Universal Spirituality

For more than 3000 years, mantras (sacred sounds) have been chanted for the purpose of spiritual healing. Some of them are short mantras, consisting of a single word or even just a syllable (named bija mantras), while others are long mantras, which are made of a sequence of words, from only a few to more than a hundred.…
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  “Summary: Regardless of receptor types, spiking patterns determine vibrotactile frequency perception. The findings challenge existing theories about how Pacinian receptor channels work together in response to vibrotactile stimulation.” – eLife. Researchers have demonstrated a universal decoding…
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  In the summer of 1935, the physicists Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger engaged in a rich, multifaceted and sometimes fretful correspondence about the implications of the new theory of quantum mechanics. The focus of their worry was what Schrödinger later dubbed entanglement: the inability to describe two quantum…
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  The prevailing consensus in neuroscience is that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain and its metabolism. When the brain dies, the mind and consciousness of the being to whom that brain belonged ceases to exist. In other words, without a brain there can be no consciousness. But according to the…
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  Photons – those fundamental particles of light – have a slew of interesting properties, including the fact they don’t tend to crash into one another. That hasn’t stopped physicists from trying, though. University of Chicago physicists have come up with a new, highly flexible way to make…
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  The entrainment of theta brain waves with a commercially available device not only enhances theta wave activity, but also boosts memory performance. That’s according to new research from the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, published in the journal Cognitive Neuroscience.…
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  Imagine pursuing to write your name so that it can be read in a mirror. Your brain has all of the visual information you need, and you’re a pro at writing your own name. Still, this task is very difficult for most people. That’s because it requires the brain to perform a mental transformation that it’s not…
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  The concept of “spiritual experience” is subjective, which makes it hard to study. One team of scientists, however, decided to look at what happens to the brain during a spiritual experience, independent of how you define what that is. The results offer some insight into the role spirituality might play in mental…
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  A man by the name of Alexander Marshack, in the 1960s found a piece of bone near the headwaters of the Nile. The bone was close to 30,000 years old. But its age however, was not the most interesting feature. What made this bone particularly unusual is that it had, at periodic intervals, notches carved into it as if to mark a…
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  The nature-versus-nurture argument of intelligence just got a lot more complicated with the discovery that the environment can modify the expression of a key gene in the brain, affecting intelligence far more than we previously thought. Such a finding may not come as a surprise if you remember that numerous genes…
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