Imagine you are sick, lying in some nursing home bed hoping that you will make a miraculous
recovery.
Then one day a cat that has been adopted by the nursing home staff visits your bed.
It curls up at your side, only for the nurses to give you a strange, sympathetic look.
That’s because whenever this cat chooses a certain person that patient seems to die
shortly after.
This might sound unscientific and perhaps preposterous to you, but in 2007 an article
published in the New England Journal of Medicine said just that, that a cat seemed to know
when people were on their way out.
We should say that the patients at the nursing home were already terminally ill, but not
necessarily on death’s door, yet when the cat visited a certain patient they died just
after.
It confused the staff at the nursing home to say the least.
The cat’s name was Oscar and it was two years old when it started it’s routine of
visiting people right before they left this planet.
The nursing home in question was called Steere House nursing home and it was located in Rhode
Island, USA.
It’s reported that for a number of years it sometimes craned his neck while curling
up next to a patient.
When that happened the staff called the family in, knowing this person didn’t have long
left.
Over the years the cat did this to 50 patients.
So, what was going on?
Did the cat have a super-sense?
Could it literally smell death?
A doctor wrote about this strange phenomenon in 2018 and he said he talked to physicians
at the nursing home and they indeed told him the story had been corroborated by a number
of medical staff.
This was no charlatan kind of doctor and he had actually won a Pulitzer Prize for a book
called “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.”
The person who first wrote the article about Oscar and his skills said, “No one dies
on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays a while.”
The story of Oscar and his sixth sense has elicited a lot of curiosity from doctors and
the public alike.
What people wanted to know is just how did he do it, because it seemed certain that this
cat really did get it right time after time.
The BBC asked this question, and after interviewing feline experts the conclusion was not that
the cat was psychic, but perhaps that felines can smell death, something that humans cannot
smell.
Maybe when we are about to die the body emits certain chemicals and Oscar could pick up
on that.
In another article on the now famous cat, an animal expert told the BBC, “I don't
doubt that the cat in this case is sensing death approaching.
There's little we really know about it but as the body is shutting down, I would hypothesize
that the cat is sensing and smelling the organs shutting down.”
That same article said that there is some research that might suggest that dogs can
sense when we are really wick with certain cancers, but that research is not conclusive
just yet.
There is some anecdotal evidence for this, but we can’t yet call it science.
There was a case when a woman’s Chihuahua reportedly detected her breast cancer, not
just once, but on three occasions.
There is also some proof that dogs can detect when someone is about to have an epileptic
seizure, and this has led to some dogs being given to people as alert dogs.
One woman said her alert dog licks her about 40 minutes before a major seizure so she can
prepare for it.
Perhaps dogs just sense this, they know when something is wrong, and perhaps Oscar the
cat knew when something was very wrong.
Some experts say that with dogs they learned to sense sickness when they were wolves in
packs and had to know when one part of the pack was ill, but with cats it’s more confusing
as they are not pack animals.
It’s not only dogs, though, that sense sickness.
A story published in the Scientific American explained that laboratory studies showed how
mice could also sense when other mice were sick.
There is additional anecdotal evidence that tells us some animals might know when something
is seriously wrong with a person.
Psychology Today published one such story in which a person’s dog howled like crazy.
When the owner was asked why the dog was howling like that, he said it’s likely because someone
somewhere is dying.
Then it was discovered that the neighbor just died.
After the death the dog stopped its howling.
You can find a whole host of articles out there that tell us dogs and cats can intuit
when something is wrong with us, whether it be an emotional problems, sickness, or when
we are on our way out.
A professor at Texas A&M University's College of Veterinary Medicine told the Chicago Tribune
that this is mainly down to changes in our behavior, but she also said that dogs or cats
might smell sickness or impending death.
Ok, so with all this anecdotal proof that animals are able to do this, what can we actually
do with their ability?
Well, if animals might be able to predict death or detect disease early, wouldn’t
it be great if humans could do the same.
If a smell really is emitted, we should be able to smell that, too, in the best of worlds.
If we can’t smell death and will never smell death, though, we’ll have to come up with
something else.
If you’ve seen our show on nursing homes and what’s called palliative care you’ll
know that doctors will give some people a certain amount of time to live.
This is no exact science and doctors often get it wrong, usually being more optimistic
rather than pessimistic.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could get it right?
That has led some computer scientists to try and create an algorithm that is better at
predicting death than humans.
What one scientist was asked to do was create the death “sweet spot”.
What that means is that people don’t want to be going into care for more than a year,
so if they have longer than that the machine would say so.
On the other hand, people generally don’t want to die within three months because this
gives them little time to prepare and for the family to prepare, too.
What if a machine could say for certain that a person had, say, six months to live?
