Learn about the mystery of how Tibetan monks seem to keep meditating after death; and a woolly mammoth that walked VERY far. Thukdam Project scientists still stumped over how deceased Tibetan monks continue to meditate after death by Grant Currin Berman, R. (2021, August 5). The strange case of the dead-but-not-dead Tibetan monks. Big Think; Big Think. https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/thukdam-study Burke, D. (2021, July 28). Inside the First-Ever Scientific Study of Post-Mortem Meditation. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/thukdam-project/ Lott, D. T., Yeshi, T., Norchung, N., Dolma, S., Tsering, N., Jinpa, N., Woser, T., Dorjee, K., Desel, T., Fitch, D., Finley, A. J., Goldman, R., Bernal, A. M. O., Ragazzi, R., Aroor, K., Koger, J., Francis, A., Perlman, D. M., Wielgosz, J., & Bachhuber, D. R. W. (2021). No Detectable Electroencephalographic Activity After Clinical Declaration of Death Among Tibetan Buddhist Meditators in Apparent Tukdam, a Putative Postmortem Meditation State. Frontiers in Psychology, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.599190 Researchers found a Pleistocene era woolly mammoth that walked far enough to circle the Earth…twice by Cameron Duke Koumoundouros, T. (2021). An Ancient Woolly Mammoth Trekked So Far, It Could Have Circled The Globe Twice. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/researchers-decipher-the-travel-diary-written-within-a-17-000-year-old-mammoth-s-tusk Wooller, M. J., Bataille, C., Druckenmiller, P., Erickson, G. M., Groves, P., Haubenstock, N., Howe, T., Irrgeher, J., Mann, D., Moon, K., Potter, B. A., Prohaska, T., Rasic, J., Reuther, J., Shapiro, B., Spaleta, K. J., & Willis, A. D. (2021). Lifetime mobility of an Arctic woolly mammoth. Science, 373(6556), 806–808. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg1134 Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day withCody Gough andAshley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Learn about the mystery of how Tibetan monks seem to keep meditating after death; and a woolly mammoth that walked VERY far.
Thukdam Project scientists still stumped over how deceased Tibetan monks continue to meditate after death by Grant Currin
Researchers found a Pleistocene era woolly mammoth that walked far enough to circle the Earth…twice by Cameron Duke
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/monks-meditating-after-death-and-a-marathoning-woolly-mammoth
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about the mystery of how Tibetan monks seem to keep meditating after death; and a wooly mammoth that walked far enough to circle the Earth — twice.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Tibetan monks seem to have a strange superpower: they can continue meditating after death. And scientists want to find out what’s going on.
One of those scientists is Richard Davidson. In 2014, he saw something truly remarkable: the body of his friend, a Tibetan monk named Geshe Lhundub Sopa, [GESH-ay LOON-doob SOAP-uh] five days after death. The monk’s body looked... pretty good. That’s unusual because a corpse normally starts to decay just a day after death. Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry, and the experience inspired him to launch a huge research project into the Tibetan Buddhist practice of meditation after death.
Davidson and his collaborators have just published their first paper. It suggests that the mystery won’t be easy to solve.
In the eyes of his fellow believers, the deceased Sopa was in a meditative state called thukdam [took-DAHm], or “clear light.” There are some reports of thukdam lasting for hundreds of years, but it typically lasts a couple of weeks. Tibetan monks say that during thukdam, the mind slowly dissipates and flows into a universal consciousness. Sopa’s body began to decay normally after about 7 days, at which point it was cremated.
Davidson and his team are using modern scientific instruments and methods to study this unusual meditative state. The endeavor is called the Thukdam Project, and it’s sponsored by Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In the first study, researchers wanted to use EEG to monitor the brains of monks for more than a day after each of the monks had died. But it can be tricky to find research participants for this kind of work. It’s not because of tensions between science and religion. In fact, the Dalai Lama has been calling for this kind of research for 20 years. Instead, it’s a problem of modesty and social custom. Thukdam is seen as a massive spiritual achievement, and many believers are reluctant to tell researchers — or anyone else — that they hope to enter the special meditation at the end of their lives.
But the researchers did find thirteen monks to participate in the study. What they discovered was a bit underwhelming. There was no postmortem brain activity detected in any of the participants.
It might seem like there’s no sense in pursuing the question further, but the researchers say this is just the beginning. They say this first study quote-unquote “ruled out the brain.” Future studies will look elsewhere in and around the body for whatever it is that causes the slowdown in decomposition.
The scientists will soon be joined by a new group of researchers. Several Tibetan monks have been training at Emory University in Atlanta. They’ll be working in their own communities to study the phenomenon themselves. The next phase of the project will examine how bodies decompose in various climates in India.
As the Dalai Lama has said, “What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter.”
It’s hard enough to study the behavior of a living animal, so studying one that died out 4,000 years ago like woolly mammoths did? That’s a real challenge. Scientists know that they’d spend their lives travelling the tundra in search of food, but not how far those travels took them — until recently. New evidence suggests that one mammoth walked far enough in its lifetime that it could have circled the globe twice.
Many mammoths that died during the Pleistocene era were well preserved by glacial ice. As glaciers defrost, more and more of these well-preserved specimens become available for study. But those specimens are limited, so there are still many things we don’t know about how these animals lived. Fortunately, scientists have some pretty ingenious ways of coaxing secrets from the remains they do have.
In a recent study, paleontologists were able to analyze a mammoth tusk that stretched a whopping five-and-a-half feet or 1.7 meters long — aka, one Halle Berry. Mammoth tusks contain growth rings — just like trees do. And by counting them, scientists can determine how old the mammoth was when it died. This one in particular, was 28, which might explain the Catwoman-sized tusks. But age isn’t all scientists can learn from the growth rings. By analyzing radioactive isotopes within the rings, they can determine where that ring grew.
As the mammoth grazed, it would incorporate chemical elements from its food into its tusks — and those elements changed from place to place. Specifically, scientists looked for strontium 87, a rare isotope of strontium with a half life of 49 million years. The rocks and soil in different locations have different amounts of it, and those same ratios end up in the plants that grow in that soil. For that reason, you can think of ratios of strontium isotopes as a geographic fingerprint or GPS coordinates. By taking measurements of strontium and other isotopes from rings in the tusk, the researchers discovered this mammoth’s travel blog.
And travel it did. From the tusk, researchers were able to map out a nearly 50,000 mile journey throughout Alaska. It spent its early years in the Yukon River basin in Alaska’s interior. At two years old, it moved north and began roaming a large territory southeast of the Brooks Range Mountains, a mountain range that stretches across the north of Alaska, and that was probably with a herd. At 16, it began roaming a larger range, probably alone as a bull. It spent its final years in the far north of Alaska on the northern slope of the Brooks Range, where it eventually died and its body was hidden under the ice.
That’s a long way to walk. 500 miles? Try 50,000. The Proclaimers have nothing on this mammoth.
Let’s recap today’s takeaways
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ASHLEY: Today’s writers were Grant Currin and Cameron Duke.
CODY: Our managing editor is Ashley Hamer.
ASHLEY: Our producer and audio editor is Cody Gough.
CODY: [AD LIB SOMETHING FUNNY] Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!