Science

I realized today that in all my posts regarding the brain and how to sculpt it with mindfulness, I’ve never actually explained how and why meditation works. Specifically, the science behind how your brain changes the longer you meditate. I think this is important for many reasons, but one of the most salient is that this information serves as a great motivator to keep up a daily practice (or start one). I’m sure you’ve heard people extol…

by Ashby Kinch | The Conversation In the Halloween season, American culture briefly participates in an ancient tradition of making the world of the dead visible to the living: Children dress as skeletons, teens go to horror movies and adults play the part of ghosts in haunted houses. But what if the dead played a more active, more participatory role in our daily lives? It might appear to be a…

by Melissa Chim | The Conversation Books have always had the power to cast a spell over their readers – figuratively. But one book that was quite popular from the 15th to 17th centuries, and infamously so, is literally about spells: what witches do, how do identify them, how to get them to confess, and how to bring them to swift punishment. As fear of witches reached a fever pitch…

Numbers are ancient, meaningful, and powerful. It was the Pythagoreans in the 6th century BC who were one of the first groups to popularize the idea that numbers are not merely mathematical symbols, but they actually carry spiritual significance. As Pythagoras was once quoted to have said, “Number is the ruler of forms and ideas and the cause of gods and daemons.” Thanks to Pythagoras, we have the system of…