Science Of The Soul - Full Documentary

what is the soul where is it can you measure it touch it recreate it do near-death experiences reincarnation and unexplained brain activity indicate the existence of the soul these are questions that have intrigued and haunted people since they first walked the earth today in the 21st century experts are closing in on some answers using new technology and new understandings to unlock the secrets of the soul [Music] 21 grams less than one ounce a weight attributed to the sole by a Boston physician in 1907 dr. Duncan MacDougall conducted a ghoulish experiment he watched six people die dr. mcdougal wanted to know whether the soul existed so he built a delicate scale to determine whether humans got lighter at the moment of death in just one of the deaths MacDougall recorded a weight change of less than one ounce 21 grams his experiment got a tiny mention in the New York Times more of a curiosity the news although no one since has been able to duplicate MacDougall's McCobb test it's still remembered today as the first time that modern science attempted to quantify the existence of the soul cultures since the beginning of civilization haven't needed nor relied on scientific evidence of the soul a core belief for most cultures and religions is that when our bodies die there is an immortal part of us that remains past death our soul all the world's great major religions talk about us as being souls as truly being spiritual beings that are incarnated here in our bodies and that the death of our physical body is not the death of us it's the death of the body that that us that special spark that is us I call that the soul it leaves there's a lot of question right now about how much of the irrational mysterious supernatural aspects of life we can explain through science and many many scientists are directing their attention toward those questions and I applaud that but I also think that religion is a language for the stuff that we don't understand and one of the reasons that religion is so fascinating to me is that it is by definition paradoxical oxymoronic like things don't fit rationally together you want to live forever and you want to keep changing you want to have an immortal soul and you want to hug your grandma you know you want these things don't fit together they're not rational to trace the history of the modern Western view of the soul the trail begins in the 3rd century BC Alexander the Great swept across Europe and Asia and Greek thinking the spread like wildfire the Greeks above all others set the stage for what we believe about the soul today the Greeks believed that your body was unimportant in fact even bad it was the place where all of your most bass impulses resided so lust greed hunger childbearing everything that was yucky about human life resided in the body and everything that was good and true about human life resided in the soul which was in the head so when you died your soul ascended to God and your body resided in the ground you didn't need it anymore the Greeks believed in reincarnation that the soul can move on to a new body as Christianity conquered the world the Greek idea of body and soul being separate things was eclipsed by the evolving Christian notion that body and soul are part of the same whole because the in the Greek context you had your soul your soul went up to heaven after you died and your body was dirt dust the Christian teaching is that your body and your soul are one thing you can't have one without the other together they make you you Christian ideas of what does my soul look like raised questions that people joke about but it remains one of life's great mysteries where we go and what we are we die and which me is my soul am i me when I was 26 or am i me when I am 80 am i mean with my wrinkle so remind me without my wrinkles you know am i me with my cancer am i me without my cancer you know those questions start to get people hung up and then they start to be kind of funny and silly but the yearning itself is real and powerful so it's it's a conundrum like all of these things Christian beliefs eventually deviated even further from the Greeks who considered the soul separate from the body like an energy force Christian souls were more like ghosts with shapes I can Dante's Inferno etc you see all these Souls they seem like bodies Dante can recognize them but you know their souls their souls that are shaped like bodies so they have taken on a certain amount of syllogism which I think shows how hard it is for Christianity to separate body and souls that even these souls which were pronounced as completely immaterial there's no matter in them nevertheless they can be perceived that way the West inherited a combination of Greek and Christian apocalyptic ideas about what the soul is which is more confounding today than it was in its own time if the soul leaves the body after death where does it go in the years or even centuries it may have to wait until the day that Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead what do you do in the period between the Last Judgment and you know when a person dies well what is the soul just on itself I mean how do we envisage the soul without the body it's very very difficult with the scholars of early Christianity say for example is that we've made it into a mush that in those days you know there was a word for resurrection which meant resurrection and there was a there was a combination of words for immortality of us all which meant something different and now when we talk about heaven and afterlife we mush it all together and we mean heaven and we mean resurrection and we mean immortality of the soul and we mean seeing grandma and we mean seeing Jesus and we mean hearing harps and and we don't disentangle these ideas but in the ancient world they were very distinct ideas and you were either in the immortality of the soul camp or you were in the resurrection camp since resurrection involves bodies and immortality involves Souls Rennie Descartes tried to reconcile the two by focusing on consciousness in the 17th century he famously wrote I think therefore I am since then scientists believed that if there is a soul it resides somewhere in the brain but they haven't found it yet and today we're still grappling with the problem is the existence of the soul a question for science or religion to answer religion is a way for us to talk about and think about those aspects of human life that are beyond us and so let science keep probing because it must and yet let us keep acknowledging through whatever language works for us whether it's poetry or art or religion that there are aspects to the human experience into human yearning that failed to meet categories and I think the soul is one of those things we want to believe that there's something special about us that lives forever and we want to believe that we will commune with those we love at some later point we don't want to lose those people and those yearnings are powerful and important those yearnings require that consciousness be something separate from the brain that it is something not material but magical the spiritual among us believe one thing I have seen men women old young all face all gender orientations atheist believers all religious traditions I believe it is a universal human phenomenon it's part of being human that we are all souls and that each soul sometimes has the capacity to have a spiritual experience in certain circumstances the scientific among us hold another view I don't think consciousness is some supernatural soul that is not measurable scientifically that somehow associated with our natural brain I also don't think there's a mystical world beyond what we can measure if something actually exists then it's part of the real world and ultimately we should be able to detect it a Louisiana boy offers incredible evidence that should satisfy both sides of the soul debate his case offers proof of the soul is real that it can be reincarnated and that science can study it according to a 2007 Pew Research Center poll eighty-one percent of Americans say they believe in an afterlife forty-five percent believe in ghosts I personally had an experience where I saw the spirit of my grandfather