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A neuroscience discovery about pupil dilation matches age-old wisdom from our daily prayers. Along the way we relive the Exodus and get ready for the redemption coming. Watch out. Your poker face may be more revealing than you know. A neuroscientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia has shown that when people make decisions, their pupils dilate, a subtle cue that could be used to predict a person's intentions, or communicate with people with locked-in syndrome. |
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When mass media pioneer, Marshall McLuhan, coined the phrase "The medium is the message," he probably wasn't thinking about Torah.
Nonetheless, by shifting our focus from what we are trying to say to what means we are using to say it, he opened us up to a deeper appreciation of our own tradition.
Take for example, the delivery of the most powerful and transformational message ever to have graced the planet: The Ten Commandments. Consummate educator that He is, the One Above composed a multi-media extravaganza that puts Cecile B. DeMille's cheap knock-off to shame. |
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Sooner or later, the question always comes up.
Once the human mind develops the capacity to associate cause and effect, everything becomes subject to scrutiny.
A young child's endless string of "why"s testifies to that, as does the physicist's experiments and the businessman's analysis of market conditions. Whether it's how did we get here, what killed the dinosaurs, or why does $4.05 sound like so much more than $3.95, we are fascinated with the story of how one thing leads to another, how the past leads us to the present, and how the now takes us forward.
So too it is with that most primordial of cause-and-effect questions: What created G-d?
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3:00 pm, Wednesday afternoon. Instead of getting ready to flee school like the vast majority of other Grade 7 classes, this particular group of 12-year-olds was just gearing up for their daily dose of reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. |
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One single prayer can heal a relationship, according to a new study released by Florida State University.
At least ninety per cent of Americans pray every day[1], asking and thanking their Maker for blessings of health, wealth and peace of mind. But what would happen, asked Psychologist Nathaniel Lambert of Florida State University, if we focused our prayers on the people that make us mad? |
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It was snowy and cold that Friday in February, but the butterflies had returned - to my stomach at least.
True I had done this all before, but never on such a large scale. A hundred pairs of eyes faced mine, waiting, wondering what was next.
I asked for two volunteers from the audience and several hands went up. In a multicultural setting like this, I made sure my selection was equitable - a male and a female, one white, one colored. I would administer the test and the volunteers would record and tally the student responses. |
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An industrial engineer at Ben Gurion University of the Negev has constructed a surprising new "bridge" between Torah and science, a bridge that is firm enough to withstand the strict standards of scientific scrutiny.
On a hunch, Prof. Haim Shore started exploring the mathematical relationship between modern measures of natural phenomena, and the gematria or numerical value of their Biblical Hebrew names. For example, what could the Hebrew word for pregnancy have to do with the period of gestation? It turns out that the word, heraiyon, with a numerical value of 271, maps exactly into the length of the average human pregnancy, which is 271 days. |
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Freaky. Spooky. We've all had that feeling when those random details that comprise daily life suddenly fall into place as if... as if... they are not really random after all |
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Suddenly I realized I was stuck. All the course work was behind me - the botany, zoology, statistics. My thesis topic was approved, I had read all the relevant background literature, my hypothesis was stated, methods chosen, data collected over four years, results analyzed, and conclusions made. In the emerging discipline of Applied Ecology, this doctoral thesis had all the ingredients of a significant contribution. |
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Soul of Science 
