>> rose: welcome to our program. tonight we continue our brain watch series with jonah lehrer, his book is called major how creativity -- image how creativity works. >> if we relax in the shower or on the job or driving a car that we're finally able to turn the spotlight of attention inwards and that's when we hear the quiet voice coming to the back of our head giving us the answer. maybe the voice has been there for hours or days or weeks we just haven't taken a moment to listen. that's why relaxation is so important. the larger lesson gets backer to the wonderful line of einstein that creativity is the residue of wasted time. a moment of insight you have to make time to makwaste time to m. it will arrive after you start searching for it. >> rose: we'll continue with michael gazzaniga, has book who is in charge, free will and the

science of the brain. >> free will is an illusion. free will is just a miscast problem in my opinion and what i try to do in the book is not just assert that but to tell the story about how the brain is built. what we know comes from the factory and the brain. how it's organized in terms of all these modules. and to ultimately paint the picture that our brains work in an automatic ways just like a wrist watch but we have this belief, strong illusion that we're acting as if we are in charge. >> rose: we one clude this evening with thomas de wesselow his book is the sign, the shroud of turin and the secret of the resurrection. >> i realize that the shroud is far more mysterious than people generally think. people think it must be fake, someone must have painted it or they must have produced weird rubbing technique or something.

let's not think about it. i'm an expert in images of this period and the more i looked at it the more i realized this could not be a medieval work of art. >> rose: how the brain works and new connections between the shroud of turin and the resurrection when we continue.

captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: jonah lehrer is here at able 30, he's already a oij 30 he's already a best author he writes about neuro sciences and popular culture for "wall street journal." he's contributing editor at wire and writes for the new yorker magazine. his new book examines a phenomena that has fascinated humanity for ages, the mind's power to create. it is called the book image, a creativity works i'm please to do have him at this table for

the worse time. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: you've had this really wonderful career. you were at columbia, you won a roadrhodes scholarship. at one point of your life you were studying science, studying neuroscience. >> i really wanted to be a neuroscientist. that was the narrative i carried around my entire life. >> rose: why, what introduced you to neuroscience. >> i think it was something about the mystery of the brain. i mean it's a very profound three pounds of meat inside our head, just trying to understand how it worked. there was notions and an ancient quest to know ourselves and these tools to know ourselves in a new way struck me as a romantic and wonderful endeavor. and then i had the pleasure, deep measure of several years working in the technician in the lab of eric kenda and i love spending time with those scientists. i love asking them silly questions but i also discovered i was a terrible

experimentalist. as one person used to joke i excelled pa at experimental failure. i didn't have the patience or discipline. the best scientist they love the manual labor of the scientific process. they've got a skill for taking big metaphysical questions, what is memory and breaking them down into testable chunks. >> rose: they enjoy the process too don't they. >> exactly. they find ways to mind their failures for new insights. i real piesed i wasn't cut out for it. >> rose: did you at the same time find out you were cut out for the written word. >> that came a little bit, that came a little bit later, you know. i then tried some other stuff when i was at ox palo verde i did 20th century literature and philosophy and i realize i still miss science, the miss the immere seizalempiricallism. that's when i found out about writing. >> rose: this is a perfect marriage between writing and subject matter. >> it's a pretty great job. >> rose: tell me about creativity. what have you learned about it

that we didn't know. >> you know, we've had this myths for thousands of years about the creative process that it's this thing we rely on the muses for. you outsource the imagination. it seems so mysterious when we invent an idea out of thing air. >> rose: it was related to some kind of genius thing. >> yes. very rare rare talent. >> rose: exactly. >> you see this mirrored as school kids when you ask a second grader are you creative, 95% say yes i love to paint i love to draw. by fifth grade it's down to 50% by the tomb they are high school seniors less than 10% of kids believe they're creative. >> rose: what happens. >> we're very efficient like creativity is off and that's a very sad fact. also come to internalize this myth about creativ creativity ts a require gift. scientific method is it is a message of universal talent. this isn't evenly distributed.

