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Your heartbeat for months before you existed. Your body came first. Fingers, a spine, a brain running in the dark before anyone [music] was inside to feel it. There's a version of you back there with no name, no memory, no sense of being anyone at all. And behind [music] that one, an earlier one. and behind that earlier. Still, follow yourself backward past your first [music] memory, past your birth, past the body built without you, and you don't [music] fade out. You arrive somewhere. I've read all the research, talked [music] to doctors, read the philosophers, and dug through what cultures around the world have said about where a person comes from. [music] So, we're going to go and look all the way back. What were [music] you before you were born? Where were you? Where does consciousness begin? And [music] where do you begin? You already know. You knew it [music] before you were born. You've just forgotten. Washington, D.C. 1985. A baby boy named Jeffrey Lawson was born early with a heart that needed [music] surgery. They opened his chest. The operation took hours, [music] and through all of it, they gave him no anesthetic, only a drug to keep his body [music] still. It wasn't an accident. At the time, the best doctors in the world believed a newborn couldn't really feel pain. The crying, the flinching, the racing [music] heart. They called it reflex, a body reacting on its own with no one inside to feel it. His mother, [music] Jill, found out afterward. She asked what they had given her son for the pain. The answer was nothing. It hadn't occurred to them. She didn't accept it. Her fight and the research that came after ended the practice a few years later. But for most of a century, babies were operated on a wake because the people holding the scalpel were sure no one was home. They were wrong. Someone was there feeling all of it. But pain does [music] not answer the deeper question. From the outside, you can see a body cry, flinch, and react. What you cannot see is the experience behind those reactions. [music] You cannot point [music] to the exact moment when sensation becomes awareness or when awareness [music] becomes a person. You were that baby once. Somewhere inside a someone arrived and [music] not even you can say when. So let's go looking for [music] that moment not forward the way the story is always told. First [music] this birthday, then that one backward down through your own beginning. [music] Past your first memory. Past the day you were born. past the body [music] that was built without you. Back to the last trace of you there is, and then one step further to whatever [music] was there before. We start where the trail of you runs out. Try to remember being one year old. You can't. No one [music] can. Everyone's earliest memory lands in about the same place. Three, four, 5 years old. Before that, nothing. [music] A blank where the first years of your life should be. And those were not small years. Someone was your entire world in them. Their face was the whole sky. Their arms were the edge of everything safe. They gave up sleep, gave up years, gave up the shape of their old life and poured everything they had into you. [singing] the most important person of your life in the most important years of it. And you kept not one frame for a 100 years. We assumed those years were never recorded at all. That the baby's brain was too unfinished to save anything. That might be the wrong conclusion. Those memories might not be erased, but locked. [music] Somewhere behind a door you can't open. The face that was your whole world may still be in there, recorded, intact [music] in the dark. So the you that remembers, the one keeping the story of your life came late. It [music] wasn't there for the beginning. Go back far enough and you reach [music] a version of yourself that was fully alive, fully here and kept no record of [music] being anyone at all. We keep going back before you could remember. There's a stranger gap. Still a stretch where there was no you for anything to happen to. Watch a baby in front of a mirror. [music] For the first year and a half of life, it doesn't know the face looking back. It reaches for it like a playmate, another baby in the glass. Then somewhere around 18 months, that changes. The child [music] lifts a hand and touches its own face. [music] [music] Something has clicked. That's me. And for [music] the first time there is a me for it to be. Before that the lights were on. The baby saw, felt, cried, laughed. But there was no one at the center of it calling any of it mine. Experience with nobody yet who owned it. So the self you feel yourself to be the eye behind your eyes switched on late. It was built like the fingers in the spine after the fact. Take it away. Go back before it. And the experience is still there. It just doesn't belong to anyone yet. Which means we're not looking for the moment experience began. We're looking for something underneath [music] it. And so we go back further, back through the one door you came in by. The most violent thing that will ever happen to you already has You were forced out of the only world