Science Friday - Eric Kandel and the Disordered Mind, Death. Aug 31, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: August 31, 2018

The human brain contains an estimated 100 billion neurons. When those cells malfunction, the disrupted process can lead to schizophrenia, PTSD, and other disorders. In his book The Disordered Mind, Nobel Prize-winning neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel looks at where the processes fault to give insight into how the brain works. According to Kandel, the understanding of these disorders offers a chance “to see how our individual experiences and behavior are rooted in the interaction of genes and environment that shapes our brains.” Earlier in 2018, Utah became the 15th state to legalize water cremation, or alkaline hydrolysis. Unlike traditional cremation, which burns human remains at 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, water cremation uses a mixture of water and lye, along with heat and pressure, to break down the remains. Meanwhile, many cemeteries across the country now offer green burial sites—sites that ban embalming fluid and use biodegradable caskets. As climate-conscious consumers consider their final arrangements, alternative funerals like a water cremation or a green burial are becoming more popular in the face of resource-heavy traditional funerals.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Dr. Eric Candell certainly needs no introduction to Yucy Fry listeners. The 2000 Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine and co-director of the Mind Behavior Institute at Columbia University has spent his entire career working to understand the brain and what makes us whom we are. And he has a new book, The Disordered Mind, what unusual brains tell us about ourselves.

And you can read an excerpt of this incredibly great book. It's his best work at our website at ScienceFriday.com slash disordered. And Dr. Candell, Eric is here with us. Welcome back. It's always a pleasure to have you. It's a pleasure for me to be here. You know, in this book, you examine the brain by watching what happens when things go wrong in the brain, disease and illness. And I was interesting to note in your notes.

You say this is an observation that you first made way back in your medical school days and thought about, gee, you know, this is what I want to know about. Well, in some ways it's a tradition within neurology that we learn a lot about disorders of brain teaches us about normal function occurs. So from that point of view, I was influenced very much about the tradition within neurology. It has not been as characteristic of psychiatry, the field I came from, but psychiatry and neurology emerging, really, because Psychiatry really emerged as a discipline originally because people thought that the mind was different from the brain. Now we realize that all metal processes are brain processes and that neurology and psychiatry have many features in common.

In your book you say that as we understand these disorders better, more and more similarities will emerge. Absolutely. And that's the key. Absolutely, that's the key. The convergence will contribute to a way new scientific humanism. What do you mean by that? Well, what is the brain concerned with? It's concerned with who we are. What makes us who we are, what makes us as, you know, loving human beings,

what makes us as aggressive human beings. And as we understand more, the biological underpinnings of it, we'll understand more of the detailed mechanisms of it, and we'll really get a biological humanism. We'll understand humanistic issues in terms of biological mechanisms. Let me ask you to help translate some of the news that's been happening this week in brain science. An international team has identified a kind of brain cell exists in people but not in mice. And in nature neuroscience it was published, they dubbed it Rose Hip Neurons. Do you know anything about that? I saw that, and I think it's a very nice finding.

I felt it was a little bit overhyped, if I may say so. mice are not people. We do a lot of experiments on mice and we can do lots of experiments that are relevant to people, but clearly if you look at the brain of a mouse and you look at a brain of a person, it's very different.

So to have a nerve cell that's present in humans and not a mice doesn't blow me away, it turns out that apes also have this neuron. So that tells you at least it's a feature of the primate brain. What its importance is is hard to know. It may be quite important, but it may not be terribly significant.

I think it's too early to know. Let's get into some of the details in your book, because you cover just about every brain disorder or illness that we can think of. Well, I mean, those are interesting problems in the psychiatric ones, schizophrenia and depression. We have relatively little insight into the underlying biology. We're beginning to make some progress, but we don't have a deep insight. You're right in the section about autism.

You're right that despite advances in science and medicine, many people continue to view mood disorders as personal weakness, bad behavior, rather than a set of illness. It's ridiculous. And this is why people with psychiatry have really been dismissed by society so often. That's no longer the case now, by and large. But it was thought to be bad behavior, bad upbringing or something like that instead of realizing this is a disease like Parkinson's disease. or any other neurological disease. And what was the resistance to that? Was it hubris?

