Manuel Martín-Loeches (Alcalá de Henares, 1964) PhD, is Professor of Psychobiology at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has published more than a hundred scientific articles and works with several media outlets in radio, television, and the press, among them El Cultural de El Mundo, the magazine QUO, la Cadena SER radio, TVE (Spanish TV), and the TV channel Cuatro, as well as participating in congresses and lectures.
His area of research has always been the brain and human cognition. He has engaged in postdoctoral studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and the Humboldt University of Berlin and, later at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at the University College of London, among others.
The basic cognitive processes he has been working on in his research include visual attention, working memory and, in particular, human language. In recent years he has given special attention to the evolution of the human mind and brain and, in this field, has contributed several essays on the role of working memory in the advent of the modern human mind, the relations between the form of the brain and cognition, and the interactions between the emotions and cognitive processes, with the aim of studying the vulnerability of the human mind and brain to external, fundamentally social, factors. He has also contributed to the study of the neurocognitive mechanisms of religion, aesthetics, and art, as well as those of such social, such human emotions as guilt, shame, and pride.
He is author of the books ¿Qué es la actividad cerebral? Técnicas para su estudio (Biblioteca Nueva, 2001), La mente del Homo sapiens. El cerebro y la evolución humana (Aguilar, 2008), La evolución del cerebro: la fascinante historia de nuestra mente (RBA, 2018), and El cerebro social: por qué estamos diseñados para conectar con los demás (RBA, 2019). With Juan Luis Arsuaga he co-authored the widely acclaimed El sello indeleble: pasado, presente y futuro del ser humano (Debate, 2013).
His most recent essay is ¿De qué nos sirve ser tan listos? (Destino, 2023).
«Every time I have a problem with neuroscience, I ask Manuel Martín-Loeches about it. He knows what he’s talking and writing about.»
Juan Luis Arsuaga, paleoanthropologist & bestselling author
