"Mood Food" refers to nutrient-dense food that positively impact emotional well-being, brain health, and cognitive function, effectively acting as "food for the mind". By supplying essential nutrients like Omega-3s, vitamins, and antioxidants, these foods boost neurotransmitters and manage energy levels to reduce stress and improve mental stability.
Keiichi Matsuda is a designer and film-maker. His research examines the implications or emerging technologies for human perception and the built environment. Keiichi is interested in the dissolving boundaries between virtual and physical working with videos, architecture and interactive media to propose new perspectives on the city. He has been published extensively in print and online, and has won awards for design, drawing and filmmaking.
You might find his 4-minute short film, Merger(2019) interesting to watch:
Human Planet is a British television documentary series produced by the BBC with co-production from Discovery and BBC Worldwide. It describes the human species and its relationship with the natural world by showing the remarkable ways humans have adapted to life in every environment on Earth.
After watching the episode Arctic: Life in the Deep Freeze, now it's time to check your answers to the questions discussed in class, so click on the link below to find out!
Now that we have just finished the unit of Art, I would like to present to you one of the most stimulating photographers I have recently known: He's a French guy called JR, and he has described himself as a photograffeur (a photographer with a touch of graffiti in his art). He was awarded the TED prize back in 2011 for his inspiring work which he has spread all over the planet. JR's work combines art and action, and deals with commitment, freedom, identity, and limits. Check out his talk in TED: Could art actually change the world?
In 2011, Leonard Cohen received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature for "a body of literary work that has influenced three generations of people worldwide through his creation of emotional imagery in which poetry and music are fused in an oeuvre of immutable merit". When he came to Oviedo to collect his literary prize, he gave one of the most beautiful speeches I've ever heard in this kind of setting.
His voice is so soft and delightful, his pronunciation so clear and precise, and his tempo so fine-tuned, that I recommend you to listen and repeat his words: if you do so you will certainly make good progress in your pronunciation.
This post is dedicated to Paco for appreciating the good music, and for helping out with the classroom dynamics yesterday. Thanks, Paco!
After watching the very beginnings of the motion pictures industry in class, I'd like to suggest you continue learning about this amazing human enterprise. Movies have been around for several generations now, and have deeply contributed to shaping our understanding of the world surrounding us. Please, watch the following documentary up to minute 12, since you will have to answer to the five questions I pose below. After that, you're free to continue watching the video until the end, maybe you'd like to sit back, relax, and grab some popcorn... Just an idea!
Open Questions:
1.- Who created the well-known American Movie Industry originally?
2.- Who were its first audience? Why?
3.- What was frightening about The Great Train Robbery?
4.- Who's the author of a new film language in the US? With which movie?
5.- How did film making become big business in the US?
After watching the episode of Modern Family which deals with parenting issues, now it's time to review the words and expressions we worked on together in class. Below you can find the vocabulary sheet and the episode with the subtitles. You should watch it again, a second viewing is surely gonna be of great help to understand all the expressions we learned, and to catch all the jokes!
This is the last post before the exam, so I figured you could use some time off and watch these people turning a dull routine visit to the gas station to fill up the tank into the funkiest, funniest moment ever! Worth the watch, really! Check out their singing.. there's some real talent hiding out there... Don't miss the couple's good vibes!
And this is one of the most visited videos in 2011, a breathtaking recording of animal interaction in a nature preserve called Kruger, in South Africa. Judge by yourselves: fake or real?
Pretty amazing, huh? But there's always room for some critical reflection here: Do you think the man may be somehow involved in the way animals interact here? Maybe you wanna think about the dimensions of park safaris like this one...
... I know you guys were all heart broken the other day in class... But believe me, it's always better when we see and face reality as it is, and are not deceived by the appearances, don't you think? Now you can tell your friends that the poor lemmings never commited suicide. It's been a ubiquitous myth, but we buy it no more. And where does that myth come from? In 1958 Walt Disney produced White Wilderness, part of the studio's True Life Adventure series. This documentary featured a segment on lemmings, detailing their strange compulsion to commit mass suicide. But this was all fake! In fact, it was staged: the lemmings supposedly committing mass suicide by leaping into the ocean were actually thrown off the cliff by Disney filmmakers! The epic "lemming migration" was staged using careful editing, tight camera angles and a few dozen lemmings running on a snow covered turntable.
As Karl S. Kruszelnicki puts it in his article, considering a company like Disney, where one rodent, namely Mickey Mouse, was Royalty, it's rather odd to think that Disney could be so unkind to another rodent, the lemming...
Here I suggest a new listening task for you guys: it consists in catching the expressions the experimenter uses to describe some of the actions that he's carrying out in this video. They all involve an action verb. You just have to listen out for the sentence where this action verb appears, and write it down. Find the lists of verbs below. Then click on the key to the listening practice at the bottom of this post to find out how accurate you were with this information filling practice.
1) fill -->
2) place over -->
3) invert -->
4) support & remove -->
5) pour -->
6) overflow -->
7) place & turn upside down -->
8) come out -->
9) tip -->
10)cause the water to come out -->
PS: Didn't you just love his goggles?? Hey, maybe that blue coloring is totally radioactive!
Now that we're done with the mid-year exams, we might as well just stop for a while, have some time off to think and reflect on what we have achieved this year, which is quite a lot! (more than we would think, for sure), and shake off the stress we carry around as we are in motion, fast motion, from work to school, from school to our daily chores, etc... People from the Slow Movement know about this feeling, and some years ago started sending out this message for us to regain a more humanlike pace, and stop living like powered up robots.
What follows is a description of this movement posted in wikipedia, and a really nice talk by worldwide-known advocates of Slowness.
The Slow Movement promotes a cultural shift toward slowing down life's pace. It began with Carlo Petrini's protest against the opening of a McDonald's restaurant in Piazza di Spagna, Rome, in 1986 that sparked the creation of the Slow Food organization. Over time, this developed into a subculture in other areas, such as Cittaslow (Slow Cities), Slow Living, Slow Travel, and Slow Design.
And now watch the video. I suggest that you sit back on your chair, breathe, make yourself comfortable, and, importantly, leave the cell aside, no whatsapps to be checked and that kind of stuff... just relax and listen to these people talking about how to start shifting our minds.
Human Planet is a British television documentary series produced by the BBC with co-production from Discovery and BBC Worldwide. It describes the human species and its relationship with the natural world by showing the remarkable ways human have adapted to life in every environment on Earth.
After watching the episode Arctic: Life in the Deep Freeze, now it's time to check your answers to the questions discussed in class, so click on the link below to find out!
