Science Of The Soul - Full Documentary

What is the

soul

? Where is? Can you measure it? Touch it, recreate it. Near-death experiences? Reincarnation and unexplained brain activity indicate the existence of the

soul

. These are questions that have intrigued and tormented people since they first walked the Earth today in the 21st century. 19th century experts are getting closer to some answers using new technology and new knowledge to unlock the secrets of the soul. 21 grams less than an ounce, weight attributed to the soul by a Boston doctor in 1907. Dr. Duncan McDougall conducted a macabre experiment that observed six people die. Dr. McDougall wanted to know if the soul existed so he built a delicate scale to determining whether humans became lighter at the time of death in only one of the deaths mcdougall recorded a weight change of less than an ounce (21 grams) his experiment got a A small mention in the New York Times is more of a curiosity, The news, although no one has since been able to duplicate Mcdougal's macabre test, is still remembered today as the first time modern

science

attempted to quantify the existence of soul cultures since the beginning of civilization.

I have neither needed nor depended on scientific evidence of the soul. A central belief for most cultures and religions is that when our bodies die, there is an immortal part of us that remains after death, our soul. All the great religions of the world talk about us as human beings. the souls as truly spiritual beings that are incarnated here in our bodies and that the death of our physical body is not the death of us, it is the death of the body that that special spark that is us I call that soul that leaves there There are many questions right now about how many of the irrational, mysterious and supernatural aspects of life we ​​can explain through

science

and many scientists are turning their attention to those questions and I applaud that, but I also believe that religion is a language for things that We don't understand it and one of the reasons why religion is so fascinating to me is that it is, by definition, a paradoxical oxymoron like things don't rationally fit together you want to live forever and you want to keep changing you want to have an immortal being soul and you want to hug your grandmother you know you want these things they do not fit they are not rational trace the history of the modern Western view of the soul the path begins in the 3rd century BC.

Alexander the Great toured Europe and Asia and Greek thought spread like wildfire. The Greeks, above all others, set the stage for what we believe today about the soul. The Greeks believed that the body was unimportant, in fact, even It was bad, it was the place where all your most basic impulses resided, so lust, greed, hunger, child, enduring everything disgusting in human life resided in the body and everything good and true in human life resided. in the soul that was in the head, so when you died, your soul ascended to God and your body resided on earth. you no longer needed it the greeks believed in reincarnation that the soul can pass into a new body when christianity conquered the world the greek idea that the body and soul were separate things was eclipsed by the evolving christian notion that the body and the soul are parts of the same whole because in the Greek context you had your soul, your soul went up to heaven after you died and your body was earth, dust, nothing, the Christian teaching is that your body and your soul are one thing without the which you can't have the other together they give you Christian ideas of what my soul is like they raise questions that people joke about, but it remains one of the great mysteries of life where we go and what we are after we die and which self is my soul , is it me when?

I was, you know, 26 or is it me when I'm 80 or is it me with my wrinkles or is it me without my wrinkles you know, is it me with my cancer? Am I me without my cancer? You know, those questions start to make people hang up and then they start to be a little funny and silly, but the longing itself is real and powerful, so it's an enigma like all these things. Christian beliefs eventually deviated further from the Greeks who considered the soul separate from the body as an energy. Maybe Christian souls were more like ghosts with shapes, I can Dante's Inferno, etc., you see all these souls, okay, they look like bodies, Dante can recognize them, but you know that their souls are shaped like bodies, so they have assumed a true The amount of somatism I believe shows how difficult it is for Christianity to separate the body and the soul is that even these souls that were declared to be completely immaterial have no matter, yet they can be perceived that way.

The West inherited a combination of Greek and Christian. apocalyptic ideas about what the soul is, which are more confusing today than in their time, if the soul leaves the body after death, where will it go in years or even centuries, it may have to wait until the day when Jesus returns to judge. the living and the dead what is done in the period between the final judgment knowing when a person dies well what is the soul alone I mean how do we conceive the soul without the body is very, very difficult what the early Christian scholars said What I mean, for example, we have turned it into mush that in those days there was a word for resurrection that meant resurrection and there was a combination of words for immortality of the soul that meant something different and now when we talk about heaven and the afterlife it is we mix everything up and we mean heaven and we need the resurrection and we mean the immortality of the soul and we mean seeing grandma and we mean seeing Jesus and we mean hearing harps and we don't unravel these ideas but in the ancient world They were very different ideas, when you were in the field of soul immortality or in the field of resurrection, since resurrection involves bodies and immortality involves souls.

René Descartes attempted to reconcile the two by focusing on consciousness in the In the 17th century he wrote, "I believe, therefore I am." Since then, scientists believed that if there is a soul it resides somewhere in the brain, but they have not yet found it and today we are still dealing with the problem of the existence of the soul. a question for science or religion to answer religion is a way of talking and thinking about those aspects of human life that are beyond us and therefore let science continue to investigate because it must and without However, let's continue to recognize through language that works for us.

Whether it's poetry, art or religion, there are aspects of human experience and human longing that don't fit the categories and I think the soul is one of those things where we want to believe that there is something special about us that lives forever and We want to believe that we will be in communion with those we love at some later time, we do not want to lose those people and those longings are powerful and important, those longings require that consciousness be something separate from the brain, that it is not something material but magical, spiritual. . among us I believe one thing that I have seen men women old young everyone faces all gender orientations atheists believers all religious traditions I believe it is a universal human phenomenon it is part of being human that we are all souls and that each soul sometimes has the capacity of having a spiritual experience in certain circumstances, the scientists among us have another vision.

