Biophotons carry information: Rouleau excerpt #8

Rouleau writes: Before I delineate the many reasons why the brain must be regarded as an electromagnetic organ that can functionally survive death, I will first provide a necessary but non-exhaustive definition and description of electromagnetism. There are four fundamental forces that establish the physical parameters of our Universe: the weak force, the strong force, gravity, and electromagnetism. If they were to suddenly change in amplitude or character, the laws that physicists use to describe Nature would need to be completely re-written. In fact, it is uncertain whether life could even exist given alternative cosmic circumstances.

The electromagnetic force is responsible for the attraction between protons and electrons, holding atoms together, and establishing the chemical bonds and intermolecular forces that are required for life. Protons express a positive charge, electrons express an equal but negative charge, and the two particles tend to exist in a state of balance or equilibrium when they form atoms. When a neutral atom loses an electron, thereby disturbing the balance and expressing a relative excess of protons, it becomes positively charged – also called a positive ion. 

Similarly, when a neutral atom loses a proton, it becomes a negative ion. When electrons flow through space, they generate electromagnetic fields (EMFs), which are distributed arrays of point charges in space-time that organize along invisible flux lines that are readily visualized in two dimensions with iron filings and bar magnets. When opposite charges are separated by a distance, they generate a property called polarity – which is the physical basis for both the bar magnet and the electrical properties of the cell membrane discussed in a previous section.

The quantum or irreducible unit of the EMF is the photon, which is the particle-wave we call light. Indeed, white light, radio waves, and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation are essentially the same photonic “stuff”. What gives them qualitatively different properties are their energy levels, which are proportional to the frequencies of their oscillations.

There are two related components to electromagnetic fields: the electric field, which is determined by the charge of the object or particle, and the magnetic field, which is determined by the motion of the charged object or particle. For example, the ions that align themselves across the cell’s membrane express intrinsic electric fields. When those ions move across the membrane from the outside to the inside of the cell through a channel, their moving charges generate magnetic fields. Suffice it to say that electromagnetism is a pervasive and integral force in the Universe – a necessary but by no means a special property of living organisms or the brain.

However, the scientific fields of bioelectricity and bioelectromagnetics have reliably demonstrated that cells and tissues are uniquely structured to receive and channel electromagnetic energy to signal or do work. This has been known since the time of Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), who demonstrated that static electricity could be used to activate the muscles of dead frogs, suggesting our bodies functioned by endogenous analogues or “animal electricity”. More than a means to move muscles, electromagnetism is intimately linked to brain function and, as I will soon become evident, is likely the fundament of consciousness.

Returning to the task of demonstrating that the brain is an electromagnetic organ, recall that neurons, of which we have tens of billions, are highly polar cells that individually discharge electromagnetic pulses of energy called action potentials dozens of times per second. Therefore, it would be unsurprising to detect electromagnetic emissions from brain tissues at different scales of measurement. Indeed, EEGs detect brain activity by measuring voltage fluctuations across the surface of the scalp that are caused by the dynamic electric fields of thousands of cortical neurons firing in synchrony. These complex electromagnetic brain patterns are not random. Rather, they are organized according to predictable patterns that have been described as electrical “microstates”. The duration, shape, and stability of microstates are predictive of age, cognition, and disease. Current investigations are linking the brain’s multi-regional electromagnetic states or “electomes”, with diagnostic applications in neuropsychiatry.

Magnetoencephalography (MEG), which is a newer technology that measures the brain’s weak magnetic fields using highly sensitive detectors, clearly demonstrates that the brain actively emits EMFs that are detectable outside the skull and information-rich. Like EEG, MEG is used as a diagnostic instrument because the specific properties of the brain’s magnetic field emissions reflect the synchronous neuronal activity of tens of thousands of cells. Interestingly, MEG has also been applied to study neurocognitive processes in developing fetuses and was recently used to identify the neural correlates of the earliest stages of human cognitive development. One exciting possibility is that MEG may one day be used to identify the precise transition from non-conscious matter to conscious matter in the brains of developing humans.

In addition to its electric and magnetic field emissions, the human brain has been repeatedly shown to emit visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light. Distinct from bioluminescence, light emitted by biological organisms or “biophotons” are caused by chemical reactions within cells associated with energy production and are functionally linked to microtubules – the skeleton-like structures that give cells shape and their capacity to move. While photons are emitted by other tissues and species some authors have hinted at the possible existence of optical signaling channels within the human brain that operate like fiber optic cables by transmitting photons for cell-to-cell communication. As has been predicted, it would be unsurprising if neurons did perform signaling using photons as information carriers since brain exposures to artificial sources of light are known to modify neural oscillations as well as facilitate the release of neurotransmitters like glutamate and dopamine. Infrared light, for example, can stop neurons from conducting current, meaning a superimposed optical brain network may exist independent of synaptic networks.

