Will My Personality Be Formed Again After Death

The dead tin speak to us. I know I hear them.

I'm listening right now to the voice of my granddad, which sounds thin and warbled, liked a clogged whistle. "You should become a doctor," he's maxim.

When Grandad was live, my future employment was only well-nigh the just topic we discussed. That wasn't considering we didn't see each other often (he lived a few miles away) or considering he died when I was fourteen. It's because the topic of whether I would pursue medicine came up a lot.

While we were playing checkers: "You should go a medico." In the machine to a eating place that would cook meat the only mode he'd eat it (burnt to a cinder): "You lot should become a physician." Interrupting sustained periods of silence: "You should get a doctor."

When choosing a major in college, I instantly heard my grandpa — then a few years gone — and his refrain. Grandpa was there to offer me advice. I chose to ignore him.

Kurt Gray, a psychologist at the University of Northward Carolina, can also hear the dead. But fifty-fifty amend, the researcher on mind perception can explain how and why.

How we hear the dead

Michelle Robinson / Flickr

As Grey explains it, "Humans accept developed the ability to accept offline models of people'due south minds." In other words, our minds can generate a sort of simulation of other people'southward minds. Which explains why when we remember a person, we're not just remembering their voices. We're remembering their personalities, their behaviors. We tin can imagine what they might do, even when they're not there. These models of their minds can exist in our minds long later the person perishes.

We can do this for the dead considering we do it for the living. When nosotros interact with a person, we're constantly anticipating how they might respond. Psychologists call this "perspective taking," or theory of mind, and it'due south what has allowed for humans to thrive in social groups. "When we know someone well enough, nosotros don't have to base their thoughts on our own thoughts; we just know their thoughts," Gray says.

In some respects, we know others ameliorate than we know ourselves. When asked if I'thou going to eat an extra slice of block, I say no. But my best friend knows I'chiliad going to practise it anyway. One joy of loving another person is having this knowledge grow intense, intimate, and absurdly specific.

How the dead tin can guide us

Nick Kenrick / Flickr

Grayness is interested in this because he'south a scientist. Simply he also knows it from his own experience with loss.

When Grayness finished his PhD studies in 2010, his longtime mentor Daniel Wegner told him he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. It was a death judgement. But Wegner had a book project he wanted to complete and asked his former pupil to see it through. Information technology was kind of a "terminal request from a dying man," Gray explains.

The Mind Gild, published in March, is a layman'south guide to understanding how humans come to understand the minds of others. The volume dives into questions like why we see caring minds in some animals (similar dogs) just non others (like cockroaches), why nosotros tin can dehumanize enemies, and how we make moral judgments, such as when to pull the plug on a comatose patient. It also has a chapter on death, explaining humanity's unshakable tendency toward dualism — seeing the mind and trunk are 2 separate entities.

The main question Wegner and Gray sought to answer in their research was where and why people draw the line between perceiving some other (or an inanimate object) as having a mind or not. What they found is that minds exist on a continuum. For example, a robot is seen as having bureau — the power to think and exhibit self-control — but not experience, i.e., the power to experience emotions.

They also explore how nosotros think most the minds of the dead. "The minds of others in decease stay as we knew them in life, even if we knew them simply briefly," they write. "But we as well tend to exaggerate who they were — the good becoming truly heroic and the bad condign truly evil."

When Wegner died, Gray had many capacity left to write on his ain. What made information technology less daunting was the fact that he could however imagine the vox of his old mentor guiding him, making edits, pushing Gray to keep the text calorie-free with a screwball sense of humor.

"Information technology didn't actually feel like Dan had passed away as much while I was nevertheless working on the book," he tells me. That's because he could access his mental simulation of Wegner and concur conversations with information technology.

Greyness described this experience in a mannerly essay on Medium:

As I progressed through the chapters I took solace in these conversations with Dan. To me, he was still alive because I was constantly asking myself "WWDWD?" As I wrote, I could hear him corking jokes, or making suggestions, or — more often than I wished — telling me to cutting an unabridged paragraph.

Other times, Gray would ignore the ghost. "A lot of times when I would hear Dan'due south phonation saying, 'I would do it this mode,' I could exist similar, 'Likewise bad.'"

Retention gives life a 2d life

Evelyn Berg / Flickr

Science fiction visions of the time to come are currently enthralled with the idea that nosotros may exist able to upload our consciousness to the cloud, and live, for fourth dimension immortal, in a simulation (similar in the critically unacclaimed Johnny Depp movie Transcendence ).

But we already do this. In our interactions with one another, we're imprinting ourselves into others' memories of united states of america. Information technology's not immortality, but information technology'southward not insignificant either. "Especially if y'all have a worldview that doesn't believe in heaven and reincarnation, this provides people with some style of belongings on to loved ones," Gray says.

In the curt time after people die, there'south an uncanny feeling like they've but stepped out for the day; that they will return at some signal. As infants nosotros develop object permanence — the understanding that objects or people don't disappear completely when they're out of view. As adults, that feeling is hard to shake when it comes to the dead.

I never asked my grandad why he was and then persistent about me studying medicine. Simply at present I think information technology was because he was starting to meet lots of physicians, and they were taking whatever money he had. Aging is grotesque and costly, he might have thought. Th eastward grandkids ought to cash in.

All memories, nevertheless, even those of loved ones, grow repose with time — and neglect. When Gray finished the volume, he says it was like losing his mentor for a 2d time. With their collaboration complete, the mental ghost of Wegner quieted down. He had fewer edits to brand, fewer jokes to crack. Grey learned it takes effort to keep a voice alive.

"If y'all want to proceed someone alive, you lot have to keep thinking of them — and it's hard work," he says.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2016/4/13/11408710/hear-the-dead

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