The concept of a soul or vital force is consistent across scientific, medical, theological, and philosophical thought. The soul is often described as contained within specific organs but separate from the body, and it is unsurprising that its location has been a subject of great debate throughout history. Despite much contention, those historically in search of the soul have generally agreed that it is the essence of a person – their true and immortal self. Indeed, when confronted with the challenge of identifying themselves, most people point to their chest or, approximately, their heart.
This cardiocentric model of who we are is described in humanity’s earliest writings from the third millennium BCE, indicating that Ancient Egyptians believed souls were immortal and located within the hearts of impermanent bodies. The related idea of the pneuma – ancient Greek for breath, spirit, or soul – represents one among many similar beliefs about the essence of human life. Consistent with the heart’s exalted status throughout history, and until very recently, irreversible cardiac arrest was considered the medical standard for death. Which is to say, when your heart stopped beating, you stopped being.
However, the importance of other bodily organs did not go unnoticed by our ancestors. Notable philosophers such as Plato and Descartes championed the brain as the locus of the soul and modern definitions of death rest squarely on the structural and functional integrity of the brain, not the heart.
A fascination with the brain is also present in Ancient Egyptian writings as evidenced by the lucid descriptions of agnosias, automatic behaviors, and emotional disturbances associated with head injuries as reported in the Edwin Smith Papyrus. Around 200 BCE, the famous Greek physician Galen noted that stimulating the heart induced no cognitive or perceptual response but that the same procedure applied to the brain had marked effects. Some prehistoric human skulls, discovered to be over 5000 years old, feature holes with tapered edges that suggest they were formed and allowed to heal while the person was alive, which is evidence of a surgical technique called trepanation that is still used today to relieve increased intracranial pressure that can cause altered mental states and death.
Unsurprisingly, our ancestors noticed that our heads and their contents are major anatomical correlates of how we feel, what we do, and who we are. As they would have observed frequently in soldiers returning from war, getting hit in the head could change someone’s personality and behavior, as well as erase their memories. As modern clinicians know, a person suffering a head injury then would have, in their own words, reported feeling “like a different person”.
Beyond brain injury, the most extreme changes would be associated with death, including a loss of speech and all movement by which we infer thought and experience or “consciousness”. Then, like now, people might have seemed to live behind their eyes until they could no longer open them and the care with which burial and cremation practices were carried out tens of thousands of years ago suggests that when faced with the death of loved ones, our ancestors likely wondered where they had gone and if they would ever meet again.
That timeless question concerning the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death remains as relevant today among religious and non-religious people alike. In centuries past, we turned to both scientific and religious institutions with questions about the afterlife or lack thereof, receiving incomplete and deeply dissatisfying answers that failed to quell the human fear of annihilation.
In this essay, I will demonstrate that a contemporary scientific understanding of life, death, consciousness, and its survival is possible and that the best available evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death is empirical.
Beyond religion and philosophy, the scientific method, bolstered by our modern technological instruments, has already addressed questions of survival in significant ways that are not immediately obvious. Whereas one might expect near death experiences (NDEs) and related subjective reports to carry the burden of proof for survival research, a review of the literature published between 1945 and 2013 demonstrated that NDEs often fall short of providing investigators with explanatory hypotheses or testable mechanisms.
Therefore, unintuitively, NDEs are important but may not represent the best available scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after death. Instead, scientists have formulated testable hypotheses on the bases of pervasive cultural ideas of psychic energy to found what is now a nascent but empirical study of consciousness as a force that interacts with the brain but is independent of it. If brains are conduits or vessels rather than generators of consciousness, death may represent a significant change to the individual but certainly not an end.
In this essay, I will outline why the survival of consciousness after brain death is not only possible, but probable beyond a reasonable doubt. I will also demonstrate that our understanding of brain function has changed radically over the past century and now includes biophysical mechanisms which can explain not only survival, but also related observations which have classically been categorized as “psi” phenomena.
For example, while it is true that the putative telepathic and remote-viewing abilities of unique individuals such as Sean Harribance and Ingo Swann are not easily explained by older models of brain function that treat endogenous activations as the sole sources of cognition, new models that place consciousness at least partly outside the brain can explain them. In fact, the latest evidence indicates that our brains readily interact with electromagnetic fields (EMF) from natural and artificial sources. Not only do brain cells signal wirelessly to each other by means of their own weak electric fields, but the Earth’s magnetic field has been repeatedly shown to influence, cohere, and resonate with human brain activity in real-time, with profound consequences on neurocognitive and behavioural output.
Using principles of electromagnetic induction, we now employ technologies such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to change brain activity, assess and treat neurological disorders, and even subvert free will. Our brains’ EMFs, which can be detected using biomedical devices such as magnetoencephalography (MEG), are all immersed in a shared geomagnetic medium that oscillates with periodicities that match the frequency patterns of our own brain waves.
As will become clear, it is possible that the information content of our experiences and memories can be uploaded or downloaded to and from spaces external to our brains, existing independently after we die. On the bases of these and other discoveries, I will instruct and elucidate a comprehensive model of brain function that characterizes consciousness as a transmitted signal or force with at least a partial existence outside the head.
Before I elaborate on these lines of evidence, I want to briefly emphasize two important points. First, the question of whether or not consciousness survives permanent bodily death is fundamentally a scientific one. We must remember, after all, that the natural world is filled with phenomena that confound our intuitions and, before scientific inquiry, appear magical, other-worldly, or divine. When we are finally able to measure, quantify, and subject said phenomena to independent replication, we inevitably realize that what seemed unrealistic was simply a misunderstood feature of the natural world.
If consciousness is a physical and reproducible phenomenon that can be measured albeit indirectly, we should be able to design experiments to detect its presence within or without the body after death. Indeed, the final section of this essay will make concrete experimental suggestions for doing exactly that, including the measurement of death-related light emissions and creating lab-engineered brain tissues to tease apart mind from matter.
Second, the question we are concerned with is of tremendous importance to the human species. Great religions, cultures, and scientific institutions throughout history have dedicated enormous amounts of attention and resources to the study and contemplation of life after death. People are willing to fight and die to maintain their cultural belief systems, which often provide coherent and anxiolytic frameworks for life and death. Contemplating mortality is a feature, not a bug of the human condition. Some of the most beautiful poetry and devotional art that our species has ever produced has been shaped along the boundaries of life and death.
Standing on the shoulders of countless thinkers throughout history, I am humbled to find myself addressing this timeless question. Most of what I will discuss will be curated rather than created; however, I will supplement my case with some of my original published research in the field of neuroscience to support the central thesis: consciousness survives death.
Nicolas Rouleau, PhD, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, is an assistant professor at Algoma University in Canada. Footnotes and bibliography are omitted from these excerpts but the entire essay with these details is available online at https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/contest-runners-up/.
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