Given recent the recent discoveries that much more information can be encoded in light than previously assumed, the possibility of light-based brain function is an increasingly interesting frontier in neuroscience research. In addition to basic amplitude and frequency modulation, information can be encoded within the direction and spacing of rotating photons. Therefore, it is possible that brain biophoton emissions carry tremendous amounts of information when emitted.

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/.

Electromagnetic force: Rouleau excerpt #7

Rouleau writes: While William James’ transmission hypothesis is appealing as a solution to the problem of survival, he did not offer a potential mechanism. Without a physical mechanism by which transmission can occur, the hypothesis cannot survive scientific scrutiny. It seems to me that there are at least two possible mechanisms by which transmission could occur in principle. The first and less likely possibility is that there exists a consciousness-specific signal or particle that interacts with the brain, imbuing it with a capacity for experience and awareness.

The famous neurophysiologist John C. Eccles – who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Andrew Huxley and Alan Lloyd Hodgkin for their characterization of the neuronal action potential – proposed the existence of one such particle called the “psychon” that he claimed could solve the classic mind-brain problem. The idea involved a subatomic psychon interacting with a dendron, which is a receptive appendage of a neuron. Eccles posited that psychons would act on dendrons to imbue them with conscious experience and a reverse interaction would transfer perception and memory from the neuron to the particle. Psychons would also be able to interact with each other, creating a “psychon world” separate from the brain.

While his model is interesting, is consistent with William James’ transmission hypothesis, and is appealing as a solution to the survival problem, Eccles’ psychon has never been measured. The discovery of Eccles’ consciousness-specific particle would fundamentally disrupt our understanding of physics and elevate mental processes to the status of something like a fundamental force.

However, a more likely mechanism would involve a generic physical force that has already been identified and is well-known to interact with the brain. The candidate force should be pervasive over time and space with the capacity to transmit information over long distances. The electromagnetic force satisfies all of these criteria. Electromagnetic fields define the action potential, allow brain cells to communicate wirelessly, are used as biomarkers of brain disease, and even as clinically effective neuropsychiatric treatments when patterned appropriately. Experimental applications of electromagnetic fields to the brain can cause out-of-body experiences and the sensed presence including visitations and apparitions with reports of communion with a creator or God.

In the next section, I will discuss the most significant scientific evidence in support of the joint hypotheses that 1) the transmissive functional dependence of the brain is fundamentally electromagnetic and that 2) this satisfies the criteria for the survival of human consciousness following bodily death.

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/.

Are brains transmissive? Rouleau excerpt #6

Rouleau writes: The Ingersoll Lectures, which have been hosted by the Divinity School at Harvard University since the 1890s, are delivered every year between the end of May and the beginning of December on the subject of human immortality. Consistent with requests made when it was originally endowed, lecturers can be professors, clergymen, or laypeople but should not be limited to any one group. Notable thinkers and scientists including William Osler, Alfred North Whitehead, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and Stephen Jay Gould are among the long list of distinguished speakers associated with the Ingersoll Lectures series. While the specific topics vary according to expertise, many lecturers have offered insights on the survival of human consciousness following bodily death.

In 1897, the famous “Father of American psychology” William James – who was also a notable physician, philosopher, and psychical researcher with a profound interest in the paranormal – delivered the second annual Ingersoll lecture entitled “Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine”. In his lecture, the transcript of which was published in 1898, James outlined what I submit is the definitive case for the survival of human consciousness. The main arguments put forward in the lecture are as relevant today as they were then; however, over a century of neuroscientific research has provided the benefit of empirical support, which makes his argument significantly more compelling. As I am convinced William James’ formulation of the problem of survival is critical to appreciating the proposed solution, I will summarize his lecture and its implications here. Once the concept is characterized, the remaining sections of the essay will be comprised of a systematic description of the empirical support for James’ hypothesis.

William James structured his groundbreaking lecture as a reply to two reasonable objections to the doctrine of human immortality. The first objection to which he replied is the same we concerned ourselves with in the previous section: If the brain is the seat of consciousness, how can it survive brain death and decay? After re-stating the objection, James began with a throat-clearing about the dependence of memory, thought, and consciousness on the brain:

The first of these difficulties is relative to the absolute dependence of our spiritual life, as we know it here, upon the brain. . . . How can the function possibly persist after its organ has undergone decay? . . . Every one knows that arrests of brain development occasion imbecility, that blows on the head abolish memory or consciousness, and the brain-stimulants and poisons change the quality of our ideas. . . . various special forms of thinking are functions of special portions of the brain.