you'd ever known. Crushed through a passage barely wide enough. Blinded [music] by light, hit by cold air, filled for the first time with the [music] strange burning of your own breath. And you screamed. Everyone in the room smiled because the scream meant you were alive. No one said it might also be the oldest [music] grief there is. The moment you were cut loose from the hole, you were part of and handed a piece of your own. An inside and an outside, a you and a not you. One researcher who studies the newborn brain [music] puts it simply that birth itself might be [music] the moment consciousness switches on. That the first thing a newborn meets is [music] shock. An outside world loud and unpredictable. Nothing like the warm certainty it was just pulled out of. But the cut [music] did not break every connection. While you were growing inside her, some of your cells crossed the border [music] into her body and stayed in her heart, in her blood, in [music] her bones, maybe her brain. Cells with your signature in [music] them, still there years later, decades later. some of them for the rest of her life. Long after she let you go, she was still physically [music] carrying pieces of you. You spend your whole life feeling like a separate thing. On the far side of [music] that cut, you were never fully separate. Go back further before your birth. Now there's no edge left. No inside and outside. [music] Just the warm dark and [music] something already stirring in it because someone in there is already listening. The body comes to know its mother's [music] voice through the wall of her own. It learns the [music] rhythm and melody of her language and responds when it hears it. Even before birth, brain scans reveal organized patterns that seem to be more than simple reflexes. And a growing number of serious [music] researchers have landed on an unsettling idea. That experience doesn't switch on at birth at all. that the first faint [music] flicker of it comes a light here in the last [music] weeks in the dark. But there's no person in here, [music] no eye, no border between where she stops and you start. Her blood is your blood. Her heartbeat is the whole sky. Think about it [music] for a moment. A baby inside a mother. Like something in a room. Her on the outside, [music] you on the inside. Two people, one of them very small. Philosophers call that the containment view. And one of them, Elen Kingma, has spent years arguing we've never had a good reason to believe it. Because look at how biologists decide where one body ends and another begins. [music] Does it hold its own temperature, its own chemistry? Hers held yours? [music] Does it breathe for itself, eat for [music] itself, clean itself? Her lungs breathed for you. Her blood [music] brought your food and carried your waste away. Is there a clean break between the two? A wall? A border? [music] There isn't one. [music] The placenta isn't a wall. It's a shared organ [music] grown from both of you. The two of you continuous through it. And would an immune system treat it as an intruder? Hers [music] didn't. It stood down for you. By the measures we use everywhere else in biology, [music] you weren't a passenger inside her. You were a part of her. The way a limb is part of a body. Philosophers still [music] argue about this. But if it's right, you didn't [music] start as a tiny separate person in a room. You started [music] as part of somebody else. And birth wasn't the [music] day you arrived. It was the [music] day you stopped being part of her. But that [music] day is still months away. We're before it. where you're part [music] of her body and there's still no one home and you were loved anyway. Two people already in love with [music] someone who wasn't there yet where a heart started beating [music] around 3 weeks in a fast wet flicker on a screen that made a room go quiet. where the most [music] important work of your life got done while you were still away. You weren't a you yet. You were part of a whole. We keep going [music] back. There's less and less of you now. But before we do, a quick word. Films like this take [music] quite some time to make. weeks of reading, research, writing, [music] and sitting with questions that don't have easy answers. We [music] make them because we really love making them. So, if this is the kind of thing you want more of, think about [music] becoming a channel member by tapping the join button below this video. You get episodes early and adree, and it's what really helps us making them. And if a membership isn't in the cards for you, totally fine. [music] There's a free way to help. Check if you see the hype button under the video. If you do, give it a [music] tap. It tells YouTube that this one matters and it helps someone else discover it. [music] Thank you truly. Now, back to the story. [music] We keep going back. There's less and less of you now. [music] Back to the very start of the body, two cells meet and [music] a code is written that never existed before and never will again. The full instructions for a person and still no person, nobody home, [music] just a spark and a set of directions. And the spark isn't new