The strange brain of Westerners, the subversive Sevillians of the sixties and other books of the week

Without human genes we cannot learn to read and write.

But reading and writing modify the brain.

It is the essential argument from which emerges the essay written by Harvard evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich

.

Throughout its almost 800 pages, it describes how the extensive literacy of the population of developed countries, which unfortunately remains a rarity among the thousand cultures of planet Earth, has modified the configuration of their neurons.

The differences between Western populations and other cultures go beyond perceiving letters and words, those very special objects, Javier Sampedro explains in his book review: the distinctive features extend to spatial reasoning, attention, memory, fairness, risk appetite, pattern recognition, inductive thinking, and even susceptibility to optical illusions.

For his part, in his literary testament after his recent death, Bruno Latour, the last great philosopher of science, delivers the volume

, in which he points out that climate change is an opportunity to understand where we live, what kind of place Earth is, and what kind of freedom is required to keep it habitable for us and the rest of the world. beings.

It starts from the basis that our planet is not an immutable place: living beings have struggled for millions of years to transform the environment and create the best conditions for their existence while evolving.

The result of that balance is the Earth as we know it, only now we are transforming it at an unsustainable rate.

It's time to slow down, to redirect, says Latour.

Among the outstanding books of the week there is also the volume entitled

, in which Fran G. Matute explains how minorities in 1960s Seville connected with a tumultuous avant-garde during a radicalized period.

While Franco and another 10,000 parishioners in that Spain of the crucifix and iron hand attended the cardinal's homily in the Plaza de España in Seville, a group of hippies experimented with hallucinogens in a place in Alcalá de Guadaíra on a trip distorted by the screams of the pigs being castrated on a nearby farm.

Seeds of aesthetic and ideological subversion that evolved into relevant figures in the culture of democracy.

Seville, like Madrid or Barcelona, ​​also became a magnetic pole for a youth that wanted to get rid of the authoritarian dirt.

Leila Guerriero has been in charge of editing a volume that collects 130 journalistic columns by the Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez, author of books that have established her as the queen of the horror novel, but also of respected chronicles and excellent stories.

The book, titled

, brings together a large set of opinions, chronicles and many portraits of admired artists that, added together, make up a long self-portrait in installments of the author herself.

The critics of

also review other interesting essays, such as the one written by Carlos Álvarez Nogal, entitled

, about the Genoese Bartolomé Spínola, who became a general factor of King Philip IV and which provides insight into the functioning of the Royal Treasury. of a court plunged into decadence in the middle years of the 17th century.

Or the compilation of critical essays written by women, coordinated by renowned artists Sinéad Gleeson and Kim Gordon under the title

, and which analyzes how melodies build a sentimental education and mark out the chronology of memory.

Lastly, in addition to Jordi Doce's book of poetry,

, the Saturday cultural supplement of EL PAÍS also dedicates its space to Giorgio Agamben's book

, which raises doubts about the German poet's supposed dementia while relates the interested circumstances that led to take it as true.

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