When we are thinking of things seen, it is our occipital convolutions that are active; when of things heard, it is a certain portion of our temporal lobes; when of things to be spoken, it is one of our frontal convolutions. . . . For the purposes of my argument, now, I wish to adopt this general doctrine as if it were established absolutely, with no possibility of restriction. . . .Thought is a function of the brain.

Having firmly adopted the position that thought – including consciousness – is a function of the brain, James accepted the challenge of reconciling its survival with death. To that end, he explained why most of his contemporaries believed immortality, or the survival of consciousness after bodily death, was impossible and why their reasoning was flawed:

The supposed impossibility of its continuing comes from too superficial a look at the admitted fact of functional dependence. The moment we inquire more closely into the notion of functional dependence, and ask ourselves, for example, how many kinds of functional dependence there may be, we immediately perceive that there is one kind at least that does not exclude a life hereafter at all. The fatal conclusion of the physiologist flows from his assuming offhand another kind of functional dependence and treating it as the only imaginable kind.

Next, James described three types of functional dependences: productive, permissive, and transmissive. He argued that objections to human immortality – the survival of consciousness after death – are based upon the widely-held assumption that brain functions including consciousness are consequences of productive function. That is, the function is “inwardly created” or caused by endogenous neurobiological events – as is the current dogma in the modern field of neuroscience. He elaborates:

When the physiologist who thinks that his science cuts off all hope of immortality pronounces the phrase, ``Thought is a function of the brain,'' he thinks of the matter just as he thinks when he says, ``Steam is a function of the tea-kettle,'' ``Light is a function of the electric circuit,'' ``Power is a function of the moving waterfall.'' In these latter cases the several material objects have the function of inwardly creating or engendering their effects, and their function must be called productive function. Just so, he thinks, it must be with the brain. Engendering consciousness in its interior, much as it engenders cholesterin and creatin and carbonic acid, its relation to our soul's life must also be called productive function. Of course, if such production be the function, then when the organ perishes, since the production can no longer continue, the soul must surely die. Such a conclusion as this is indeed inevitable from that particular conception of the facts.

Having rejected the conclusion that consciousness necessarily arises from a productive functional dependence of the brain, James then described permissive or “releasing” function, which is derivative of Newton’s first law of motion, where function is inevitable unless obstructed by a barrier. To clarify the point, he cited the example of a crossbow, where the release of the string returns the bow to its original shape, thus firing the arrow. However, we will be primarily concerned with James’ third type of functional dependence: transmission.

In James’ view, transmissive function is like a filter or sieve that, by dint of its own structure, organizes the shape and character of existing but separate forces into parcels, units, or subdivisions of the whole. Stating his thesis, William James considered the possibility that consciousness is dependent upon a transmissive property of the brain rather than a productive one. In his own words:

In the case of a colored glass, a prism, or a refracting lens, we have transmissive function. The energy of light, no matter how produced, is by the glass sifted and limited in color, and by the lens or prism determined to a certain path and shape. Similarly, the keys of an organ have only a transmissive function. They open successively the various pipes and let the wind in the air-chest escape in various ways. The voices of the various pipes are constituted by the columns of air trembling as they emerge. But the air is not engendered in the organ. The organ proper, as distinguished from its air-chest, is only an apparatus for letting portions of it loose upon the world in these peculiarly limited shapes. My thesis is now this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider . . . transmissive function.

Staying with the metaphor of transmitted light, James then asked his audience to consider the possibility that “the millions of finite streams of consciousness known to us as our private selves” are part of one infinite Thought that, like white light through a prism, is shattered into an infinite spectrum of waves. Considering the possibility that brains selectively obstruct the transmission of consciousness, and that this process explains the unique features of human individuality, James described how his proposed mechanism might track changing mental states, death, and the survival of consciousness after brain decay:

According to the state in which the brain finds itself, the barrier of its obstructiveness may also be supposed to rise or fall. It sinks so low, when the brain is in full activity, that a comparative flood of spiritual energy pours over. At other times, only such occasional waves of thought as heavy sleep permits get by. And when finally a brain stops acting altogether, or decays, that special stream of consciousness which it subverted will vanish entirely from this natural world. But the sphere of being that supplied the consciousness would still be intact; and in that more real world with which, even whilst here, it was continuous, the consciousness might, in ways unknown to us, continue still.

