural processes of aesthetic experiences, bridging neuroscience, psycholog

Introduction While media coverage into medicine development presents the industry as a single gleaming lab, with bubbling vials, shining lab coats and meticulous standards, the real process is significantly less glamorous than we might think. Antibiotics, one of the most significant treatments in human history, were developed slowly over centuries, from moldy bread to Fleming’s laboratory research and mass production. It involved guesswork, chance, careful research and signi

Developing a new drug costs an average of 2.6 billion dollars and takes over 10 years, with less than 10% of candidates reaching patients (Deng et al., 2021). At the same time, radiologists, or medical imaging specialists, work hard to find diagnosis and information from scans. Artificial intelligence, or AI has been growing and advancing over the years, possibly holding the key to faster, cheaper, and more successful drug development and medical diagnosis for patients. Howev

For many centuries, healthcare has been a means of diagnosing diseases, repairing damage, and extending human life through treatments meant to aid the physical body. However, as the world’s understanding of health has expanded, a debate has emerged: can healthcare truly be considered complete if it heals the physical body while ignoring emotional well-being? Some argue that healthcare’s primary responsibility should remain as the treatment of physical illnesses because as far

Call biomedicine what you want -Western, conventional, mainstream, etc.- for every name captures how much of a cornerstone to the modern medical field this science is. The field has worked on a multitude of life-changing diseases, from tackling sickle cell disease through gene-editing therapy, to leukemia through marrow transplants. These successes of this field have earned its extreme prevalence, and yet it fails in many regards. Biomedicine is effective as medical intervent

Note-taking is widely recognized as one of the most efficient forms of recording information– take, for example, schools, which expect students to write down important points from a lecture or to take notes while reading. However, what if making doodles, the very thing that many students are often punished for, proved to be more efficient than classic, written notes? Well, scientists think it just might be. According to results from a study performed on undergraduate students

The ongoing conflict in Gaza has gained worldwide attention and provoked discussions on humanitarian purgatory and international accountability. While the matter remains controversial, a critical matter demands attention and action; the health crisis. Before the escalation of the conflict on October 7, 2023, Gaza’s healthcare system already faced major issues. Decades of underfunding, depleted stocks, and border blockades severely crippled the healthcare system and the escala

For much of the last century, since the discovery of penicillin, antibiotics have completely transformed medicine, turning multiple once-fatal illnesses into treatable infections. In recent years, however, concern has grown around the evolution of natural resistance mechanisms against these drugs. Every year, treatments that once seemed low-risk and easy to recover from have become harder to manage. Among the causes behind this trend, one has stood out as especially alarming

The Impact of Interior Design and Artwork on Patient Wellbeing Is artwork in hospitals simply an amenity, or does it have a real biological impact on patients? A 2025 study conducted by the NIH firmly supports the latter. Visual artwork lowers heart rate, improves mental health, and provides a psychological distraction. Specifically, it improves emotional health by triggering the brain's reward center to release dopamine and it engages the default mode network to give a sens

The question of whether parents should be allowed to refuse life-saving medical treatment for their child on religious grounds is one of the most difficult ethical dilemmas in healthcare. It pits parental rights and religious freedom against the child’s right to life and the medical duty of care. While respect for belief systems is important, parents should not be permitted to refuse life-saving treatment when this refusal endangers the child’s survival. Ethical reasoning and

Have you ever wondered why humans create art? From an evolutionary perspective, a painting cannot feed us, a song cannot protect us from predators, and a sculpture cannot build shelter. At first glance, art appears almost unnecessary. Yet wherever humans have existed, art has followed. More than 45,000 years ago, across continents and throughout history, our ancestors have carved figures, composed music, danced, and decorated their bodies with remarkable consistency. If evo