The soul hypothesis: Scientist wonders if there is proof for existence of consciousness

With science, it has always been a question of matter over mind. The actual brain, gray and wrinkly and full of electrical activity, can be measured and mapped, so that's fine. But the mind — the part of you that thinks it thinks, the feeling you have that you willed your arm to move or decided to order the salad instead of the burger — that's just an illusion, just the by-product of nerve activity, neuroscientists say. Consciousness, they argue, is really just one big neuronal machine.

And the soul? Don't even ask.

But these are the questions that nag at professor Dick Burgess. A neurophysiologist who has taught at the University of Utah for 35 years, Burgess is a longtime agnostic who wonders if there might be scientific proof for the existence of both consciousness and soul.

Next semester, Burgess will teach a course called "Spirituality and Healing: A Neurophysiological Perspective." He gave a preview of the course two weeks ago at an Integrative Health Conference at the U., where he recounted the perplexing story of Uttara Haddur, a Hindu woman from Nagpur, India, who in 1974 suddenly began speaking in a form of antiquated Bengali, telling stories of people she said she knew from a village 1,200 kilometers away. Her name, she said, was Sharada.

University of Virginia Medical Center psychiatry professor Ian Stevenson traveled to India to study Uttara/Sharada and published his investigation in the 1980s, first in an article in the Journal of the American Society of Psychical Research and later in a book published by the University of Virginia Press. According to these reports, Uttara/Sharada's stories checked out, referencing families and events that had happened in the early 1800s.

So what are the possible hypotheses for this story, Burgess wants to know. That it's a hoax? That Uttara was suffering from multiple personality disorder? That this is a case of "soul possession"?

"This case is very difficult to explain unless Sharada's soul is driving Uttara's nervous system," says Burgess. But he is always going to consider other explanations, he says. "Otherwise I wouldn't be a scientist."

Burgess was baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but stopped going to church as a teenager and hasn't been to church in decades, he says. "I won't do anything on faith. I'm a scientist. I generate hypotheses. I say, 'Hey, how can this be explained?'

"For many years I shied away from the soul because it had these religious connotations," he says. "But why not just be bold, and take the evidence you have, without preconceptions, and see if you can integrate it into a coherent network that explains all these phenomena?"