after he died and I haven't gone to the place where I believed it was true and yet it felt true to me it felt real to me and I am very sympathetic with those feelings that people have you know they see the ghosts or the spirits of people they've lost they have a traumatic physical experience and they see things and I actually think that soul is more a matter of faith and proof today scientists are studying people who make a compelling case that they used to be someone else at the University of Virginia a group of psychiatrists use science to unlock the secrets of reincarnation since the 1960s the division of perceptual studies has been collecting cases of children who claim 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 at times can exist separately from a functioning brain so in the cases that these children's reports as you look at the the best cases they provide evidence that at times there can be this carryover of memories and emotions that seem carried over from one life and and continue on and another may 2000 life is Louisiana a mother awakens to hear the screams of her two-year-old son was laying on his back and he was kicking his feet up like this and pounding his fists like this just kicking and kicking and screaming at the top of his lungs and realign anger cannot soothe her baby James eventually he falls back to sleep she thinks the nightmare is over but really it is just beginning then the next night he had another one it was the exact same thing that the same exact kicking motion and the more he had it the more bizarre it became because it was so so specific and so repetitive this marked the start of one of the best documented cases of possible reincarnation in history today James Leininger is 12 I play sports baseball soccer go to ascension Episcopal School I have a lot of friends there other kids when they were younger say I want to be a fireman I want to be an astronaut but I was always I want to be a fighter pilot I want to be in the Marines pictures yeah well they came out nice from the age of 3 James's parents began to hear stories from their son that shocked them that their son was recalling things that connected him to a Navy pilot who died in 1945 they were skeptical Bruce is an HR manager in the oil industry andrea is a former ballerina turned instructor as Christians they never believed in reincarnation but they began to piece together an amazing story the first clue came from the terrifying non-stop nightmares that James began having at the age of 2 he was saying airplane crash on fire little man can't get out airplane crash on fire little man can't get out that's why I was like oh my god is that what he's been dreaming this entire time what he was saying wasn't registering as much on me and what he was what he was doing he was flailing around in bed and I remember the very specific thought I had at that point this looks like The Exorcist he was freaking out I had this thought he possessed what is going on here within a year the visions that greeted James in his nightmares began taking shape when he was wide awake I was reading to James and then he sat up he goes mama the little man's going like this and he laid down and he goes and he did the same thing he did in this dream he's he's kicking his feet up and he goes little man's going like this who can't get out can't get out and they sat him back up and I said who's the little man he goes me it still makes my hair stand up and Bruce says what happens you're playing he said it crashed on fire and he said why did your airplane crash and he said it got shot Bruce said who shot your plane he went oh the Japanese James then gave his parents the next uncanny clue one that was very specific the name of a ship from which he says his aircraft took off so I said well did you boat have a name and he said Natoma and I I've never heard the word before and I went down the hall and got onto the computer and googled it and down around hit 300 all there was this thing at the tomah baek's CVE 62 clicked on it and up comes this history of a World War two aircraft carrier and so that was the beginning of what the heck is going on here standing there staring at this picture of this little it was like an aerial photo of this little aircraft carrier in the water I'm just stood there staring at it for a long time I had no answers you know how could he know this how could he know a person how could he know ship and what did all this means so that was where I really just said I'm gonna get to the bottom of this I don't know how I'm gonna do it I don't know what I'm gonna find but I'm not gonna stop looking until I get as many answers as I can get this was enough to send Bruce on an investigation doing his own research over the next two years he learned about the men from a Natoma Bay both living and and James kept giving his parents additional tantalizing eerie clues well I kept asking him do you remember what your name was do you remember what your name was and he always said James and that thought well he's too he's confused he thinks I'm asking him what his name is then James started drawing that was one of my mission things mission thing you remember that yeah that's one of my favorite ones the same thing over and over like a movie compressed all into one frame an air battle flak a plane on fire [Music] and his signature James three so one day I was in the kitchen I was washing dishes James had breakfast and and hit the airplane he was just flying around like this and he goes mama before I was born I was a pilot my airplane got shot in the engine and crashed in the water and that's how I died and I was just froze it was such a bizarre thing to say but it was it was just that matter of fact there was no drama there was no emotion to it at 3 James started pretending to be a pilot with an attention to detail that astonished his father one day he dragged a car seat into the closet in my office and he set up a little cockpit in there he had a little play school console and like it was gonna be a cockpit yo and he's going back and forth all sudden the door comes flying open and he comes rolling out of it I said James what happened to you he says I said you'd folly his no he says my plane got shot and I bailed out the next breakthrough came when Bruce was invited to the Natoma Bay Veterans reunion he asked about the names of men killed in battle and this led him to finally solving the mystery of James 3 he called me on the phone he said you won't believe this there's only one guy from the tomah Bay who was killed during a bat battle for Iwo Jima and his name was it was James M Houston jr. and I said wait that would make our James James 3 I was so excited I'm like that's it I'm like it that's him it's James M Houston his name is James James 3 James Houston jr. World War 2 Navy pilot at age 21 on March 3rd 1945 his plane was shot down over chichi Jima now the skeptical parents were sitting on compelling proof that their little boy really was reincarnated [Music] Louisiana boy James Leininger spent his childhood recounting memories of being a world war two Navy pilot memories of a past life his parents could no longer ignore from the age of two to six James continued to provide pieces of evidence of the incredible possibility that he was James Houston reincarnated displaying the Wildcat is the plane that James in Houston crashed in and he was a test pilot for Corsair and he would test fly those off of carriers the f-18 is the plane I want to fly when I grow up since he was two James showed an unusual fascination for military air shows and an uncanny familiarity with vintage aircraft his parents cautiously made contact with James Houston's only surviving relative his sister and at first she didn't know what to think about the little boy who claimed to be her brother reincarnated but then James asked her for a painting that only one person other than her knew existed she said this January 16th 2006 says dear James I do hope that this is the picture you asked for is the only one of me done by my mother I am sorry to be so long sending it to you these past few weeks have been very busy and hectic I hope you like it with my love Annie James believed then as he does now that it was the dead pilots soul