William James conceded that no known mechanism at the time of his lecture could explain transmissive functional dependence in brains; however, he enjoined his audience to consider that a productive mechanism had also not yet been demonstrated – a fact that remains true today despite an embarrassment of riches with regard to correlational data (e.g., neural correlates of consciousness). James then concluded that the productive theory was only regarded as more likely than the transmissive theory because it was more popular – a point that also remains true today. Finally, he described some perceived advantages of the transmission theory:

Consciousness in this process does not have to be generated de novo in a vast number of places. It exists already, behind the scenes, coeval with the world. The transmission-theory not only avoids in this way multiplying miracles, but it puts itself in touch with general idealistic philosophy better than the production-theory does. . . . It puts itself also in touch with [Gustav Fechner’s] conception of a `threshold' . . . Before consciousness can come, a certain degree of activity in the movement must be reached. . . . but the height of the threshold varies under different circumstances: it may rise or fall. When it falls, as in states of great lucidity, we grow conscious of things of which we should be unconscious at other times; when it rises, as in drowsiness, consciousness sinks in amount. . . . [and] conforms to our notion of a permanent obstruction to the transmission of consciousness, which obstruction may, in our brains, grow alternately greater or less.

James then dedicated some attention to the important point that transmissive brains could account for phenomena that are conceptually marginalized by the assumption of productive functional dependence. Specifically, he listed several psi phenomena that are made mechanistically plausible by the adoption of a theory of transmission:

The transmission-theory also puts itself in touch with a whole class of experiences that are with difficulty explained by the production-theory . . . [such] as religious conversions, providential leadings in answer to prayer, instantaneous healings, premonitions, apparitions at time of death, clairvoyant visions or impressions, and the whole range of mediumistic capacities, to say nothing of still more exceptional and incomprehensible things. . . . On the transmission-theory, they don't have to be `produced,'--they exist ready-made in the transcendental world, and all that is needed is an abnormal lowering of the brain-threshold to let them through. . . . All such experiences, quite paradoxical and meaningless on the production-theory, fall very naturally into place on the other theory. We need only suppose the continuity of our consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional waves occasionally pouring over the dam.

William James ended his lecture by addressing the second of the two objections to the doctrine of immortality: If immortality is true, and consciousness continues after death, the number of immortal beings would be unimaginably large. He quickly dismisses the objection as a failure of imagination before summarizing his view, which is potentially inclusive to all living organisms across time and space:

For my own part, then, so far as logic goes, I am willing that every leaf that ever grew in this world's forests and rustled in the breeze should become immortal. It is purely a question: are the leaves so, or not? Abstract quantity, and the abstract needlessness in our eyes of so much reduplication of things so much alike, have no connection with the subject. For bigness and number and generic similarity are only manners of our finite way of thinking.

One important point that James did not discuss was the intercompatibility of functional dependences. Based upon his descriptions, productive and transmissive functional dependences should be able to co-exist and interact within the same system. Indeed, just as James cites examples of objects or devices that express one form of functional dependence – the prism, the pipe organ, and the tea kettle – it is immediately apparent that there are equal numbers of such devices that can be said to have multiple functional dependences. Clock radios, for example, are dependent upon both electric circuits (James cites internal circuitry as productive) and the reception of transmitted information by way of their antennae. A clock radio does not create music de novo – it is a conduit for information that, when coupled to a speaker, can transduce electromagnetic waves into mechanical vibrations that are perceived as organized patterns of sound. If the clock radio were to fall and shatter or be unplugged from its power source, the electromagnetic equivalent of the music as radio waves would “survive”. Repairing the device or re-establishing its power source would seem to resuscitate the music that had never really been lost.

Therefore, it is also possible that brains, with their numerous and complex internal structures, are functionally multi-dependent, expressing both productive and transmissive properties. Just as the information content of music is preserved in the case of a broken radio, it is conceivable that the information content of experience is preserved upon the death of the brain. In this way, the highly predictive contemporary models of neurobiology do not need to be abandoned to reconcile consciousness with transmission and survival but may instead require a modest amendment.

James’ functional dependences may also be less distinct than described. After all, while he points to “steam as a function of the tea kettle”, “light as a function of the electric circuit”, and “power as a function of the waterfall” as examples of productive functional dependences, it is unclear why the causes of these processes cannot equally be attributed to external events. Is the electricity running through the light bulb’s circuit not a function of the power generator, which is a function of the waterfall, which is, in turn, a function of gravity? While it is useful to consider the proximate cause as the starting point of any process, further examination will always lead to the discovery of an ultimate cause outside of the system itself. Therefore, the concept of productive dependence is likely an artifact of our perception rather than an actual property of systems and this illusion has defined our intuitions about how brains function. In fact, all functions of the body are subject to this misapprehension. Muscles do not create heat – heat is a biproduct of twitching cells, which is itself a product of chemical reactions driven by reactants or their precursors that were at some point ingested as food. The iron in our blood that facilitates oxygen transport throughout the body was synthesized in the core of a star, not the body. Albeit a minor digression, it should always be remembered that the ultimate causes of all bodily events are not found within the body at all.

