Friends are great. You share so much with them: interests, likes, perhaps even your latest crush! But now scientists are finding that best friends share much more than social and psychological traits – they even share genes!
Scientists at Yale and University of California, San Diego have found that we share a considerable amount of genetic material with our friends – close to 1% of the assembled DNA. It may seem small to many but in genetics, this value is practically off the charts! For some perspective, you also share 1% of your genetic code with your fourth cousins. This is when you share a great-great-great-grandparent. So, it looks like we seek out close friends who resemble our family.
To figure this crazy factoid out, scientists examined around 2,000 people in a racially and ethnically homogenous area. Usually, this
is not the greatest way to conduct scientific studies, but in this case it is good because it rules out a tendency to befriend people who share the same race. Continuing with the control group, they looked at around 1,300 pairs of friends and examined 1.5 million markers of gene variation within them.
Consequently it was found, the highest genetic similarity we share with our friends pertains to the sense of smell. This might explain why our friends are always in love with our impeccable taste in fragrances! On a technical front, this discovery led researchers to say that it may very well could be the sense of smell that brings people together into the same environment and thus into social contact. Continue reading →
Let’s look at a few blunt (and disturbing) facts about our society. Children are more overweight than any other time in history. They play more video games and watch more television than ever before. Children are being overstimulated with soda and cartoons and then we pump them full of drugs when they can’t focus inside a classroom. Parents are getting divorces at a higher rate than any other time in history, which strongly impacts a child’s sense of worth and personal development. Not to mention, there are a whole host of false parenting beliefs and cultural beliefs that have been proven to cause brain and emotional health problems within children:
“Ill-advised practices and beliefs have become commonplace in our culture, such as the use of infant formula, the isolation of infants in their own rooms or the belief that responding too quickly to a fussing baby will ‘spoil’ it,” says Darcia Narvaez, Notre Dame professor of psychology reporting on a recent study.
We often speak of the universe being a reflection of ourselves, and point to how the eye, veins, and brain cells mirror visual phenomenon in the natural universe. As above so below right? Well check this out. How about the idea that the universe is a giant brain? The idea of the universe as a ‘giant brain’ has been proposed by scientists and science fiction writers for decades, but now physicists say there may be some evidence that it’s actually true (in a sense).
The Study
According to a study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports, the universe may be growing in the same way as a giant brain – with the electrical firing between brain cells ‘mirrored’ by the shape of expanding galaxies. The results of a computer simulation suggest that “natural growth dynamics” – the way that systems evolve – are the same for different kinds of networks – whether its the internet, the human brain or the universe as a whole.
When the team compared the universe’s history with growth of social networks and brain circuits, they found all the networks expanded in similar ways: They balanced links between similar nodes with ones that already had many connections. For instance, a cat lover surfing the Internet may visit mega-sites such as Google or Yahoo, but will also browse cat fancier websites or YouTube kitten videos. In the same way, neighboring brain cells like to connect, but neurons also link to such “Google brain cells” that are hooked up to loads of other brain cells.
“The new study suggests a single fundamental law of nature may govern these networks”, said physicist Kevin Bassler of the University of Houston. “”For a physicist it’s an immediate signal that there is some missing understanding of how nature works,” says Dmitri Krioukov from the University of California San Diego. Continue reading →
There is a wide array of data that exists that would be best explained by inferring the existence of a non-physical soul, but a large barrier people often come up against is trying to understand how the soul could even fit into our scientific understandings of consciousness.
How does it work? Where is it located? How does it interact with our consciousness? Thankfully, we now have a theoretical framework that explains the existence of the soul and even the afterlife!
The soul is quantum information
According to Dr. Stuart Hameroff, a professor at the University of Arizona, a near-death experience happens when the quantum information that inhabits the nervous system leaves the body and dissipates into the universe. Contrary to materialistic accounts of consciousness, Dr. Hameroff offers an alternative explanation of consciousness that can perhaps appeal to both the rational scientific mind and personal intuitions.
Consciousness resides, according to Stuart and British physicist Sir Roger Penrose, in the microtubules of the brain cells, which are the primary sites of quantum processing. Upon death, this information is released from your body, meaning that your consciousness goes with it. They have argued that our experience of consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in these microtubules, a theory which they dubbed orchestrated objective reduction (Orch-OR).