asking for that picture I had asked her for a painting that my past mother had done for her and me this was in her attic for 50 or so years my parents and she thought it was crazy that I would know about something like this and to became a believer and there were other more chilling connections James had three GI Joes he named Billy Walter and Leon names his Paris thought were strange for a boy to choose Bruce is like hey James where do you named your GI Joe he's just playin he goes Walter so you're like Walter Bruce Gus how can be named your GI Joes Billy Walter and Leon and he goes cuz that's who met me when I got to heaven and it was one of the moments were like the blood drained out there's fate our face and we just kind of walked backwards Bruce went in the office I went in the office we closed the door he's in there going through papers like this and like what are you looking for what are you looking for he finds his piece of paper and he's like and he says Billy peeler Walter Devlin Leon Conner were all in the same squadron as James Houston I was like when did they die did they die before throwing papers around pulls out another sheet and he looked at the dates of death and they all died before James Houston died they all flew with him although James's dad remains skeptical that reincarnation might really be possible what happened next was uncanny so we're cleaning up the yard he's playing in the lead I said I just love you to bits and he goes well he said I knew you'd be a good daddy when I picked you and I said what I mean some when I found you and mommy I knew you 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 it's just why I found you and mommy I found your mommy in Hawaii James told his father that he saw them in a pink hotel which is where the lining girls 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's ordeal and their solution was to go to Japan to the very expansive ocean where the pilot James Houston Jr died [Music] the boat was right above where the you know the wreckage of the plane was and Bruce did this beautiful memorial service and so I thought that was a perfect moment for me to just say you know I sat down with them and I said you know Jim Houston's been a part of your life for as long as we can remember and he's always going to be important part of of who you are but you have a life to live as James Leininger and it's time for you to say goodbye and to Jim Houston and he just started small started bawling and he cried for about 20 minutes he had every was the saddest thing I ever seen he had everyone on the boat crying please [Music] good job [Music] good boy there's such a brave soul such a brave soul and spirit this is weird when we got back to shore it was something had changed they left something there he really did it was palpable you could see that he were he was he'd mourned that and everything that had happened it was ready to move on and he really did at that point that's kind of when everything really changed we're gonna be the same thing that games in the next picture that James Leininger drew was one of peace the nightmares 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 to be bogged down or confused or he's our son you know it's not he's not Jim Houston got a life to live today James Leininger can remember nothing specific about the soul that used to torment him at 12 he is an ordinary boy whose bedroom says something about who he is and who he believes he once was I'm gonna Boy Scouts I'm a first class scout and the Boy Scouts these are the books I got from chichi Jima yearbooks BB gun my money bag my phone I don't know when I got this but this is a my grandmother's rosary and my Star Wars stuff and a Blue Angels he doesn't talk much about his past life memories with his friends but he doesn't hide it either if classmates stumble across a story on the Internet to James reincarnation is a fact of his existence it's part of his soul I believe that the spirit that I used to have when I was four or five six has gone away I'm just James now it's not I still have James Houston in me I think but it's not so much the bad history it's more of the peaceful history of his life instead of the crashing of the plane his death I don't really think about my story so much I just don't really talk about it people ask me a question about it I'll answer it you know I was skeptical the whole way I still have a hard time really saying this really has happened you know but it did so the issue is you know how does it happen I don't know why it happens we can sit here and guess about it but the fact is that it does happen and so people should be should listen closer should not just give it up because of the two-year old saying something that might sound meaningless to you from the point of view of the people that we've spoken to that are attempting to do something with it I can understand rational thinking I'm pretty rational guy this is not something rational and I had to struggle with that spiritually but I came to the conclusion that it's I now have a three dimensional belief system instead of two dimensional at the University of Virginia's division of perceptual studies dr. Jim Tucker has examined James Leininger Tucker has developed what he calls a strength of case scale for reincarnation and he gives James a near-perfect score average age when they first start speaking is 38 months so usually two or three years old when it comes out and some of them will talk about these things anytime day or night sometimes the cases can start with nightmares the way they did in James langurs case some are intrigued many are perplexed some are upset some of the Christian parents in the United States are kind of thrown by it but regardless of their reaction the children will talk about this for some time and then usually by the time they get to be five or six they seem to forget about and then just go on with their their current life after four decades in 2,500 cases the researchers at the University of Virginia have come to a startling conclusion reincarnation is real which certainly suggests that there is a part of us a consciousness part that may be able to continue on after the brain dies which would indicate that the brain may not be the creator of at least part of our consciousness but Moroz serve a portal that the consciousness flows through that there may be this other piece of existence separate from the physical world that there's this consciousness piece again that may be independent of the physical world and the physical brains that it seems to come through dr. paul de bell is a psychiatrist who specializes in what's called past life regression using hypnotism he's taken countless patients on a voyage back in time to souls their bodies have forgotten and he provides a recent example we'll call mr. X he had been sexually abused as a child I NT was really angry about that and so he came in for a regression so he suddenly found himself above a castle in Austria in 1630 he was actually a she just washing the floors of this castle de Belle firmly believes that what he is doing is about finding the soul through science I think that spirituality today is in the same point that psychology was a hundred years ago when nobody thought that the mind could be understood nobody's thought dreams could be understood nobody thought ill mental illness could be understood because it was too complex but if we use those same tools which is methodical systematic investigation with hypotheses and experimental proofs that then we'll begin to gradually make progress meanwhile skeptics of reincarnation would say that James Leininger x' case is circumstantial at best in America belief in reincarnation is growing part of this is driven by celebrities who you know say they believe in reincarnation Julia Roberts recently told Elle magazine that she believed she thought of herself as very Hindu and she talked about her daughter and how her daughter clearly embodied somebody else 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 destination somewhere else when life is bad on earth and you want to get out skeptics aside to the lining Gers the existence of the soul does not require the validation of scientists or psychiatrists James's experience is proof