some are more creative than others but you get better at it sniessment.>> rose: you say itr most important mental talent. >> we live in a world surrounded by our enventures. it has come two define the human species. this is stuff we all invented it doesn't always exist this is the world we live? >> rose: where does it come from. >> it comes from these, it comes from in here. it doesn't come from the muses. the other myth i want to expose is we assume creativity is a singular thing that there's one way we need to be thinking. creativity is a catch all term for a variety of the same thought processes. sometimes you need a moment of insight and sometimes you need that focus you need to grind it out and go through draft after draft. >> rose: sometimes you mead a roaa -- need a road block. >> sometimes you need to hit the wall and be horribly stumped. your brain is telling you need a

moment of insight you need a big break through an epiphany. science made progress understanding how these moments come from. they are the most miss fierce aspect of the -- mysterious process. you can't just put undergrads in a brain scanner and say have an epiphany. >> rose: we want to look at your creativity. >> exactly. instead what they had to do was find a way to generate lots of moments of insight on the fly. people like mark and john have come up with, instead of word problems that generate lots of moments of insight. so these are known as compound associate problems, the acronym is unfortunate c.r.a.p. you have to find a fourth word for those three. it might be pine, crab and sauce and pineapple, crab apple and

apple sauce. as soon as it pops into your head you know this is the right answer. it feels like a moment of insight people in the lab will say aha and their eyes go all wide. what they found is the shoksz before you have a moment of -- seconds before you have a moment of insight is an obscure bit of cortex in the rights hemisphere shows a sharp spike of activity. this is the area associated with things like the processing of jokes and al society interpretation of met -- al society interpretation of met foes. when we say juliet is the son we're that saying he's a big flaming ball. it's a metaphor. it's looking past these surface dissimilarities the fact that jewejuliet and suns have nothinn common. those are mode associations you realize romeoization jewel yut lights up his word. a mental process is required and you need to make sense of pine crab and sauce. those aren't three words going together frequently.

you need to find this other word which is apple and that bins them all together. the similar mental process is when you need a moment of insight. when the connections were on the surface and obvious we probably would have found them already. that's why we hit the wall. that's why we're sunk. that's why we probably need to rely on this brain in the back of the right hem hemisphere whih drops together dissimilar ideas. >> rose: is another word for drawn together distantly related ideas being able to see connections. >> you know, s.c. johnson put creative fee connecting thing. it's a new connection between old ideas. when you need a big new idea, it's going to come from hold ideas that are even farther apart. no one else can see the connection between them. no one else can bind them together. >> rose: what's the relation shoop between bob dylan, creativity and like a rolling stone. >> i begin the book by telling a story that happened in may 1965 when bob dylan gave up on singing song writing. he was so burnt out, he was on

this grueling tour and he didn't know how to reinvent himself. he didn't want to be a folk singer anymore but he didn't know what to write next. so he moves up to woodstock. he didn't take his guitar he was going to paint and write poetry but he was done with the music business. he's there for a couple days when all of a send he feels this familiar feeling the itch of unwritten words as he put it. it's like this ghost gives you what to stay. he starts psychiatric ling and - starts psychiatri scribbling, ut visceral verb. he takes 25 pages of notes he scrawled in wood talk all by himself and what he sees in these notes are the lyrics to like a rolling stone. the very next week he goes into the space of columbia records and they recorded what will revolutionize rock and roll. >> rose: he understood it. imindicate out. >> he understood it. this is a defining feature of

