> For thousands of years, living people breathed, dead people didn’t, and no one knew why. The explanations that passed for medicine during that time sound absurd now. The early Greeks, most notably Homer, believed that humans had two souls – one immortal, in the head, and one mortal, in the chest – and that a baby’s first breath drew in that mortal soul. The last exhale released it.

The biblical view is also noteworthy. When man was created, God took "dust of the ground" and gave it "the breath of life", thus creating a "living soul".

Interestingly enough, a soul is defined this way as is a living, breathing creature – and not a ghost, as most people believe.