I do not believe that consciousness is a supernatural soul that cannot be measured scientifically and is somehow associated with our natural brain. I also don't believe there is a mystical world beyond what we can. If something really exists, then it is part of the real world and we should ultimately be able to detect it. A Louisiana boy offers incredible evidence that should satisfy both sides of the soul debate. His case offers proof that the soul is real and can be reincarnated. and that science can study it according to a 2007 Pew Research Center survey 81 of Americans say they believe in an afterlife 45 believe in ghosts I personally had an experience where I saw my grandfather's spirit after his death and did not I have gone to the place where I believe it was true and yet it seemed real to me, it seemed real to me and I very much sympathize with those feelings that people have, you know, they see the ghosts or the spirits of people they have lost, they have a traumatic experience. physical experience and they see things and in fact I think the soul is more a matter of faith than proof today scientists are studying people who present a convincing case that they used to be someone else at the university of virginia a group of psychiatrists uses science to unlock the secrets of reincarnation since the 1960s the division of perceptual studies has been collecting cases of children who claim to have past life memories they now have files on 2500 children well i think what the research shows is that for people who are open to considering the possibility that there is evidence that consciousness can sometimes exist separate from a functioning brain, so in the cases of these children's reports, if you look at the best cases , provide evidence that sometimes there can be this transfer of memories and emotions that seem inherited from one life and then continue in another May 2000 in Lafayette Louisiana a mother wakes up and hears the screams of her two year old son who was lying on his back up and she was kicking her feet up like that and punching her fists like that, just kicking and kicking and screaming at the top of her lungs andrea leininger can't calm her baby james down finally he goes back to sleep she thinks the nightmare is over but in reality it's just beginning and The next night he had another one it was exactly the same. exact kicking motion and the more she did it, the weirder it got because it was so specific and so repetitive.

This marked the beginning of one of the best-documented cases of possible reincarnation in history. Today James Linenger is 12 years old. I play sports, baseball, soccer. I go to Ascension Episcopal School I have a lot of friends there the other kids when they were younger say I want to be a firefighter I want to be an astronaut but I always was I want to be a fighter pilot I want to be in the navy Oh you guys are school pictures yeah oh , they turned out well from the age of three. James' parents began to hear stories from his son that surprised them because his son was remembering things that connected him to a Navy pilot who died in 1945.

They were skeptical. Bruce is a human resources manager in the oil industry Andrea is a former dancer turned instructor As Christians never believed in reincarnation but they began to piece together an astonishing story The first clue came from the terrifying continuous nightmares that James began having at age of two he was saying plane crash on fire little man can't get out plane crash on fire little man can't get out that's when I thought oh my god, what he's been dreaming of all this time what he was saying was 'I didn't realize What he was doing, he was thrashing around in bed and I remember the very specific thought I had at that moment.

It seems like the exorcist was going crazy. I thought he owned what's going on. Here, within a year, the visions that greeted James in his nightmares began to take shape when he was

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y awake. I was reading to James and then he sat down, says mom, the little man acts like that and he lay down and went and did the same thing. The same thing he did in his dream, he's putting his feet up and says, the little man does something like that, he can't get out, he can't get out and I sat him down again and told him who the little man is and he still tells me. it makes my hair stand on end and bruce said what happened to your plane he said it crashed in flames and he said why did your plane crash and he said he was shot bruce said who shot at your plane and the japanese left james then hit them his parents the The next strange clue, one that was very specific, was the name of a ship that he said his plane took off from, so I said, well, did your ship have a name? and he said, uh, natoma, and I had never heard that word before and I went down the hall and uh, I got on the computer, I Googled it and, about 300, this thing came up: Toma Bay Cve 62, He clicked on it and this story of a World War II aircraft carrier came up, and that was the beginning of what the hell is going on.

Standing here, looking at this photo of this little guy, it was like an aerial photograph of this little aircraft carrier in the water and I stood there looking at it for a long time. He had no answers, do you know how he could know this? How could he? I know a person, how could he know a ship and what did it all mean? So that's where I really said, "I'm going to get to the bottom of this." I don't know how I'm going to do it. I don't know what I'm going to find, but I'm not going to stop searching until I get as many answers as I can.

This was enough to send Bruce into an investigation that he conducted his own investigation of for the next two years. He learned about the men of Natoma Bay, both living and dead, and James kept giving his parents additional clues, tantalizing and chilling. Well, I kept asking him. Do you remember what your name is? Do you remember whichwas your name? And he always said James and I thought, well, he's two years old. confused, he thinks I'm asking him what his name is, so James started to draw, that was one of my missions, the mission, remember yes, it's one of my favorites, the same thing over and over again, like a movie compressed into a frame only. an air battle, a plane on fire and his signature james three, so one day i was in the kitchen, i was washing the dishes, james had breakfast and he crashed into the plane, he was just flying like that and mom left before me When I was born, I was a The pilot of my plane was shot in the engine and crashed into the water and that's how I died and froze.

It was a very strange thing to say, but it was like that, in fact, there was no drama, there was no emotion. at three james started pretending to be a pilot with an attention to detail that amazed his father one day he dragged a car seat into my office closet and set up a small cockpit there, he had a small school games console and since it was going to be a cabin, you know, and he goes back and forth, suddenly the door flies open and he rolls out of it. I said James, what happened to you?

He says, I said you fall, he says no, he says they shot at my plane and me. The next development came when Bruce was invited to the Natoma Bay veterans' meeting. He asked about the names of men killed in battle and this led him to finally solve the mystery of James III. He called me on the phone and said, "You will win." I don't think so, there's just one guy from Tomah Bay who died during the battle for Iwo Jima and his name was James M Houston Jr. and I said, "Wait, that would make our James James three." He was so excited.

I could understand that it's him, it's James m Houston, his name is James, it's James Three, James Houston Jr., World War II Navy pilot at age 21 on March 3, 1945. His plane was shot down on Chichi Jima. Now skeptical parents were faced with compelling evidence. That his little boy really was reincarnated, a boy from Louisiana, James Liner spent his childhood recounting memories of being a World War II Navy pilot, memories of a past life that his parents could no longer ignore since he was two years old. six years, james continued to provide evidence of the incredible possibility that he was james houston reincarnated this plane the wildcat is the plane in which james m houston crashed and he was a test pilot for the privateer and would test flights from aircraft carriers the f-18 is the plane i want to fly when i grow up since he was two years old james showed an unusual fascination with military air shows and an uncanny familiarity with vintage aircraft his parents cautiously contacted james houston's only surviving relative His sister Anne at first didn't know what to think about the boy who claimed to be her brother reincarnated but then James asked her for a painting that only one person besides her knew existed.

