Is believe in immortality hardwired in humans? Meg Mickelsen

In every corner humanity, throughout history, one will find the belief in immortality, that is that some part of every person, an essence or soul will transcend death and live on into some form of afterlife.  Every major religion conforms to this one bizarre idea as well as every culture.  It seems, that even if we understand that our minds our a product of our brain, we instinctually separate the two.  Scientific studies on religion have long shown that both children and adults share this belief in an eternal soul, however, for years the "why" behind this world wide phenomenon has been blamed on cultural exposure. A new, revolutionary study on the subject, led by Natalie Emmons is radically changing previous conceptions, by suggesting that human's belief in an immortal essences is hardwired.   Emmons conducted her research by focusing on prelife, a subject that few cultures have beliefs on. She first interviewed children from and indigenous Shuar village in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador, children from a culture with zero beliefs about prelife.  These children should also have a very balanced rational view of life and death due to their exposure to hunting and farming.  She also interviewed children in an urban area near Quito, Ecuador.  These children were Roman Catholic, a religion that teaches that life begins at conception.  Emmons showed the children drawings of a baby, a young woman, and the same woman while pregnant, and then asked questions about the child's abilities and feelings during the time before conception, in the womb, and as a baby.  Emmons thought that these two radically different cultures would have very different beliefs, but she was wrong.  Both groups believed that the body didn't exist before birth and neither did thought or memory, but they seemed to think that feelings and desires existed only with the potential of conception. For example, although they reasoned that they could not see without eyes they also reported being happy about meeting their family or sad that they were apart from their family.   "They didn't even realize they were contradicting themselves," said Emmons. "Even kids who had biological knowledge about reproduction still seemed to think that they had existed in some sort of eternal form. And that form really seemed to be about emotions and desires."   Yet despite all this lovely information, a major question is still unanswered.  What purpose do these innate beliefs serve? Why did we evolve to hold such irrational fancies?  I, completely aware that consciousness and emotions are  products of the brain, struggle to imagine my mind as indistinct from my body, but why do I have this shared biological quirk.  Well, Emmons has a theory.  "We're really good at figuring out what people are thinking, what their emotions are, what their desires are," she said. We tend to see people as the sum of their mental states, and desires and emotions may be particularly helpful when predicting their behavior. Because this ability is so useful and so powerful, it flows over into other parts of our thinking. We sometimes see connections where potentially none exist, we hope there's a master plan for the universe, we see purpose when there is none
, and we imagine that a soul survives without a body"   Read more here
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