 

James, W. (1898). Human immortality: Two supposed objections to the doctrine. Houghton, Mifflin.

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/.

An objective argument: Rouleau excerpt #5

Rouleau writes: There are at least three additional concrete reasons why subjective accounts such as NDEs, OOBEs, and GEs should only be used sparingly in pursuit of a scientific approach to understanding survival. First, scientific evidence demands replicability for independent verification which is not possible for individual subjective experiences. And while collections of similar experiences reported by many individuals may constitute evidence of a sort, they can always be explained by conserved brain structure-function relationships across the human species. In his book entitled “Neuropsychological Bases of God Beliefs”, notable neuroscientist Michael Persinger explains that because brain structure is highly conserved across the billions of humans on the planet, similar experiences associated with death are expected:

The fact that similar allusions to death (from people who have almost died) exist in many human cultures does not prove the validity of these experiences. Similar near-death reports may only reflect the similar construction of the human brain. They may indicate only that human brains undergo similar sequences as bodies slowly die. This is certainly not surprising and would even be mundane if any other part of the human body was involved. Manifestations of muscle deterioration, for example, follow more or less the same sequence no matter what human culture has reported it. 

The most striking example of this involves the pervasive NDE of “the light at the end of the tunnel”. This visual experience can be explained by the highly conserved structure of the occipital cortex and its anatomical relationship with the posterior cerebral artery. Upon loss of blood flow during cardiac arrest or ischemic stroke, peripheral vision becomes impaired before central vision, producing a visual window: the archetypal experience of a darkened tunnel with light at its center. 

 

While the labels that describe the tunnel phenomenon might vary from culture to culture, the common perceptual features reflect the common functional anatomy of the brain and its arteries. In other words, the assumption that shared glimpses of an afterlife across multiple near-death reports constitute evidence for the existence of a genuine space beyond life can always be undermined by the alternative hypothesis that humans share a conserved brain structure with conserved experiential correlates. Similarly, entoptic phenomena, which are visual experiences caused by the structures of the eye itself that appear universally throughout history including in paleolithic art motifs, illustrate the fundamental problem of relying on convergent subjective reports as a form of evidence.

The second reason for the sparing use of subjective accounts is the following: NDEs, OOBEs, and GEs are, by definition, brain activations that are reported in the living state and the same neuropsychological correlates have been reported in individuals who did not die or nearly die. Because NDE-type experiences – including the sensation of floating away from the body, entering another plane of existence, or encountering supernatural beings – are reported independent of death, the assumption that recondite information from an afterlife is being relayed to the living state is only one of many possible explanations. The third and final reason is that all of these experiences can be reproduced experimentally in healthy, living subjects in the laboratory. 

 

Indeed, mystical, religious, transcendent, euphoric, rapturous, and conversion-type experiences have been elicited by direct stimulation of the brain and the temporal lobes in particular. Since the early stimulation experiments with surgical patients, non-invasive replications with healthy individuals using applied electromagnetic fields have been performed with similar results. These include the sensed presence, OOBEs, and visitations by post-mortem apparitions and deities. 

 

That what appear to be reports from the afterlife can be reproduced experimentally in the laboratory should arouse a healthy skepticism in the scientifically minded. Of course, there will always be the possibility that the act of stimulating areas of the brain that induce experiences of an afterlife is, in fact, allowing the individual to experience a genuine reality that can only be accessed in particular altered states of consciousness – like a virtual path through the looking-glass. However, for the reasons listed above, the contents of subjective experiences should not be regarded as strong forms of scientific evidence.

With these caveats in mind, we turn to the proposed solution that I claim will, beyond a reasonable doubt, support the survival of consciousness after bodily death. As will be discussed throughout the remaining sections, the way in which the brain functions and interacts with consciousness is central to the survival hypothesis. 

 

Drawing on extensive experimental evidence, I will demonstrate that brain functions including consciousness are not fully explained by the conventional neurophysiological model. Brain function is at least partly determined by and can interact with natural, physical forces outside of the head – a model of consciousness that was first articulated over a century ago by one the most significant figures in the history of psychology.

 

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/.

 

Criteria for surviving death: Rouleau excerpt #4

Rouleau writes: Though I have now defined the major terms of life, death, and consciousness as they relate to the brain, one additional consideration should be addressed. When discussing the survival of consciousness after permanent bodily death, we are often implicitly talking about more than just a capacity for experience or awareness. Across cultural traditions, conceptions of an afterlife are often (but not always) personal, and what survives is thought of as an imprint or engram of the formerly living person complete with memories and even desires, fears, and love.