She said this January 16, 2006. It says "Dear James. I hope this is the photo you asked for. It's the only one of me taken by my mother. I'm sorry it took me so long to send it to you. These last few weeks have been very busy and hectic. I hope you like it. with my love annie james I believed then as now that she was dead The soul of a pilot asking for that photo. I had asked for a painting that my late mother had done for her and me. This was in her attic for about 50 years.

My parents and she thought it was crazy that i knew something like this. he also became a believer and there were other creepier connections james had three gi joes that he called billy walter and leon names that his parents thought were strange for a kid chose them bruce is like hey james what are you going to name your uh gi joe he's just playing he says walter and then we think walter bruce says how can we name your gi joes billy walter and leon and he says because That was the one who met me when I arrived in heaven and it was one of the moments in which the blood escaped?

We looked at each other's faces and we just walked back Bruce walked into the office I walked into the office We closed the door He's there going through papers like this I tell him what are you looking for? What are you looking for? He finds this piece of paper and he says and he says Billy Peeler Walter Devlin and Leon Connor were all in the same squad as James Houston I was like when did they die? they died before he's throwing away papers he pulls out another sheet and looks at the death dates and they all died before james houston died they all flew away with them although james' father remained skeptical that reincarnation was really possible what happened next It was weird so we're cleaning the yard he's playing in the leaves I said I just love you bits and he says well he said I knew you'd be a good dad when I picked you and I said what he said well when I found you and Mommy I knew they would be good parents my head was shrinking to the size of a raisin you know my brain I said what do you mean when you found her she said well I found you and mom uh I found your mom in Hawaii James told his father that he saw them in a pink hotel which is where the liners were staying when they decided to have james bruce and andrea were cautious about asking doctors and psychiatrists for help they decided to find their own solution to james' ordeal and their solution was to go to japan to the ocean very expansive where pilot james houston jr died, you who are the pilot of the souls of men the ship was right above where the plane wreckage was and bruce did this beautiful memorial service so i thought it was a perfect time to just say that I sat down with them and said: you know Jim Houston has been a part of your life for as long as we can remember and he will always be an important part of who you are, but you have a life to live as James Liner and it's time for you to say goodbye. and to jim houston and he just started the ball he started to cry and cried for about 20 minutes he had everything it was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life he had everyone on the boat crying it's time good job I salute you good boy and you're a such a brave soul such a brave soul and spirit this is strange when we got back to shore something had changed he left something there he really did it it was palpable you could see he was he had cried that and everything that had happened happened and he was ready to move on forward and really did it that moment was when everything really changed.

I'm going to be the same as James M. Houston was a pilot. The next image James Liner drew was one of peace. The nightmare stopped. the memories started to fade I don't want him to remember anything about his past life he has a life you know and I don't want him to stagnate or get confused or is he our son you know he's not, he's not Jim Houston, he's I have a life to live today james leininger can't remember anything specific about the soul that used to torment him at age 12 he's an ordinary kid whose bedroom says something about who he is and who he thinks he once was i'm in boy scouts i'm a first class scout and the boy scouts these are the books i got from chichijima uh yearbooks bb gun my money bag my phone i don't know when i bought this but this is my grandmother's rosary and my star wars stuff and a blue angels doesn't talk much about memories about his past lives with his friends but he also doesn't hide it if his classmates come across a story on the internet about James reincarnation is a fact of his existence it's part of his soul I think The spirit he used to have when he was four or five six years gone.

I'm just James now. Not now. I still have James Houston in me I think, but it's not so much the bad story, but more the peaceful story of his life rather than the plane crash his death I don't really think much about my story I just don't talk about it people tell me ask a question about it I'll answer it uh yeah you know I was skeptical All the way I'm still having a hard time saying this really yeah this happened you know but it happened the problem is you know how it happens I don't know why it happens , we can sit here and guess, but the fact is that it happens and that's why people should listen more care

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y, they shouldn't just give up because the two year old says something that might seem meaningless from people's point of view. who we have spoken to and who are Trying to do something scientific with this, I can understand rational thinking.

I'm a pretty rational guy. This is not a rational thing and I had a spiritual struggle with it, but I came to the conclusion that I now have a three-dimensional belief system. of two dimensions in the division of perceptual studies at the university of virginia dr. jim tucker has examined james laninger tucker has developed what he calls a strength of case scale for reincarnation and he gives james a near perfect score um average age when they start talking is 38 months, so he's usually two or three years when it comes out and some of them talk about these things at any time of the day or night.

Sometimes cases can start with nightmares as they did in the James Langer case. Some are intrigued, many are perplexed, some are upset. Some of the Christian parents in the United States are a little bewildered by this, but regardless of their reaction, children will talk about this for some time and then, usually, when they are five or six years old, they seem to forget about it and then Just continue with your current life After four decades and 2,500 cases, researchers at the University of Virginia have come to a surprising conclusion: reincarnation is real, which certainly suggests that there is a part of us, a part of consciousness that may continue after the brain dies, which would indicate that the brain may not be the creator of at least part of our consciousness, but rather a kind of portal through which consciousness flows and that there may be another part of existence separate from the physical world that again there is this piece of consciousness that can be independent of the physical world and the physical brains and that seems to come from dr.

Paul de bell is a psychiatrist who specializes in what is called past life regression using hypnotism. He has taken countless patients on a journey through time. to the souls that their bodies have forgotten and he provides a recent example that we have called Mr x. He had been sexually abused as a child and he was very angry about it and so he went into a regression and suddenly found himself on top of a castle in Austria in 1630. In reality it was a she who was washing the floors of this castle in Bell Cree firmly that what he is doing is finding the soul through science.

I think that spirituality today is at the same point that psychology was a hundred years ago when no one thought that the mind could be understood, no one thought that dreams could be understood, no one thought that mental illnesses could be understood because they were too complex, but If we use those same tools, which is a methodical systematic investigation with hypotheses and experimental tests, then we will begin. to gradually progress meanwhile reincarnation skeptics would say that james laninger's case is circumstantial at best, in america belief in reincarnation is growing, part of this is driven by celebrities who, you know, They say they believe in reincarnation, Julia Roberts recently told Elle magazine that she believed she considered herself very Hindu and talked about her daughter and how her daughter clearly embodied another person.