either. >> [music] >> Every cell in you split from a cell before it and that one from another unbroken back through your mother and her mother and every grandmother you have ever [music] had. Past the first people, past the first animals, all the way down to a single speck of life in a warm sea almost 4 billion years ago. A flame passed hand to hand for 4 billion years, never once going out. You're the newest [music] place. It's burning. So the material is ancient, the pattern is ancient, but you, the one watching this, are nowhere in it [music] yet. Not in the code, not in the cells, not in the 4 billion years. Go back one [music] more step past the two cells before the spark. And there's nothing left of you at all. No memory, no self, no body, no code. Everything you have ever called you is gone. If the story you were told is true, this is where you hit [music] nothing. the empty space before a person [music] starts. But that's not all we found on the [music] way back. We went backward and at every [music] step we took something away. The memories, the remembering self, the name, the body, the code, one layer of you after another peeled off and set down. And at every step, something stayed. [music] Under the memories, there was still experience. Under the self, there was still someone seeing before there [music] was an eye to own it. Everything we subtracted was you. The thing that never subtracted was awareness [music] itself. So the bottom is in a blank. Strip away everything you were sure you were and you don't [music] reach nothing. You reach the one thing still here right now watching this awareness with the person [music] taken off it. It doesn't thin out as you [music] go back. It's what all the rest was built on. >> [music] >> So the right question to ask is not when did you begin? It's what were you before there was a [music] you and here science has no clear answers yet. But we are not the first to stand here. Ask people who never met, separated by oceans and thousands of years, where they were before they were born. They keep handing back the same answer. In India, the oldest philosophy says you were never a separate thing to begin with. That what you call you is a drop that briefly forgot it was the ocean. Being born is [music] the drop taking a shape. Dying is the drop remembering [music] it was always water. In ancient Greece, Plato taught that the soul existed before the body and [music] once knew everything and that on its way into a new life, it drank [music] from a river called lethy, the river of forgetting. [music] That he said is why learning so often feels like remembering. [music] You're not taking in something new. You're recovering [music] something you already knew before you came. And in an old [music] Jewish teaching, a child in the womb is taught the whole of wisdom by candle light and can see from one end of the world to the other. Then at birth, an angel presses a fingertip to its lips and it forgets all of it. That small groove above your mouth, the filtrum is the print the angel [music] left. Different lands, different times, the same story every time you came out of a greater hole. You crossed into a body [music] and you forgot. You could call that coincidence. Frightened people inventing [music] the same comfort separately. But the same images [music] turn up in places that were never taught them. In the dreams of people who never heard the myths, in the drawings of [music] children too young to know them. The same handful of ancient stories rising on their own in minds that had [music] no way to get them from anywhere, which is hard to explain unless there's a layer underneath the personal mind. [music] Which leaves one last step. Maybe all these people describe the same thing. because they are all remembering the same thing. Maybe the story one hole then a descent then forgetting is [music] everywhere. Not because we invent it but because every one of us [music] has actually been there. And the myths are what [music] leaks back through. There is a piece of science that points the same way [music] and it comes from studying the very young. The psychologist Allison Gopnik spent her career watching [music] how babies think and reached a conclusion that turns [music] the story on its head. A baby, she argues, is not less conscious than you. It's more. Your adult attention is a narrow spotlight. One thing lit, the rest of the [music] world dimmed to nothing. A baby's awareness is a lantern thrown wide, flooded by everything at once. Imagine it to be like being in love in a new city for the first time after three double espressos. We picture a child climbing toward consciousness, gathering it as the brain matures. Gopnik's work [music] says the opposite. You started wide open. Growing up was the slow work of narrowing, closing the lantern down to a spotlight, [music] filtering the flood, learning not to see almost everything so you could be one particular person. [music] You didn't grow into consciousness. You grew a filter. What comes next can't be proven, but once you see it, everything we just went through makes sense. [music] What if the brain doesn't make consciousness at all? What if it receives