 When one of my daughters was four years old, she came charging out of her bedroom running, ran down the steps. Normally, she'd be asleep. She was a good sleeper. This was 9, 9.30 in the evening. And through her sob, through her crying, she said, I don't want to be a thing that dies. I don't want to be a thing that dies, breaks your heart, doesn't it? Here at a very young age, a kid is in touch with the tragedy of existence. She was calling out for some kind of help. I tried to help her. I almost said, shut up and go to bed. But my wife, God bless her, said, OK, dear, it's OK. You've got a long life ahead of you. And she gave her a hug, immediate cure almost. Her mind now went to a different topic. She no longer had this dread of death. Now, I think most people, maybe not this crowd, but most people would say, don't worry, dear, God will take care of you. And that will be a stepping stone or a platform for later on talking about the soul and afterlife. The truth is, most people worldwide, worldwide think there is a soul, believe there is a soul, and they also believe that it's going to go somewhere. Maybe it'll end up in the gated community called Heaven. And you have this extended family reunion, a picnic for all time. It never appealed to me. I thought we'd eventually got on each other's nerves, wouldn't you? So now, near the end of my career, I got interested in this phenomenon. How does it come about that people believe they have souls, and there's an afterlife? So I started reading about it, and I started stunning it. I started doing a few little empirical things. I wrote about a short thing about the history of afterlife beliefs. And I got a colleague who was a brain scientist, and we decided to co-teach a course, really outrageously popular course now, on soul beliefs that causes and consequences the soul beliefs. So I want to give you just a little update on what we've been looking at. Go back to my daughter, who was all of a sudden confronting the issue of death. She was four years old. Now, we now know that age four, there are brain structures that are able to support the whole notion that you can be at one place and another place at the same time. Time traveling. I call it the traveling self. You might wonder what I'm talking about. Well, that's how you got here tonight. You thought about how you're going to get here, and you imagine yourself here and there, and you finally made it. Kids love it. When it first kicks in, they love to think about what they're going to do tomorrow, who they're going to play with. The next birthday party. You know, don't just think about it. They put themselves there. And then you go further, and you picture yourself catching a touchdown. One arm on TV, winning score, or in some winner circle, and you go and imagine this and imagine that, and you imagine yourself dead. It's a shocker. It leads to all kinds of internal turmoil. We can't imagine not existing. It brings us to a complete halt. And that's when if you come, somebody comes in and say, well, yes, you're going to die, but not really. It's a kind of source of comfort. It brings down, it calms down the internal milieu. Now, another piece of research. Borrowed from other people. It's a mouse. Yeah, it is. Alligator. Alligator is hungry. Get some mouse. Choose it up. Swallow, swallow, swallow. Kids, look at this. Is the mouse dead? Yes. Are you sure? Yes, it's been chewed up. It doesn't work. The body doesn't work. It's a goner. Does the mouse miss its mother? Get this. Does the mouse miss its mother? Yes. Does it miss its friends? Yes. Does it get hungry? Yes. Is it angry with the alligator? Well, that depends. But you see what's happening here. You've got a body and you've got a mind. You've got a separate existence. You've got a material self and you've got an essence. And when kids are told that there's life after death, they're ready to believe. You don't have to shove it down their throats. They've already made that distinction. Now, when you get to the point where these beliefs are internalized, they become permanent structures. They don't want to become interfered with. And yet they control a lot of things that people do. Ways that we think about life. So what I like to do when I talk to people is I say, I want you to talk about your soul. Tell other people about your soul. Tell other people about what you believe after life after death. And they'll tell you things. And it opens up a whole thing to talk about, brings things that are undercover, out of cover, and we can talk about it. And students come back to me and say, look, I talked to my grandmother. I couldn't believe what she said. And let's get the secret out. Let's talk about what we think about souls and what we think about after life. I talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And what happens is you begin to look at your own beliefs, break them down, look at the assumptions. The assumptions of four-year-olds, the assumptions of your parents and generations and generations, may not fit with what we know now. So as we talk, maybe we'll become more loving people. Thank you.