to them of the afterlife but the question remains if the soul exists in every human can it be found and measured by science one neuroscientist is blazing new trails into how the brain works he's looking for evidence of consciousness in people who show no signs of consciousness at all the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with the afterlife and they maintained that belief across thousands of years they believed that our souls and bodies were so entangled that he needed one another even in the afterlife so they perfected mummification they even stored the mummies internal organs to keep them safe they believe the soul was located in the heart as for the brain they declared it had no function so they removed it through the nose and threw it away the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus believed that the soul was made up of atoms dispersed into the cosmos after death in the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes made a revolutionary declaration 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 certain that it resided somewhere in the brain the field of neuroscience was born scientists started to poke around looking inside the human brain searching for the soul but they never found it no one is even sure where to look within the brains 100 billion neurons some scientists even say it's an impossible mystery to solve given the brains complexity but others are determined to prove that the brain is the key to unlocking the secrets of the soul in medical school we were given a brain to dissect as part of our anatomy class and they brought out this preserved brain and formaldehyde it 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 pro but ice they tell you okay first thing to do is start to probe away from the cortex and gently remove this layer of cells and I thought to myself did I just you know peel away what would have been this patient's recollection of a summer during a childhood picnic or a relationship with a particularly significant person in their lives what did I just remove from this piece of brain that was once something what I think soul and mind are interchangeable I think as a neuroscientist mind and brain are interchangeable for 20 years dr. Adrian Owen has been studying which parts of the brain are active for different specific activities but our mind is a product of the complex brain that we have I think the reason we feel that we all have a soul and my soul is different to your soul is because my brain is different to your brain for dr. Owen the brain is the key to solving the mystery of who we are and he's trying to prove that by working with patients in vegetative states have you looked at some pictures kritz I want you to try and look all right here's you and Randy and Walt you're all in your uniforms chris was an officer and training at West Point Military Academy in 2007 his car was rear-ended he nearly died instead he survived with permanent brain damage but the Chris that was there a young bright cadet with his life ahead of him was gone first you see the picture of you and your friends and you can't imagine and your worst nightmares I've seen families go through this but until it happens to you you have no concept asked how heartbreaking it is there are times when you feel like you know they're not there other times that you feel like very strongly that he's there he's listening making eye contact with me and it's so hard to pinpoint where is he is he here is he locked in you know we don't really have any answers I don't believe that Chris doesn't have a soul I think there's that spark of life that leaves you at the moment of death is basically what the soul is and Chris might not have full conscious be conscious but he's still here I definitely feel like soul is more than just consciousness Chris I have a hammer and a ball I want you to look at the ball what dr. Owens research is trying to prove is whether chris is clinically speaking as conscious now as he was before his accident you know his consciousness you have a big problem lately the only way I can tell you that I am conscious is through some sort of action either by you know telling you or by demonstrating you know 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 that they are by definition unable to produce the source of responses that the rest of us would use to demonstrate them we were conscious [Music] for dr. Owen what began as a simple study of consciousness turned into an unprecedented discovery he conducted tests on a 23 year old woman in a vegetative state the results have revolutionized Sciences understanding of the brain she was the victim of a road traffic accident and have been examined periodically for five months and on each examination had all of the necessary criteria for a diagnosis of vegetative state so we put an fMRI scanner and we asked her to imagine playing a game of tennis in this scan when you hit the word tennis I want you to imagine standing on a tennis court playing a game of tennis we pick this task because it's something that we tried many times in healthy volunteers and we know this produces quite a specific activation in an area in the middle of the front of the brain called the supplementary motor area and this area controls upper body movements and if you lie in the scanner and imagine moving your body around as you would if you were playing a game of tennis you get very strong activation in this area of the brain so while she was in the scanner we instructed her that when she heard the word tennis would like her to start imagining this task and carry on until we said rest and when we did this her brain activated just like a healthy volunteer so on this basis we concluded that she wasn't vegetative at all she was entirely consciously aware that was pretty exciting and we had another task that we used it was it was important to show that this wasn't just an automatic reaction but if we changed the task the brain activation would change so we used a type of spatial navigation task where we asked her to imagine moving from room to room in her house and this pretty much always activates an area deep inside the brain called the parahippocampal gyrus in healthy volunteers never seen it before in a vegetative patient but nonetheless when we asked her to imagine moving from room to room in her house the parahippocampal gyrus activated just as it would in a healthy volunteer Owens 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 he's here when I speak to him I'm I don't know how to put this and I think he's still there oftentimes I sit aside and they say to myself what is he thinking because he can't speak to us you know what is he thinking but I'll give you an example we have this ball at home he actually kicks the ball I become the target he will hit me with it in the Oh laughs you'll laugh at me and I feel it's me that is target yes the same Scotty he just can't get out is your name Scotty yes or no look at the card that has your answer Owen has proven that despite no signs of outward awareness for some an inner spark remains and within that undiscovered brain may be where we find the soul and for the indigenous peoples of the Americas humans are the minority in a world inhabited primarily by spirits a common thread through these beliefs from the cherokee to the Haida is that transformation takes place when a child is about to harmonize his soul with the spirit world around him at this critical moment spirit guides need an adolescent into adulthood and the human soul is unleashed in today's Western society children are born with souls the soul and body are linked one of the central tenets of a Christian faith is that Christ rose from the dead right and I think it's very reassuring for people because they do associate body with identity to have both the body and soul and in fact you know in Christianity it's a very very hard to separate body soul because you know they're described as kind of a marriage to each other professor Alison Gopnik doesn't believe in the eternal soul but her research into the uncharted areas of children's brains has led her to the conclusion that what some would call the spirit is closest to us when we are children I'm a scientist an atheist and materialist