it? A radio doesn't invent the music. [music] The music is already in the air everywhere all at once. [music] The radio does one small thing. [music] It tunes that whole signal down to a single station and makes it playable. Smash the radio and the music doesn't die. It just stops coming [music] through that one set. This isn't [music] something new. William James, Bergson, Huxley, serious minds a century ago all circled the same idea that [music] the brain is not a generator but a filter, a reducing valve, [snorts] something that narrows the whole of mind down to the thin survivable trickle one body can carry. [music] The philosopher Bernardo Castro puts it this way. >> There are plenty of reasons to think that the brain does not generate the mind, but the brain is what the mind looks like when it's observed from the outside. The brain is the image of the mind. It's the cognitive representation we make of another mind, not the generator of the mind. >> If that's true, the question finally has an answer. Where [music] were you before you were born? You were the signal, not a person. The whole of it, everywhere at once before a body grew a receiver and tuned [music] it down to one station. Every layer we peeled off was part [music] of the receiver. What was left underneath was what the receiver was tuning. Consciousness already there waiting [music] for a body to narrow it into a U. Consciousness [music] came first. You are it briefly narrowed, turned down from everything to one and made to [music] forget the rest. So there could be a single clear voice that answers to your name. [music] And you were not the first to be narrowed like this. It has happened over and over [music] for as long as there have been people. [music] One hole handed down and tuned into a single life. Again and again, each new light caught from the one before it. For a while, two flames burn as one. a mother and the child inside her. No border anywhere between them. Then they separate and neither [music] one is what it was. The child's flame [music] steadies into a single burning self. But the mother doesn't simply go back to being who she was before. In 2024, researchers scanned one woman's brain 26 times. From before she conceived all the way through the pregnancy to 2 years after the birth. Nobody had ever watched a brain go through it in real time before. It did not come out [music] the same. Her gray matter thinned across almost the entire cortex and kept [music] thinning as the pregnancy went on. Not damage closer to the pruning a brain [music] does in adolescence. cutting back, sharpening, specializing. Afterward, some of it returned, some never did. There was barely a region left untouched. She went in as one person and came out [music] as another. There's a word for it now, matressence. The mother is [music] born too. Her flame in time begins to fade. And before it goes out, that child grown now leans their flame against a new one. And it catches. Not life being passed this time. Consciousness. One flame [music] lighting the next, each one lit from the one before. [music] It's been happening for as long as there have been mothers. Everyone who ever lived was for one moment two flames burning as one. You were the next flame, waiting to [music] be lit from the one before you. And the place [music] you came from may not only be behind you. In the deepest reach of sleep, the self switches off. No [music] you, no time, no world. And you don't panic in there because there's no one left to panic. [music] Then you surface [music] and it all reassembles and you call it morning. You may have already been to the place you were before you were born. You go there and come home from it every single day, [music] but you never bring anything back from inside [music] a single station. You can't hear the whole broadcast from in here. You can't prove a word of this. Maybe that not knowing [music] is part of what you agreed to forget on the way in. So if tonight you're holding someone who won't remember it, hold them tight. You're the voice from before. [music] The one thread they'll reach for in the dark for the rest of their life. [music] Long after they forgotten, your face was ever the whole sky. And once you were [music] the one being held, someone learned your cry. Carried you [music] through the nights you couldn't be soothed. You kept none of it. But it's why [music] a certain voice can still calm you down. It is why being [music] held still works. [music] Why in the worst moments you reach for someone in the dark? You were the whole signal once. [music] Then a receiver switched on and narrowed you to one. [music] [music] And remember, [music] consider becoming a channel member by clicking the join button below. Producing episodes like this takes a great deal of time and effort, and your support directly helps us keep creating them. As a member, you'll also get early access to new videos and the option to watch [music] ad [singing] free. There's a mirror to that moment [singing] for every one of us. the moment the receiver switches off again. Watch this episode to explore what you see when you die. 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