Rouleau writes: In this essay, I have presented the best available evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. As it stands, the data indicate that survival is possible beyond a reasonable doubt. Predicted over a century ago by William James in his prescient lecture on human immortality, contemporary neuroscience research indicates that brains display transmissive functions – they receive, process, and emit electromagnetic energies that are not dependent upon the activities of living cells.
Consciousness is not produced by the brain alone. It is a force that exists independent of any organ as an electromagnetic signal that can interact with the brain by transmission to generate thought and experience. Therefore, when brain cells functionally deactivate, decay, decompose, and disintegrate, an immortal stream of consciousness persists. Just as consciousness survives death, so too do our memories as electromagnetic patterns stored in a physical Akashic record. The dying brain does not drag consciousness into the void – it merely loosens its grip on the transcerebral field that gives rise to it and connects us all. The butterflies of the soul cannot be caged, and without the air beneath their wings, they cannot fly.
I hope what was presented here will inspire philosophers and scientists alike to pursue an increasingly sophisticated study of consciousness as it relates to death and dying. Equipped with advanced measurement tools, modern investigators will likely be successful in elucidating the forces that give rise to consciousness and its relationship with death. However, there are many self-defeating habits that threaten its discovery. Chief among them is a failure of imagination, which shackles the mind to the useful dogmas and doctrines of so-called established disciplines. The life sciences, in particular, have become ironically resistant to change or new ideas that subvert convention. On the other hand, there are some who are too willing to accept any model of consciousness that conveniently satisfies a particular belief system. Extreme positions such as these do not grapple with the data, but rather attempt to contort facts to satisfy theories. Therefore, the practical success of this essay will only be realized if it breaks more bonds than it builds – an open mind is more productive toward the related sciences of consciousness and survival. Above all else, we should dispassionately align ourselves with whatever the empirical evidence suggests is most likely.
In the spirit of kindling scientific discussion and creative ideas, I will close this essay with a forward-looking exercise by outlining possible future directions for survival research. Specifically, I will offer suggestions to experimentally assess the brain’s putative transmissive functions on which the post-mortem survival of consciousness likely depends. What I will discuss are only a few obvious paradigms that follow from the main points of the essay; however, I suspect the most creative ideas will come from readers from all over the world and across all areas of study. Therefore, I will frame each thought with a question that I hope others will refine or attempt to answer.
Among the many possible experimental approaches, the continued investigation of complex EMF-brain interactions and their effects on consciousness represents the lowest-hanging fruit and can be immediately pursued. Therefore, the first question is: If environmental EMFs are received and filtered by brain tissues to generate consciousness, will selective shielding conditions change experience? While previous studies have focused on attenuating field strength or intensity, efforts should now focus on blocking frequencies and pulse patterns using high- and low-pass EMF-filtering materials.
For example, selectively inhibiting theta- and alpha-band EMF oscillations should attenuate real-time EEG coherence with geomagnetic field fluctuations. Psychometric scales of mood, attention, and arousal states as well as personality inventories should also be administered and correlated with brain measurements. Quantitative analyses of linguistic themes and emotional content of self-reported experiences should be analyzed across large groups of participants exposed to the same EMF-blocking conditions. Dying patients may also be measured using combinations of shielding, magnetometers, EEG devices, and photomultiplier tubes to determine relationships between functional brain death and local electromagnetic energies including biophotons. In particular, I anticipate that measuring the “death flash”, its neural correlates, and environmental dynamics will help advance an empirically-based science of survival.
Beyond a study of the individual, the transmissive model predicts that consciousness can effectively be shared between all brains. In recent decades, there have been several independent efforts to demonstrate real-time brain signal coherence between paired human subjects who are physically isolated from each other. One of the most simple and elegant experiments of brain-brain “excess correlation” was performed by Leanna J. Standish’s team and published in 2006. A pair of human subjects, designated as “stimulated” or “non-stimulated”, were separated by 30 feet and a wall of medical-grade EMF shielding material. The stimulated individual always sat in front of a video screen that presented them with visual stimuli in sequential ON-OFF patterns while the non-stimulated individual, wearing sensory-isolating goggles, was always placed in an fMRI scanner.
Remarkably, the visual cortex of the non-stimulated person became reliably activated when the other person was being stimulated and deactivated when the stimulation stopped. In other words, even though the non-stimulated person was not experiencing visual stimulation, their cortex was being activated as if it was. This was one of the first robust demonstrations of brain-to-brain communication without the use of an intermediate technology.
Since her seminal discovery, others have replicated the effects with weaker intensity magnetic fields. As a graduate student in Michael Persinger’s laboratory, I published a similar experiment wherein subjects separated by approximately 6,000 km were exposed to synchronized rotating magnetic fields with changing angular velocities. Interestingly, when we measured the EEG rhythms of our paired subjects and later source-localized the brain activity, theta band (4–8 Hz) signals originating within the parahippocampal cortex displayed significant superimposition across pairs of brains as if they were functionally connected.