My personal opinion is that Americans like reincarnation because, comparatively speaking, life here is good and it's one thing to want heaven, which is an eternal destiny somewhere else when life is bad on earth and you want to get rid of it. Skeptics aside to the liners the existence of the soul does not require validation from scientists or psychiatrists James' experience is proof for them of the afterlife, but the question remains whether the soul exists in every human being. Can it be find and measure through science? A neuroscientist is breaking new ground in how the brain works.

He is looking for evidence of consciousness in people who show no signs of consciousness. The ancient Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife and maintained that belief across thousands of people. For years they believed that our souls and bodies were so intertwined that they needed each other even in the afterlife, so they perfected mummification. They even stored the mummy's internal organs to keep them safe. They believed that the soul was located in the heart, just like the brain. declared that it had no function so they took it out through the nose and threw it in the trash the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus believed that the soul was made up of atoms dispersed in the cosmos after death in the 17th century the philosopher René Descartes made a statement revolutionary when he equated the soul with consciousness I think, therefore I am If the Egyptians believed that the soul was in the heart Descartes was sure that it resided somewhere in the brain The field of neuroscience was born Scientists began snooping around, searching inside the human brain looking for the soul but they never found it, no one is sure where to look within the 100 billion neurons of the brain.

Some scientists even say it's an impossible mystery.to solve given the complexity of the brain, but others are determined to prove that the brain is the key to unlocking the secrets of the soul. In medical school they gave us a brain to dissect as part of our neuroanatomy class and they brought out this preserved brain and the formaldehyde was my opportunity to do a brain dissection and you have a manual, so I put the manual next to me and they give you a little probe and they say okay, the first thing you do is start probing from the cortex and gently remove this layer of cells and I thought, you know, remove what would have been this patient's memory of a summer. during a childhood picnic or a relationship with a particularly important person in their lives, what did I just remove from this piece of brain that was once a good thing?

I believe that the soul and the mind are interchangeable and I believe that, as a neuroscientist, the mind and the brain are interchangeable for 20 For years, Dr. Adrian Owen has been studying which parts of the brain are active for different specific activities. Well, our mind is a product of the complex brain we have. I think the reason we feel like we all have a soul and my soul is different than yours. The soul is because my brain is different from yours. For Dr. Owen, the brain is the key to solving the mystery of who we are, and he's trying to show that when working with patients in vegetative states, you can look at some photos, Chris.

I want you to try and look. Alright, here you are, Randy and Walt, you're all in your uniforms. Chris was an officer in training at the West Point Military Academy in 2007. His car was rear-ended. He almost died. Instead, he survived with permanent brain damage, but Chris was there. a brilliant young cadet with his life ahead of him was gone Chris, do you see the picture of you and your friends and can't imagine your worst nightmares? I have seen families go through this, but until it happens to you you have no concept of how heartbreaking it is.

There are moments when you feel like you know they are not there, other times you feel very strongly that he is there, he is listening, making eye contact with me and it's very difficult to determine where he is. he's locked up here you know we don't really have any answers I don't think Chris doesn't have a soul um I think there's that spark of life that leaves you at the moment of death that's basically what the soul is and Chris may not be fully conscious. He's been conscious but he's still here I definitely feel like the soul is more than just consciousness Chris I have a hammer and a ball I want you to look at the ball What Dr.

Owen's research is trying to prove is Is Chris clinically speaking so conscious now? as I was before your accident, you know your consciousness, you have a big problem, the only way I can tell you that I am conscious is through some type of action, whether you know it or by showing that you know that if you take something like so-called disorders of consciousness, vegetative state, minimally conscious state, you don't have those things with some of these patients who, by definition, are incapable of producing the kinds of responses that the rest of us would have. used to prove that we were conscious because dr owen what began as a simple study of consciousness became an unprecedented discovery he conducted tests on a 23-year-old woman in a vegetative state the results have revolutionized science's understanding of the human brain who was the victim of a traffic accident and had been examined periodically for five months and in each examination she had all the necessary criteria for a diagnosis of a vegetative state, so we put in a fMRI scanner and asked her to imagine playing a game of tennis in this scan when you hear the word tennis I want you to imagine yourself standing on a tennis court playing a game of tennis we chose this task because it is something that we tested many times in healthy volunteers we know that this produces a fairly specific activation in an area between The front part of the brain is called the supplementary motor area and this area controls the movements of the upper body and if you lie in the scanner and imagine moving your body like you would if you were playing tennis, you will get a very strong activation in this area of ​​the brain. the brain um so while he was in the scanner we told him that when he heard the word tennis we would like him to start imagining this task and continue until we said rest and when we did this his brain activated like a healthy volunteer.

So on this basis we came to the conclusion that she was not vegetative at all, she was completely conscious, that was quite exciting and we had another task that we used. It was important to show that this was not just an automatic reaction, but if we changed the task, the brain activation would change, so we used a type of spatial navigation task in which we asked you to imagine moving from one room to another in your home and this almost always activates an area deep within the brain called the parahippocampal gyrus. Healthy volunteers had never seen it before in a vegetative patient, but still, when we asked him to imagine moving from room to room in her house, the parahippocampal gyrus activated just as it would in a healthy volunteer.

Owen's groundbreaking work opens new questions about where consciousness begins and ends. Scotty was a New York City police officer who was hit by a car in 2002. I feel like he's here when I talk to him. I don't know how to say this and I think he's still there. Many times I sit on the side and wonder what he is thinking because he can't talk to us. You know what he's thinking, but I'll give you an example. We have this ball at home. He really kicks the ball. I become the target he will hit me with. and he'll laugh, he'll laugh at me and I feel like he, it's me he's pointing at, yeah, there and it's Scotty himself, he just can't say it's your name, Scotty, yes or no, look at the card that's got your Answer Owen has shown that, even though for some there are no signs of external consciousness, an internal spark remains and within that undiscovered brain may be where we find the soul of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, humans being the minority in a world inhabited primarily by spirits, a common thread.