the moments of insight. this is one of the things that makes them so miss fierce. as soon as the answer -- mistears, you know the pans. you know this is the solution you've been searching for. >> rose: wow. so suppose that, suppose you know, you know that you hit a road block, you hit a wall. what ought you do to find a creative way around the wall? >> this was quite surprising to me because i think we live in this day and age that worships attention. that is all about the focus. so when you hit a hard problem you assume what you need to do is to drink a triple express owe, chug red bull, chain yourself to your desk. that's exactly backwards. what scientists have found is people in a relaxed state of mind are much more likely to have a movement insight. >> rose: people say to me all the time best ideas is out running in the morning, i was out driving commuting in my car. >> in the shower is a popular

one. >> rose: hanging out on a sunday morning. that kind of thing. what is it about that. >> because when we're not relaxed, when we're chained to our desk, our attention's out here. it's consumed by the noise of the world so we're thinking about the problem itself. you go back to those associate problems or thinking about pine crab and sauce. there's probably a wrong answer we can't get passed. it's not until we're relaxed in the shower or driving a car that we're finally able to turn the spotlight of attention inwards and that's when we hear that quiet voice coming from the back of our head giving us the answer. maybe the voice has been there for hours days or weeks we just haven't taken a moment to listen. that's why relaxation is so important. the larger lesson here really gets back to this wonderful line of einstein that creativity is the residue of wasted time. when you need a moment of insight you really have to make time to waste time because this is, this seems paradoxical but the ends will only arrive after you stop searching for it. >> rose: there's milton blazer what do we learn from him a great designer. >> peace got a wonderful slogan

above his studio door which is art is work. it would be wonderful if the advice we could give to everyone is that, you know, the solution to every creative problem is to take a long hot shower to go for a work on the beach to you know drink a beer. that's of course not how it works in the real world. you talk to creative people, they often begin with their roam particular break throughs, those epiphanies when we don't expect them. when we press them they talk about all the hard work that came after. they talk about the iterations, drafts and frustration and failures. >> rose: i've talked to a large number of artists that go to the gallery or go to the museum and just look. i mean it's a studying process. >> it's about realizing that creativity is not a straight line. that it really is about just being open-minded. it's about letting yourself be exposed to lots of ideas even if you don't know how they're going to fit in. it's about seeking out diverse inputs and usually this mirrored again and again in the literature. it's why pawnt peurs with more

diverse social networks people who spend time with people that are not like them. they are three times more innovative than people with predictable social networks. it's great to spend time with people who don't think like us. >> rose: what did you mean when you said the most important challenges exceed the capabilities of the individual's imagination. >> this i think is mirrored in the work it's really demonstrated by the work of ben jones. he's an economist at north western and he's dated 20 i million science papers. you go back to the 1950's and he has the papers in the field those home papers paradigm shifting papers. they are the product of a lone genius. someone by themselves shifted the paradigm. einstein, darwin, someone like that. he fast forward to the 21st century and now science looks very different. now the papers in the field are really the product of genes, people from different disciplines come together. one explanation for this is it's really better, problems are getting harder. the low hanging fruit is gone. so we have to learn how to work together or fail alone.

that the problems we have now really do show the capabilities of the individual's imagination. they exspee exceed one disciplid that's why it's important to get people from different backgrounds to collaborate. >> rose: steve jobs was a proponent of that. >> absolutely. i think his real genius was managing the operative post and getting computer scientists and computer programmers to work with designers and artists. >> rose: pushing them to their limit. >> absolutely. >> rose: you can imagine more. >> yes. and by practicing brutal honesty, i think you know he really understood that creativity requires people from different backgrounds to come together. one of my favorite stories in the book involves his design for the pixar studios. the original design for the building called for three separate buildings. one building for the an merits, one for the computer scientists one building for the writers and directors. job thought it was the wrong idea. he knew the success of pixar would depend on these cultures so they interact.