Therefore, the second question is the following: Are all brains fundamentally connected by shared forces, electromagnetic or otherwise, which permit the exchange of brain-based information associated with memory and consciousness? And can they be enhanced or attenuated by certain technologies?
Pursuing fundamental mechanisms of survival and transmissive consciousness may require a completely different approach grounded in biological engineering. In our 2021 review article entitled “Toward Studying Cognition in a Dish”, my colleagues and I discussed using neural tissue engineering techniques to assess cognitive capacities including consciousness in lab-grown brains59. One implication of this approach would be a novel means of testing independence of consciousness from substrates including brain matter:
Instead of probing the preassembled brains of animals, investigators are now free to design and build artificial circuits and pathways that differ from their naturally selected counterparts and to push systems to their extremes in search of first principles that underlie brain function. Indeed, artificial neural tissues are not limited by inborn developmental morphology or structural–functional templates found in nature. As it is conceivable that some or all higher-order cognitive functions may be substrate independent, the rationale and means to test the independence hypothesis are now beginning to converge.
We argued that incremental innovations would eventually lead to the creation of bioengineered brains that would be indistinguishable from their natural templates and that these lab-grown tissues would necessarily display features of consciousness:
To fully replicate the structure of the brain such that the artificially generated tissue is at every level of analysis – from the proteins that make up the cells and the precise composition of the extracellular matrix linking neurons and glia – indistinguishable from its natural template would be, by definition, to create a tissue that can experience. To suppose otherwise would be to admit that consciousness does not emerge from brain matter. . . . Just as comparative anatomy highlighted the remarkable overlap between species which were thought to be phylogenetically unrelated, we submit that a comparative study of cognition across a large set of iterative artificial neural tissues is of equal importance as we attempt to understand the biological origins of phenomena such as thought, intelligence, and even consciousness.
With near-limitless customization potential, lab-grown tissues may represent the perfect tools to test passive neural properties and the transmissive theory of consciousness. Thus, the third and final question is: Are transmissive brain functions independent of productive functions or do they interact?
One way to parse productive and transmissive brain functions is to build modular brains in the laboratory and to systematically add and subtract tissue elements to examine their relative impact on passive EMF signal filtration and amplification as well as how these properties influence action potentials and network properties. Neural tissue engineering techniques may also be used to identify the receptive structures and transduction mechanisms that underly both passive and active magnetoreception. Lab-grown brains with titrated concentrations of embedded magnetite could be exposed to alternative EMF conditions while measuring neural activity. EMFs could then be applied to examine the role of magnetite on brain activity and its resonance potential.
As technological innovations accelerate, it is worth considering the possibility that memory and consciousness could one day be transmitted to artificial or bioengineered brains – a voluntary rebirth for those who resist drifting away from their bodies. A procedure to transfer experience from one brain or to another would circumvent the need for medical breakthroughs associated with cancer and senescence because the diseased body could always be substituted for another without sacrificing the ”individual”. In that case, repairing the body would always be less desirable than replacing it.
Similarly, a sufficiently precise 3D printer may one day be able to re-create the fine-structure of a deceased person’s former brain. If the transmissive theory of consciousness is valid, the 3D printed brain would be precisely “tuned” to capture the signals which once defined the individual’s consciousness. While it may only be a distant reality, consciousness may be “brought back” from its brain-independent state by re-creating the brains of the deceased using advanced technologies.
The future of survival research will depend on our willingness to entertain creative and previously unexplored ideas as well the availability of funding opportunities to legitimize the subject matter, attract talent, stimulate discovery, and elevate the topic for public engagement. In addition to what I have presented, alternative solutions to the problem of survival should be explored in the interest of generating competing scientific theories and a robust dialectic that drives innovation.
For example, consider the possibility that there are many paths to immortality. Indeed, the simulation argument is quite compelling: If humans, equipped with super powerful computers, will one day be able to generate simulations with conscious humans that are indistinguishable from reality, they may also be able to run many simultaneous simulations – perhaps several orders of magnitude more than the one surface reality. It is then much more likely than not that our consciousness is simulated. While it is likely that consciousness survives death independent of any technological assistance, the opportunity to choose an afterlife would be the ultimate expression of human freedom.
Nicolas Rouleau, PhD, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, is an assistant professor at Algoma University in Canada. He received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies "An Immortal Stream of Consciousness" in response to its search for "scientific evidence for the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death." Footnotes and bibliography are omitted from these excerpts from his essay, but the full essay is available online at https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/contest-runners-up/.
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