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With marijuana already legalized for medicinal use in 23 U.S. states, for recreational use in three (Alaska joined Colorado and Washington last week) and more states expected to pass similar legislation, the pot busi- ness is only expected to grow. Some cannabis companies are apparently looking to reach out to an untapped market — kosher medicinal marijuana users. This is critical for purveyors hoping to enter the medical cannabis market in New York, as the state senate only allows patients to receive marijuana in a non-smokeable form. As marijuana is a plant, it requires no real kosher supervision when it is sold by itself in dispensaries, but if companies want to sell kosher edi- bles, they will need to go through the same process to which all food com- panies must submit to get certified. In the past, the Orthodox Union, one of the main certifiers of kashrut in America, was loath to give kosher certification to companies that man- ufacture tobacco products because of the deleterious health effects. But, the Jewish Daily Forward reported last week, as the health benefits of cannabis are now understood, the Orthodox Union has no such qualms about certifying medical marijuana. In Israel, despite the fact that foods infused with medical marijuana are sold (including in one interest- ing case to an inmate who was not allowed to smoke his medicinal pot during his prison sentence and thus had to resort to pot-infused cookies), the Chief Rabbinate of Israel has not weighed in on the kashrut of edibles. "We don't deal with it," said Daniel Bar, spokesman for the rabbinate. "We have not even looked into it:' ❑ Teachers may now need to reconsider reprimanding daydreaming students in class as a new Israeli study found that mind-wandering actually enhances brain performance and prepares the mind for complex tasks. In a study published last month in the American scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Bar-Ilan University were able to show that, contrary to common belief, a wandering mind does not ham- per the ability to accomplish a task, but actually improves it. This surprising result may occur due to the convergence of both "thought- freeing" activity and "thought-control- ling" mechanisms in a single region of the brain, according to Professor Moshe Bar, director of Bar-Ilan's Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center. "Over the last 15 or 20 years, sci- entists have shown that — unlike the localized neural activity associated with specific tasks — mind-wandering involves the activation of a gigantic default network [of] many parts of the brain," Bar said. "This cross-brain involvement may be involved in behavioral outcomes such as creativity and mood, and may also contribute to the ability to stay suc- cessfully on task while the mind goes off on its merry mental way" The researchers were also able to show that an external stimulus can sub- stantially increase the rate at which day- dreaming occurs, which in turn offers a positive effect on task performance. According to Bar, the study shows people do not necessarily have a finite cognitive attention span. "Rather than reducing the subjects' ability to complete the task, it caused task performance to become slightly improved," Bar said. "The external stim- ulation actually enhanced the subjects' cognitive capacity" During the experiment, participants were treated with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a painless procedure that uses low-level electricity to stimulate specific brain regions. They were asked to track and respond to numbers flashing on a computer, and periodically report the extent to which they were experiencing spontaneous thoughts unrelated to the task given. According to Bar, the results go far beyond what was previously achieved using studies based on fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), and demonstrate the role the frontal lobes play in the production of mind-wander- ing behavior. ❑