20% of J-Jr. High kids think dolls are alive

[L S]

% of J-Jr. High kids that believe...

12.8% - dead can be revived
12.6% - dead get hungry
11.8% - airplanes are alive
20.7% - dolls are alive

In the article below...


TABOO TOPIC: For many kids, death not final-just hit the reset button
By ASAKO MIYASAKA, Shukan Asahi
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


More than 20 percent of children surveyed believe that the dead can come back to life. With the popularity of dramas and movies about people returning after death, Japanese educators are pondering how best to teach children the truth.

``To be honest, until I heard your lecture, I was no different from today's children who don't fully understand the meaning of death,'' a female college student wrote to professor Hiroshi Nakamura of Japan Women's University after listening to his lecture on death at the age of 19.

``I also answered `maybe' to the question of whether dead animals can come back to life. When you said that the dead never come back to life, I was surprised but at the same time I finally understood death.''

The student wrote that she had seen a TV program that claimed a woman had come back from the dead three times. Each time, a few hours after doctors pronounced the woman dead, she was allegedly resuscitated. That's when the student believed, without a shadow of doubt, that people can sometimes return to life. But she said the lecture made her realize that the woman on the TV program simply wasn't dead though the doctors thought she was.

``During my series of lectures, I have heard of several college students who believed that people can come back from death,'' Nakamura said. ``Some people say this is because Japanese culture believes in reincarnation. But I think there's more to it.''

Nakamura is a child psychologist, but he is now studying what he refers to as ``death education.'' In the 2003 school year, he surveyed about 1,900 elementary, junior high and high school kids living in the Kanto, Kansai and Chubu regions. Their responses showed a surprising willingness to believe, religious questions aside, that death is not final.

While 32.9 percent of the youngsters responded ``No'' to the question ``Can the dead come back to life?'' another 30.9 percent said they did not know, 9.2 percent said ``Yes,'' and 12.7 percent said it was possible ``in certain cases.''

An earlier survey Nakamura conducted with about 400 junior high children in the 2002 school year revealed that 49.3 percent believed the dead can come back to life in at least some cases. Only 33.3 percent said it was impossible and 17.4 percent didn't know.

More here...

[AssKissinger]

An earlier survey Nakamura conducted with about 400 junior high children in the 2002 school year revealed that 49.3 percent believed the dead can come back to life in at least some cases. Only 33.3 percent said it was impossible and 17.4 percent didn't know.

A lot of them saw me rise from the dead.

[L S]

A lot of them saw me rise from the dead.

[/quote]

[Big Booger]

How can they be sure those kids didn't fuck off on the questionnaire? I mean we are talking about kids with a maturity level of Pee Wee Herman..

[AssKissinger]

How can they be sure those kids didn't fuck off on the questionnaire? I mean we are talking about kids with a maturity level of Pee Wee Herman..

Too true but some kids in JHS are so stupid it really is shocking. But even so, they're brilliant against a group of average American adults.

But one thing though, I'm not so sure that you can't die for a second or whatever and get a shock with those paddle things and come back. Clear! Death, is kind of like pornography, you know they say, 'It's hard to define but I know it when I see it.' Of course, technically if you're alive you've never been dead but like if you define death by saying the heart stopped or even a combination of no pulse and no breathing, sometimes people hit that point and then pop up again...don't they? Have you seen Night of the Living Dead?

[Big Booger]

How can they be sure those kids didn't fuck off on the questionnaire? I mean we are talking about kids with a maturity level of Pee Wee Herman..

Too true but some kids in JHS are so stupid it really is shocking. But even so, they're brilliant against a group of average American adults.

But one thing though, I'm not so sure that you can't die for a second or whatever and get a shock with those paddle things and come back. Clear! Death, is kind of like pornography, you know they say, 'It's hard to define but I know it when I see it.' Of course, technically if you're alive you've never been dead but like if you define death by saying the heart stopped or even a combination of no pulse and no breathing, sometimes people hit that point and then pop up again...don't they? Have you seen Night of the Living Dead?

You'd make a good detective.. Questioning the legitimacy of death.. or maybe even a good lawyer... but you not immoral enough I think.