I mean, you know. I think a poor understanding of what is a disease and what is not. Huh. And a lot of diseases are based in your brain. Of course. Chemistry is. That's true. But a lot of diseases manifest themselves as awkward behavior

instead of just, you know, disorders of walking or disorders of speaking or something like that, which is obviously. not something which is put on or, you know, learned. Speaking about that, you gave us a tour of the biology behind all sorts of disorders. And as I say, we're on autism now. You talk about there used to be this refrigerator mom hypothesis. It was due to the mom was the parent.

Crazy. Crazy. It's very easy when something develops early in childhood to blame it on the parents. We now realize that although the parents, contribute importantly to the development of their children. There are many things that are independent of parental behavior. Are you saying that in the book that we are actually finding genes that related to autism?

Yes, yes, yes. Is it a single gene or is multiple? Several genes. Several genes. Yes. That's going to be really a major advance in the next 20 or 30 years. Genetics is becoming so powerful to understand one of the genes that are altered and to see whether we can develop pharmaceutical approaches

that we'll be able to help out. And I think we'll be able to do that better if we understand the genetic basis of it. Our number 8447248255, if you'd like to talk with Dr. Candell, or you can tweet us at Cy Fry. Speaking of genes, something that was fascinating to me

reading all about stuff that you can do, the idea that we can repair cells at the synapse versus, you know, any other way, I hadn't thought about that before, but you say that is a frontier. That is a frontier. To see whether one can inject into the cell body molecules that will allow you to repair the synapse at the periphery is a major effort going on right now. Synapses is where the... Neurons contact their targets, either another cell or a muscle.

And there's a change... Points of communication. It communicates by sending out chemicals across the boundary. There are actually two kinds of synapses. They're electrical and they're chemical. There are some synapses in which the current actually flows from one cell to another. Not that common in the mammalian brain, but there is some synapses like this. The more common synapses is that one neuron...

called the presynaptic neuron, releases a chemical substance, a transmitter, that acts on the target cell. It's quite fascinating. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. Let's talk about stress. Yes.

I mean, it's killing us all, right? All of us are under stress. And you actually show the molecular pathways and things that are going on. You talk about cortisol destroying synaptic connections. What is cortisol? What do you mean by destroying? Steroid, really released by the adrenal gland,

which is capable in a high, amounts or if it's taken as a drug or adjusted in some other way of interfering with the connections between nerve cells and synapses. As you can imagine, the synapses, which are a very delicate, refined, and interesting molecular machinery whereby one cell communicates to another has many components to it, so it's very susceptible to interference and disruption. Is it possible for the brain to repair? Yes, absolutely. We never thought that was possible. No, but it's possible.

If the damage is slight and the brain is rested or there is not that much activity in that area, a repair can occur. It's not that common, but it can occur. How many disorders you say, you do say that for many disorders, the early treatment is key. Can you stop progression of something like PTSD or schizophrenia as it progresses? If you... Schizophrenia is not terribly progressive. It may progress to some degree. But I think with most diseases, if you interfere with them early, in the early stages,

you're more likely to be able to limit its detrimental action. You talk about this early intervention in mental disorder and the lack of it, and you say that scientists have successfully identified high, risk lifestyles for heart attacks, they develop interventions for them. Why not the same for mental diseases? Well, they're beginning to do this, right? I mean, certainly if you see that people have a tendency to sadness or depression interfering early, you know, pharmacologically and psychotherapeutically, would be very helpful. Once the disease really becomes ingrained in a person's lifestyle becomes much more difficult to counteract it.

844724825. Let's see if we can get a call in before we go to the break. Jim in Pacific, California. Hi, Jim. Hi, how you doing? Hi there. Go ahead. So I was a big fan of Oliver Sacks and really loved his book, Hallucinations. And he seemed to have a point that as a species, we have really failed and neglect to, to mentor human attributes like synesthesia, which you could call disorders, and as an occupational therapist, I treated them for years. But how much we're missing about the potential for human growth and development

with a lot of things that we classify as in the old days, demon-induced and all this other stuff. Well, you know, it's a very fine line. It depends to what degree this trait interferes with the functioning of an individual. If somebody has some neurological or psychiatric peculiarity, but it does not interfere with their life,

in some cases may make their life richer, then by all mean, one does not want to interfere with it. We're going to take a break and go to a break. We want to come back and talk about some of the interesting treatments and modalities. For example, you talk about in your book, treating PTSD with virtual reality. I'll take a break, and that sounds fascinating.