they would learn from the computer scientists and vice versa. he learned that's not enough so he carved out this big h room. he put coffee shops there and mail boxes there and gifts in the cafeteria. even that's not enough because he built a cafeteria with a bunch of an merits an animators. the two bathrooms in the entire pixar studios and he put them in the h room because there's one place we have to go every day. >> rose: bathroom. >> it's the bathroom. >> rose: you meet people on the way and coming back. >> you'll have those patient difficult tice -- serendipitous chats. >> rose: he thought the most productive meetings happen by happen stance on the way somewhere you run into somebody and you have a conversation. >> you couldn't plot them out n advance. >> rose: come to my meeting at 9:00. >> there were those random bumps. it's surprising because we live in the age of technology where we assume it's e-mail or skype

interrupting remoting. jobs understood that physical location still matters that even in the 21st century it will be human friction from fool people in too small a space that's where the sparks come from. >> rose: the friction. this is jobs talking about some of these kinds of ideas, at least the angle of them in this conversation with me 15 years ago. here it is. how do you think of yourself. i mean after apple, after next how do you think of yourself. >> the things i've done in my life and the things we do now at pixar these are team sports. it's not something that one person does. you have to have an extraordinary team because these are, you're trying to climb a mountain with a whole party of people a lot of stuff to bring up the mountain. >> rose: it's really good. >> yes a wonderful quote. >> rose: he had to go to the mountain. nobody climbed never so alone. >> absolutely. i think it's a longstanding myth we've had about creativity we

overemphasize the singular nature of it. even somebody like bob dylan who goes to woodstock by himself he's stealing ideas from everywhere, other people. love and theft. you fall in love with something and then you steal it and reinvent it and make it your sent. >> rose: that's creative too. >> that's part and parcel of the creative process. >> rose: you see something and you start to play with it and thing you create something out of it but you might not have gotten there without that in the first. >> absolutely. whether it's shakespeare feeling lines from christopher marlowe or the bloomberg printing presses, wine press technology transplanted to the printed word or the google search algorithm. we've been ranking pack democratic articles in terms of the number of citations for decades and they simply took that hold idea and cept them to the worldwide web. >> howeb. >> rose: how do you see creative from what you do. >> it mostly plays out in my day to day work. i don't know how to finish a sentence or begin an article. and i'll sit with it for hours and just struggle and get so

angry. one way of writing this book has changed my process it's much more willing to take a break and leave the phone behind and just make time to waste time. >> rose: what did jazz pianist have. >> this is for me one of the big mysteries that i was interested in when i began thinking about this book. you watch videos and john coltrane. this guy steps out on to a stage and beauty pours out of him for 45 minutes or 60 minutes. he is just improvising. he's no idea what he's going to play and yet he just knows he can invent it. >> rose: could he duplicate it the next night. >> he could create a whole new kind of beauty the next night. this is total e awe inspiring. there's some really interesting new work which has begun to deconstruct the improv process kind of spontaneous creativity. what scientists have discovered at johns hopkins when you put jazz pe pianisted they have ther

ambitions. they activate the door cull frontal cortex just behind the forehead closely associated with things like self control, impulse control that keeps us from eating the ice cream in the fridge. the first thing that comes to our mind so it's a pretty important part of the brain. but it can also hold us back because it makes us worried about what we're saying the voice telling us not to do something. when you need to improvise for an hour on stage when you need to let yourself go, you need to get out of your head turn that voice off. in a sense variable to just inhibit their inhibitions on command. that itself that act of deactivation takes years of practice. it looks easy on stage when they do it but that's only because they work so hard. >> rose: you have seen me do this before. i always ask brian scientists what is the one -- brian -- bran scientists, is there something in neuroscience you would like an answer to. >> i would love to really understand the persistence of memory. what allows a memory just to

last and last and last. even when it's not reinforced. >> rose: i remember certain things and not other things. because there's nothing about the things i necessarily remember that have to do with the sentology of that thing absolute to my life. >> it's the total unpredictable nature that makes itself fascinate. and why some files, you know, get stuck and you can't get rid of them and other files we love to hold on to just vanish and disappear. these a sink and flow nature to memory which i think he writes as beautifully as will ever be but he really captures i think just how strange and peculiar human memory is. but you know the particular technical question i'm fascinated by is what allows it to persist. our brain is going through tremendous flux all the time. neurons are being born, circuits are changing, we are a machine up here. >> rose: your experience changes your brain. >> proteins are always coming and going. what allows these memories to just last. in a sense they seem more

