Nikos Nerantzis

Physicist.

[Brady Long @thisguyknowsai]

A neurologist studied patients whose emotional brain was perfectly disconnected from their rational brain, expecting to find hyper-logical supercomputers, and instead found people who could not decide what to eat for lunch or which day to schedule a meeting.

His name was Antonio Damasio.

He was the head of neurology at the University of Iowa. In 1994 he published a book called Descartes' Error that quietly broke 350 years of Western philosophy in 300 pages, and the entire field of behavioral economics was built on top of what he discovered.

The story that changed his career started with a patient he simply called Elliot.

Elliot was a successful businessman in his thirties. Good husband. Good father. High income. Sharp mind. Then a small benign tumor started growing in his frontal lobe and his doctors had to remove it. The surgery was a success. The tumor came out clean.

The recovery looked perfect. His IQ tests came back in the superior range. His memory was sharp. His vocabulary was intact. His logic was airtight.

His life collapsed inside a year.

He could not finish a project at work. He would sit at his desk and try to organize a pile of papers and get stuck for an entire afternoon trying to decide which sorting method was best. Alphabetical. Chronological. By topic. By client.

He could see the pros and cons of each one with perfect clarity. He just could not pick. He would still be sitting there at 6pm with the same pile in front of him.

He got fired. He took his savings and made a series of bizarre business decisions and lost all of it. He got divorced. He married someone his family hated and got divorced again.

He ended up living with his parents in his late thirties, unable to hold a basic clerical job, with a measured intelligence that put him in the top few percent of the population.

His doctors could not figure out what was wrong with him. They eventually sent him to Damasio.

Damasio ran every test he could find. Elliot scored perfectly on all of them. He could solve logic puzzles. He could discuss moral dilemmas with sophisticated reasoning. He could analyze a hypothetical business scenario and identify the optimal strategy faster than most people. On paper he looked like the most rational person you could meet.

Then Damasio noticed something nobody else had thought to test.

He showed Elliot photographs of horrific things. A burning house. A car accident. A drowning child. The kind of images that make most people flinch. Elliot looked at them calmly. He described them in detail. He could explain why a normal person would find them disturbing. He just did not find them disturbing himself.

The surgery had cut out a small region of his brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and along with the tumor, it had taken his entire emotional response system with it.

Elliot was not a man with damaged logic. He was a man with no emotions.

And he could not decide what to eat for lunch.

Damasio sat with this for years. He found more patients with similar damage. The pattern was identical every time. High IQ. Perfect memory. Sound logic. Total inability to make even the smallest decision in their own life. They could explain in detail what they should do. They could not actually do it.

This was supposed to be impossible.

For 350 years, the entire Western tradition had been telling people that emotion was the enemy of rational thought. Descartes had drawn the line in 1641. The mind is one thing. The body and its feelings are another. To think clearly, you must separate yourself from your emotions, suppress your gut, listen only to pure reason.

This is the foundation that almost every philosophy class, business school, and self-help book still rests on today.

Damasio had just produced the cleanest counterexample in medical history. He had patients whose brains had done exactly what Descartes told everyone to do. They had successfully disconnected emotion from reason. The result was not a hyper-rational super-thinker. The result was a man who could not pick between two appointment dates.

The reason became clear once Damasio worked it out.

Every decision you face in a single day has more options than you have time to logically evaluate. Where should I sit on this train. What should I eat for breakfast. Which email should I answer first. Should I take this call.

Each of these has dozens of variables. If you tried to consciously analyze every variable on every decision, you would freeze inside an hour. You would never get out of bed.

The reason you do get out of bed is that your emotional brain is doing the filtering for you in the background. Before logic ever gets a chance to weigh in, your gut has already marked most of the options with a feeling. This one feels off. That one feels right. That one feels boring. That one feels exciting.

Damasio called these somatic markers, body-based emotional tags that compress thousands of past experiences into a single physical sensation that points you toward an answer.

Logic does not produce decisions. Logic justifies the decisions emotion has already made.

Elliot could not make decisions because the part of his brain that put a feeling on each option had been removed. He could see all the options. He could analyze all of them. He just had no internal compass telling him which one mattered.

Every option looked equally valid to him, which is another way of saying every option looked equally meaningless. The tie was never broken because there was nothing inside him doing the breaking.

This was the error of Descartes. The error was not in his logic. The error was the assumption that logic could ever stand alone.