Of course, some cultural traditions have provided versions of survival that are distinctly impersonal, and the view that we are all one mind or soul divided across bodies that return to a common origin upon death is well-subscribed. However, it is certainly worth considering the possibility of memory surviving death.

Consistent with modern neurobiology, memories are stored as patterns of connections between cells in the brain, punctuated by protruding spine-like membrane structures along the tree-like branches of neurons. Each cell is connected to thousands of others in what has been described as an “enchanted loom” which weaves a network in excess of one hundred trillion connections. We know that memories are not stored in any one particular area, but rather are distributed isotropically across the surface of the cerebral cortex. If you remove a part of the brain, no particular memory is erased but many or all memories will incur a loss of resolution or detail. While we may naturally lose up to 10% of our brain cells over a lifetime, what we gain is the benefit of an incredible orderliness to our connections within which our personalities and past experiences are encoded.

Despite lifelong brain degeneration, with age we tend to know more about the world as information accumulates within our neural networks. What happens to these connections upon death? Conventionally, it is assumed that as the cellular structure of the brain decomposes, so too do these connections, and the individual as represented by their neural patterns is forever lost. It is conceivable that the survival of consciousness is independent of memory and that brain decomposition erases the only physical representation of the individual. However, in light of new models of brain function that will be discussed later in this essay, we will consider both the post-mortem survival of consciousness and, to a lesser but significant degree, memory.

Now that the question has been appropriately framed and before offering a solution to establish survival, I will outline what does and does not constitute scientific evidence in support of my thesis. In Edgar D. Mitchell’s influential 1974 book entitled “Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science, Understanding the Nature and Power of Consciousness”, the prominent psychical researcher William Roll addressed this very question in his chapter on survival research. Based upon decades of work on the subject, he summarized his view on the hierarchy of evidence in the following statement:

When we ask whether consciousness continues after death, we usually assume that a surviving self will exist in some kind of body and will include the personality familiar from waking experience. In the course of their work, however, psychic researchers have encountered mediumistic communicators and apparitions that were apparently created by the living but not inhabited by their consciousness. These communicators and apparitions are indistinguishable from those representing the dead. It does not seem possible, therefore, to discover whether there is a continuation of experience after death by the study of communicators, apparitions and other surviving residues of the living. We must look elsewhere for evidence of the survival of consciousness.

Since the consciousness that may continue after death presumably exists before, we may explore it in the living. An examination of parapsychological research with living subjects suggests that consciousness is not private to any individual but can be shared by others. If a person’s consciousness does not “belong” to him, it is unlikely that it will disappear at his death. 

Roll went on to suggest that if consciousness can survive death, it will display three major characteristics: 1) there will be evidence of experiences of the self that can extend beyond the body, 2) this extended self will be able to interact with events and objects in the world, and 3) it will be able to function independently of the central nervous system.

To reiterate the main points, William Roll argued that if consciousness survives death it must not be private, can be shared, and can interact with the world independently of the central nervous system. He explicitly singled out information acquired by mediumship and apparitions as unproductive or weak forms of evidence given our inability to distinguish them from identical phenomena that can apparently be conjured by the living.

Roll considers OOBEs and the ability of consciousness to affect events at a distance as strong supportive evidence of the possibility of survival. He also suggests exploring survival in the living rather than attempting to access consciousness post-mortem since any consciousness that survives death is one that formerly existed in the living.

One reasonable interpretation of this summary is that a sufficiently sophisticated understanding of consciousness would test and potentially validate the survival hypothesis. More specifically, if we were to discover that the brain functions of living people including consciousness could be shared, accessed, projected, transmitted, or channeled to transfer information or deliberately affect events, then survival after death would be quite likely because we would have verified its independence of and ability to extend beyond the nervous system.

These putative properties of consciousness effectively describe classical psi phenomena such as telepathy, remote viewing, and psychokinesis. In other words, if consciousness interacts with but is independent of the brain, it will likely both survive brain death and explain other previously unexplained phenomena which are only conceivable as realistic under the new constraints. In fact, they may share fundamental mechanisms that remain to be fully elucidated.

I will, however, offer a partial criticism of Roll’s criteria in the interest of maintaining a high scientific standard and to address the elephant that is not in the room. That is, though it might be tempting to base an argument in support of the survival hypothesis on vivid personal accounts of an afterlife, experiences should only be included sparingly as an integral but minor part of the grand explanatory narrative.