Talking with Eric Kandale, author of The Disordered Mind, what unusual brains tell us about ourselves, our number 844-7248255. You can also tweet us at SciFRI. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday,

talking with 2000 Nobel Prize winner, Eric Candell, author of a really, really good new book, The Disordered Mind, What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves, and if you've listened to me interviewing Eric over the years, I always say this is your best book. The best is yet to come, you mean?

I'm so young. Are you 91 now? Not yet. 89. 89. In November 7th. Kind of her, as they say. November 7th. November 7th, congratulations.

But this really is. I mean, the way you were able to, in Lama's language, describe all of these things and the beautiful color diagrams. I had a very fortunate experience. Two fortunate experiences. I was in high school at Erasmus in Brooklyn, wonderful high school. And Mr. Campana, my history teacher asked me, where are you applying to college? And I said, I'm applying to Brooklyn College. It's a very good school.

My brother is going there. He said, ever thought of Harvard? I said, no. He said, why don't you apply to Harvard? So I went home and discussed it with my parents and we were refugees. We had very little money. And my father said, look, we've already paid $10 to apply to Brooklyn College an excellent school.

So Mr. Campana gave me the $10. I got accepted at Harvard with a scholarship. And at Harvard, I majored in history and literature, and I wrote all the time. I wrote essays all the time. And I really began to enjoy writing. and many of the things that I did later on. My colleagues, for example, scientists very much on my level, very rarely write for the general public. I mean, they write super papers that do excellent science, but they're not as comfortable writing as I became in college.

You had no training, formal training in writing at all. Just that you're a natural idea. Well, I had a tutor who looked at the essay, didn't look at it just from terms of style, but looked at a kind of. but commented in the style. So that certainly helped me. But I just did a lot of writing. Well, it's paid off. How do I know what I think unless I read what I write?

Oh, let me write that down. It's true in a way. It's true. It is true. You clarify your thinking. Often when I sit down to write something, my thought process about it and nowhere is clear as ultimately emerges from the written text because the written text is not one draft but ten draft. Right?

Right. It's true. If you can explain it to someone else, you understand it yourself. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Let's get this so much in this book. Let me talk about what I mentioned before the break, and that is treating PTSD with virtual reality.

How is that working? Well, so if you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you observed a very frightening experience that had consequences. so, you know, machine gun goes off near you and two of your buddies get hit and are seriously wounded. Next time you just hear the sounds going off and you're frightened terribly by it.

So one way to treat something like this is to put a person in an absolutely safe environment where they know nothing is happening and play those sounds. So they sort of become habituated with it. so they become accustomed to it and they realize that not every time they hear a terrible sound

does it necessarily mean an actual catastrophe for another person. People are doing this? They're doing this. They're doing this. That's quite interesting. Of course, we couldn't talk about brain without talking about memory. Your topic?

I like memory. What's a topic you should go into? What of my favorite topics? So what's new with memory? Only in the last few years. What is the new thinking on memory? I know you have made major contributions to this and you have a Nobel Prize.

I mean, okay, let's talk about age-related memory versus Alzheimer's or other kinds. They are separate, and you make that point in your book. Yes. I actually have done a lot of thinking about that and made a little conceptual progress. I think that as people age, they're susceptible to two kinds of memory disorders, Alzheimer's disease and age-related memory loss. And they're really quite different. The pathology of Alzheimer's disease

is very different from age-related memory loss. And age-related memory loss actually often begins before Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's disease begins in the early 70s. Age-related memory loss can be reversed. You can. Yes. and in experimental animals one can show,

and my colleagues and I, Columbia, have shown this, that a hormone released by bone called osteocalcin reverses it. And you can show in experimental animals that age-related memory laws can be reversed by just getting the animals to walk a lot. Wow. So I've given up my routine of swimming. I've reduced it,

and I'm substituting walking for swimming, and I'll report back next time we talk. You see these pictures of Ruth Bader Ginsburg doing her exercises, right? And so by strengthening your bones? The bones release a hormone called osteocalcin. And when you walk, you release that hormone. And the more you strengthen the bones, the more capable you are of doing that. So this is not a proven deal.

