Explaining What Happens After Death

[Succubus]

Believing in a mental life after death is just a side effect of how we normally think about the world.  We see the physical aspect of a person, but the mental aspect is invisible -- that's a construct which we project onto living subjects.  We process the two separately, and so we may continue to project the mental aspect even after the physical aspect is clearly done.

There's a little stage. Children are gathered around. Up pops a little mouse puppet. Hello! Baby Mouse. He's lost. He’s trying to find his way home through the woods. And he misses his mom. He's getting hungry. Then suddenly, from behind a bush, out pops an alligator! And eats him. “Baby Mouse is not alive anymore,” the narrator concludes.

This slightly perverse act of puppetry was the brainchild of two psychologists, Jesse Bering and David Bjorkland. They showed it to hundreds of children of various age groups, then asked them all kinds of questions, like:

• Even though Baby Mouse is not alive anymore, will he still need to eat food?  ("Biological")
  
• Is he still hungry? ("Biopsychological")
  
• Can he see where he is? ("Perceptual")
  
• Does he still love his mom? ("Emotional")
  
• Does he still want to get home? ("Desire")
  
• Does he know he’s not alive? ("Epistemic," which I've renamed "Mindf#&!")
  

What they found is that the youngest children (aged 3 – 6) had a pretty good understanding that biological functions stopped at death. 85% of them reported that Baby Mouse's brain stopped working after he was eaten. Most figured that Baby Mouse couldn’t eat anything anymore. But when it came to questions about emotion or desire, things got blurry. A majority of the little kids answered "yes," Baby Mouse's emotions and desires continue even though he's not alive anymore. Judging from their answers, they didn't think Baby Mouse had fully ceased to exist. Bering and Bjorkland call this "psychological continuity." Yes, he still loves his mom. Yes, he still wants to get home.

When the team asked older kids (age 10 - 12) the same questions, they found they were more likely to answer "no" -- more likely to believe that Baby Mouse's mental states stopped after death. In fact, within just a few years, from kindergarten age to older elementary school age, the answers became statistically just like those of adults.*

Here's how Bering and Bjorklund interpret these results: they think the sense that we "continue on" is something that's with us from a very young age -- it’s how we "naturally" understand death before we're taught otherwise. Their idea is that to get to a place where you don’t believe in an afterlife, it actually takes UNLEARNING a basic belief.

To test their hypothesis, they repeated the experiment a couple years later in Spain. This time, half the kids were from a religious school (Catholic) and half were from a secular school. Once again, they got the same results. As Bering explains it:

   "An overwhelming majority of the youngest children -- five- to six-year-olds -- from both educational backgrounds said that Baby Mouse’s mental states survived. The type of curriculum, secular or religious, made no difference. With increasing age, however, culture becomes a factor -- the kids attending Catholic school were more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than were those at the secular school."

Mice Puppets and Souls

Another aspect of the distributed way that our brain processes our experience of other people is Capgras delusion.  See Wikipedia || Capgras delusion and How Stuff Works || Capgras delusion.

The first clues to the possible causes of the Capgras delusion were suggested by the study of brain-injured patients who had developed prosopagnosia. In this condition, patients are unable to recognize faces consciously, despite being able to recognize other types of visual objects. However, a 1984 study by Bauer showed that even though conscious face recognition was impaired, patients with the condition showed autonomic arousal (measured by a galvanic skin response measure) to familiar faces, suggesting that there are two pathways to face recognition—one conscious and one unconscious.

In a 1990 paper published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, psychologists Hadyn Ellis and Andy Young hypothesized that patients with Capgras delusion may have a "mirror image" or double dissociation of prosopagnosia, in that their conscious ability to recognize faces was intact, but they might have damage to the system that produces the automatic emotional arousal to familiar faces. This might lead to the experience of recognizing someone while feeling something was not "quite right" about them. In 1997, Hadyn Ellis and his colleagues published a study of five patients with Capgras delusion (all diagnosed with schizophrenia) and confirmed that although they could consciously recognize the faces, they did not show the normal automatic emotional arousal response. The same low level of autonomic response was shown in the presence of strangers. Young (2008) has theorized that this means that patients suffering from the disease experience a "loss" of familiarity, not a "lack" of it. Further evidence for this explanation comes from other studies measuring galvanic skin responses (GSR) to faces. A patient with Capgras delusion showed reduced GSRs to faces in spite of normal face recognition. This theory for the causes of Capgras delusion was summarised in Trends in Cognitive Science.

Wikipedia || Capgras delusion

What an interesting and fascinating read. Homsaps are indeed a most curious thing.