This point should not be interpreted as a dismissal of the validity or importance of individual experience. Indeed, Roll’s criteria identified experiences as essential to the big picture, and it can never be said that a particular experience of the afterlife is false since verification is impossible. However, it is for this same reason that I claim we can never exclude the possibility of illusion or hallucination.

Furthermore, if experiences can be shared, how might we distinguish the subjective accounts of one person from the channeled accounts of another? That is, subjective experiences can be both meaningful and true and still not qualify as strong scientific evidence. Therefore, I submit that experiences can only partially corroborate but never fully validate survival since the content of experience cannot be empirically measured yet. Of course, there may one day be a technology that measures the raw content of experience in real-time; however, no such technology currently exists.

 

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/.

Death is a process: Rouleau excerpt #3

Rouleau writes: To appreciate the significance and implications of brain death, I will now provide a brief overview of the living brain’s structure and function. The human brain is approximately 1350 cubic centimeters of water, fat, and protein with lesser concentrations of metals and other molecules (Figure 1A). Its outer structure, the cerebrum, resembles a raveled knot of hills and valleys – gyri and sulci – which are connected like a wrinkled but continuous sheet. 

The one-to-four millimeter outer shell of the cerebrum, which is appropriately called the “cortex” or the Latin word for tree bark, is generally considered to be the most important structural correlate of consciousness within the brain. It receives information from sensory organs that define vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, and other perceptual modalities. The cortex also governs language, voluntary movement, decision-making, reasoning, moral judgements, emotional regulation, and countless other brain functions. Most neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) are fundamentally cortical including high-frequency (gamma) synchronous activity. 

Further, distinct activations of the cerebral cortices are apparent in near-death experiences (NDEs), out-of-body experiences (OOBEs), and God experiences (GEs), which are frequently cited in survival research. Finally, the clinical criteria for brain death hinge on specific diminishments of cortical activity as inferred by brain imaging. Therefore, the cerebral cortices are undoubtedly areas that we must focus on if we are going to address the survival of consciousness after death.

The cerebral cortices (Figure 1B,C) are composed of 10 to 100 billion cells which includes both neurons – the definitive brain cell – and the supportive glial cells. Originally described as “the butterflies of the soul” by the great neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, neurons maintain an electric charge across their membranes like other cells. However, unlike most cells, they are specialized to be highly polar and rapid communicators. The brain is considered an electrochemical organ and neurons reflect this duality by signaling to each other by both electrical and chemical means. 

The quintessential signal of the neuron is the action potential: an all-or-nothing, 1 millisecond discharge of electromagnetic energy that results in the release of chemicals called neurotransmitters that trigger downstream action potentials in turn. Every time a neuron discharges its membrane potential, it briefly reverses its charge from internally negative to positive, crossing an important electrical threshold of 0 millivolts, which indicates the cell and its environment are electrically indistinguishable. Under normal circumstances, neurons readily re-polarize themselves and continue signaling; however, for a very brief but real moment they are electrically neutral: this is a property of dead and dying cells. 

As far as modern neuroscience is concerned, an uncharged neuron is incapable of generating cognition. In other words, every time a neuron is activated, it crosses the electrical equivalent of the life-death boundary and then comes back again. Of course, this state is transient, but it is important to realize that neurons operate on the edge of life and death. Indeed, over 85,000 neurons die and are never replaced as a normal part of brain aging every single day. Unlike most other organs, brains are in a constant state of incremental degeneration, though what connections remain become increasingly efficient and define the individual’s personality and memory. But what happens when brains become irreversibly non-functional?

As was previously discussed, a still heart is no longer the gold standard definition of death in medicine. In recent years, the consensus has moved toward brain death and detailed criteria have been put forward to guide clinical assessment. One technical definition, for example, specifies the amplitude of electroencephalography (EEG) voltage should be below 2 microvolts for over 30 minutes. However, beyond black-and-white definitions of life and death is a more accurate view of what actually occurs when consciousness appears to stop.

Death is usually understood to be a fixed time that can be reported on a medical chart; however, this is clearly not the case. Living and dying are processes, not events, and processes take time. Furthermore, the boundaries of processes are always blurry or undefined. We now know that when the heart stops pumping oxygen-and nutrient-rich blood to the head, the brain remains functionally active for 3 or 4 hours post-mortem. Because the means by which we detect brain activity such as EEG depend on the synchronous activity of thousands of cells working together, there is likely asynchronous neural activity that persists undetected well- beyond that – the random beating wings of a billion dying butterflies.