This is, you know, I think, a very attractive avenue to explore. A few weeks ago, you know, in your book you talk about the famous miner and the brain and, you know, missing the rod that went through his brain. and all that. But a few weeks ago, there was a story of a six-year-old boy who lost his entire occipital lobe, and much of his temporal lobe were removed, and the doctor's report he's the same old guy. How do you explain all that? A sixth of his brain, supposedly, was gone. If this would have happened to the kid when he was 18 years old, that would not happen. The immature brain is capable of regenerative capabilities, but that's true for many parts of the body.

before puberty we have regenerative capabilities and many organs of the body that we don't have after puberty. Going back to Alzheimer's, do we know what causes it? I mean, do we talk about the tangles and whatever

in the brain. There was a time maybe that is gone. We did know if those tangles were the cause or the effect. Do we know now? We have reason to believe that they're contributing factor to the cause. The reason we have not been effective in treating Alzheimer's disease,

is that by the time somebody presents with the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, they've already lost a lot of nerve cells. So if you initiate treatment, you can't get those cells back. All you can do is save future damage, but you already have a serious disease. So we somehow need an earlier way to make the diagnosis. Either routinely everybody over 40 gets an annual brain imaging, or if there's the slightest clue,

even by that time, a slightest clue already means you've lost a lot of nerve cells. One thing one has to realize that unlike liver cells and other cells, brain cells don't regenerate. So if you lose certain brain cells, you've lost them, kid. That's it. So then how does the brain repair itself then? The brain does not repair itself by growing new cells. It repairs itself by hooking up what it has.

You can't grow new cells. So it repurposes other cells. Yes. That's fascinating. Let's see if we can get a few phone calls. Justin in Newburgh, North Carolina. Hi there. Welcome.

I was just wondering what your thoughts are on artificial help with, you know, cannabinoids, THC, CBD, things like that in order to combat PTSD, Alzheimer, things of that nature, what you might have to say about something like that. Okay. I think there's a great future in that because unlike some organs of the body, the nerve cells don't regenerate, as we mentioned. So if you really lose a significant number of cells, you need something to compensate for that. And if, you know, a device of some sort can be plugged in and connected to the brain in some way

and substituted for the missing function, and people are beginning to explore that. That would be wonderful. I mean, it's nothing like having your brain do it, but it compensates for many of the deficiencies that you would have, and you would have a meaningful life in your older years. Have you seen Michael Pollan's new book about LSD

and treatments like that that they're experimenting with? That's not your feel. No, no, no, I just haven't read it, yeah. Yeah, it's quite interesting. I have just a few more minutes left. A half hour goes by pretty fast. Where are the wrong places that people are investigating in this, and where are the right places in brain science and mental illness?

Where is the right, where is the hottest area that people are? Well, certainly the area we know least about, and where you would hit a home run if you made a major breakthrough is consciousness. where does consciousness reside. Now, starting it's left down. There are a few people are beginning to work with that. But it's, you know, at a very...

Is it possible to understand, can we understand our own mind by being inside our own mind? Why not? I study my mind by studying your mind, right? I assume that consciousness in your brain is going to use mechanisms

very, very similar, if not identical, to those in my brain. There may be more extensive in your brain, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the mechanisms are almost certainly identical. Sounds very much what Einstein said when he was asked about, can we comprehend the universe?

And he said, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Eric, we're right out of time. We just started. We'll have you back, okay? Anytime you want to drop in. You're very nice to have me. Oh, no, it's always my pleasure.

Anytime. Eric Candell. of a winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, co-director of the Zuckerman Mind Behavior Institute at Columbia, and this new book is terrific. The Disordered Mind would unusual brain tell us about ourselves an excerpt on our website at Science Friday.com. Disordered.