Through these beliefs, from the Cherokee to the Haida, transformation takes place when a child is about to harmonize his soul with the spiritual world around him, at this critical moment the spirit guides guide the adolescent towards the age adult and the human soul is unleashed in today's Western society. children are born with a soul the soul and the body are linked one of the central tenets of the christian faith is that christ rose from the dead and i think that is very reassuring for people because they associate the body with the identity to have both the body like the soul and in fact, you know that in Christianity it is very, very difficult to separate the body and the soul because you know that they are described as a kind of marriage to each other.

Professor Allison Gopnik does not believe in the eternal soul, but in researching it in unexplored areas of childhood. brain has led her to the conclusion that what some would call the spirit is the closest thing to us when we are children. I am a scientist, atheist, materialist. I believe that everything that is here is everything that is here, but I also believe that many of the feelings and experiences, intuitions, knowledge and truth that people have talked about when they have talked about the soul, the spiritual or the transcendent, are those experiences in which we recognize the meaning, beauty and importance of everything that happens around us.

I think those are the Moments when we are most like children. This is my machine and I want you to discover how the machine works. Well, Gopnik set out to solve the problem. At what age is identity activated? When I think? Then I start. She wanted to study. babies his colleagues told him he was wasting his time when I was going to Oxford as a graduate student, one of the people there told me when I first arrived that this whole research program I had was useless because the babies didn't have a level upper cerebral cortex did not have any of the higher brain areas that we had as adults which of these would be best to make the box which do you think maybe this one, after 20 years of research, gopnik has helped show that neurons in children The brains show more activity than those of adults, where the adult brain is a focus, the child is more like a flashlight that shines in all directions, so there has been a big change from this vision of babies, is what I consider it a kind of crying carrot. from semi-vegetables to those who are learning the most by solving the most difficult problems and doing it incredibly fast gopnik believes that preschoolers represent human R&D her studies indicate that they play and learn with the same intention she believes that we learn to survive In the world as adults and we play to try to imagine ways to change it, it's like instead of just looking at one small part of the world, they are aware of the whole variety of everything going on around them at once, I think.

A good way to appreciate this as an adult is to think about what happens when, for example, you go and travel to a strange place, everything around you is something captivating, attractive, different and new, and you get this very vivid and wide scope of everything happening around you at the same time I think that's what it feels like to be a baby gopnik studies The interesting thing about us as adults is that we are unconscious, so to speak, most of the time. Tests have shown that a baby's brain is lit up most of the time. The day is first love in Paris.

Every step is skydiving. Every hide and seek game is Einstein discovering the theory. I think babies and toddlers genuinely perceive that aspect of the way the world and the universe works, which means they are the kind of examples of what it means to have a soul, but gopnik's research shows that when a child becomes self-aware, brain activity slows down and the connection with what some call the soul begins to weaken, so between the ages of three and five you begin to see that children have what we call autobiographical memory. It not only remembers information from the past, even newborns can do this, but it constructs a narrative that says: I am the same person I was in the past and I am the same person I will be in the future.

We develop as we grow we eclipse our childhood consciousness where once we became closer to our souls surprisingly anesthesia may hold the answer to those questions until relatively recently babies were not given anesthesia now it turns out that babies actually need more anesthesia than, relatively speaking, than adults Why what is anesthesia? Do we really know? It seems that anesthesia poses its own mysteries about consciousness and the soul. An Arizona anesthesiologist stumbled upon a theory about where his patients go when they are under anesthesia, proving to him the existence of the soul. I've been practicing anesthesiology for 35 years and it's still fun, it's still amazing every time patients lose consciousness, eventually we wake them up and I wonder where they went, but the real question is why are they conscious in the first place?

So anesthesia is a really good tool to try to figure out what the anesthetized patient is missing. Here we go, you can come with us. Anesthesia is a mystery. It's been around since 1846, but no one is sure exactly how it works or where we're going. When we were well taken care of in the 19th century, people started experimenting with laughing gas, nitrous oxide, and they used it for parties where everyone was having a good time, literally laughing constantly and also with another gas called ether, diethyl ether, which caused mischief with ether when Inhaled in small quantities, people became uninhibited and exuberant and had a great time and someone realized that if they took too much they would become unconscious and actually insensitive to pain, so several People began trying to use these gases as surgical anesthesia. this arm can go this far after years of risky trial and error the doctors perfected the medications but they didn't understand the science in fact no one understands what happens to the mind under anesthesia generally one does not dream under anesthesia there is no consciousness it just disappears while it lasts anesthesia, tell me when you're asleep, okay, that's a trick question, you can't do that.

One interesting thing about anesthesia is that patients who are under anesthesia after waking up have no idea of ​​the time elapsed. and I think the passage of time is a key feature of subjective consciousness, so consciousness is simply absent, it has disappeared. A brain scanner attached to the patient reveals a surprising clue about how anesthesia works during surgery. A bright, flashing halogen light is used. Helps stimulate brain response Bright light pierces your closed eyelidsWith tape the EEG monitor shows that the patient's brain is responding as if awake we see that the brain is quite active and there are all kinds of evoked potentials that are sinking it is not like sleeping and this fascinates me.

I first became interested in consciousness about how the brain produces. Experience at university, at medical school. I was doing elective research in a lab studying cancer and I was looking at how cells divide. Hamroff then learned about microtubules. Microtubules are hollow tubes. which can be found in all living cells 30 years ago had its eureka moment and has since formed a complex theory that microtubules are the location of what some would call the soul. In my opinion, microtubules are the origin of consciousness, specifically quantum computing. Synchronized with the EEG gamma within the neurons of the brain is the origin of consciousness.