durable than the brain itself. that is an interesting memory. one thing i just begun thinking about and maybe it's become my next book i don't know but is the nature of love more generally. not just romantic love, not just the passion in front of the person but i think i want to say we love something whether it's love of a person, love of idea, love of a god, here's a pleasure, here's a source of meaning that won't get old that will stay interesting for years at a time. it will persist like one of those memories. and that's a very rare and you m pharmacologically. they get so better. then you 95%. towards the right answer. >> that's right. it's all in the question. >> rose: it's all in the question. >> no question about it. no question that answers the question. >> rose: tell me about brain science law. >> so this is new to me and started about four years ago. and the question was or the issue was were people going to

start to import neuroscience knowledge into the court. were they going to say mr. jones has a lesion in the frontal lobe and that's why he should be held not guilty. >> rose: right. >> and right off the bat. >> rose: not responsible. >> not responsible. and right off the bat the problem with that notion is a lot of people have holes in the frontal lobe and most of them come to bad things. so the notion that you can say that because he has the hole, he did bad things, it's just weakness from the start. but then there's all new brain averages, brain imaging studies and saying well we see evidence now that maybe mr. jones couldn't form an intention. so maybe he didn't have guilty mind. >> rose: he didn't know the difference between right and wrong. >> he didn't know the difference between right and wrong and that should be an issue. and my take on it just to cut through it is that that is all coming in neuroscience in the

next 15 years. what we have today i think is a very limited use of neuroscience in the court. it's not ready but it's coming. and i actually think that the judicial system ought to think of how they might establish panels of sig scientists maybe t the level on of the department of justice can even evaluate this flood of scientific information and say okay that one's a good one. we're not ready for this one and so forth. >> rose: why don't you try to do something about it. >> i try in my way. >> rose: his way is who's in charge, free will and the science of the brain. thank you. >> thank you. >> rose: pleasure to see you. >> rose: the shroud of turin is a large cloth with the view of the image of a tortured and crucified man. it's a holy of christianity. carbon testing concluded the shroud is a medieval faith.

thomas de wesselow began an intensive examination of the shroud and historical significance. he believes the shroud is authentic and inspired the belief of the resurrection of christ. he analyzes his conclusion in the new book the shroud of turin and the secret of the resurrection. i am pleased to have him here at this table. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: walk through me the senses of the investigation that you have taken here and what you think tells us about the resurrection. you're a art historian. >> i'm a heart historia art hisd that's how i approach this whole problem. i was watching a documentary in it in 2004. like most people i was a skeptic at that stage and most people assume it's a medieval faith and i didn't think about it very much. and i missed the program if i had to watch it at the last minute and i was really intrigue because it presented evidence that there were problems with

the carbon basing. and also presented some really interesting new evidence about the manufacture of the cloth from the textile store if you just finished doing a restoration on it. that's expertise that i pay attention to. and she said that there was a theme on the cloth which matched that of the first century cloth from judaea. >> rose: a scene. >> a scene connecting two parts of the cloth. now there's a set of expertise i take seriously. i still thought i knew about the carbon basing like most people. i just assumed it must be. i thought to myself i'm an art historian i deal with medieval art. most people think this is a medieval artifact so i'm in a good position to look at it and investigate it. and so i went back to cambridge and i got a couple books down