The implications of this go further than most people who read the book the first time realize.

Every confident, decisive person you have ever admired is not running on pure logic. They are running on emotion that has been well-trained by years of experience, and their logic is just the press release they release afterward to explain the decision their gut already made.

The people you call indecisive are not too emotional. They are people whose emotional signals are giving them conflicting tags on the same option.

Daniel Kahneman built his entire System 1 and System 2 framework on top of this finding. Every behavioral economist working today is downstream of Damasio. Every modern theory of cognitive bias starts from the same admission. The mind that decides is not the mind you think is doing the deciding.

Descartes was wrong on the most famous line he ever wrote. It is not "I think, therefore I am." It is closer to "I feel, therefore I can think."

You do not get to choose whether your decisions are emotional. You only get to choose whether your emotions have been trained on enough experience to point you toward the right ones.

[Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish]

A video of a Dutch policeman throwing a heavily pregnant woman to the ground has caused outrage. The woman says police attacked her at a migration centre where authorities had detained her Palestinian husband.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

BREAKING:

Israel is dropping white phosphorus bombs on civilian areas in the village of Arnoun, Nabatieh, South Lebanon.

These are internationally banned munitions — and Israel is unleashing them against civilians.

[Scientix @scientix_eu]

Are we teaching young people to think critically about #AI? 🧐

On #ScientixTV, we're interviewing Angelie from @AirbusFdn on their approach to AI and their free educational resources on artificial intelligence!👩‍💻

👉https://t.co/IaEacvlTKT

[Ηellenic Olympic Committee @HellenicOlympic]

🔝Nέο τρομερό άλμα από τον μοναδικό Μίλτο Τεντόγλου.
💪Απογειώθηκε στα 8.49 στο διεθνές μίτινγκ της Λεμεσού και πέτυχε την καλύτερη φετινή επίδοση στον κόσμο και 6η στην καριέρα του.
👏👏👏Μπράβο Μίλτοοοοοο
📺 @ertofficial_

[Scientix @scientix_eu]

🌍 Thank you for being part of the STEM Discovery Campaign!
Now it’s time to celebrate 🎉
🏆 The winners are live on the Scientix Community Tool!
📲Download the app, register, and see if you're one of them!
🤩 https://t.co/cL2piTZVmB
#SDC26

[Marka2‼️ @Marka2free]

Κατέρρευσε και το ψέμα της ΝΔ ότι η κυβέρνηση Σαμάρα έβγαζε τη χώρα από την κρίση κι ότι το μνημόνιο Τσίπρα ήταν αχρείαστο.
«Οι στόχοι δεν επιτεύχθηκαν, οι όροι δεν τηρήθηκαν και γι αυτό δεν έγιναν εκταμιεύσεις » στην κυβέρνηση της ΝΔ, αποκαλύπτει ο Ρεγκλινγκ
#στο_χιλιοστό

[Niko Efstathiou @NikoEfst]

Εγκαινιάζουμε την στήλη Explainer στο WIRED Greece εξηγώντας τι είναι το vibe coding. Δεν πληκτρολογείς πλέον κώδικα, αλλά περιγράφεις σε απλή, ανθρώπινη γλώσσα αυτό που θέλεις να φτιαχτεί. Εσύ δίνεις το «vibe», και το AI αναλαμβάνει την εκτέλεση. https://t.co/qNJncgb7Fv

[gfloras @georgefloras]

