Today from the Department of Perhaps the Most-Awesome Academic Grants: The Templeton Foundation has awarded $5 million to create something called The Immortality Project, a sprawling research venture into the implications of human’s expanding expiration dates.
The grant for University of California-Riverside philosopher John Martin Fischer may be one of the country’s biggest investments in looking scientifically at how we view death, what role it plays in our psyches, whether our brains are hard-wired to experience an afterlife.
Part of the project will look at cultural variations in reports of near-death experiences. Americans, for example, consistently report a tunnel and a light at the end. In Japan, reports often find the individual tending a garden.
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