I think everything that's here is everything that's here but I also think that many of the feelings and experiences and intuitions and knowledge and truth that people have talked about when they've talked about the soul or the spiritual or the transcendent those experiences where we recognize the meaning and beauty and significance of everything that's going on around us I think those are the moments when we're most like children this is my mission and I want you to figure out how the machine works okay gopnik's set out to solve the problem at what age does identity switch on when does I think therefore I am begin wanted to study infants her colleagues told her she was wasting her time when I was going to Oxford when I was a graduate student one of the people there told me when I first arrived that this entire research program I had was useless because babies didn't have a higher cortex they didn't have any of the higher brain areas that we had as adults after 20 years of research Gopnik has helped prove that the neurons and children's brains display more activity than those in adults where the adult brain is a spotlight the child is more like a lantern illuminating in all directions so there's been a big big change from this view of babies is what I think of as being sort of crying carrots sort of see me vegetables too the ones who were doing the most learning solving the hardest problems and doing it incredibly quickly gopnik believes that preschool children represent human R&D first studies indicate that they play and learn with the same intent she believes that we learn to survive in the world as grown-ups and we play to try and imagine ways to change it it's as if instead of just looking at one little part of the world they are conscious of the entire manifold everything that's going on around them at once I think a good way of appreciating this as an adult is think about what happens when for instance you go and travel to a strange place everything around you is something that's captivating and engaging and different and new and you get this very vivid very wide-ranging awareness of everything that's going on once I think that's what it's like to actually be a baby gopnik's studies have shown that adult brains only light up when we are trying to learn something new and even then only in certain areas in fact I think one of the interesting things about us as adults is that we run unconscious as it were so much of the time tests have shown that a baby's brain is lit up most of the time one way I've put this is to say you know for children every day is first love in Paris every step is skydiving every peekaboo game is Einstein discovering the theory I think babies and young children are genuinely perceiving that aspect of of the way the world in the universe works that means that they're the kind of exemplars of what it means to have a soul but gopnik's research shows that when a child becomes self-aware the brain activity slows down and the connection with what some call the soul begins to weaken so between about three and five you start seeing children having what we call autobiographical memory not just remembering information from the past even newborns can do that but constructing a narrative that says I am the same person that I was in the past and I am the same person I'm going to be in the future does the identity that we develop as we grow eclipse our infant consciousness where we once closer to our souls surprisingly anesthesia may hold the answer to those questions until relatively recently babies weren't administered anesthesia now it turns out that babies actually need more anesthesia than relatively speaking than adults do why what is anesthesia do we really know it seems that anaesthesia poses its own mysteries about consciousness and the soul an Arizona anesthesiologist stumbled upon a theory of where his patients go when they're under anesthesia proving to him the existence of the soul I've been practicing anesthesiology for 35 years now and it's still a kick it's still amazing every time patients lose their consciousness at the end we wake them back up and I wonder where did they go 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 is missing in the anesthetized patient there we go you come with us anesthesia is a mystery it's been around since 1846 but no one is quite sure exactly how it works or where we go when we're put under in the 19th century people started experimenting with laughing gas nitrous oxide and they used it for parties that everybody had a good time they literally were laughing constantly and also another gas called ether diethyl ether leading to ether frolics when inhaled in low amounts people got disinhibited and abelian tanned had a great time and somebody realized that they have too much they would become unconscious and actually insensitive to pain and so a number of people began to attempt to use these gases for surgical anesthesia after years of risky trial-and-error doctors perfected the drugs 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's no consciousness you're just gone for the duration of the anaesthetic you tell me when you're asleep okay that's a trick question you can't do one interesting thing about anesthesia is that patients who are under anesthesia after they wake up have no conception of elapsed time whatsoever and I think the passage of time is a is a key feature of subjective consciousness so a consciousness is just absent it's gone a brain scanner connected to the patient reveals the startling clue to how anesthesia works during the surgery a bright flashing halogen light is used to help stimulate brain response the bright light pierces her taped shut eyelids the EEG monitor shows that the patient's brain is responding just as if she were awake you see that the brain is quite active going under is not like sleep and this fascinates Hameroff I first got interested in consciousness how the brain produces experience in college in medical school I was doing a research elective in a lab studying cancer and I was looking at how cells divide power off then learned about microtubules microtubules are hollow tubes that can be found in all living cells thirty years ago he had his Eureka moment and since then he has 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 computation synchronized to gama EEG inside neurons in the brain is the origin of consciousness Hameroff theory has shocked the world of neuroscience he's basically saying that consciousness may be found and quantified that it has substance and that it survives the body I'll stand by this even though it's a bit controversial it's conceivable that when a patient has a cardiac arrest or dies the quantum information that involves consciousness isn't necessarily destroyed it may actually just sort of leak out and remain in the universe and remain entangled if the patient's revived then it can go it can go back in and and patient had a near-death and out-of-body experience if the patient dies it's conceivable to me that that entity which could call the soul remains entangled indefinitely and so it's conceivable that the soul is a real entity in terms of quantum information embedded in the fundamental level of the universe what Hameroff is saying is that the 21 grams myth is basically true the soul has substance though it can't be weighed the information can be measured Hameroff shocking theory has caught the attention of the world's top physicists who think that he may have stumbled on to understanding how the mind and soul separate complex quantum physics may hold the key quantum theory is pretty intriguing and it's not necessarily consistent with an a simple materialist understanding of the universe the things are more complicated than we're aware but I think people who just immediately discounted as being sort of mystic mumbo jumbo I think they're being too quick with that that quantum theory does challenge us to try to really understand the world the physical world at its core and it may well be more complicated or or wondrous than than what a lot of people realize this comes as no surprise to those who have died and come back to tell the tale most cultures throughout time have held that there is something that survives the