Science Discovered the Soul and Nobody Noticed
The soul is as scientifically real as visual memory or inheritable eye color.
If by “soul” we refer to that part of a being that extends before birth or after death, then science has already discovered the soul. And nobody noticed.
An Overview of Some Evidence
There’s lots of evidence. For example:
Researchers Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler discovered that mice have memories of their parents’ lives. They demonstrate convincingly that mice can fear a smell simply because one of their parents had a bad experience with it, even if the offspring have no other reason to fear the scent, and even if they had no contact with the parent. (The experiment involved fathers, to rule out the possibility that the information was transmitted in utero.) Read details in Nature here. There’s also a short video you can watch:
Similarly, a retrospective study on the children of prisoners of war from the US Civil War reveals that people, too, respond to their parents’ experience: Children can have PTSD if their father experienced trauma, even if the children never met the father. The researchers, Dora Costa, Noelle Yetter, and Heather DeSomer clarify: “Socioeconomic effects, family structure, father-specific survival traits, and maternal effects, including quality of paternal marriages, cannot explain” why children respond to their parents’ experiences.
And observationally, the University of Virginia School of Medicine has documented over 2,000 children who remember things from before they were born. The Washington Post details one such case here.
You may be skeptical. I certainly was.
By temperament, I doubted the reliability of the case studies at the University of Virginia — though not for any particularly justified reason. You may, too. You may similarly doubt the reliability of retrospective studies in general. But the results from the mice are clear and extraordinarily persuasive, and confirmed by other research (see below).
We respond to experiences from before we were born.
In light of the data on the mice, there’s really no reason to doubt the other experiments that point in the same direction. A wide body of evidence suggests the same thing: We respond to experiences from before we were born.
More Evidence
Lots of other observations align:
Parental memories extend at least four generations in mice.1
The way female rats raise their offspring influences future generations.2
In humans: The children of Holocaust survivors have altered behavior and altered genes that relate to stress response.3
Similar changes in humans are documented in the children of: a Dutch famine,4 both food scarcity5 and smoking6 in Sweden, violence in Rwanda,7 and many more.
Human memories from past lives have been reported in at least 20 scientific journals8 representing observations from all over the world,9 according to a recent survey study.10
Details
So the question has been answered as definitively as possible: Our experience of life begins before our birth and extends beyond our death. What remains is to discover the extent of those experiences, and the mechanisms — the latter both out of scientific curiosity and because the mechanisms may offer insight into the extent.
Our experience of life begins before our birth and extends beyond our death.
The clearest evidence we have is from animals and specific stressors, probably because that’s the easiest to find and measure. Scientists permit themselves to afflict animals with stress in order to observe the results. And animals like mice reproduce every few months, so it’s easy to study more than one generation.
We cannot do the same with humans. So we are limited to looking back to see what happened (the children of prisoners of war, for example), and looking around with the goal of reconstructing the past (past-life memories in children). And this evidence is murkier.
I am by nature dubious in particular of past-life memories (again, though, not for any particularly valid reason). And I can see some more principled reasons to doubt the case reports, even though they are so numerous. If enough children invent random stories, perhaps a few will eventually match real past lives, purely by chance. Additionally, no past-life memory is a perfect match, and it’s not clear how much of a match should be counted as evidence of a memory. So even hundreds of documented cases in dozens of journals are not conclusive.
We know for sure information can be transmitted across generations.
Still, I think the animal studies give us the proper framework here. We know for sure that information can be transmitted across generations. Instead of arbitrarily ruling out the possibility that humans can transmit memories, I think we should investigate with an open mind. (I’ll admit again that I’m not particularly good at this.) We should ask two questions.
The first question is what can be transmitted. Stress? (Yes.) Parenting technique? (Yes.) Recognition and fear of a specific smell? (Yes.) Recognition and fear of a specific person? A language? Other memories? Attitudes? A soul mate? We don’t know yet.
The second question is, how?
How?
The most widely proposed mechanism for this cross-generational memory is something called epigenetics, which the CDC defines as “how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.” In other words, experiences actually change our DNA in subtle ways, and then that experience-altered DNA is passed to the next generation. In this way, the next generation is influenced by the previous generations' experiences.
This is well-established science at this point, as clear as inheriting eye color. Researchers have already amply documented subtle changes in DNA that result from experiences. (To put it in 7th grade Earth-science terms, both Darwin and Lamarck were right.)
To put it in 7th grade earth-science terms, both Darwin and Lamarck were right.
So epigenetics is an important piece of this complex puzzle.
But the details remain elusive. How do the mice encode the particular scents? Can any experience be encoded in DNA? If so, how? What about the over 2,000 children who have memories of people who are not their immediate ancestors?
In light of these questions and many more like them, the epigenetics explanation must be considered both tentative and incomplete. Still, our incomplete understanding of the mechanism should not block our recognition of the facts. (By comparison, we don’t fully understand how herding instincts and other complex behaviors are transmitted in dogs, but we know that they are.)
The Soul
All of the available scientific evidence suggests that our experience on earth consists of more than the time between our birth and death. We remember and react to events from before we were born. And our experiences live on after we die.
What is the soul if not that?
van Steenwyk et al., 2018: van Steenwyk, G., Roszkowski, M., Manuella, F., Franklin, T. B., & Mansuy, I. M. (2018). Transgenerational inheritance of behavioral and metabolic effects of paternal exposure to traumatic stress in early postnatal life: evidence in the 4th generation. Environmental Epigenetics, 4(2), dvy023.
Champagne, F. A., 2008. Epigenetic mechanisms and the transgenerational effects of maternal care. Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, 29(3), 386–397.
Heijmans et al., 2008: Heijmans, B.T., Tobi, E.W., Stein, A.D., Putter, H., Blauw, G.J., Susser, E.S., Slagboom, P.E., & Lumey, L.H. (2008). Persistent epigenetic differences associated with prenatal exposure to famine in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(44), 17046–17049.
ibid.
The journals are: Journal of Scientific Exploration, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Explore - The Journal of Science and Healing, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Transcultural Psychiatry, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Psychological Reports, Indian Journal of Psychiatry, Anthropology and Humanism, Journal of Anthropological Research, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, International Journal of Sexual Health, Anthropologica, British Journal of Medical Psychology, NIMHANS Journal, Anthropology of Consciousness, Journal of Near-Death Studies, Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, Subtle Energies & Energy Medicine.
Some of these journals focus on past-life memories; others are more general.
58 cases in Asia, 10 in North America, 2 in Europe, 1 in Africa, and 7 spanning more than one territory. Based purely on population, North America is slightly over-represented and Asia a little more over-represented, Europe is slightly under-represented, and Africa is considerably under-represented.
Fascinating stuff! Thanks for this