A conceptual approach to the magical number 7

The traditional paradigm for studying the magical number is questioned and a new approach is sought in order to obtain a better conceptual understanding of this phenomenon. Building on earlier work, a theory is proposed whereby the results of an absolute identification experiment can be characterized by a single parameter to a reasonable approximation. This parameter is the variance in the subject's response to a sensory input. By reducing the magical number to a single parameter, we see that the value of the upper limit in information transmission depends not so much on the absolute magnitude of the response error, but actually on how fast this error grows with range. The theory also predicts a little known characteristic of the magical number. If this prediction can be demonstrated experimentally, we shall need to reinterpret the magical number. Received: 12 September 1997 / Accepted in revised form: 13 March 1998     

Notes about the uses of plants by one of the last healers in the Basilicata Region (South Italy)

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: The paper refers to the knowledge and uses of plants and to the linked ritual practices as referred by Matteo (It.'Zi Matteo', En. 'Uncle Matthew'), one of the last elder healers in the Basilicata Region (South Italy). Particular attention is also paid to the uses of 'Vruca' (Tamarix gallica L.) as a medicinal and magical plant used to heal common warts on various parts of the body. METHODS: After obtaining prior informed consent, we collected data through an open interview about the uses of the plants and on the associated ritual practices. For each species, data were collected that included the vernacular names, preparation, plant parts utilized and their method of use. RESULTS: The uses of 52 taxa are described. Among these, 43 are or were employed medicinally, eight as culinary foodstuffs, and 4 for domestic, handicraft or ethnoveterinary uses. Among the major findings: the ritual and magical use of Tamarix gallica L. to heal warts is described in detail; so far, no records of similar use were found in any Italian ethnobotanical studies conducted in southern Italy. CONCLUSION: Phytotherapy in the Basilicata region is practiced by elderly people who resort to medicinal plants for mild illnesses; we interviewed one of those traditional healers who is very experienced in the field, and possesses rich ethno-pharmacological knowledge.     

Disease Etiologies in Non-Western Medical Systems

This paper argues that disease etiology is the key to cross-cultural comparison of non-Western medical systems. Two principal etiologies are identified: personalistic and naturalistic. Correlated with personalistic etiologies are the belief that all misfortune, disease included, is explained in the same way; illness, religion, and magic are inseparable; the most powerful curers have supernatural and magical powers, and their primary role is diagnostic. Correlated with naturalistic etiologies are the belief that disease causality has nothing to do with other misfortunes; religion and magic are largely unrelated to illness; the principal curers lack supernatural or magical powers, and their primary role is therapeutic . [disease, religion, and magic; ethnomedicine, medical anthropology, non-Western medical systems, shamans]     

Können Tiere zählen?

The “magical” number four We know already since more than 140 years that humans have the inborn ability to recognize only up to four objects correctly if counting is strictly inhibited. Many vertebrates and the honeybee workers can remember up to four objects albeit they are unable to count. This inborn numerical competence common to humans and animals raises interesting questions concerning the purpose and the evolution of this ability. The “magical” number four is obviously a neurological, historical and mythological enigma.     

The Magical Activation of Left Amygdala when Reading Harry Potter: An fMRI Study on How Descriptions of Supra-Natural Events Entertain and Enchant