body after death 21st century science is seeking to prove it science says that consciousness is limited to and generated by the brain very clear very straightforward after 10 seconds without oxygen the brain starts to die after five minutes it's completely gone but what happens to consciousness in that precious five minutes new research suggests that consciousness might actually leave the brain the near-death experience in cardiac arrest says something different it says when the brain is not functioning then consciousness can separate from the brain and is able to gain information which becomes accessible when you regain consciousness and that is an astonishing statement Yvan casein is a family doctor in Toronto 30 years ago she nearly died in a small plane crash in which someone was killed it changed her life forever we flew into really bad weather and the engine stopped working so the plane started crashing so we were plummeting down to the ground though there was terrible turbulence in the air was shaking and my immediate reaction was intense terror I was terrified I was frightened the plane was crashing I was going to die and what happened was I had this feeling like my fear was being pushed out and this calm and peace was descending upon me and I entered sort of a paranormal peaceful state the plane crashed into an icy lake in a wilderness area hundreds of miles from the nearest town then what happened is my near-death experience deepened suddenly as I was swimming to shore and starting to freeze I heard this noise and it was like my consciousness got whisked out of my body and I was no longer in my body that was swimming to shore suddenly I was like twenty or thirty feet above my body looking down and it was me still trying to swim to shore miraculously a helicopter pilot hearing of a downed plane came to her rescue she was rushed to hospital nearly dead from hypothermia she was immersed in hot water but there was little hope and it was in that hot water that my consciousness reentered my body and what I experienced was something like this it was like what I imagined if a genie were sucked into a bottle that with a loud whoosh I was sucked in from this expanded place up there and abruptly sucked into the small confines of my body Kayson now combines her medical practice with helping others who have had near-death experiences she is convinced after studying hundreds of cases but the soul is not merely consciousness it is an energy force all on its own 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 calling them paranormal this despite the fact that every year hundreds of thousands of people die and report the experience at the time casein did not know whether she was alone had anyone else had an experience like this and what is it called what is this that happened to me dr. Peter Fenwick has studied the phenomena of near-death experience for years initially a skeptic he is now a believer as far as near-death experiences are concerned I didn't believe them they happened in America they happened in California they certainly wouldn't happen in London what we found out was that near-death experiences are very common so I think we have to see consciousness no longer as just a point source generated by the brain ends at death it may do but I think the evidence stars beginning to be against this it looks as if it may split from the brain at the time of death Fenwick is doing a study of 1,500 heart attack patients who have had near-death experiences he's placed objects in the ER room that the patient cannot see unless the patient's consciousness somehow leaves his or her body according to his study the mind and the brain are not the same thing they are separate although near-death experiences have been reported for decades it's only recently that science has been willing to consider them as evidence of the soul thirteen million Americans have reported a near-death experience the statistics are as high in other countries and the stories have striking similarities it was 1972 and what car was sideswiped by its Hank or a car that was as big as it sank I to small fiberglass sports Conners virtually run over in my own car horribly injured comatose and near death Howard Tibble lay in the critical care ward of a hospital evidently for the next three days an intense pain er unable to talk to anybody or correspond in any way I didn't know where I was and I had no I don't know what was going on suddenly it was nighttime I knew it was night because the lights are on in the ward and I felt no fear or pain or worry I heard so many stories of people who came to me and said that when they tried to tell somebody about their experience let's take for example a near-death experience that perhaps they spoke to their doctor and their doctor pathologized it and said that it was a hallucination or maybe they'd had a brief psychotic break or maybe that was some unconscious unresolved neurotic issues always a negative label which people who'd had such a positive experience the label didn't fit they were not getting validation this feeling of safety and peace has been reported in almost all near-death experiences the next step is also almost universal and out-of-body experience fully conscious the dead person floats around the room seeing objects that could not be seen face up on the bed I took myself a little tour of the ward just floating around and this wasn't hostile with a high ceiling and we had they had strip lights and I floated up to the side of this strip lamp and he had the word Osram and I was one foot from it I could have touched it but I had no hands to touch it I didn't find it odd or anything well there you go Oscar I make lamps you know it's fine with me the next step for most people is the souls return to the body bringing a memory of the experience that is not like a dream it seems real we use the word soul as as if it were a sort of thing that flies away to heaven and it could be consciousness it could be a mind it could be a number of things I actually believe it's the way out from here to start the journey to wherever we go but I don't think we have to be religious to make that journey I've not been that good in my life you know rock and roll clinical studies on near-death experiences indicate that something untangles itself from a dying body but research has a long way to go before proving that a spirit like something truly exists whether or not we'll be able to validate the idea that there is a soul is always going to be an open question because of course we never know for what we do do is we take information from some of the widest appearances which we can have and if you take all those together then you would argue that's in some way the old idea of there being different levels within the body and some of these are able to continue after death it's a very good hypothesis yeah 81% of Americans believe in the soul and yet out-of-body experiences are marginalized with UFO sightings and seeing ghosts Fenwick's research aims to change that he even believes science will soon be able to prove the existence of telepathy linked Souls speaking across space and time do I think the consciousness can exist outside the brain well there's lots of evidence to show that they're all the telepathy experiments in my field there is what happens as you approach death and there was something called deathbed coincidences the dying person seems to make a visit to other people but it's other people with whom they're closely emotionally attached it's usually a strong emotional feeling that something has happened to somebody and the evidence for this is getting very good and I suspect in the course of the next few years will become much more into the mainstream while some scientists grapple with the survival of consciousness after the death of the body others are trying to touch the soul with the help of a Shaymin dr. Frank Aiken Hoffer has traveled to the jungles of Peru to take a powerful drug that he thinks can help him measure his soul and he's going to use 21st century EEG technology to help him do it my topic is is awakening of the mind and it's really very dangerous to say that in scientific form because it that doesn't seem like a legitimate scientific topic it's a religious