Alejandra González

In a variety of synaesthesia, photisms result from affect-laden stimuli as emotional words, or faces of familiar people. For R, who participated in this study, the sight of a familiar person triggers a mental image of "a human silhouette filled with colour". Subjective descriptions of synaesthetic experiences induced by the visual perception of people's figures and faces show similarities with the reports of those who claim to possess the ability to see the aura. It has been proposed that the purported auric perception may be easily explained by the presence of a specific subtype of cross-modal perception. We analyse the subjective reports of four synaesthetes who experience colours in response to human faces and figures. These reports are compared with descriptions of alleged auric phenomena found in the literature and with claims made by experts in esoteric spheres. The discrepancies found suggest that both phenomena are phenomenologically and behaviourally dissimilar

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI.

La sostenibilidad implica una nueva forma de comprender el mundo y organizar las relaciones. Nutrida en valores que se dirigen al equilibrio y desarrollo humano, instala la necesidad de actualizar los modelos educativos en Educación Superior y constituirse en aporte al desarrollo sostenible. En ese contexto, la universidad Bernardo O’Higgins, considera necesario compilar aquellas fortalezas del socioconstructivismo y el modelo dialógico, como formas de relación en y para el aprendizaje en comunidad. Fortaleciendo el análisis de la formación integral desde un enfoque cualitativo. Dando cuenta de cómo mejoran los procesos al participar en espacios como las Comunidades de Aprendizaje en Red.

Procesos como el estallido social chileno, o las recientes protestas en Venezuela a raíz de los resultados electorales, son algunos de los muchos ejemplos en la historia reciente de Latinoamérica que nos indican el aparente agotamiento de los mecanismos tradicionales de la política estatal, así como de su léxico político. Bajo esta premisa surgió, en el seno del giro decolonial, la reflexión sobre le concepto de la poshegemonía. Este concepto apareció con el objetivo de repensar la hegemonía gramsciana desde los estudios culturales y decoloniales, para cuestionar la relación entre las clases dominantes y las dominadas. Para este fin, se desarrolló una serie de reflexiones teóricas que, partiendo de una amalgama de influencias de la filosofía política contemporánea, buscaban, a su vez, repensar los cauces de la política en el marco del Estado-nación, y que ponían en el centro de la reflexión a la figura de la subalternidad. El presente artículo ahonda en las influencias filosóficas de la poshegemonía, proporciona un análisis sobre la capacidad emancipatoria de dicho concepto en su carácter epistemológico y teórico, y concluye ciertas lecciones sobre la exploración conceptual en la que se embarcan los estudios latinoamericanos al lidiar con la realidad poscolonial y la transformación de la vida política en el subcontinente.

Synaesthesia is a condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces photisms, i.e. mental percepts of colours. R is a 20 year old colour blind subject who, in addition to the relatively common grapheme-colour synaesthesia, presents a rarely reported cross modal perception in which a variety of visual stimuli elicit aura-like percepts of colour. In R, photisms seem to be closely related to the affective valence of stimuli and typically bring out a consistent pattern of emotional responses. The present case study suggests that colours might be an intrinsic category of the human brain. We developed an empirical methodology that allowed us to study the subject's otherwise inaccessible phenomenological experience. First, we found that R shows a Stroop effect (delayed response due to interference) elicited by photisms despite the fact that he does not show a regular Stroop with real colours. Secondly, by manipulating the colour context we confirmed that colours can alter R's emotional evaluation of the stimuli. Furthermore, we demonstrated that R's auras may actually lead to a partially inverted emotional spectrum where certain stimuli bring out emotional reactions opposite to the normal ones. These findings can only be accounted for by considering R's subjective colour experience or qualia. Therefore the present paper defends the view that qualia are a useful scientific concept that can be approached and studied by experimental methods.

La sostenibilidad implica una nueva forma de comprender el mundo y organizar las relaciones. Nutrida en valores que se dirigen al equilibrio y desarrollo humano, instala la necesidad de actualizar los modelos educativos en Educación Superior y constituirse en aporte al desarrollo sostenible. En ese contexto, la universidad Bernardo O’Higgins, considera necesario compilar aquellas fortalezas del socioconstructivismo y el modelo dialógico, como formas de relación en y para el aprendizaje en comunidad. Fortaleciendo el análisis de la formación integral desde un enfoque cualitativo. Dando cuenta de cómo mejoran los procesos al participar en espacios como las Comunidades de Aprendizaje en Red.