Earlier this year, Utah, legalized something called water cremation or alkaline hydrolysis. This is instead of burning human remains at 1,400 degrees, like in a traditional cremation. Water cremation, as the name suggests, uses a mixture of water and lye, along with heat and pressure to break down the remains. Now, you may not have heard of this type of cremation, but the 15 states have legalized the practice. Alternative funeral options are becoming more popular now. Many cemeteries across the country now offer green burial sites.

Green burials don't use in bombing fluid to preserve the body and the caskets have to be biodegradable. the amount of resources traditional funerals use are changing the way people think about their final resting place. And my next guests are going to talk about why people are choosing alternative funerary practice. John Troyer is the director of the Center for Death and Society at the University of Bath in England. Welcome to Science Friday. Good afternoon. I, it's a pleasure to be on the show with you. You're welcome. And Dukartik Chundran is an environmental engineer at Research Associate at the Death Lab at Columbia.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Ira. Hello, John. Good little, Karnik. How are you? Cardi, tell us about what is like the Death Lab like at Columbia. Well, I'm only part of Death Lab. Death Lab is led by Kyla Rothstein from G.Sab, the Graduate School of Architecture, Policy and Planning. I'm a professor in the School of Engineering, and I work on biological systems, biological transformations. This is one of the more interesting applications that I'm at.

actually currently working on. And of course, I was introduced to this by Carla. Let's get into some of the alternatives that we can talk about. John, we mentioned, I mentioned right at the top water cremation. Can you tell us what it is?

Give us a little thumbnail description of it? Sure. The water cremation system is an alkaline hydrolysis-based system. So it was developed years ago for any really animal carcasses. But any kind of organic material.

And the process works. This way, you take a body, in this case it would be a human body, and you put it in a stainless steel cylinder. It's flooded with water, heated, and you also then usually involve in alkaline, like a potassium hydroxide, but it usually can be a different mix. And what it does is it breaks the body down all the organic matter, leaving any inorganic matter, such as implants or, for example, fillings and teeth. and then you're left with bone material like you would have for a cremation system.

And then the post-process fluid then generally goes to the wastewater treatment plan. Myra Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. So you basically then have the fluid left over and you're left with the bones. And what happens to the bones? Well, the bones can then be processed like they would be with a cremation. So they're made into smaller pieces, sometimes what's referred to as a cremulator, and then return to the family. And they can then be scattered or handled however the family wishes. So people are looking for alternatives to cremation and burial, then, is what you're saying.

Yeah, of course. But I think that's a longstanding tradition. I mean, I think that there's been as long as humans or even we could go with our cousins of Neanderthals have been burying the dead, there's always been a looking for how can we do it different? otherwise. Kartick, you agree? Well, yes, overall I agree, but again, I'm working on a specific aspect of this, and I can actually draw parallels to what John actually just said.

Well, describe what you're working on. Yeah, yeah. So what John just described, alkaline hydrolysis is the chemical process of breakdown of the different constituents of organic matter, for instance, in a human, body. What we are doing is we are doing this using microorganisms for biologically, not chemically, but biologically. And we actually use, you know, coincidentally, somewhat similar terms, not alkaline hydrolysis, but hydrolysis. Really the first step in the biological breakdown of complex organic materials such as the human body, such as the cells that comprise the human

body. But then there are subsequent steps beyond hydrolysis that are also interested. So what microorganisms do under anaerobic conditions, which refers to the absence of oxygen, first is that the complex organic molecules are broken down through hydrolysis, biological hydrolysis, as opposed to chemical hydrolysis, into their more simple forms. And the process basically, this cascade basically continues till the molecules could reach terminally. methane, which potentially could be a form of energy, and this is something that we had investigated earlier on. But then we, but then recognizing that, well, methane is fine as an energy source, but we have to consider that a single human body may not be able to produce

a lot of energy, and also there might be other forms of energy that could be more readily captured. We have since focused our attention to the direct conversion of, let's say, not the organic carbon, but let's say the electrons that constitute any organic material directly into electricity and directly into light thereafter. But similar to what John said in terms of what remains in the biological process then is nitrogen and phosphorus and of course the inorganics also. And so which can be recovered. Okay. We're going to have to take a break. We'll come back and talk lots more about the green way of dying. Our number 844-8255, you can also tweet us at SciFri.

