Study Reveals That Our Brains Encourage Death Denial

A new study from researchers at Bar Ilan University in Israel has found that the human brain enables death denial by protecting us from the knowledge of our own mortality. Yair Dor-Ziderman, a former doctoral student at the university who is now a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, set out to determine whether our brains could grasp “the idea of ending, of nothing, of complete annihilation.”

Dor-Ziderman and his colleagues recruited 24 volunteers and observed their brain activity as they watched faces appear on a screen. After viewing repeated images of one person’s face beneath death-related words, such as “grave” or “funeral,” a new face was associated with the words — causing the subjects’ brains to produce signals that indicated surprise.

However, when during a second test the volunteers saw their own faces beneath words associated with death, the prediction system in their brains went offline, and did not log any new surprise signals.

“This suggests that we shield ourselves from existential threats, or consciously thinking about the idea that we are going to die, by shutting down predictions about the self, or categorizing the information as being about other people,” Avi Goldstein, one of the paper’s senior authors told The Guardian. The findings were published in November in the journal NeuroImage.

Death Provides Unconscious Motivation Despite Denial

Psychologist Ernest Becker’s seminal 1973 work “The Denial of Death” suggests it’s the death drive (rather than the sex drive of Freudian analysis) that holds the greatest influence on humans, fueling them to build families, create things, seek success and leave a lasting legacy. Yet Becker also acknowledged that most humans are not capable of consciously recognizing the likelihood of their own mortality.

“The fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation,” Becker wrote. “But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one’s mental functioning, else the organism could not function … And so we can understand what seems like an impossible paradox: the ever-present fear of death in the normal biological functioning of our instinct of self-preservation, as well as our utter obliviousness to this fear in our conscious life.”

Some psychologists have since expanded on Becker’s work to create Terror Management Theory, which suggests that people embrace worldviews allowing them to retain a sense of importance but that often result in prejudice or a sense of superiority. Other experts say that people become more accepting of death as they age. “The elderly become more present-centered,” Steve Taylor, a psychology lecturer at Leeds Beckett University in England, told Time magazine. “And research shows that being present-centered leads to enhanced well-being.”

Ultimately, Dor-Ziderman believes that this latest research reveals that our brains have trouble assimilating the reality of death. “We have this primal mechanism that means when the brain gets information that links self to death, something tells us it’s not reliable, so we shouldn’t believe it,” he said. “The brain does not accept that death is related to us.”

Still, Dor-Ziderman told LiveScience that some advanced meditators have allegedly eliminated the fear of death, and his team intends to bring them into the lab, and see what they can find. “We want to see if this is true,” he said.