Η σημερινή ανακοίνωση της Ευρωπαικής Εισαγγελίας (σε μετάφραση) η οποία ξεκινάει, προφανώς, διαδικασίες κατά της Ελλάδας για την μη ανανέωση της θητείας για 5 έτη και για την παρέμβαση του Φλωρίδη για τις υποθέσεις πολιτικών.
(Λουξεμβούργο, 22 Μαΐου 2026) - Σήμερα, ο Ευρωπαίος Γενικός Εισαγγελέας απηύθυνε επιστολή στην Ευρωπαϊκή Επιτροπή σύμφωνα με την αιτιολογική σκέψη 16 του Κανονισμού (ΕΕ) 2020/2092 της 16ης Δεκεμβρίου 2020 σχετικά με ένα γενικό καθεστώς αιρεσιμότητας για την προστασία του προϋπολογισμού της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης (Κανονισμός Αιρεσιμότητας), επισημαίνοντας τις πρόσφατες νομοθετικές τροποποιήσεις και αποφάσεις με αρνητικές επιπτώσεις στην ανεξάρτητη και αποτελεσματική λειτουργία της Ευρωπαϊκής Εισαγγελίας (EPPO) στην Ελλάδα.
Η βιαστική τροποποίηση του ελληνικού Κώδικα Ποινικής Δικονομίας, η οποία θεσπίζει ειδική διαδικασία για κακουργήματα που διαπράττονται από βουλευτές του Κοινοβουλίου, έχει αρνητικό αντίκτυπο στην ικανότητα της EPPO να διερευνά και να διώκει αποτελεσματικά αδικήματα που εμπίπτουν στην αρμοδιότητά της στην Ελλάδα. Επιπλέον, η πρόσφατη άρνηση του Ανώτατου Δικαστικού Συμβουλίου της Ελλάδας να αναγνωρίσει την πλήρη ισχύ της απόφασης που έλαβε το Σώμα της EPPO στις 12 Νοεμβρίου 2025, για ανανέωση της θητείας τριών Ευρωπαίων Εντεταλμένων Εισαγγελέων για 5 χρόνια, έχει αρνητικό αντίκτυπο στην ανεξαρτησία της EPPO στην Ελλάδα.
Ως εκ τούτου, ο Ευρωπαίος Γενικός Εισαγγελέας ενημέρωσε την Ευρωπαϊκή Επιτροπή σχετικά με αυτές τις εξελίξεις, οι οποίες εγείρουν σοβαρές αμφιβολίες ως προς τη συμμόρφωση των ελληνικών αρχών με την υποχρέωσή τους για καλόπιστη συνεργασία βάσει του άρθρου 4(3) της ΣΕΕ.
Η Ευρωπαϊκή Εισαγγελία είναι η ανεξάρτητη εισαγγελία της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης. Είναι υπεύθυνη για τη διερεύνηση, τη δίωξη και την παραπομπή στη δικαιοσύνη εγκλημάτων κατά των οικονομικών συμφερόντων της ΕΕ.
Εδώ η πρωτότυπη ανακοίνωση:
https://t.co/vLW4chQ4pm

[VelvetThorns_ @VelThorns]

ΜΥΣΤΡΑΣ - Ανακαινισμενο Παλάτι των Ηγεμόνων
Η Αίθουσα του Θρόνου.
Η εμνπευσμένη απο ζωγραφική του Φωτη Κόντογλου, περιβολή του Αυτοκράτορα Κων. Παλαιολόγου.
Η εμπνευσμενη απο βυζαντ. τοιχογραφια περιβολή της Ελ. Δραγάση.

[Φερμίνα @ferminadas85]

Εσείς όλα καλά?

"Άδειασμα σοκ στην Ελλάδα από ΝΑΤΟ:
«Συνηθίστε τα ουκρανικά drones.. είστε μέρος του πολέμου» - Αφωνία στην κυβέρνηση

Ο Διοικητής του ΝΑΤΟ στην Ευρώπη Alexus Grynkevich αποκάλεσε..
«κοινή πρακτική» την επιδρομή ουκρανικών drone στις ελληνικές ακτές

[Chris Avramidis @chris_avramidis]

«Οποίος διαφωνεί με τον βασανισμό Ελλήνων από οπλισμένους κουκουλοφόρους είναι αντισημίτης»

Τι λες @AdonisGeorgiadi ?
Σου αρέσουν τα βασανιστήρια του Ισραήλ σε Έλληνες πολίτες;

[Erika  @ExploreCosmos_]

The Milky Way’s central black hole, Sagittarius A*, is often described through numbers that sound almost unreal.

It has about four million times the mass of the Sun and lies roughly 26,000 light-years from Earth, hidden behind dense regions of gas and dust near the centre of our galaxy.

Meanwhile, our entire Solar System is moving around the galactic centre at about 220 to 230 kilometres per second.

That sounds extreme, but the reason we do not feel it is simple: we do not feel constant velocity.

We feel acceleration, changes in motion, turns, vibrations, impacts. A smooth motion through space produces no direct bodily sensation, in the same way passengers in a plane do not feel the aircraft’s cruising speed unless it changes direction, climbs, descends, or hits turbulence.

The Solar System’s orbit around the Milky Way is real, but the acceleration involved is incredibly small compared with the gravity we experience on Earth.

There is also an important distinction that often gets blurred in popular explanations.