Literature containing supra-natural, or magical events has enchanted generations of readers. When reading narratives describing such events, readers mentally simulate a text world different from the real one. The corresponding violation of world-knowledge during this simulation likely increases cognitive processing demands for ongoing discourse integration, catches readers’ attention, and might thus contribute to the pleasure and deep emotional experience associated with ludic immersive reading. In the present study, we presented participants in an MR scanner with passages selected from the Harry Potter book series, half of which described magical events, while the other half served as control condition. Passages in both conditions were closely matched for relevant psycholinguistic variables including, e.g., emotional valence and arousal, passage-wise mean word imageability and frequency, and syntactic complexity. Post-hoc ratings showed that readers considered supra-natural contents more surprising and more strongly associated with reading pleasure than control passages. In the fMRI data, we found stronger neural activation for the supra-natural than the control condition in bilateral inferior frontal gyri, bilateral inferior parietal lobules, left fusiform gyrus, and left amygdala. The increased activation in the amygdala (part of the salience and emotion processing network) appears to be associated with feelings of surprise and the reading pleasure, which supra-natural events, full of novelty and unexpectedness, brought about. The involvement of bilateral inferior frontal gyri likely reflects higher cognitive processing demand due to world knowledge violations, whereas increased attention to supra-natural events is reflected in inferior frontal gyri and inferior parietal lobules that are part of the fronto-parietal attention network.     

Development through paper deals: space and politics of value in peri-urban India

The article looks at contestations over space in peri-urban India. It studies the acrimonious responses in defense of a local marketplace that occupied public land against the sovereign project of highway expansion in peri-urban West Bengal. It posits an opposition between two aspects of state governance—rational–legal and magical—that shape the contentions. In the rational–legal mode, the expansion of the highways represents the official development goals of progress. The magical aspects of the state engender the circulation of officially approved illegal chits that give occupying migrant villagers’ claim to the space around the highway. The ethnography looks at the affective economy of illegal chits that political parties and local bureaucracies use to bring migrating villagers within their ambit. It explores how illegal chits embody the state’s legible presence in the villagers’ everyday lives, their kinnetworks, communities and transform individual affective orientations toward space. In these new modes of simultaneous “space” and “place” making, public land is understood less as commons, but more as a stretch that could be divided among individuals and households aspiring to be “developed” or upwardly mobile by excluding others. The essay contends that emergence of the “right to the city” as a collective right requires a double-edged critique. A simple celebration of the subversive potential of the magical aspect of the state vis-à-vis its rational–legal mode may not be helpful for a politics of value that seeks to challenge the idea of value (or what makes life worth living) embedded in the wider neoliberal development discourse.     

Periodical cicadas

The evolution of periodicity and synchronicity of magical cicadas is studied by means of mathematical models. Received: 28 January 1999 / Revised version: 4 November 1999 / Published online: 3 April 2000     

Rathwa Pithoro: Writing about Writing and Reading Painted Ethnography

Based on fieldwork among the Rathwa tribal community of Gujarat, this article is an analysis of the ritual and installation of wall painting known as Pithoro. The analysis of the culture's own construct of what constitutes writing and reading is considered to bring out the magical power in interpreting that which is written and/or drawn. As the reading capacity is more significant, especially the one undertaken by the ritual specialist, the ethnographic account treats the paintings installed not only for the sake of ritual but to alter politicoeconomic situations of the Rathwa tribals in the course of history. This article presents the paintings as a total communication system, which is not just the work of art drawn but also written within the culture, as their own ethnography for the culture itself.     

The magic of the national flag

This paper aims to explore the question of the cult of the national flag from a few selected angles. I focus in particular on the magical dimension of the national flag. My argument is that the central position of the flag in nationalism has much do to with a magical mode of thinking. However, this type of thinking cannot simply be regarded as the legacy of so-called primitive or pre-industrial societies. On the contrary, I will argue that national flags are modern phenomena. The magic of the flag causes some people to behave as if the flag constituted an integral part of the nation. Damage of the flag is feared as desacralization, which may have direct consequences for the nation and threatens its existence. The magic of the flag is based on the confusion of two ontological domains: symbolic-metaphorical and metonymical-causal.     