Hammeroff's theory has shocked the world of neuroscience. He's basically saying that consciousness can be found and quantified, that it has substance, and that it survives the body. I'll stick with it even though it's a bit controversial, it's conceivable that when a patient goes into cardiac arrest or dies, the quantum information involving consciousness isn't necessarily destroyed, it can actually leak out and remain in the universe and remain entangled if the patient is revived, then he can go, he can come back and the patient had a near-death and self-body experience. If the patient dies, it is conceivable to me that that entity I might call the soul remains entangled indefinitely, and therefore it is conceivable that the soul is a real entity in terms of quantum information embedded at the fundamental level of the universe (what Hammer says). -off is that the 21 gram myth is basically true the soul has substance although it cannot be weighed the information can be measured Hammer off shocking theory has caught the attention of the world's best physicists who think they may have discovered how the mind and soul separate complex quantum physics may hold the key to quantum theory is quite intriguing and is not necessarily consistent with a simple materialist understanding of the universe things are in.

It's more complicated than we think, but I think The people who immediately dismissed it as some kind of mystical mumbo-jumbo, I think are being too quick to say that quantum theory challenges us to try to really understand the world, the physical world. In essence, and it may well be more complicated or more wonderful than many people realize, this is no surprise to those who have died and come back to tell the story that most cultures throughout time have held that there is something that the body survives after death 21st century science is trying to prove it science says that consciousness is limited and generated by the brain very clear very simple after 10 seconds without oxygen the brain begins to die after five minutes it disappears for complete but what happens to consciousness in that? five precious minutes new research suggests that consciousness could actually leave the brain the near-death experience in cardiac arrest says something different it says that when the brain is not functioning then consciousness can separate from the brain and is able to obtain information that becomes accessible when you regain consciousness now, that is an astonishing statement.

Devon Cason is a family doctor in Toronto. 30 years ago he almost died in a plane crash in which someone died. He changed his life forever. We flew in very bad weather and the engine stopped working, so the plane started to crash and we were falling to the ground. There was terrible turbulence and the air shook and my immediate reaction was intense terror. I was terrified. I was afraid the plane would crash. I was going to die. And what happened was I had this feeling. As if my fear was being expelled and this calm and peace descended upon me and I entered a kind of paranormal state of peace, the plane crashed into a frozen lake in a wilderness area hundreds of miles from the nearest city, so I What happened is my almost- The experience of death suddenly deepened as I swam toward shore and began to freeze.

I heard this noise and it was like my consciousness was taken out of my body and I was no longer in my body that was swimming towards the shore. Suddenly I was like 20 or 30 years old. feet above my body looking down and it was me still trying to swim to shore miraculously a helicopter pilot upon hearing about a downed plane came to rescue her they rushed her to the hospital almost dead from hypothermia they submerged her in hot water but there was little hope and it was in that hot water that my consciousness re-entered my body and what I experienced was something like this, it was like what I imagine if a genie was sucked into a bottle that with a loud hiss I was sucked from this place expanded upward. there and abruptly absorbed by the small confines of my body.

Kasen now combines his own medical practice with helping others who have had near-death experiences. After studying hundreds of cases, she is convinced that the soul is not simply consciousness, it is an entire energetic force. Every world religion holds the belief that there is something that survives the body after death, but modern Western society still rejects near-death experiences as paranormal, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people die each year and They report the experience at that time. kayson didn't know if she was alone if anyone else had had an experience like this and what is it called what is this that dr.

Peter Fenwick has studied near-death phenomena for years. Initially a skeptic, now a believer. When it comes to near-death experiences, I didn't believe them. They happened in the United States. They happened in California. They certainly wouldn't happen in London. What we found was that near-death experiences are very common, so I think we have to do it. seeing consciousness no longer as just a point source generated by the brain ends at death, maybe so, but I think the evidence is starting to be against this, it seems as if it can separate from the brain at the moment of death.

Fenwick is doing a study. of 1500 heart attack patients who have had near-death experiences, placed objects in the emergency room that the patient cannot see unless the patient's consciousness somehow leaves their body according to their study, the mind and the brain they are not the same. Although near-death experiences have been reported for decades, only recently has science been willing to consider them as evidence of the soul. 13 million Americans have reported a near-death experience. The statistics are so high in other countries and the stories have a surprising impact. Similarities It was 1972 when my car was sideswiped by a tank or a car that was as big as a tank.

I had a little fiberglass sports car and I was practically run over in my own car. I was horribly injured, in a coma and on the verge of death. Howard Tibble lay in the critical care ward of a hospital evidently for the next three days in severe pain unable to speak to anyone or correspond in any way he did not know where he was and he had no idea what was happening he suddenly became unconscious. night Once I knew it was night because the lights were on in the room and I felt no fear or pain or worry.

I heard many stories of people who came to me and told me that when they were trying to tell someone about their experience, let's take for example. a near-death experience that maybe they talked about with their doctor and their doctor pathologized it and said it was a hallucination or maybe they had a brief psychotic break or maybe it was some unresolved unconscious neurotic problem, it's always a negative label that people who had had such a positive experience that the label didn't fit. They weren't getting validation. This feeling of security and peace has been reported in almost all near-death experiences.

The next step is also almost universal. A fully conscious out-of-body experience. the dead person floats around the room seeing objects that could not be seen face up on the bed. I did a little tour of the room just floating and this was a hospital with a high ceiling and we had strip lights and I was floating. to the side of this strip lamp and it had the word ozram on it and it was a foot away from it. I could have touched her but I didn't have hands to touch her. I didn't find it strange or anything, I thought, well, there you have it.

I was out there making lamps you know that's fine with me the next step for most people is the return of the soul to the body bringing a memory of the experience that is not like a dream seems real we use the word soul as if it were a species of something flying into the sky and um, it could be consciousness, it could be a mind, it could be several things, in fact I think it's the exit from here to begin the journey to wherever we go, but I don't think we have to be religious to make that trip I haven't been that good in my life you know, rock and roll studies of near-death experiences indicate that something unravels from a dying body, but research has a long way to go before proving that a spirit as if something really exists, whether or not we will be able to validate the idea that a soul exists, will always be an open question because of course we never know, but what we do is take information from some of the sources wider. experiences that we can have and if we take them all together then you could argue that somehow the old idea that there are different levels within the body and some of them can continue after death is a very good hypothesis, yes, 81 of the Americans believe in the soul and yet out-of-body experiences are marginalized with UFO and ghost sightings.