The Sun is not orbiting Sagittarius A* in the same direct way that Earth orbits the Sun.

The black hole marks the dynamical centre of the Milky Way and is an extraordinary object, but it is only a tiny fraction of the galaxy’s total mass. From our position, about two-thirds of the way out from the centre, the Solar System is moving through the combined gravitational field of everything inside its galactic orbit: stars, gas, dust, stellar remnants, dark matter, and the central black hole. Sagittarius A* is part of that gravitational structure, but it does not dominate the Solar System’s motion from so far away.

So saying that we orbit the black hole is a useful simplification, but the more accurate statement is that we orbit the centre of mass of the Milky Way’s inner gravitational field.

The mass of Sagittarius A* has been measured mainly by tracking the motion of stars very close to the galactic centre.

These stars move in tight, fast orbits around an invisible compact object, and their trajectories reveal that a mass of about four million suns must be concentrated in a very small region. That is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole.

The Event Horizon Telescope image later added a direct visual confirmation of the region around its event horizon, but the basic mass estimate comes from orbital dynamics: gravity written into the paths of stars.

The broader lesson is that motion in astronomy is not always intuitive. Earth rotates, Earth orbits the Sun, the Sun moves around the Milky Way, and the Milky Way itself moves relative to the cosmic microwave background.

We are involved in several motions at once, but we do not feel them because we are carried along with the same physical system. What matters locally is not how fast we are moving relative to some distant frame of reference, but whether that motion changes in a way our bodies can detect.

At galactic scales, the Solar System is not being violently dragged through space. It is following a smooth, long orbit through the Milky Way’s gravitational potential, taking roughly 225 to 250 million years to complete a single circuit.

[Scientix @scientix_eu]

How do we integrate green competences into teacher training across Europe?🤔
Let's discuss at the @nbs_academy online Closing Conference on 22 May co-organised by #Scientix🌱
✅Keynotes from NBS experts
✅Interactive panel discussions
✅Strategy sessions
👉https://t.co/3iIe5KGtRd

[VAR @Athens_1990]

Κόπηκαν κάποια δέντρα στην πλατεία Παπαναστασίου στην Πεύκη. Όπως φαίνεται τα κόβουν λίγα λίγα για να μην αντιδράσει ο κόσμος. Κάποιοι δεν θέλουν τα μεγάλα αιωνόβια δέντρα.

[Reporters United @reporters_gr]

2⃣ Έγγραφα από τη Διαύγεια τεκμηριώνουν ότι η #ΕΛΑΣ κατέχει δύο συσκευές #UFED για την υποκλοπή δεδομένων από κινητά μέσω φυσικής κατάσχεσής τους.

🔸Η καπνοβιομηχανία #Παπαστράτος (θυγατρική της Philip Morris International) έχει δωρίσει σε #ΑΑΔΕ και #ΣΔΟΕ δύο #UFED και ένα #Pathfinder, σύστημα ανάλυσης δεδομένων της ισραηλινής #Cellebrite.

[Reporters United @reporters_gr]

#Thread: Νέο ρεπορτάζ.

❗Με χρήση του ισραηλινού λογισμικού #UFED και αμφίβολη νομιμότητα: #ΕΛΑΣ και #ΑΑΔΕ παραβιάζουν κινητά πολιτών.

❗️Η σύνδεση της #Cellebrite με τις ελληνικές κυβερνήσεις.

✍️ Δημήτρης Καρακώστας, @Chondrogiannos
🎨 @spoovio

👇

https://t.co/6mUdYcoMlr

[Noema Magazine @NoemaMag]

“AI cannot replace human scientists.”

—@Sara_Imari

https://t.co/4B0yM4gaGa

[P.G. Papanikolaou @PGPapanikolaou]

Χιλιάδες νευροεπιστήμονες του πλανήτη 30 χρόνια φωνάζουν πως η εργασία σε πληκτρολόγια χωρίς εργονομικές συνθήκες σακατεύει την αυχενική μοίρα της σπονδυλικής στήλης και τα χέρια (σύνδρομο καρπιαίου σωλήνα και ωλένια νευρίτιδα) αλλά εσείς προτιμάτε να εντυπωσιάζεστε με δηθενιές.

[Quanta Magazine @QuantaMagazine]

The idea that depression stems primarily from a lack of serotonin has lost much of its support. Scientists are rethinking the causes — and definition — of the illness. (From the archive)
https://t.co/uX3TFfBUnf