Benedictine monks were allegedly among the first to have a semblance of routine as we know it in modern times. Governed by their clocks, they began doing things at the same time every day. They “rose together, ate together, and prayed together” in accordance with the canonical hours. Eventually, tradespeople and merchants from their town started aligning their day-to-day tasks with the tolling of the monastery’s bells, cementing the routine as standard by the time of the Industrial Revolution. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