We'll be back after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking about the new way of people, well, if they die, what to do with their bodies. You know, the funeral parlors are having different options available to people who want to look at sort of green ways of being buried without being buried. Space is running out. People are not crazy about, you know, going up in flames and all the pollution that happens

with embalming fluid and remains and things like that. So I have a couple of guests who are here to talk about that. John Troyer is director of the Center for Death in Society at the University of Bath in England. And Cardick Chundran is an environment engineer and research associate at the Death Lab at Columbia University. You just got into Cardick, you just got into talking about. this electrical technique. So you basically turned the body into electrons at the end? Yeah.

No, we are just using the electrons that are inherently present. So we're just harnessing those electrons, as opposed to, let's say, dissipating them as we would if we combusted the human body. Have you tried this out on any humans, human bodies yet? No, no, we have not tried this on human bodies. We are still quite early on in this work. We are using surrogates, for instance. We've done work with pork shops, which is what could be used in our labs.

And that's where we are. So it's very much in the lab right now. I'll be the first to admit that we still have some ways to go. And John, what are some other ways people are trying to make, you know, to make, this way of dying more green? Well, I mean, there's been a series of systems that have been, you know, developed. There have been people who've tried coal-based freeze drying systems,

whether that's some kind of almost flash freezing or different exposures to coal to make the body brittle. There's different companies that have been approaching that. There's also, in some ways, looking at just approaches to decomposition, putting the body out, letting it break down. down that way. There's the flame-based systems, there's water-based. There's a number of ways that people try to do it.

I mean, I think that really the issue is always been one more of partly creativity. How can we think about different ways to approach the final disposition of human beings? Certainly where Cardic and the Death Lab group we're doing is good that way. But also, too, there's always a question around how do social attitudes change. And so that's always been a big part of it as well. Tell me more about that. Well, I think that, you know, there's always an eageric response that says any new method of disposing of dead bodies will automatically be rejected. And you do tend to get a kind of moral panic at times about that.

The way that I tend to explain it is that there's a sort of Monday to Friday system of acceptance, which on Monday you have the moral panic you can expect any kind of tabloid, particularly over here in England, to have a sort of a blaring, heavily. line about how this is immoral and evil. And then by Friday, you get bad philosophical introspection about what this can mean about the, you know, what is life, what is death, how do we understand the person? And so I think over time you find that any new method once it's introduced becomes accepted. Cremations, the classic example, not widely accepted for many, many years, and now increasingly becoming the go-to method, a final disposition.

Oh, you know, a lot of people want to talk about this. Let's go to the phones, 8404-7-24-25. Donna in Utica, New York. Hi, Donna. Hi. I probably have all of this wrong. When you said you were going to have the segment, I was looking frantically for this article from a few years ago, but the gentleman mentioned something about freezing the body. I thought there was some place in the Netherlands where they were trying to do something like that. I want to say, and I'm probably getting it wrong, nitric oxide, like they took the fluids out of the body, and then you froze the body and it was like you could like tap it and you'd like shatter like glass.

but it was supposed to be your body would be like nutrients for the soil and it wouldn't be hazardous to the earth's health for you to put it in the soil do you know anything about that? I'll ask. John Cardick?

Well, yeah, I think what your column I'd be referring to is it was a system that was pioneered or developed in Sweden by a woman named Susan McMassad called Permission and that was a freeze-drying system and it was using nitrogen to freeze the body.

And that was the basic premise. There are other companies working on it, and they're trying to get the technology off the ground and people using it. But that is, in a sense, it how it works, yeah. Yeah, you know, John, I imagine cities. I hear in a big city like New York, there are many cemeteries.