Psychologie masculine et PMA

M.A.P. and their rationally magical aspects are often desired by the woman, rather more than by the man who would more readily follow a wait-and-see policy, at least at the beginning. Masculine narcissism inclines to be wounded essentially by sexual deficiency and infertility lived first as a temporary problem, touch him less, at lest apparently, at the outset of the situation. But in men as in women, we are well aware that the traumatic impact is particular and specific to each case and each individual, and never proportional to the so-called gravity of the infertility. Furthermore let us keep in mind that in itself the discovery of the infertility is always a psychological trauma for a man, with various possible consequences i.e. depressive state, culpability, behaviour of abandon, sexual problems, extra-martial sexuality, professional hyperactivity… a.s.o., in short an identity crisis. For Harrison and al. [3], infertility is one of the direst and most stressful situations a couple may encounter as a couple. Our role as practitioners is of course to take note of those different parameters so as to help man, and woman, to round that cape and to get over an ordeal they consider a tragedy. Then, and then only, will we be able to make use of the M.A.P. as of a realistic instrument to accompany them with, and not as a magical mean which excludes them.     

Drogues anciennes, drogues nouvelles, pratiques actuelles (2e partie)

When humans departed from their simian cousins, endowed with a large frontal brain capable of planning and self-reference in the arid savannah, they walked away from the shaded calm of the fruit trees on two feet to encounter a troubling world of new dangers and uncertainties. From that point forward, humans have created gods, myths, language and war and sought out magical plants to relieve suffering and anguish, escape the imprisoning world, and find the courage to confront it. For millennia, drugs have been a part of sacred, magical and medicinal knowledge. All medical psychopharmacology is based on the same foundation underpinning that “primitive” psychopharmacology, and the technological and scientific revolution of the nineteenth century, which made it possible to isolate active ingredients and synthesize new molecules, set the stage for the emergence of varied routes of administration, expanded by the circulation of people, goods and information on a planetary scale. Today, this mass consumption and trafficking, and the profits they generate, are resulting in major public health challenges in modern societies, as well as serious sociopolitical and economic problems. From an evolutionary perspective, pure psychoactive drugs and the direct means of administering them are recent phenomena and pathogenic in that they short-circuit adaptive processes by acting directly on the circuits of the primitive brain, which controls emotions and basic survival behaviour. This development and the use of cocktails of psychoactive drugs suggest an evolution toward the true chemical regulation of existence. After having previously discussed tranquilizers and psychostimulants (part one), this second part will describe the vast world of psychodysleptic drugs. Acting more on psychological processes expressed in “digital” mode, they disrupt self-awareness, perceptual categories, and analogic memories. Sometimes truly psychotogenic, they increasingly result in psychiatric complications, particularly troublesome in certain patients who are probably genetically predisposed.     

Cell and tissue fixation, 1972-1982

Conclusions There have been changes in the practice of fixation over the past 10 years. There seem to be at least two different pressures working. On the one hand, there is increasing diversity in cell biological techniques which in turn demands more variable fixation procedures. Some of these have been outlined. Some of this change in practice has percolated through to pathology where it has been found to be diagnostically useful. In surgical pathology on the other hand, there is the continuing financial pressure for more rapid through-put of specimens which includes more rapid fixation, often with the loss of potential for subsequent chemical investigations. These are the horns of the dilemma; both are wanted at the same time.It seems that there is no magical fixative in sight which will permit all investigations on all tissues. Rather, it seems that the future will hold increasing diversity in fixation procedures which will demand that practitioners be well informed as to possibilities which, hopefully, may lend to better understanding of the problems and mechanisms of fixation.     

Notes about the uses of plants by one of the last healers in the Basilicata Region (South Italy)

Human societies utilize mollusks for myriad material and spiritual ends. An example of their use in a religious context is found in Brazil's African-derived belief systems. Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion introduced during the 18^th-19^th centuries by enslaved Yoruba, includes various magical and liturgical uses of mollusks. This work inventoried the species utilized by adherents and to analyzed their symbolic and magical context. Data were obtained from Candomblé temples in two cities in the northeast of Brazil-Caruaru, in the state of Pernambuco, and Campina Grande, in the state of Paraíba. Questionnaires administered to eleven adepts revealed that at least nineteen mollusk species are being used. Shells from Monetaria moneta, M. annulus and Erosaria caputserpentis were cited by all of the interviewees. Three uses stood out: divination (jogo de búzios); utilization as ritual objects; and employment as sacrificial offerings (Igbin or Boi-de-Oxalá). The jogo de búzios (shell toss), employed in West Africa, Brazil and Cuba, is of fundamental importance to the cult, representing the means by which the faithful enter in contact with the divinities (Orixás) and consult people's futures (Odu). The utilization of mollusks in Candomblé is strongly influenced by ancient Yoruba myths (Itãs) which, having survived enslavement and generations of captive labor, continue to guide the lives of Brazil's African Diaspora.     

