Online Museum of Oddities and Wonders
A scientist went into some old-age homes where the residents averaged 80 years old, and taught some of them Transcendental Meditation. Three years later he returned and found that 24 percent of the residents had died. Of the ones who practiced meditation, none had died.
In Tibet, monks occasionally performed brain surgery successfully. They would bore a hole through a person’s forehead and insert a tube into their pineal gland, at the bottom of their brain. This was to induce a “mystical state of consciousness.”
We know these surgeries were successful because some of the skulls examined show evidence of regrowth.
The Rx symbol that pharmacists use was originally the astrological sign for Jupiter.
In the times of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, around 350 BC, people thought that the liver, not the heart, was the center of emotion. Now we know that it is not the heart, either.
You may have trouble believing that your thoughts and emotions could reside anywhere but in your brain. That’s what you were taught. But what if you were taught that your thoughts came from your belly? Might that seem just as real as what you believe now?
A devout Hindu, to demonstrate his mastery over pain, raised his arm above his head and kept it that way for years. He held so still that a bird built a nest in his hand.
Members of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church have ten times less lung cancer, 40 percent less heart disease and one-fourth as many dental cavities as average Americans. Many Seventh-Day Adventists are vegetarians, some are vegans (no meat, milk or egg products), many avoid coffee, and most do not smoke or drink any significant quantities of alcohol.
It was illegal to teach evolution in Tennessee until 1968.
In the Bible, the fruit that Eve ate in the Garden of Eden was not specifically an apple. In the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, it is called a banana. Some scientists believe the fruit may have been a lemon, because edible apples did not yet exist in the time and place of Eden.