Fenwick's research aims to change the fact that he even believes that science will soon be able to prove the existence of souls connected by telepathy that speak across space and time. consciousness can exist outside the brain there is a lot of evidence to show that it is all the telepathy experiments in my field there is what happens when you get close to death and there is something called deathbed coincidences the dying person seems to visit other people uh, but they are other people with whom they have a very close emotional bond. It is usually a strong emotional feeling that something has happened to someone and the evidence for this is becoming very good and I suspect over the course of the next few years it will become much more so.

While some scientists fight for the survival of consciousness after the death of the body, others try to touch the soul with the help of a shaman. Dr. Frank Eckenhoffer has traveled to the jungles of Peru to take a powerful drug that he claims can help him measure his soul, and he's going to use 21st century EEG technology to help him do it. My topic is awakening the mind and it's actually very dangerous to say that in a scientific forum because it doesn't sound like a legitimate scientist. The topic is a religious topic, this field of consciousness, the reason why it is somewhat conservative, is touching this dangerous third rail of science where you are getting very close to what is called religion, so I think there is a resistance or not sure how to incorporate scientific methods into this. edge where science studies consciousness, but not only consciousness, but something that really is religion, is religious experience in recent years, dr. eckenhoffer has been intrigued by a powerful plant substance that greatly alters consciousness. the substance is called ayahuasca.

Don Galermo is the local shaman who has mastered the art of preparing and experiencing Ayahuasca comes from an Indian word meaning vine of the soul. Many consider it a direct route to the divine. It is illegal in many Western countries. The potency of ayahuasca depends on the skills of the shaman who cultivates, harvests and prepares it. It is taken in the form of a potion. Sections of ayahuasca vine are crushed and boiled with chacuruna leaves in 30 liters of water and then boiled. Ayahuasca is the leader of the liquid that remains throughout the centuries. Those who have taken ayahuasca have reported out-of-body experiences. and encounters with beings that can only be described as souls.

The doctor. Eckenhoffer is focusing his ayahuasca studies on the elevated levels of certain generally latent brain activities that occur under the influence of the drug. He has studied the brain patterns of Buddhist monks and believes he holds the key Buddhist monks achieve altered states of consciousness through meditation Buddhists believe they achieve a heightened state of consciousness that brings them closer to what has been called the universal soul The doctor. ekenhofer will be connected to the EEG to find out after he ingests the drug. If there are measurable changes in neural activity in the brain, Edeg is very sensitive to these subtle changes in consciousness, there are important changes in the patterns that occur in the brain.EEG and I have done measurements and discovered that there are certain very interesting frequencies, so these frequencies are indicators of this change of state.

Eckenhoffer drinks the ayahuasca potion. It takes approximately half an hour for its effect to appear. When he does, he will not be able to communicate what he feels. Only the EEG can capture the data at the same time. At first you will have a sort of subtle change in how your body feels and then slowly the psychedelic experiences will begin, you may see floating patterns and then it merges with images that appear to have more complex shapes, they could be images of people or faces and then it becomes like a waking dream, then there is another quality of experience, it's called a journey, so the journey is where I think what is happening is an out of body experience that is happening at that moment, sometimes you feel like you were in another place when you go to another world.

To encounter an entity of some kind, you may be taught things by entities, just like in Christianity, we have stories of how angelic entities that have come, come down and channel, so sometimes it's very quick when it slips through. An altered state Ekkenhofer begins to move his hands as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra His researchers hope that the EEG will record this spike in activity supporting Ekkenhofer's theory that ayahuasca can point the way to touching soul impressions lost in his own consciousness the next morning firmly back into scientific mode examining the story the eeg data tells alpha part oh ooh that's the part whatever he saw, eckenhofer may have looked like he was on the verge of a coma, but in reality his brain was on fire.

Eckenhofer's EEG tests show that in an altered trance-like state the brain behaves much like it would in an out-of-body experience or a religious outburst to him this is what seeing the soul means to me the word Soul is more of a Western type formulation of a religious category. I actually feel that the soul is a meeting place between the formless dimension of spirituality and the physical world. Maybe that could be seen as moving or as a point of connection, since one group seeks to find evidence of enhanced consciousness within their own minds, another is trying to see if they can create it by building a brain, a frankenstein's monster, a thinking being created by a more powerful science that its creator was eventually ostracized for being feared. and misunderstood.

Mary Shelley's famous monster lives on through almost two centuries of popular culture because the story of Frankenstein is a story that scares us to the core. Dr. frankenstein was a swiss scientist who was obsessed with the spark of human life it is logical that another scientist has chosen switzerland to launch a project equivalent to the 21st century for 15 years dr. henry markrum has been working on a biology model machine that can think just like us dr macram is the leader of the blue brain project blue brain uses one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world to reverse engineer the human brain.

Many people ask why you do that. I mean why would you want to build a model when there are 6 billion of us what would it be useful for and can it really be useful and ultimately what we are looking for is trying to understand and learn about the brain and what it is about. able. Is it really the same as us? Is it the same as a The goal of the project is to imitate the complex structure of the human brain on a computer and see if it has the ability to reason just as we do.

I think what bluebrain is fundamentally different from most models is that we are not trying to build a model in the simplest way possible, but instead we are trying to build the model in the most biological way possible, if you can create a artificial brain in a biological way. Markham says he can't predict whether that will be the case. or it won't become a conscious brain, our strategy is that if we build it right and understand it from first principles, it will emerge and it will speak and it will have higher brain functions and I don't know, it may or may not.

Consciousness like Dr. Frankenstein, the blue brain team is using living material to create their creature, not human parts, but rats. Human neurons are strikingly similar to those of rats. First a rat is decapitated. A thin portion of your still active brain is immersed in an artificial brain fluid that allows the brain tissue to continue functioning for several hours. The tissue is placed under a microscope. A single neuron is removed. The basic shapes and reactions of the rat's still-living neurons are then mapped. These graphs are real blue brain images showing the activity of the rat's neurons. that the computer has recreated for its own mind any mechanism that we can find in the human brain that we can replicate in a machine if it is conscious some people will say that it is not just a machine it is just software a program cannot be conscious other people like me Me I would say that we are just a program, we have a hundred billion neurons and we can actually understand precisely what happens in each one.