If you could create an algorithm that estimated the time just right it would save a lot of
people a lot of trouble.
Unfortunately cats cannot do this, so the computer scientists started testing an algorithm.
They used over 200,000 patients, with diseases ranging from cancer to heart and kidney failure.
They fed the medical information of deceased patients into their algorithm.
If you could get enough information of what happened when, perhaps that algorithm could
begin guessing how long a person had left.
Certain symptoms and behaviors might show up for people at the same time and so the
machine could state that someone likely has six months left.
Doctors of course also have access to such information and they have a lot of experience.
But a machine can access a huge amount of data very quickly, which is something doctors
cannot do.
Doctors work with scores of people, but a machine could work with unlimited people from
all over the world if the information was fed into it.
So, that’s what the researchers did.
They fed all that information into what’s called a “deep neural network.”
This is an algorithm that is supposed to mimic how the human brain works.
The machine had one task.
It was to go through all that information and then make a decision.
It was fed data from 160,000 patients, and then with the 40,000 patients left it was
supposed to give an estimate as to how long they had to live.
It was pretty successful, too.
It predicted in nine out of 10 patients that they would die anytime within three to 12
months and they did die within that time frame.
It was 95 percent correct when it predicted the patient had longer than twelve months
to live.
Predicting death using artificial intelligence is a big thing according to an article in
Wired in 2019, but that article said the machine might be biased because doctors have been
biased in the past.
Doctors might treat races differently and so that information will be fed into the algorithm
and so it will be biased, too.
Doctors might also treat people differently according to their level of wealth, so this
could be problematic if we are to trust the algorithm.
The article concluded, “Artificial intelligence is a promising tool that has shown its utility
for diagnostic purposes, but predicting death, and possibly even determining death, is a
unique and challenging area that could be fraught with the same biases that affect analog
physician-patient interactions.”
In the UK a massive study was done using the health data of 500,000 people.
It looked at how they lived and what health issues they had in their life and then predicted
early death, meaning dying before the average age of death in the UK.
There was a lot of input from the participants in this study, from their waist size, to where
they worked, what kinds of foods they ate, how much alcohol they drank and what their
skin tone was.
An assistant professor of epidemiology and data science at the University of Nottingham
said the algorithm was pretty accurate, and over 16,000 people from the 500,000 did actually
die prematurely over the years the study was conducted.
The scientists used three types of algorithm, a simple one, a not so simple one, and also
a very advanced deep-learning algorithm.
The latter guessed premature death 76 percent in the patients that died during the study
and the former guessed it right 64 percent of the time.
The really simple one only 44 percent of the time.
The lead researcher said this about the results: “We have taken a major step forward in this
field by developing a unique and holistic approach to predicting a person’s risk of
premature death by machine-learning.
This uses computers to build new risk prediction models that take into account a wide range
of demographic, biometric, clinical and lifestyle factors for each individual assessed, even
their dietary consumption of fruit, vegetables and meat per day.”
It’s still early days and a lot more research needs to be done, but one day soon a computer
might tell you how long you’ve got based on lots of variables.
If you are already very sick perhaps an algorithm will at least tell you how long you’ve got
left and so you can prepare for that.
Cats and dogs with very sensitive senses are still a bit of a mystery to us, and so we
are relying more on data than pets to tell us what chance we have of surviving.
This is a controversial topic of course because what if the machine gets it wrong?
What if someone is told they are going to die and so just gives up?
We guess it’s only a matter of time until we put our trust into these machines, but
even if we do perhaps we should never give up on a miraculous recovery.
As for predicting when we’ll die in general it’s complicated.
You can go online now and imput a bunch of data about yourself into a website and it
will then tell you how long you’ll live, but these things can’t possibly get it right.
We suggest you don’t look at these sites.
We did and it seems we are going out much earlier than we expected.
The Harvard longevity specialist David Sinclair appeared on the Joe Rogan Show again recently
and he pointed out that you can certainly embrace healthy habits to live a longer and
more fulfilling life, but sometimes you are just unlucky in the lottery of life.
You might have heard of the French woman, Jeanne Calment, who lived until a ripe old
age of 122 and a bit.
She didn’t seem to do anything special, and she only gave up smoking at 117.
There is some skepticism concerning the exact age she died, but she didn’t go pretty sure
and that’s a fact.
She was cycling at 100, and while she didn’t have the best heart, coughed a lot, and had
rheumatism, she was in good shape throughout her winter years.
With that in mind we might wonder just how we might predict how old we’ll be when we
die.
We don’t want you to now start embracing bad habits, but just know that some people
just seem to have the right genes.
We have two questions to ask you now.
Number one is do you believe that animals can tell when we are sick or going to die?
Number two is what do you think about these algorithms we have discussed today?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other episode What Happens When You Die?
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.