from the bookshelf and started reading and became increasing fascinated by it because i realized that the shroud is far more mysterious than people generally think. a lot of people think it must be a medieval fake, someone must have painted it or they must have produced weird rubbing technique or something. let's not think about it. i'm an expert in images of this period and the more i looked at it the more i realized this could not be a medieval work of art. as i got more and more interested i realized that there were nuggets of interesting information about it existing earlier as well. i started thinking about it and then i came to this sudden realization, i was thinking about there's a lot of evidence that suggested it really is older than the middle ages. well suppose, hypothese hypothet would it have meant to people in the first century. it's not something art

historians thinking about the whole time about the meaning of images and how it affects people. and so i just played that scenario out of my mind and sort of went into the tune if you'd like and thought well what does it mean and i suddenly realized that there was this mow fetch connection with the rhesus -- potential connection with the resurrection. >> rose: what's the connection? >> well the connection is that in the old days people didn't see images the way that we see them now. they were much more rare for start and we live in a world that's saturated with images and they're all over the place. and we don't real pay much attention. this seem quite mundane. but before the modern world when images were much rarer, they were special in a way and people understood them and felt them to be in some sense alive. this is the instinct known as an missal. this is the human universal.

anthropologists discover it wherever they go. you and i are article animases as well. it's not like the old days that's an easy misunderstanding. this is the way people respond to images naturally. and i realize that this is especially true of natural images. so images connected with the body like shadows and reflections. and so i realize the shroud fell into that category and that it would have been perceived in the first century as a sort of quasi living double of jesus. and so because it's found in the tomb after his death it would have been perceived as a form of jesus resurrected. >> rose: so there you are. that's the connection. >> that's the connection. that's the hypothesis which i then go on to prove by looking at the evidence from the gospel

increased, the owe evidence of . >> rose: let's look at some thing. talk to me about them. first it's the shroud. there it is. what do we make of this. >> the full shroud. >> rose: yes. >> well it's the most extraordinary image. i mean as i said, just now, it's far more mysterious than people realize. >> rose: right. what's this up here. >> it's 14 foot long. it has the double imprint of a man who has been crucified. you can see his front and his back. ignore the larger sort of bolder marks, the parallel, they're burn marks. so it's incredibly faint the image. i've seen it. i went to the last exhibition in 2010. it's vanishingly famous. we couldn't actually get that close just members of the public but people examined it close.

when you get within about six feet i think they say, it actually fades from view. it's so fainted. if you stand back you can still see the image and it's clearly there. so it's got a very sort of a haunting effect in a way because it moves in and how th out of v. >> rose: the next is the shroud in the frontal figure. >> that sort of illustrates one of the points that i'm trying to make very well because held vertically, and it's always displayed nowadays horizontalally how you get the sense of the presence more strongly. it's about the psychological impact in the image. if you look at that image very clearly as well, you can see the eyes. >> rose: yes. >> now the eyes look in this image which is how the shroud appears when you see it with the naked eyes. the eyes look as if they're open and they look massive examine -- and they look as if they're flowing with an inneglowing wits

well. this is a negative image which is an interesting aspect. >> rose: the next one is the shroud and the close up face, right. >> there you have the face. it has this extraordinary psychological power. i was able to look at it in turin by turning my head and i spent a good two or three minutes just staring at that face. it seemed, it's really important to understand the effect of that psychologically thinking back to the first entry at a time when people have this quasi, this idea of images as sort of alive and they were very rare and special. this is an image this was found in a tube in extra circumstances as well. >> rose: now you believe that after jesus' designals sa disci, what? >> i believe you can reconstruct the history of the resurrection.

