Noetic science saves rehashed Dan Brown novel

I just completed Dan Brown’s latest novel, “The Lost Symbol,” and although I wasn’t all that impressed with the book, I very much liked the ending.
Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say the ending was simple, especially when compared to the ending of some of his other books, yet it packed a wallop I’m still thinking about four days later.
Still without spoiling anything, part of the ending, as well as the rest of the novel, revolved around something I had never heard about before called noetic science.
As defined by Cassandra Vieten, director of research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, noetic science is “a multidisciplinary field that brings objective scientific tools and techniques together with subjective inner knowing to study the full range of human experience.”
Huh? In simpler terms noetic scientists try to measure things we’ve long regarded as immeasurable – things like prayer, intuition and life after death.
In one scene in “The Lost Symbol,” noetic scientist Katherine Solomon talks about an experiment she conducted that measured the weight of a man right before he died and then immediately after he died. She discovered his weight dropped a fraction of an ounce following his death, thus proving his soul had a measurable weight once it left his body.
Skeptics might think this is just fiction, which is justifiable since the claim appears in a fiction novel, but Brown is a knowledgeable author who knows how to find obscure facts and incorporate them into his books. It’s a good thing he does, because some of the outlandish and implausible events that take place in his books may make them unreadable without all of these juicy tidbits that are just plain fun to learn about.
Well before the term noetic science was coined, Dr. Duncan MacDougall conducted experiments in 1907 that determined a human soul weighed 21 grams. He also conducted the experiment on dogs and discovered their weight did not decrease after death. Some scientists have disputed his results, but it’s clear Brown was at least grounded in reality, and not fiction, when he wrote about the subject.
Brown also writes about the power of mass thinking in “The Lost Symbol” as an example of noetic science. Mass thinking is basically the ability for a lot of like-thinking people to make either positive or negative things occur. An example is the election of Barack Obama a year ago. The majority of people were in a hopeful mood, following a period in which many people had negative thoughts due to the collapse of the economy, and as a result they swept him and many hope-oriented candidates into office.
He says in the novel modern technologies such as Facebook and Twitter allow for a quick spread of mass thoughts, which could someday lead to a new age of enlightenment. Considering we’re only three years away from the date the ancient Mayan calendar ceases to exist – Dec. 21, 2012 – it’s hopeful to believe the world won’t end on this date, as some predict (see the new film “2012” for more about this apocalyptic end), but instead we’ll enter into this new age of enlightenment as others predict. I’m a positive thinker, so I’ll gladly choose this over a pending doom.
As I mentioned before, I wasn’t all that impressed with “The Lost Symbol,” mainly because it’s more of the same from the author. If you’ve read “The Da Vinci Code” or “Angels & Demons,” you’ve pretty much read this book already. Then again, if that’s what you want, you’ll definitely enjoy this one, too. I was just hoping for something more.
For me, it was difficult reading through some of the ridiculous events that take place in the book. Why do so many unbelievable things happen to the Robert Langdon character, and why hasn’t he learned his lesson by now? Stay in the classroom and don’t offer any help to suspicious people, you may find yourself wanting to tell him.
I’m not sure I would have ever gotten through the book without the bits about noetic science. Fortunately, I found that interesting enough to slog my way through it, even though it took me two months, whereas his other novels I breezed through in days.
It makes me wish noetic science was around when I was in high school. Then I may have continued to take science classes beyond biology and chemistry, and today instead of reading about it in tired novels, I could be one of those scientists on the frontier of some new discovery that could change the way people think about the world.
I know, that’s far-fetched. But probably not as far-fetched as most of the stuff happening in “The Lost Symbol.”