They now sort of in the middle of the cities because the cities spread around outside of them. Cities must realize there's going to be a shortage of where to place bodies sooner or only. Yeah, no, they do. A city like New York is great because so I'm from a small town in Wisconsin where we've got nothing but land. But in New York, there's actually a huge secondary market

in reselling of great plots where families figure out that they've got the fly and someone wants to buy it. So that's the market side of it. In terms of what cities do, well, yeah, there's all kinds of plans. Certainly what, again, the Death Lab group has been working on, and certainly Carla Rothstein, who I kind of a good colleague and friend, And they've been trying to develop how can cities pioneer new methods of creating new burial kinds of spots that may not so much go down, but maybe go up or maybe elevate or, you know, come up with methods that are not so dependent on long periods of time. Yeah, absolutely.

Let's go to Zoe in Cincinnati. Hi, Zoe. Hi, Ira. Thanks for taking my call. You're welcome. I just wanted to make a comment about, I heard that a few companies. have been working on using either our ashes or our remains to plant trees. And I just think it's interesting that they're trying to use our dead cells to create new life.

Karnik, have you heard about that? I haven't heard about this, but that would be the most logical endpoint, really, and especially with anaerobic biological systems, the nutrients in our cells, in any living cells for that matter. They are not modified, and so they remain in almost an ideal state to serve as nutrients for plant growth. John Troyer, what do you say about that? Well, yeah, I mean, there's 1,000-1 uses people come up with for cremated remains now at this point, and there's a number of companies that are offering what you might think of is more biologically based,

or tree-based systems or cremation urns that are biodegradable, and you put the remains in and the tree grows from it. I mean, it's carbonized material, so anything you can do with carbonized material, you could do it. And it makes good sense. I think I'm fully supporting people's choices to dispose of the remains as they see shit. Well, I want to thank both of you for taking time to join us.

John Troy is Director of the Center for Death and Society, and Cardick Chandron is an environmental engineer and research associate at the Death Lab at Columbia University. Nice title over there, Cardick. Good luck to both of you. Technology isn't, you're welcome. Technology isn't just helping us deal with the infrastructure problem of death. It also changed, is also changed the way we memorialize the dead.

Medical advances during the 50s and 60s move dying from in the home to in hospitals, pushing death out of sight. Well, social media and other digital platforms are bringing it back into plain view. and it's helping people grieve. Joining me to talk about death and how it's making its way to digital space as Candy Can. She is an associate professor at Baylor University

and author of the book Virtual After Lives, Grieving the Dead in the 21st Century. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me, Ira. You know, we have seen online one type of online memorial our websites, a funeral homes offer, you know, they put you as part of their funeral package. Are those becoming more popular?

They are becoming more popular, and for funeral homes to stay viable and to be relevant, more and more of them are offering some kind of digital services package as part of their funeral. So it's usually a complimentary service, and you can write a digital obituary, you can leave Grandpa a candle, you can give Grandma a teddy bear, and you can even send virtual flabituary. online. And it's sort of a place that will stay up. I don't imagine how long, probably a long time, so people could visit it. That's right. So most funeral homes have a kind of digital archive that remains online, so you can go back and visit it. I've seen these archives go back as far as 10, 12 years. And then people will leave their remembrances. And so instead of having a physical or material guest books, you would sign the digital guest book. So have social media like Facebook or places like that played a role here too?

Yeah, so social media is definitely the place where I think most people are seeing changing notions of grief online. And I think it's been really interesting to watch the kind of progress because now there's actually ritualized procedures that we see across social media, whether it's in China or Mexico or the United States. You see things like people posting a picture of the deceased, writing a message annually on the day of the death, writing a message on the day of the birth, and then just revisiting the social media pages, say, on Facebook or writing someone on Twitter whenever one is reminded of the deceased. I imagine there must be apps for that now besides just the website. There are apps.

So there's some interesting apps like in China. They have a tradition called Qing Ming, where you go back to the tomb and clean the tomb and honor the deceased annually. And so in China now, they actually, the government has sponsored an app so that their purpose is to reduce transportation, pollution. And so you can actually, instead of going back to Grandpa's grave and cleaning it, you can simply visit him online while you're riding the subway and burn some incense, leave a prayer. and send a message. So have virtual incense online. Yep. On the app.

