The Afterlife Is in Our Heads

Plus: the english word that hasn't changed in sound or meaning in 8,000 years; a visual proof of a powerful idea; what is misinformation doing to us; and more. [View in browser]( | [Become a member]( EDITORS’ CHOICE October 02, 2022   Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here](. Good Morning! This Sunday, start with the latest from Nautilus—plus this week’s Behind the Scenes with Dimitris Xygalatas and some of our most popular stories this week [GO TO NAUTILUS](   [NEUROSCIENCE]( [The Afterlife Is in Our Heads]( The real meaning of near-death experiences. BY KRISTEN FRENCH One Sunday evening in September, nearly 30 years ago, Xavier Melo, then 23, was driving home from his job as a private math tutor in Barcelona, Spain. [Continue reading →]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [SUBSCRIBE TODAY](   [Math That Inspires Learning]( Spark your child’s curiosity for math with [MEL Science](. Learn math the fun way with hands-on kits and engaging in-app experiences loved by kids (and parents, too). Early birds [get 50% off their first math box]( with code EUCLID. [Make Math Fun](   BEHIND THE SCENES [Dimitris Xygalatas Takes Us Behind “The Real Magic of Rituals”]( What captured Dimitris Xygalatas’ imagination, as a boy growing up in Greece, were documentaries about science and the natural world. He admired people like David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, and Jacques Cousteau, adventurers who explained all manner of puzzling behaviors. Their passion for science was infectious. Reading magazines like National Geographic fed Xygalatas’ curiosity, and he became captivated by the exotic-seeming practices he’d come across—sometimes quite painful rituals, practiced in far away places. But Xygalatas, the author of Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, thought these were things “other people” did. [In our conversation](, he told me it was a revelation when he “first discovered that people in my home country did the same kinds of things, when they would engage in painful pilgrimages and perform fire-walking rituals and other kinds of extravagant ceremonies.” As a result, he began to realize what every anthropologist realizes. “That what, at first glance, might seem bizarre or exotic very often is something fundamentally human and something that we all, in our different ways, do in our own societies, even if the forms change.” His article, “[The Real Magic of Rituals](,” makes the case that rituals can help people soothe anxiety. Xygalatas explained where that idea came from. “Famously, Bronislaw Malinowski, an anthropologist who studied fishermen in the Trobriand Islands, noticed that these fishermen would perform a lot of rituals before going out in the open ocean to fish in what were very dangerous waters,” Xygalatas said. “But they wouldn't perform as many rituals before fishing in the shallow waters of the lagoon.” Malinowski first proposed the idea that ritual is a mental technology people use to calm their nerves. It went untested for about a century. “It was just in recent decades,” Xygalatas said, “that a combination of careful anthropological observation and scientific measurement has actually shown this to be true.” Ritual is also a key component of healthy psychological development. Families that partake in more holiday traditions and related rituals, Xygalatas said, have children that grow better adjusted, and build better relationships with their parents. [Those are findings he takes seriously](. “I actually have a toddler in my life, and we are already beginning to think about what kinds of rituals we want to incorporate in our family life, to instill in him this sense of tradition and continuity,” Xygalatas said. “For example, we are not particularly religious, and we've never had a Christmas tree around the home, but now that we have a toddler, we do.” He also has his own rituals to observe. “Whenever I go back to my home country, I always visit the stadium of my home team, and I engage in those types of collective chanting and dancing that are fundamental to one's sense of group membership, and I do say that they have the same effects on me as they always did since I was a kid in Greece.” For more from Xygalatas on the relationship between ritual and religion, what makes painful and emotional rituals good or bad, and why levels of ritualistic behavior never really change—[watch here](. —Brian Gallagher, associate editor   [“Ketamine can reproduce all aspects of the near-death experience.”]( [Science journalist Kristen French on the real meaning of these puzzling accounts.](   Popular This Week [ANTHROPOLOGY]( [The Real Magic of Rituals]( BY DIMITRIS XYGALATAS Tennis star Rafael Nadal performs an elaborate repertoire of rituals before and during every match. [Continue reading →]( [MATH]( [A Simple Visual Proof of a Powerful Idea]( BY KEVIN HARTNETT A recent advance in geometry makes heavy use of Ramsey’s theorem, an important idea in another field—graph theory. [Continue reading →]( [PHILOSOPHY]( [What Is Misinformation Doing to Us?]( BY BRIAN GALLAGHER Since 2016, there’s been a growing panic about how much misinformation is affecting what people believe and do. [Continue reading →]( [COMMUNICATION]( [The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years]( BY SEVINDJ NURKIYAZOVA “One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. [Continue reading →](   More in Neuroscience [We Are Beast Machines]( We understand conscious experiences only in light of our nature as living creatures. BY ANIL SETH [Continue reading →]( [Where Is My Mind?]( The rise and fall of the claustrum epitomizes the hunt for consciousness in the brain. BY MARCO ALTAMIRANO & BRIAN N. MATHUR [Continue reading →](   Today’s newsletter was written by Brian Gallagher   COVER STORY [Under Anesthesia, Where Do Our Minds Go?]( General anesthesia redefined surgery and medicine, but over a century later it still carries significant risks. To better understand our brains and design safer anesthesia, scientists are turning to EEG. Read this story and others that showcase [Nautilus](' unique style of environmental journalism in Issue 45. [Join the discussion]( on the high price of cheap shrimp; the current status of the bees; and the political power of ecstatic sex. [Join Now](   [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( Copyright © 2022 NautilusNext, All rights reserved. You were subscribed to the newsletter from nautil.us. Our mailing address is: NautilusNext 360 W 36th Street, 7S, New York, NY 10018 Don't want to hear from us anymore? Click here to [unsubscribe](.