Do you feel immortal? Chances are you did when you were born

  • 28 Jan 2014

According to a recent study led by Natalie Emmons of Boston University, the tendency to reason in terms of an eternal mind "is a universal cognitive default", regardless of race, religion or culture. In other words, we all come into this life believing we're immortal, with a large proportion of us never truly shaking the belief off.

Emmons examined the development of prelife reasoning in children to shed greater light on the sensation many people have of owning a particular, ineffable and fundamental core, which exists separate to the physical state, even if it can be reasoned that these ideas are non-scientific and irrational. "I study these things for a living but even find myself defaulting to them. I know that my mind is a product of my brain but I still like to think of myself as something independent of my body," said Emmons.

It is often said that these feelings emerge due to the inculcation of religious beliefs -- that is, the idea of a "soul", or other similar notions, arise from our understanding of what constitutes a religious-based afterlife, whether we believe in it or not -- or from cultural influences such as TV, films or books.

However, Emmons hypothesised that perhaps this wasn't a cultural phenomenon but was instead the result of intuition, in much the same way a child intuitively "learns" to talk. To assess this theory, Emmons focused on the concept of prelife, rather than

afterlife, as notions of prelife are largely left untouched by religion: "Considering their absence from the vast majority of Christian and Jewish faiths, which account for a third of the world's religions, cultural scripts about prelife existence are not as ubiquitous or pancultural as they are in the case of afterlife."

Emmons studied 283 children from two distinct cultures in Ecuador, which were then split into four sequential age groups (five- to six-year-olds, seven- to eight-year-olds, nine- to ten-year-olds, and eleven- to twelve year-olds) and examined for any developmental changes in reasoning. The first group of children were from an indigenous tribe who had no concept of a religious "prelife" and were used to dealing with life and death owing to the prominence of hunting and farming in their culture. The second group were from an urban environment and exclusively Roman Catholic.

The examination included presenting the children with drawings of a young woman, the same woman pregnant and a baby.

Emmons then asked the children to describe how they might have felt if they imagined themselves existing prior to conception, in the womb and as newborn babies, using the pictures as prompts. "By being self-referential in nature the investigation was the ﬁrst to systematically examine children's reasoning about their own, rather than another's, capacities during a period detached from a biological earthly body," the study reads.

Despite the disparate nature of the two groups, Emmons discovered they both provided similar answers. The children believed that whilst they had no physical manifestation before birth, they could nonetheless still think, and feel emotions. This led Emmons to conclude that our bias towards a belief of some kind of existence prior to material embodiment emerges naturally in early life, with mentality -- such as feelings and emotions -- taking precedence over bodily attributes. "This work shows that it's possible for science to study religious belief," said Deborah Kelemen, an Associate Professor of Psychology at Boston University and co-author of the paper. "At the same time, it helps us understand some universal aspects of human cognition and the structure of the mind."

The necessity for having evolved this apparently universal technique of believing in a form of eternal life is not entirely clear, with Emmons postulating it might be a by-product of our highly developed social reasoning: "We're really good at figuring out what people are thinking, what their emotions are, what their desires are". However, the fallout of this developed sense of reasoning is to sometimes find patterns and connections where there are none, such as seeing faces in inannimate objects, believing there is "puprose" to the universive, or in this instance, believing in eternal souls.

The full study can be read online.