The ethnobotany of Christ's Thorn Jujube (Ziziphus spina-christi) in Israel

This article surveys the ethnobotany of Ziziphus spina-christi (L.) Desf. in the Middle East from various aspects: historical, religious, philological, literary, linguistic, as well as pharmacological, among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. It is suggested that this is the only tree species considered "holy" by Muslims (all the individuals of the species are sanctified by religion) in addition to its status as "sacred tree " (particular trees which are venerated due to historical or magical events related to them, regardless of their botanical identity) in the Middle East. It has also a special status as "blessed tree" among the Druze.     

Wonder or evil?: Multifaceted health hazards and health benefits of Cannabis sativa and its phytochemicals

Cannabis sativa, widely known as ‘Marijuana’ poses a dilemma for being a blend of both good and bad medicinal effects. The historical use of Cannabis for both medicinal and recreational purposes suggests it to be a friendly plant. However, whether the misuse of Cannabis and the cannabinoids derived from it can hamper normal body physiology is a focus of ongoing research. On the one hand, there is enough evidence to suggest that misuse of marijuana can cause deleterious effects on various organs like the lungs, immune system, cardiovascular system, etc. and also influence fertility and cause teratogenic effects. However, on the other hand, marijuana has been found to offer a magical cure for anorexia, chronic pain, muscle spasticity, nausea, and disturbed sleep. Indeed, most recently, the United Nations has given its verdict in favour of Cannabis declaring it as a non-dangerous narcotic. This review provides insights into the various health effects of Cannabis and its specialized metabolites and indicates how wise steps can be taken to promote good use and prevent misuse of the metabolites derived from this plant.     

Plants and People in the Isle of Man,AD 800–1800

Summary

Aspects of the relationship between plants and people on the Isle of Man are discussed. They include the gradual felling of Man's woodlands, and the survival of pockets of the original woodland flora; plants with magical and ritual uses, especially those with calendar associations such as the ‘herbs of St John’ and plants associated with Tynwald Day and Lammas; herbs brought to Man by early Celtic monks; the secular herbal medicine tradition, particularly the activities of the Teare family of Ballawhane; and the herbal remedy revival which resulted from the influence of Methodism in the late 1770s. Details of herbs used to flavour beer are given as well as information on insular and imported dyestuffs.     

Application of Lithospermum officinale L. in early Bronze Age medicine

A plaster made of tar with the fruit of Lithospermum officinale L. (common gromwell) was found in a woman’s grave discovered at site no. 14 in Szarbia, Koniusza district, Malopolska province. The grave is dated to early Bronze Age, the late phase of the Mierzanowice culture (from about 1750 to 1600 B.C.). The heat discharging and antiseptic properties of phenols contained in wood tar and also the pharmacological properties of the nutlets of L. officinale suggest that the plaster was used as medicinal remedy. It cannot be ruled out that the nuts of L. officinale were used as a sympathetic agent or even as magical additives in this mixture.     

Universal Aspects of Symbolic Healing: A Theoretical Synthesis

In this article I propose that symbolic healing has a universal structure in which the healer helps the patient particularize a general cultural mythic world and manipulate healing symbols in it. Problems currently existing in the explanation of symbolic healing are examined. The relationship between Western psychotherapy and magical healing is explained, the Junction qfshamanic ecstasy is discussed, and symbolic healing is explained in terms of a theory of living systems.