[AssKissinger]

Asked whether airplanes and dolls are alive, more junior high school kids than fourth- to sixth-graders said these objects were living species. Asked whether dead people can move or experience hunger, more junior high school pupils than fourth- to sixth-graders answered ``Yes.''

The airplanes as alive one is just plain surreal. Just imagine what it must be like in the mind of some kid going to Okinawa on his JHS Second Year school trip who thinks he's entering the belly of some kind of giant dinosaur bird or something.

One guy I know who was supervising some kids doing homestays in Australia told me that this high school girl actually got up and started pulling on the lever of the door of the airplane while it was in flight. She said she wanted some fresh air.

As far as 'Can dead people move?', that may be a case of the pollsters inability to think outside the box. Dead people often twitch around and shit for awhile. Chickens run around with their heads cut off. I don't think they're still alive though. What if their brains and their bodies don't die at the same time? Have you ever heard that people who get the guillotine can still see for a few seconds? I think that's true too. Gnarly if your head falls in a basket with a bunch of other heads. Yuck. But can dead people see? That's what I want to know.

[Samurai_Jerk]

I wonder what percentage of kids would say the dead can come back from countries that are more religious and what exactly they mean by "religious questions aside". I think AK has a good point about defining death too since, as the girl in the report pointed out, there are so many TV programs that have stories of people being brought back after being pronounced dead.

I'm pretty surprised by the fact that so many of them believe that dolls and airplanes are alive. It kind of reminds me of that one kid in elementary school that still believed in Santa after everyone else knew better. All of us kids used to try to convince him otherwise but he wouldn't budge since his parents said Santa was real.

[omae mona]

hey y'all, if I remember correctly, Taro died once, so as our only resident, actively posting Dead Fucked Gaijin (besides AK) he may have something interesting to say on this topic when he gets back online. Let's not forget to bump this thread if he doesn't find it on his own!

[AssKissinger]

http://www.alcor.org/AboutCryonics/index.html

Life can be stopped and restarted if its basic structure is preserved.

Human embryos are routinely preserved for years at temperatures that completely stop the chemistry of life. Adult humans have survived cooling to temperatures that stop the heart, brain, and all other organs from functioning for up to an hour. These and many other lessons of biology teach us that life is a particular structure of matter. Life can be stopped and restarted if cell structure and chemistry are preserved sufficiently well...


Death occurs when the chemistry of life becomes so disorganized that normal operation cannot be restored. (Death is not when life turns off. People can and have survived being "turned off".) How much chemical disorder can be survived depends on medical technology. A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible. People were called dead when their heart stopped beating. Today death is believed to occur 4 to 6 minutes after the heart stops beating because after several minutes it is difficult to resuscitate the brain. However, with new experimental treatments, more than 10 minutes of warm cardiac arrest can now be survived without brain injury. Future technologies for molecular repair may extend the frontiers of resuscitation beyond 60 minutes or more, making today's beliefs about when death occurs obsolete.

Ultimately, real death occurs when cell structure and chemistry become so disorganized that no technology could restore the original state. This is called the information-theoretic criterion for death. Any other definition of death is arbitrary and subject to continual revision as technology changes. That is certainly the case for death pronounced on the basis of absent "vital signs" today, which is not real death at all...

More than one hundred people have been cryopreserved since the first case in 1967. More than one thousand people have made legal and financial arrangements for cryonics with one of several organizations, usually by means of affordable life insurance. Alcor is the largest organization, and distinguished among cryonics organizations by its advanced technology and advocacy of a medical approach to cryonics.

[plaid_knight]

Sure, you can come back from the dead. All you
need are some Phoenix Downs.

[dimwit]

Sure, you can come back from the dead. All you
need are some Phoenix Downs.

Too true. And I suspect that is exactly the way most Jr. High Schoolers view it.

[kurohinge1]

And let's not forget this talented 27 year-old ...

... KITAMI, Hokkaido -- Police officers preparing to perform a post-mortem examination on a [27-year-old] woman whose lifeless body was found near a river in Hokkaido were forced to halt the process after her heart began beating in the mortuary... more