Organotypic slice cultures, which are pieces of brain tissue from mice and other laboratory animals that are maintained artificially in a dish, can functionally persist for weeks given the right environmental conditions. Death is by no means a moment. Rather, dying, as evidenced by the brain’s normative state of persistent degeneration, is a lifelong process that becomes suddenly accelerated after heart death. 

Indeed, brain death is likely only a meaningful concept when the brain has become physically dissociated following cellular breakdown and is actively decomposing. It should also be noted that the longer a person’s brain is deprived of oxygen, the less likely they are to ever regain consciousness. For example, following cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the likelihood of recovering consciousness after 24 hours, 72 hours, and 5 days is 34%, 25%, and 20% respectively. Brain death is clearly a process, and we can expect its interaction with consciousness, including survival, to track those changes over time.

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/.

Life and consciousness: Rouleau excerpt #2

Erwin Schrödinger

Rouleau writes: To describe how the consciousness of a living human can survive death, several important terms will first need to be defined, beginning with a review of “life”. In his 1944 book entitled “What is life? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell”, Erwin Schrödinger provided the theoretical groundwork for the scientific study of life, anticipating among other things the “aperiodic crystal” structure of DNA and the role of mutation in evolution. Most notably, Schrödinger emphasized that life, as with all products of physical laws, is dependent upon “order-from-disorder”. That is, from the percolating chaos and disorder of the quantum world emerges – not as an accident or coincidence but as a property of the conditions themselves – highly ordered molecular structures that give rise to living organisms.

Schrödinger’s speculations provided a new and exciting path from fundamental particles to life and are recognized as foundational to the field of molecular biology. He even discussed the relationships between life, free will, and consciousness. His insightful unification of non-living matter and energy with life and conscious experience was an important acknowledgement of the continuous and inseparable chain of interactions that connect the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. Since Schrödinger, there has been an explosion of information about the fundamental nature of life but the primary role of the cell as its structural and functional unit is among the least controversial facts in the field of biology.

Cells are approximately 10 millionths of a meter wide, mostly water by volume and surrounded by a thin, gated membrane that maintains order by keeping certain molecules in and others out. The cell membrane acts as a selective bridge between the inside of the cell, where chemical reactions are highly controlled, and the outside of the cell, where they are largely spontaneous or random. Because membranes can separate charged particles – also called ions – cells store an electric charge, like a battery, that can be actively discharged to help them divide, proliferate, or communicate with their neighbors. The boundary of the membrane is what distinguishes the living cell from its non-living environment.

Consider that viruses must cross the important threshold of the cell membrane to suddenly become activated and “life-like”, with disastrous consequences to our bodies. When membranes are dissolved, cells and their environments become assimilated, and life becomes non-existent. Life is therefore a state of ordered conditions maintained by a thin and delicate cell membrane that divides the world into living and non-living parts: “order-from-disorder”. As its direct negation, death, to reverse Schrödinger’s formulation, is “disorder-from-order”. More generally, death is the disorder that a living system experiences when its boundaries dissolve and it is no longer distinguishable from its environment.

Not all cells are equally relevant to the death of the individual. That is, when considering the essence of a person, we are not preoccupied with cell death in the gallbladder or kidneys. Where life, death, and consciousness interact is, as we understand it, the brain. And while the human body is a highly interconnected system, and the heart might be necessary for its function, the brain is the only known organ in the human body that is sufficient for consciousness.

Indeed, there is no reason to suppose that a brain supported by a series of artificial organs could not sustain consciousness. There are, after all, many such examples in modern medicine including circulatory pumps, ventilators, and dialysis machines that sustain conscious life. But what do I mean by the word “conscious”? A system is conscious if there is something that it is like to be it. That is, consciousness is pure subjective experience and the entry point for everything we know and can know about the external world and our internal states. It is the stream of mental chatter that defines our point of view relative to events in the world. Consciousness is, fundamentally, the thing we refer to when we say the words “I” and “me”.

For all practical purposes, it is the soul under a different name. However, just as the phlogiston theory of combustion led to the discovery of oxygen, the ancient idea of the soul has given way to a focused science of consciousness and its relationship to the essence of human life.

While consciousness and the related mechanisms that allow experience or internal representations to arise from matter are not fully understood, its existence is certain. Indeed, it was Descartes who famously pointed out that thought is the original ground truth and the foundational argument for personal existence. Today, philosophers and scientists alike generally agree that human consciousness exists and is a function of the brain.

Therefore, if the question at the core of this essay is “Can consciousness survive the death of the body below the neck including the heart?”, the answer is an uncontroversial and emphatic “yes”. However, without addressing brain death, the significance of the question at the core of this essay is completely lost. Therefore, any proposed solution for the survival of consciousness after bodily death must account for its persistence following brain death in particular.

 

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/.