3d illusion arts: Oddity Central

Oddity Central

Scientists Declare Buddhist Monk the Happiest Man in the World
The Delicate Gourd Carving Art of Marilyn Sunderland
The Bone Collector – Man Amasses Creepy Collection of over 7,000 Animal Skulls and Bones

Scientists Declare Buddhist Monk the Happiest Man in the World

Posted: 01 Nov 2012 12:39 PM PDT

Matthieu Ricard, a French researcher turned Buddhist monk was declared the happiest man on Earth by a group of scientists, after it was discovered his brain produces a level of gamma waves never before reported in the field of neuroscience.

A former molecular geneticist who left his life and career behind to discover the secrets of Buddhism, Matthieu Ricard is now one of the most celebrated monks in the Himalayas and a trusted advisor of the Dalai Lama. And while this transformation is impressive enough, there’s something else that makes Ricard a very special person. In 2009, neuroscientist Richard Davidson, from the University of Wisconsin, wired up the French monk’s head with 256 sensors as part of a research project on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation. The scans showed something remarkable: when meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produced a level of gamma waves linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory that were never even reported before in neuroscience literature. Furthermore, the scans scans also showed excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity. These results earned Matthieu Ricard the unofficial title of “happiest man in the world”.

Photo: AFP

But the 66-year-old wonder monk wasn’t always on the path to enlightenment. He grew up in Paris, as the son of well-known French libertarian philosopher Jean-Francois Revel and abstract watercolor painter Yahne Le Toumelin. ”All these people used to come around, most of Paris intellectual life. We had all the French painters and I was myself interested in classical music so I met a lot of musicians,” Ricard remembers about his childhood. ”At lunch we’d have three Nobel Prize winners eating with us. It was fantastic… Some of them were wonderful but some could be difficult.” But by the time he got his PhD in cell genetics, from the Pasteur Institute, in 1972, he had already become fed up with intelectual party debates, and started traveling to Darjeeling, India, during his vacations. It was there that he met Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, considered the greatest Buddhist master of the 20th century, and started dedicating himself to studying Buddhism. He eventually moved to India and for a quarter of a century he cut of most of his ties to the Western world. 26 years later, he returned as somewhat of a celebrity, after “The Monk And The Philosopher,” a dialogue on the meaning of life he wrote with his father, became a best seller. His peaceful life was over, as he began to do more dialogues with scientists, and the whole thing spiraled out of control.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Ricard started getting more involved with research and the science of meditation, placing himself at the forefront of of ground-breaking experiments in this new phenomenon that came to be known as neuroplasticity. ”We have been looking for 12 years at the effect of short and long-term mind-training through meditation on attention, on compassion, on emotional balance,” he says. ”We’ve found remarkable results with long-term practitioners who did 50,000 rounds of meditation, but also with three weeks of 20 minutes a day, which of course is more applicable to our modern times.” the Frenchman, who describes Buddhism as “a science of the mind”, is setting out to show how meditation can alter the human brain and improve people’s happiness in the same way weightlifting affects muscles. And he’s the best proof.

via New York Daily News

Scientists Declare Buddhist Monk the Happiest Man in the World was originally posted at OddityCentral.com

The Delicate Gourd Carving Art of Marilyn Sunderland

Posted: 01 Nov 2012 11:18 AM PDT

Born and raised in Columbia, Missouri, Marilyn Sunderland is an artist in the finest sense of the word. She can take a common gourd and turn it into a spectacular work of art by carving all kinds of images onto its shell and enhancing them with her painting.

Seeing how this Halloween a lot of websites are focusing on pumpkin art, like that of sculpting master Ray Villafane, I thought I’d show you something a bit different. Meet Marilyn Sunderland, a wonderful artist who’s become known for her intricate gourd carvings. Drawings inspiration from the beautiful landscapes in the Utah valley surrounded my mountains, where she’s been living for the last 30 years, this incredible artist etches incredibly detailed shapes into the shell of gourds creating awe-inspiring masterpieces. “Art has always been a part of my life. I have painted portraits, landscapes, and various other subjects with oils, acrylics, and pen/ink mediums. I also do wood carving and glass engravings,” Marilyn says on her site. She only took up gourd sculpting a few years ago, after buying an ultra-speed carving/etching tool, because she thought it was a versatile material. Turns out it was the right decision.

She starts out by carving the gourd with her special tool, often times cutting out individual leaves or flowers from other gourds and then attaching them to her artistic gourd to enhance the relief design, after which she uses oils, acrylics, wood stains or dyes to make the artwork even more impressing. “The gourd has become my canvas for my creative expressions. I enjoy the excitement of each day with what my imagination can bring forth in each gourd. I strive to learn more, create more, and to enjoy each day to the fullest,” Marilyn says.

Photos © Marilyn Sunderland

The Delicate Gourd Carving Art of Marilyn Sunderland was originally posted at OddityCentral.com

The Bone Collector – Man Amasses Creepy Collection of over 7,000 Animal Skulls and Bones

Posted: 01 Nov 2012 10:26 AM PDT

Ray Bandar, a retired biologist from San Francisco, has spent the last 50 years collecting thousands of animal bones. He estimates he has 7,000 skulls, 200 pelvises and countless other limbs from animals he mostly found and cleaned himself.

"I enjoy removing the flesh from the skull and disarticulating the jaws,” Bandar recently said in an interview for National Geographic’s Taboo series. ”I see nothing gross about this, whether it's a fresh animal or a badly decomposed animal, makes no difference to me.” The native San Franciscan grew up in the Richmond District and started collecting different animal specimens in junior high. That’s when he got the nickname “Reptile Ray”. As time passed, his passion for collecting and cleaning dead animals grew, and he is now the proud owner of a collection of over 7,000 skulls, including 2,600 from California marine mammals. Over the years, his own discoveries have been supplemented from local zoos, museums, taxidermists, roadkill, and trips to Australia, Africa and Mexico. His house is like no other on Earth – every room is virtually crammed with bones and skulls from animals Ray decapitated himself, but he still roams the beaches of Northern California looking for new and exciting additions to his museum home.

“I look at bones as pieces of sculpture,”, 84-year-old Bandar says, but the people who see him hacking away at dead animals on beaches don’t see him as an artist. Most of them think he’s either homeless or deranged, and the foul smell that surrounds him doesn’t help much either. But the smelly stuff doesn’t bother the collector, who loves nothing more than to use bacterial macerations, maggots and flesh-eating beetles to help him strip the flesh from the skulls. ”I have a very weak sense of smell. It’s how the marriage has survived,” says Ray’s wife, Alkmere Bandar.

A longtime research associate with the California Academy of Sciences, Ray has used his collection of bones and the experience in cleaning them to provide valuable insights in various scientific research topics. He also likes t show guests his unusually decorated house, and see their reaction shift from disbelief to utter speechlessness. Thousands of skulls grinning at you from the ceiling and from every wall in the house will make it hard for any understandable words to come out. But “you have to be careful not to get impaled on something,” Alkmene describes the dangers of walking through her husband’s “bone palace”.