topic it's field of consciousness the reason it's somewhat conservative it's touching this dangerous third rail of science we are getting very close to what's called religion so I think there's a resistance there are not being sure how to bring scientific methods into this edge where science studies consciousness but not just the consciousness that's something that that really is religion it's religious experience in recent years dr. Aiken Hoffer has been intrigued by a powerful plant-based substance that massively alters consciousness the substance is called ayahuasca Don Guillermo is the local shaman who has mastered the art of preparing and experiencing ayahuasca tenemos aqui famosa Blanca ayahuasca ayahuasca una planta BC Oh Nadia no los curanderos OTV Samos para descubrir the sacred those cool those just have been through the lament their ayahuasca comes from an Indian word that means vine of the soul it's seen by many as a direct route to the divine illegal in many Western countries ayahuasca sportin see depends on the skills of the shaman who cultivates harvests and prepares it a comedy same plant excessively is plant as intelligent A's pero dentro SI tiene su Alma cordoza school channel Traverse no in muchas veces in sueño or intuitive Amenti yo envision is no spray the community car ayahuasca is taken in the form of a potion sections of ayahuasca vine are crushed and boiled with chacruna leaves in 30 liters of water then boiled down ayahuasca is the leader of liquid that remains over the centuries those who have taken ayahuasca have reported out-of-body experiences and encounters with beings that can only be described as Souls dr. eken Hoffer is focusing his studies of ayahuasca on the elevated levels of certain and usually dormant brain activities that take place under the drugs influence he has studied the brain patterns of Buddhist monks and he thinks they hold the key Buddhist monks achieve altered states of consciousness through meditation the Buddhists believe they reach a heightened state of awareness that brings them closer to what's been called the universal soul doctor eken Hoffer will be hooked up to the EEG to find out after he ingests the drug whether there are measurable changes in the neuron activity in his brain the EEG is very sensitive to these subtle shifts in consciousness there's major pattern changes that occur in the EEG and I've made measurements and I found there's certain very interesting frequencies and so these frequencies are indicators of this of this state change that can offer drinks the ayahuasca potion it takes about half an hour before its effect kicks in when it does he won't be able to communicate what he is feeling only the EEG can capture the data in the very beginning you'll have a kind of subtle change in how your body feels and then slowly the psychedelic experiences will start you might see floating patterns and then it merges into imagery that seems to have more complex forms could be images of people or faces and then it becomes like a waking dream then there's another quality of experience it's called a journey so the journey is where I think what's happening is an out-of-body experience is occurring by that time it's feeling like you are somewhere else sometimes when you go to another world to meet an entity of some kind it's possible you could be taught things by entities just like in Christianity we have stories of how people have been taught things by angelic entities that have come [Music] it brings Darren Chapman's [Music] as he slips into an altered state I can ha Art's moving his hands as if he is conducting an unseen Orchestra his researchers hope the EEG records this spike in activity supporting economic theory that ayahuasca can point the way to touching the soul eken Hoffer can recall all the impressions lost in his own consciousness the next morning he is firmly back in scientific mode examining the story that the EEG data is telling once the ayahuasca took full effect his brain entered an even more heightened state of consciousness okay so we're starting here and we're going and searching some part of alpha oh that's the part whatever he saw beckon Hoffer may have seemed in a near coma but in fact his brain was on fire I can hafez EEG tests prove that in an altered trance-like state the brain behaves much like it would in an out-of-body experience or a religious rapture to him it this is what it means to see the soul to me the word soul is more of a Western formulation Western kind of religious category actually I feel that soul it's a meeting place between the the formless dimension of spirituality in the physical world perhaps that could be viewed as soulful or a connecting point as one group seeks to find evidence of enhanced consciousness inside their own minds another is trying to see if they can create it by building a brain the Frankenstein's monster a thinking being created by science more powerful than its maker ultimately outcast for being feared and misunderstood Mary Shelley's famous monster lives on across almost two centuries of popular culture because the story of Frankenstein is a story that scares us to our very souls dr. Frankenstein was a Swiss scientist who was obsessed with a spark of human life is only fitting that another scientist has chosen Switzerland to launch a 21st century equivalent project for 15 years dr. Henry Markram has been working on a biology modeled machine that can think just like we do [Music] dr. Markham is leader of the Blue Brain Project blue brain uses one of the world's most powerful supercomputers to reverse-engineer the human brain many people asked why are you doing that I mean why do you want to build a model and when there's six billion of us out and what will it be useful for and can it really be useful and ultimately what we are after is trying to understand and learn about the brain and what is capable of is it really the same as us is it the same as as a human being as it doesn't capture it the project's goal is to mimic the complex structure of the human brain in a computer and see if it has the ability to reason just like we do I think that what blue brain is fundamentally different from most models is that we're not trying to just build a model in the simplest way possible we're trying to build a model in the most biological way possible if an artificial brain can be created in a biological fashion Markram says he can't predict whether it will or will not become a conscious brain my strategy is that if we build it correctly and we understand it from first principles that it will emerge and it will speak and it will have higher brain functions and I don't know it may or may not have 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 slice of it's still active brain is submerged in artificial brain fluid allowing the brain tissue to keep functioning for several hours the tissue is placed under a microscope a single neuron is extracted then the basic shapes and reactions of the rat still living neurons are mapped these graphs are real images from blue brain showing the activity of the rats neurons that the computer has recreated for its own mind any mechanism we can find in the own brain we could replicate in a machine is it conscious some people will say no it's just a machine it's just a software a program can't be conscious other people like myself would say well we're just a program we have a hundred billion neurons and we can actually understand precisely what's going on in each one the neurons taken from living rat brains form the template of doctor Markham's artificial consciousness his computer maps then imitates the neurons actions basically Markram is building a brain one computer-generated neuron at a time the secret is to look for the rules and then you don't need to have studied every single neuron in the brain you build a model of a hundred of them it's not a billion and once you build a hundred you can analyze them and you analyze their statistics and you analyze their rules those rules now you can use to recreate all the diversity villians so we can actually today create well over a couple of hundred different types of mirrors and we can build as many of them as we want is not limited others are not so certain that