Hi everyone, welcome back to Seeker Plus this is Episode Two in a three part series on ghosts.
If you missed the first episode, go back and watch it. We did a lot of myth busting on some of the
more famous ghost tropes like eerie feelings and strange sounds, but spoiler alert for Episode One,
science still can't prove that ghosts exist, but kind of can't disprove them either. They can just
disprove certain experiences one by one so if we can't prove or disprove ghosts then maybe
we should dive into death instead. You know the concept of it because the idea about ghosts is
that's what happens after some people die. So what do we know about what happens when we die?
Well physically we know a lot about what happens your blood stops pumping, your body gets cold
after a while rigor mortis sets in, the body starts to decompose and rot you know all that
fun stuff. But what about the soul? Is there a soul? Are ghosts souls? What are souls?
What is a soul?Where are we starting from? Well, to quote the start of all bad speeches.
Webster's Dictionary defines the soul as the spiritual part of a person that is believed
to give life to the body and in many religions is believed to live forever. So is that a ghosts
live forever? Sounds like we're on to something. Maybe the most famous experiment that deals
with the soul. You know, a scientific attempt to quantify the soul in some way, is the 1907
21 Grams Experiment. There was a man named Dr. Duncan McDougal, which is a very fun name to say.
And he wanted to see if he could calculate the weight of the soul by convincing people who were
on their deathbed to die on a different bed that was put on a giant scale, which I guess then would
become their deathbed kind of like, you know, Air Force One, but for beds. After some death and some
calculations to account for the fluid loss and the like, Dr. McDougall concluded that the mass of the
human soul was all of 21 grams. Even in its time, this experiment was criticized pretty heavily.
A lot of errors possibly persisted in McDougall's calculations and in his methodology, and he was
also criticized for not including results where the bodies didn't show a change in weight,
which I guess he's saying they don't have a soul. I don't know. It's so historically bad. There
aren't really that many articles talking about it. But as famous as the experiments results are,
the findings were met with dissatisfaction even by other scientists at the time. Another problem
with McDougall's experiment was nobody else could replicate his results, which is kind of a
big thing in the scientific process. As recently as 2001, there was a guy who tried to replicate
the whole weighing a dying body and seeing if there was a difference, or experiment. And he
did it with sheep and goats. And some actually did measure a weight difference. But here's the thing.
They gained weight when they died. Quote, at the moment of death, an unexplained weight gain
transience of 18 to 780 grams for one to six seconds was observed with seven adult sheep,
but not with the lambs or goat. Science right? How cool is that? This scientist
blamed the weight gain on a glitch, but I have an alternative hypothesis. I think
the sheep actually absorbed souls when they die, but nobody will publish my paper on that.
Okay, so we haven't yet proved that we have a soul based on anything measurable about souls
not weight or anything else. But what if they don't have a weight? Because souls are energy?
Right? We seem to have an energy that animates us that gives us life is that what ghosts are this
continuation of this energy after we die? Okay, well, two things are true. We're all
made of energy, right? In the sense that energy and mass is related. And clearly we're animated.
There's something powering us. But energy can't be created or destroyed. That's the
law of conservation of energy. So when we die, this energy that is powering us when we're living,
it escapes our mortal body and floats off into the environment. And that's ghosts, right?
No, we know where the energy goes. When we die. it escapes our mortal body, it's not floating around
it's while a lot of it gets turned into heat. And a lot of the energy is consumed by
other organisms, worms, bacteria that take our atoms and the energy stored within them and repurpose
them for their own needs. Unless of course you're cremated in which case that energy is released
as both heat and light. That said, there's still something to be said for the fact that the atoms
and the energy that were made of have been around since the Big Bang. And since stars went
supernova, and they're gonna be around long after we're gone. So yeah, and sort of sentimental,
roundabout way we do live on but just not as poltergeists or Headless Horseman, or,
you know, anything fun like that. Now, there have been studies about consciousness after death,
which, in a way, that's what a ghost is, right? It's a conscious dead person. There was a study
done across the UK, the United States and Austria, where they pulled a few 1000 people who were
resuscitated after a fatal cardiac arrest, and I put fatal in quotes because, obviously, they live
to tell about it now, more than 45% answered that they were aware of something happening
when they were dead. But this wasn't them floating around the room and a ghost like manner. They had
memories like their life flashing before their eyes, they saw family members, they saw animals
from their past or deja vu they experienced fear, or the bright light that you hear a lot
about when people pass, but only 2% of them said that they could see and hear what was happening
in the room where they had actually died, quote, unquote, so 2% ghosts, but these stories still go
into the category of near death experiences, which is not death, near dead is still slightly alive.
