A book called the Zohar emerged during the Middle Ages, giving rise to a Jewish form of mystical speculation known as the "Cabala" and creating strong interest in the system's mystical teachings in both Jewish and Christian circles. During the Renaissance, Pico, Reuchlin, and Ricci led in applying the Zohar's mystical teachings to the OT in defense of Christian doctrines such at that of the Tri...

JCB • VOLUME 214 • NUMBER 2 • 2016 122 Growing up in the Boston area, Cliff Brangwynne was a kid with distinct interests. He recalls performing one of his fi rst experiments after watching a TV program on quantum mechanics: spending an afternoon bouncing a tennis ball off a wall in an attempt to observe quantum tunneling. Through high school, he read pop-science books about the weirdness of the...

Aesthetics in chess is a concept competent players are quite familiar with. For many, it is one of the main reasons they play. Much of the research with regard to chess however, has been towards making machines play better and to understand how humans think. This article explores the principles of chess aesthetics and proposes a computational model based on those principles. An experiment was c...

Nowadays firms have to use concurrent design to meet customers’ expectations. A plural approach to the design process is essential. Unfortunately, the design activity involves experts specialized in various aspects of the product such as aesthetics, ergonomics and mechanics. Thus the collaboration between these experts is particularly difficult in the convergence steps and often results in comp...

A large body of evidence, including longitudinal analyses of personality change, suggests that core personality traits are predominantly stable after age 30. To our knowledge, no study has demonstrated changes in personality in healthy adults after an experimentally manipulated discrete event. Intriguingly, double-blind controlled studies have shown that the classic hallucinogen psilocybin occa...

This paper examines the similarities and differences between ideas deriving from Rabbinic and mystical Judaism and psychoanalytic concepts. It will present material both from the Talmud and the Kabbalah (particularly the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalistic writings). While not arguing necessarily for any historical continuity it explores how Jewish ideas provide a deep structure underlying psychoana...

The main goal of this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to identify the neural correlates of a mystical experience. The brain activity of Carmelite nuns was measured while they were subjectively in a state of union with God. This state was associated with significant loci of activation in the right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior an...