Wow. I understand that people have also started tying the physical space of death to the digital space, like with ghost bikes, right, where people have died on a bicycle and there are spaces there, sort of geotag? That's right. Yeah, so ghost bikes are something that emerged a few years ago, and so bikers were being killed and as a way to remember them, people would buy a secondhand bike at, say, Goodwill or Salvation Army, and then paint it white.

So it would look like a ghostly bike in the physical landscape. Then they would put a biography of the person that was killed and basically write a narrative of how that person was killed. The idea was to challenge the political space of cars and try to get people to think about the fact that a lot of bikers are killed and the narratives are usually written like, oh, the biker ran into the door of the car instead of, you know, so it kind of puts the fault on the biker. So the ghost bike movement first started to challenge those narratives to make people more aware

of how many people are killed on bikes annually. So they place these ghost bikes in the physical space where the person was killed. And then there's a virtual map online where you can. visit every bike and its GPS location and then actually read the story of the person that was killed there. Very interesting. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Am I.R. Plato talking about ghost bikes and other online ways to talk about death with a candy can. She's associate professor at Baylor University and author of virtual afterlives, grieving the dead in the 21st century. Something else that you mentioned are QR codes.

We're putting QR codes on gravesites? Yeah, so it's popular in the United States and historical locations where you can put a QR code onto a gravestone. Now, the technology there is changing. We're probably moving to a point-and-scan or click-scan technology, but the technology remains the same. The idea is like Pokemon Go, where you have this kind of layer, a virtual layer, on the physical landscape. So you can point and click and scan this QR code, and you can pull up the person's biography. You can pull up, say, their playlist, you can pull up their favorite meal, a video of them. So the idea is that the person becomes this kind of 3D reality.

And they reside permanently in this, you know, virtual layer. Well, you know, that is helpful, I imagine, you know, for people who can't physically get out to see the gravesite and want to visit it, especially if you live in a different country than where you're, you know, the person is buried. I absolutely agree. And in fact, we're seeing some really interesting trends. Andrea DeSausa Martens. She does some really interesting work on Brazilian online wakes. So in Brazil, it's becoming quite popular now to live stream the wake at a funeral. So if you can't make the funeral, then at least you can attend the wake online.

So the Internet really is really helpful here in ways we may not even have thought about. Oh, exactly. And I think it also democratizes grief. It allows people a way to have these conversations about the dead that you may not be able to do on an everyday basis. You know, you're at work and you're grieving, but it's not really appropriate conversation. And so this way, you can go online and leave a message and find a community. community of people who are also grieving with you. So then the Internet really has filled a void for some people who are grieving.

Exactly. Are there other things you might think of in the future that might be or should be tried? Well, there's lots of interesting developments here, Ira. So some things that are happening now are people are creating digital avatars. So they're going online to try to create, you know, download your consciousness, if you will. And so by interacting with the avatar, you can kind of create this space where you exist online, where maybe you can give your granddaughter some advice in the future when you're not around anymore. She can log on and have a conversation with you.

And the jury's still out on whether that's helpful or not. Yeah, that's, that makes AI, gives AI a whole. whole different job to do. It really does. Wow, this is fascinating. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today, Candy. Oh, thanks for having me, Ira. Candy Kanchey's associate professor at Baylor University, an author of the book, Virtual After Lives. Yeah, that is a virtual afterlife. Virtual Afterlives grieving the dead in the 21st century. That's about all the time we have. I want to thank all our guests today. And one last thing before we go, SciFri is headed to Salt Lake City.

Join us next month, check your calendar, Saturday, September 15th at the Eccles Theater, where we'll be talking about exploring new frontiers from the unusual life hiding in forest canopies to the outer reaches of space. We have a great evening of science plan for you, and we also have live music. Yeah, you don't want to miss it. Tickets are going fast. Here's how to get them. Science Friday.com slash Salt Lake City.

That is September 15th, just a few weeks. It's a Saturday night special live science. Friday, broadcast science Friday.com slash Salt Lake City coming to you from the Eccles Theater. BJ Leiderman composed our theme music. You missed any part of our program? Well, you know, we've got our podcast, our social media. We're going all week long. Every day now is Science Friday. This being a holiday weekend, please drive safely. Have a safe holiday weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.