Neurons taken from the brains of live rats form the template for Dr. Markham's artificial consciousness. His computer maps and then imitates the actions of neurons. Basically, macramé is building a brain, one computer-generated neuron at a time, the secret is to look for the rules and then it is not necessary to have studied each neuron in the brain, you build a model of a hundred of them, not a billion. and once you build a hundred, you can analyze them and you can analyze their stats and analyze their rules. Those rules you can now use to recreate all the diversity of billions, so today we can create more than a couple hundred different types of neurons and we can build as many as we want, there are no limits, others are not so sure that the blue brain and other artificial intelligence projects of the future can ever succeed in consciousness, some believe that artificial intelligence is too complex, it is too interesting, you can't make a horse.

With feathers it would be very difficult to make a computer with fabric and you cannot create a conscious mind with silicon chips. Building a human brain will require a computer a thousand times more powerful than any that currently exist. At least three football fields to house such a computer, but Markham says the goal is within reach: creating conscious artificial intelligence. The data is there. The technology is there to explore it. The computing power has reached critical mass. now we have petaflop supercomputers 10 to 15 calculations per second it is the first time in history that these things come together, which is necessary for simulation based research, when they converge it is inevitable, so this is going to happen.

Professor Markram hopes to complete his work on his artificial brain within the next 10 years. properties that will ultimately possess that brain will be considered equal to us will have emotions or a personality or a soul when it comes to thinking about artificial intelligence of course we all have to think about that moment when we develop artificial intelligence it's just a little a little smarter than us, so maybe as a consequence, once you have one that is one step better than us at doing all these things, it will be able to produce an AI that is two steps better than us and then it will be able to produce an AI AI that's four steps better than us, and so on, you go on and you get to the kind of runaway loop that some people have called the technological singularity.

The singularity is the moment predicted by futurists when machines become conscious. and more capable than humanity, a dangerous time where they could possibly dominate us and even exterminate us, so I think that point of singularity is still several decades away, but as it gets closer, I think it's something that we really have to stop. And think very carefully if Professor Markram succeeds, will the blue brain turn out to be the singularity? will it make human existence much better or worse if it is evil will it allow makram to put it out? will be a soulless frankenstein who puts his creators to death hiroshi ishiguro is working on designing a world where humans and robots are indistinguishable and almost by accident is challenging the notion of where people and their souls begin and end ishiguro He brings the classmate for his interview himself This is my android and this is the Gemini Ishiguro uses silicone steel and mold impressions of his own body to create a life-size version of himself that could take his place in the classroom the teacher Ishiguro teaches at Osaka University and wants to see how his students will behave when forced to interact with his android instead of himself.

Ishiguro can foresee a day when his androids will not only allow people to be in two places at once. time but also joining the workforce to do unpleasant but necessary jobs Ishiguro has thought a lot about whether his robots could be advanced enough to be given consciousness, but the Japanese have a unique vision that doesn't equate consciousness with a soul, everything It has a soul and you know the locks and you know, wow, the chairs and the desks and you know everything has a soul, I think that's a fundamental difference. between Japan and other countries the human being is not so special with the Japanese you know that the human being is part of nature that is all ishiguro is part of an ancient Japanese tradition of making life like machines according to tradition the soul of the creator is in the object and in Japan it is believed that creation must also have a soul I know what the soul is what consciousness is what intelligence is what emotions are my answer is these things are subjective if we believe that the robot has a soul the robot has a soul when I developed the humanoid robot, everyone said that this robot has emotions, but I didn't implement any emotion function, so obviously these things are subjective, not objective, by giving robots personality and emotion, it may seem to humans as if They had souls in Okinawa, Japan, robots called paro.

They are made by the thousands, each with a unique ability to learn to react to human feelings. They are companions for Japan's large elderly population known as robot-assisted therapy. The mechanical companions are equipped with pattern recognition technology that can Read the mood of their owners and act appropriately to calm and calm them after meeting their owner Each Paro develops a unique personality and their own emotional range It is a computerized simulation of feelings Professor Ishiguro's ultimate goal is to overcome Parody emotions To build an android that appears to move and talk like a real human being, apart from his geminoid, he has created a female android that has advanced emotional expressions equipped with facial recognition software.

He can even watch another human being on a monitor and imitate their expression. It costs 100,000 per robot, but there is a challenge that the problem is facing. more difficult, for example, the movement of the body, this is natural, the reaction is also natural, like this, however, the doctor said that this is a kind of person with brain damage, we need to work with brain scientists and we need to have a deeper knowledge. about the human being then we can improve these robots the brain contains a hundred billion neurons spread across 100,000 miles of dense blood vessels neuroscience has barely begun to figure out how it all works while some scientists are actively seeking to create consciousness, others are stumbling with it almost by accident and counteracting the soul in the near future, one or the other might have to answer the question of whether there is something that survives the body.

Consciousness is mysterious and I think when we create non-biological systems that have that same type of behavior. and the same complexity and richness of emotional intelligence, which is also a form of intelligence, you will also be aware of if you ask someone if you believe you have an immortal soul or do you believe you have a soul. I think people would be exposing. What are your sincerest hopes? Your worst fears. So I think it's much easier for us to focus on what we can understand. Our intelligence. How intelligent are we? You know that a measure of the soul is certainly a measure of the reasoning faculty. the intellect, so it has nothing to do with the imagination, so it is a very limited view of what the soul is and also a very temporary view, while others believe that the more we look for scientific answers, the more likely we are to to accept the fact. that the soul exists, I think science and religion are coming together and I think it's just going to take more time and maybe in another hundred years most people on the planet will know that the soul is real, which yes.

It seems certain that artificial intelligence will be able to think likeus and that robots will look like us within a generation if the two are combined humans will live side by side with a new synthetic intelligent species if they have souls is a topic of heated debate either way the 21st century may well be the Era in that the existence of the soul is proven beyond all dispute, whatever the answer, the secrets of the soul are now within the reach of science.