>> rose: turin did the resurrection. >> yes. because most ancient jews rationally expecting some form of resurrection. it wasn't sure how it happened. resurrection is a form of recreation, having to do with god's recreation of the world. and so they didn't know quite whether people are going to be recreated in their old bodies or in new bodies and we get different indications. so this image that appears as i said a sort of shadow a living double of jesus, that is the language they would have used, the concept they would have used to apply to explain this image. >> rose: also, i mean, i have an understanding of this and how the disciples saw the resurrection, explain the references at the time to the risen christ. >> yes. >> that was th.>> rose: that wf

the jews at the time the risen christ. >> i can't remember those two words put together but basically yes. >> rose: so when you say that in conclusion here, do you believe this will be accepted or are you just putting this out here as hypotheses. >> i don't believe in telling people what to believe. i'm presenting it as what i think for myself is a convincing theory of what happened. i believe that each stage of the theory, the awe thentticity oft- authenticity of the showd the idea it would be received missally as a living being and therefore resurrected jesus and then proving that in relation to the gospel accounts of the resurrection also as i say st. paul's account, i believe that is historically proveable insofar as any historically theory is proveable.

so i'm not dogmatic about it. i'm putting it out there and i will see whether it's accepted but i hope it will be. i hope a lot of -- >> rose: what's more important the fact you believe you've proved brie your -- by yr own understanding as a art historian of medieval imagery it could be have been of that time. is that more important than the idea of what it could have been. >> i think they're both important. i mean i think it is as an artist and obviously i'm focused on trying to understand what this image was. i think it's really important that people understand that it's a far more important image than they do currently. i mean the first entry ever since the first photograph of the shroud at the end of the 19th century it's been ignored. and in my view that's been a mistake. this image is far more mysterious, far more interesting, far more important and influential than has been thought. it's not some medieval sort of. >> rose: i understand. so therefore the negative image,

you think that goes to the heart of the authenticity. >> the negative, the fact it's a negative image is really important and it's quite an easy thing to grasp because this was only discovered at the end of the 19th cept tree when it was first photographed. we needed photography to reveal to us the hidden realistic image within the shroud. this is the kroocia kroobl cruc. this is a hidden realistic image that could not have been conceived in the middle ages. let alone represented in its negative form so that people would never have seen the realistic in the first visit. it's a nonsense cull idea to have that as a medieval engine. >> rose: make sure i'm pronouncing this ride a malliard reaction. >> i think the best explanation for how the image was made. there's a lot of different theories about how it might have

been made in the fake or in connection with jesus' body in the tomb, there's a lot of speculation about radiation and things like that. the malliard reaction hypotheses is put forth by ray rodgers and i think it was 2002. and the way this paper with the food chemists -- spent an awfully long time ever since 1978, he had been working on the idea of the shroud trying to work out what might have produced it. and he finally having examined all the evidence came out with this hypotheses that it was the product of decomposition gases from the dead body reacting with deposits on the surface of the cloth which was due to the way the cloth was manufactured. and the type of reaction

involved is a malliard reaction which is quite often sort of reaction that makes bread turn brown basically. and it gives a completely natural explanation for this image. >> rose: mope benedict 16th, has now -- pope benedict 16th has now said or somehow articulated and die vunching from his predecessor that he thinks the burial cloth is real. >> correct. >> rose: or not. >> i'm not sure he's been that explicit. i quote in my book an interesting passage from a homily that he gave in which he refers to the cloth as it's a burial cloth of a man who was executed in complete conformity with the burial of jesus. but he also says that this is a roman one. to me that's significant because he doesn't say mid peel.

>> rose: indeed. finally there's this. you want the vatican to do what? >> i just think it will be helpful if scientists were allowed to examine the cloth again. the last time it was properly examined by scientists was 1978. and if we're going to get to the bomb of what this thing really is, we can't continue relying on science from 1978. we need to get access to it. scientists qualified investigators and i think it's potentially extreme importance not just to the cat lick church not just the christians -- catholic church or the christians but to everyone just to open it up basically to scientific research. carbon dating would be helpful as well obviously. >> rose: this from the book of your book. peter came and he came into the tomb. he saw the linen cloths lying and the other disciples also went in and he saw and believed for yet they did not know the scripture that he must rise from

the dead. that explains the mystery. thank you. >> thank you very much. >> rose: the book is called the sign. thomas de wesselow. thank you for joining us. see you next time.