Spook : science tackles the afterlife

The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit and curiosity on the human soul. What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that--the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will t...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Roach, Mary
Format: Book
Published: New York : W.W. Norton, 2006.
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MARC

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245 1 0 |a Spook :  |b science tackles the afterlife /  |c Mary Roach. 
264 1 |a New York :  |b W.W. Norton,  |c 2006. 
300 |a 311 pages :  |b illustrations ;  |c 21 cm 
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504 |a Includes bibliographical references (pages [299]-311). 
505 0 |a You again : a visit to the reincarnation nation -- The little man inside the sperm, or possibly the big toe : hunting the soul with microscopes and scalpels -- How to weigh a soul : what happens when a man (or a mouse, or a leech) dies on a scale -- The Vienna sausage affair : and other dubious highlights of the ongoing effort to see the soul -- Hard to swallow : the giddy, revolting heyday of ectoplasm -- The large claims of the medium : reaching out to the dead in a University of Arizona lab -- Soul in a dunce cap : the author enrolls in medium school -- Can you hear me now? : telecommunicating with the dead -- Inside the haunt box : can electromagnetic fields make you hallucinate? -- Listening to Casper : a psychoacoustics expert sets up camp in England's haunted spots -- Chaffin v. the dead guy in the overcoat : in which the law finds for a ghost, and the author calls in an expert witness -- Six feet over : a computer stands by on an operating room ceiling, awaiting near-death experiencers. 
520 |a The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit and curiosity on the human soul. What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that--the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day? Is there a place to plug in my lap-top?" In an attempt to find out, Mary Roach brings her tireless curiosity to bear on an array of contemporary and historical soul-searchers: scientists, schemers, engineers, mediums, all trying to prove (or disprove) that life goes on after we die. She begins the journey in rural India with a reincarnation researcher and ends up in a University of Virginia operating room where cardiologists have installed equipment near the ceiling to study out-of-body near-death experiences. Along the way, she enrolls in an English medium school, gets electromagnetically haunted at a university in Ontario, and visits a Duke University professor with a plan to weigh the consciousness of a leech. Her historical wanderings unearth soul-seeking philosophers who rummaged through cadavers and calves' heads, a North Carolina lawsuit that established legal precedence for ghosts, and the last surviving sample of "ectoplasm" in a Cambridge University archive. 
650 0 |a Future life.  |0 https://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85052611 
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650 7 |a Future life.  |2 fast  |0 (OCoLC)fst00936730  |0 https://id.worldcat.org/fast/936730 
650 7 |a Religion and science.  |2 fast  |0 (OCoLC)fst01093848  |0 https://id.worldcat.org/fast/1093848 
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