Again, this brings up the difficulty of studying what happens when we die. That's the ironic part
about this whole thing. If we could actually find a way to talk to ghosts, that would be
the only way to understand what happens when we 100% kick the bucket. Now, some may point to
these out of body experiences that are pretty consistent even across cultures and religions
as proof of an afterlife. But many neuroscientists point to brain activity as the explanation for
all of us. They think that the feelings that we get have this sense of calmness and release and
that vision of a white light they're all produced by the brain can be as neurons die,
it could be part of a defense mechanism. In the 1980s, scientists claimed to have replicated
these feelings of going through a tunnel towards a common white light using the drug ketamine,
and it's been studied a lot since then. A more recent study looked into hundreds of accounts
of near death experiences and 1000s of stories from drug users, and found that ketamine users
most often had experiences that were similar to near death experiences. So great anti drug PSA for
ketamine. Apparently, ketamine feels like you're dying, we should do a whole series on that kind
of thing. Actually. Again, though, the problem with those stories is they're from near death
experiences, not death. Most studies I found on the subject of the afterlife, they're using near
death experiences. But if we're talking about proving the existence of ghosts with science,
that won't do we need a ghost that's dead dead, not just kind of dead for a few moments and then
brought back maybe my favorite thing I came across about the idea of science proving or
disproving the existence of ghosts, is everyone's favorite physicist Brian Cox,
basically saying that if ghosts existed, they would have been found at CERN. Oh,
what can't that particle accelerator do? To actually quote him, he said,
if we want some sort of pattern that carries information about our living cells to persist,
then we must specify precisely what medium carries that pattern, and how it interacts with the matter
particles out of which our bodies are made. We must in other words, invent an extension to
the Standard Model of particle physics that has escaped detection at the Large Hadron Collider.
That's almost inconceivable at the energy scales typical of the particle interactions in our
bodies. The wired article that was talking about this broke down his quote in this way, they said
his explanation for this is simple. If ghosts existed, they would be made purely of energy
because they contain no matter, allowing them to pass through walls and do other spooky things.
The second law of thermodynamics says the overall entropy or disorder in a system always increases
with time. And this means energy is always lost to heat. The only way a ghost could continue to
haunt Earth is that they had a constant incoming source of energy, otherwise, they wouldn't last
long at all. What I think Brian meant with this specifically was, if there's something that keeps
our consciousness going after we die, it's got to be made of some particle that our colliders would
have detected because you know, our brains aren't smashing protons together at near light speed,
it's got to be particles that can interact with the matter of our brains and still persist and
carry this pattern forward of our consciousness. And nothing we've done experimentally has found
a way for our consciousness to continue by being carried by particles. Okay, so there's
not a whole lot of scientific evidence that when we die, we transfer into ghosts or ghouls. But
I guess that can all depend on what your definition of consciousness is.
After reading everything for this episode, it's pretty clear that neuroscientists think the brain
creates our consciousness, which is our being our soul, or self, whatever you want to call it,
when the brain shuts off. That's the end of that it won't exist anymore. Meaning a conscious ghost
can't exist to haunt those that wronged them. But what if scientists invented a way to transfer
consciousness before we die? Would that be a ghost? If there was a computer where you could ask
your great great, great grandparents, what their life was like and what they're up to right now?
Would we consider that a ghost?Because that's something people are kind of working on
as we speak. So that would mean if we are ever haunted by someone no longer living.
I think it'll be through your computer. Whoo, spooky the ghost is in the machine.
It's gonna be real weird watching this episode after I die. So why would you want to live on a
computer after you die? Or can you actually prove that ghosts exist? Let us know in the
comments. And let us know what topics you want us to cover. I can go into more detail on the brain.
Its defense mechanisms, there's tons of stuff to cover their brain uploading brain in a jar that
controls like a giant, beefy man to fight some Oh, you know what I'm thinking of Krang from Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles and I went Krang again. And of course, don't forget to subscribe because we
have one more episode to go and it's going to be all about if it's actually healthy for you
to believe in ghosts and why believing may have cost you money in the past. Looking at you, you
scammy psychics, Okay, thanks for watching, and we'll see you on the next episode of Seeker Plus.