the blue brain and other artificial intelligence projects of the future can ever succeed consciousness some believe is too complex AI is very interesting you can't make a horse out of feathers it would be very tough to make a computer out of cloth and you can't make a conscious mind out of silicon chips constructing a human brain will require a computer 1,000 times more powerful than any currently in existence it would take at least three football fields to house such a computer but Markram says the goal is within reach to create a conscious artificial intelligence the data is there the technology is there to explore it the computing power has reached critical mass we have petaflop supercomputers now 10 to the 15 calculations per second it's the first time in history that these things are coming together which is required for simulation based research when they converge it's inevitable so this is going to happen professor Markram hopes to complete his work on his artificial brain within the next 10 years what properties will that brain ultimately possess will it consider itself equal to us will it have emotions or a personality or a Souls 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 bit smarter than we are so maybe as a consequence once you get the one that's one step better than we are at doing all these things it's capable of producing an AI that's two steps better than we are and it's then gonna be capable of producing an AI that's four steps better than we are and so on and off you go and you're onto the the kind of the 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 when they could conceivably overpower us even exterminate us though I mean I think that point of the singularity is still a number of decades away but as it approaches I think is gonna do something we have to really slow down and think about very carefully if professor Markram succeeds will blue brain turn out to be the singularity will it make human existence better or much much worse if it is evil will it allow Markram to turn it off will it be a soulless Frankenstein that puts its makers to death Hiroshi Ishiguro is working on designing a world where humans and robots are indistinguishable cañazo and almost by accident he's challenging the notion of where people and their souls begin and end [Music] what I wanna throw either congealing Ishiguro brings the companion along for his interview himself this is my Android and this is Co Geminoid if you Goro uses silicon steel and mold impressions of his own body to create a life-sized version of himself one that could take his place in the classroom professor ishiguro teaches at Osaka University he wants to see how students will behave when forced to interact with his Android instead of himself issue Goro can foresee a day when his androids will not only enable people to be in two places at the same time but to join the workforce to perform unpleasant but necessary jobs if your girl has thought a lot about whether his robots could be advanced enough to be given consciousness but the Japanese have a unique view that does not equate consciousness with a soul everything has Soros and you know analogs and you know Wow the chairs and desks and you know everything's has a soul I think that is in a fundamental difference between in Japan and other countries the human is not so special with Japanese you know human is a part of nature that's 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's believed the creation too must have a soul so you don't think in it Thomas Egan night or Saturday I know new home didn't tell you no I told him this kind I know Thomas yachts kalidasan Disney you I do bonsai nice demo given a nice demo or Chinese demo submitted his name you are also use my uterus to you they beaucoup rava corn ingots good of the me Thomas you routines me the Hari issue though the snare serega call Akita Rory he might accrue obviously what is the song what is the consciousness what is intelligence what is emotions my answer is these things are subjective if we believe the robot has a soul the robot has a soul when I never of the humanoid robot everybody said this robot has emotion right but I didn't implement any function of emotion right so obviously these things are subjective not objective by giving robots personality and emotion it can appear to humans as though they have souls in Okinawa Japan robots called Paro are being manufactured by the thousands each with a unique ability to learn how to react to human feelings Paro are companions for Japan's vast population of elderly people 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 soothe them after getting to know its owner each Paro develops a unique personality and its own emotional range it's a computerized simulation of feelings [Music] professor Ishiguro's ultimate goal is to exceed Burroughs emotions to build an Android that looks blues and talks like a real human apart from his Geminoid he's created a female Android that has advanced emotional expressions equipped with facial recognition software it can even watch another human being on a monitor and mimic her expression cost $100,000 per robot but there's a challenge the program is getting more difficult for example the body movement this is natural the reaction is also natural racket is right however you know the medical doctor says this is a kind of a brain-damaged person that we need to work with the brain scientists and we need to have a deeper knowledge about the human then we can prove this robust the brain contains a hundred billion neurons stretched out across 100,000 miles of dense blood vessels neuroscience has only begun to figure out how it all works while some scientists actively seek to create consciousness others are stumbling into it almost by accident encountering the soul in the near future one or the other might have to answer to the question is there something that survives the body well consciousness is mysterious and I believe when we create non-biological systems that have that same kind of behavior in the same complexity and richness of emotional intelligence which is also a form of intelligence they will be conscious as well if you ask somebody do you believe you have an immortal soul or do you believe you have a soul I think that people would be exposing what are their most heartfelt hopes their worst fears and so I think it's much easier for us to focus on what we can apprehend our intelligence how smart are we Ike use you know is that a measure of the soul certainly is a measure of the reasoning faculty the intellect so it doesn't have anything to do with the imagination so it's a very limited view of what the soul is and also a very temporal view meanwhile others believe that the more we seek scientific answers the more likely we are to accept the fact that the soul exists I believe science and religion are coming together and I think it's just simply going to take more time and maybe in another hundred years most people on the planet will know that the soul is real what does seem certain is that artificial intelligence will be able to think like us and robots to look like us within a generation if the two combine humans will live side-by-side with a new synthetic intelligent species whether they have souls is a matter of heated debate either way the 21st century may well be the age when the existence of the soul is proven beyond all dispute whatever the answer the secrets of the soul are now within Sciences grasp

Channel: Syndicado TV

Views: 4,081,158

Rating: 4.7164998 out of 5

Keywords: Documentary, near death experience, deepak chopra, life after death, after death, near death experiences, untamed science, transcendent man ray kurzweil, ray kurzweil, ray kurzweil singularity, science documentaries full length, science documentaries, science documentary, science of the souls, science of the soul, bbc documentary, soul documentary, science of soul, the science of the soul, science documentary national geographic, afterlife documentary, what is the soul

Id: S7SQoQj9868

Length: 87min 25sec (5245 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/iheartbaconsalt]

Noo, this is some History Channel show from 2010. We are all robots in the simulation. There is no God, only Zuul.