We all know the difference between good vibes and bad vibes, but what is really happening at a scientific level when we talk about “vibes”? Or what about when we know someone is a bad person and can feel it in our gut, only to later find out that they are abusive and manipulative?
While there is an energetic and spiritual side to this question, there is also a hard scientific explanation of what is occurring when we tap into the vibes of other people. With the development of new scientific instruments, intuition is now something being studied using the scientific method.
The electromagnetic field of the heart
The heart generates a powerful and measurable electromagnetic field. Magnetocardiography is the science of measure the field that is produced by the electrical activity within the heart.
It’s mainstream scientific knowledge that the resonant frequencies of the field of your heart interacts with the fields of others around you. This effect is super strong within the first several feet in particular, but has been reported to be measured even at a distance of hundreds of meters.
Most of us know that the heart holds an energy system of its own and is one of the 7 main chakras within our energy field, and that our heart centers can interact with the heart centers of others. But it turns that it’s more than just an energy center for emotions, spiritual health, or even nervous system activity. The heart almost acts as a second mind with its own sense of awareness.
There is a lot of talk about meditation as being an essential practice to cultivate overall wellness. But meeditation is not just a way to cope with stress and seek inner knowledge. It literally has the potential to literally transform the world.
By transform the world, I don’t just mean transform individuals who meditate. When large numbers of people get together and meditate at the same time, it has an energetic ripple effect on the consciousness of the surrounding people. People who aren’t even meditating are impacted by the effects of the meditators. Let’s look at some of the scientific studies that prove this to be the case.
What studies have revealed
In 1978, what is known as the “Maharishi Effect” took place when a group of 7000 individuals over the course of 3 weeks were meditating in hopes of positively effecting the surrounding city. They were able to literally transform the collective energy of the city which reduced global crime rates, violence, and casualties during the times of their meditation by an average of 16%.
People who were not even meditating and had no idea that this experiment was even happening were being an impacted by such a degree that it caused a statistical change in their behaviour.
Suicide rates and automobile accidents also were reduced with all variables accounted for. In fact, there was a 72% reduction in terrorist activity during the times at which this group was meditation.
A specific study published in Psychology, Crime & Law found that crime rate dropped by 13% in Merseyside, Great Britain during time when people were meditating in large groups, whereas a control city where people where not meditating in large groups saw a steady crime rate. As the study concluded:
There were 255,000 less crimes in Merseyside from 1988 to 1992 than would have been expected had Merseyside continued to follow the national crime trend. Demographic changes, economic variables, police practice, and other factors could not account for the changes.
Almost 50 studies have been done further confirming the benefits of global meditation and it’s direct impact on everything in the world, with another study being published in Social Indicators Research which showed an overall violent crime rate drop by 15% when 4000 participants participated in group meditation.
We know meditation has endless health and psychological benefits, but it is now being explored by politics and sociology because of its undeniable impact on the behaviour of other people.
How can this be explained?
The secret of the Global Maharishi Effect is the phenomenon known to Physics as the ‘Field Effect’, the effect of coherence and positivity produced from the field of infinite correlation—the self-referral field of least excitation of consciousness—the field of Transcendental Consciousness, which is basic to creation and permeates all life everywhere.
Meditation takes your consciousness to the implicate levels of existence where your intentions have consequential effects on the explicate level that we interact with before it even manifests.
Consciousness gives rise to the material. The key idea is that all of existence emanates out of a field of universal consciousness, called the Unified Field or Super String Field.
Simply put, consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, and since all levels of reality arise out of consciousness, all levels of reality are affected by the frequency of vibration of the superstrings within this field of consciousness.
Here is theoretical physicist Dr. John Hagelin explaining more about this Unified Field:
“I think the claim can be plausibly made that the potential impact of this research exceeds that of any other ongoing social or psychological research program. It has survived a broader array of statistical tests than most research in the field of conflict resolution. This work and the theory that informs it deserve the most serious consideration by academics and policy makers alike.” — David Edwards Ph.D., Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin.
This effect is still ripe with investigation to this day. Here is a video on the power of group meditation:
According to 
Meditation takes your consciousness to the implicate levels of existence where your intentions have consequential effects on the explicate level that we interact with before it even manifests.