sign in| help
Search advanced search
 
Books
Search:
x dismiss this message

Did you know you can edit this page?

Spook
  • Rated 0 stars
Read Spook

Spook (2005) (edit title/settings)

Science Tackles the Afterlife

by Mary Roach (Author) (edit contributors)

Share this book on:
see page history

Description edit see section history

AKA "Six Feet Over"

"Equal parts Groucho Marx and Stephen Jay Gould, both enlightening and entertaining."— Sunday Denver Post & Rocky Mountain News The best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers now trains her considerable wit and curiosity on the human... read more

Characters/People edit see section history

Show all 41 characters
Popular Covers

Loading covers…

Choose your book’s cover

Quotes edit see section history

  • “"You can say it to yourself, Mary. They read your thoughts.""They do?"Dave nods his head. "Sure they do."Well, no wonder they're ignoring me.”
  • “What I notice instead is that Mathan Singh, sitting chatting with his arms around the boy, looks profoundly content. It occurs to me that it doesn't much matter whether this boy does or does not hold the soul of the son Mathan Singh lost. If Mathan Singh believes it, and if believing it eases the grief he feels, then this is what matters.”
    Mary Roach
  • “No one sets out to lie, but the truth gets nicked and misshapen.”
    Mary Roach
  • “Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What's the mechanism? The answer hinges on the fact that exposure to electromagnetic fields lowers melatonin levels. Melatonin, he explains, is an anti-convulsive; if you have less of it in your system, your brain--in particular, your right temporal lobe--will be more prone to tiny epileptic-esque microseizures and the subtle hallucinations these seizures can cause. Persinger adds that the emotions of bereavement produce stress hormones that may serve to raise the likelihood of these microseizures even further.”
    Mary Roach
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • You can try this experiment on yourself by turning your computer speaker to top volume, going to www.acoustics.org/press/145th/Walsh2.htm, scrolling down to the paragraph about roars, and clicking on the speaker icon.
    Highlighted by 60 Kindle customers
  • “The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking,” he offered, “is unconscious delusion.”
    Highlighted by 54 Kindle customers
  • Science has the answer to every question that can be asked. However, science reserves the right to change that answer should additional data become available.
    Highlighted by 38 Kindle customers
  • In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realities of the situation, the less clear-cut things become.
    Highlighted by 32 Kindle customers
  • Norman Ford, called When Did I Begin? Ford, a moral philosopher and a Salesian Catholic priest, makes the clean and quite elegant argument that personhood—to use the more secular term for ensoulment—cannot begin until after the point where identical twinning is no longer possible: about fourteen days after conception. Up until that point, it’s possible for the zygote to become two identical twins. If the soul had arrived at conception, what would happen then?
    Highlighted by 26 Kindle customers
  • For somebody, perhaps an entire committee, saw fit to erect a large wooden sign near the site where fourteen emigrants bound for California were eaten by other emigrants bound for California when they became trapped by the savage snows of 1846 and starved.* The sign reads: DONNER CAMP PICNIC GROUND.
    Highlighted by 25 Kindle customers
  • human memory is deeply fallible. It’s unreliable and easily tweaked by its owner’s beliefs and desires.
    Highlighted by 23 Kindle customers
  • Occam’s razor,* a principle which holds that the simplest, the least far-fetched, of two competing theories is the place to put your money.
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • But what if the soul—the residual energy/information that doesn’t register on our electromagnetic energy detectors—doesn’t go somewhere else, but just, you know, snuffs out? Ceases to exist? That has always been my own depressing, humdrum assumption regarding death. No can be, says Nahum. Standing in the way is the First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It has to go somewhere.
    Highlighted by 16 Kindle customers
  • Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA and author of The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
    Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers
Show all 14 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

I DON'T RECALL my mood the morning I was born, but I imagine I felt a bit out of sorts.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Introduction

1. You Again
2. The Little Man Inside the Sperm, or Possibly the Big Toe
3. How to Weigh a Soul
4. The Vienna Sausage Affair
5. Hard to Swallow
6. The Large Claims of the Medium
7. The Soul in a Dunce Cap
8. Can You Hear Me Now?
9. Inside the Haunt Box
10. Listening to Casper
11. Chaffin v. the Dead Guy in the Overcoat
12. Six Feet Over

Last Words
Acknowledgments
Bibliography

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Mary Roach (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Country: Add the country of publication.
Publication Date: 2005
ISBN: 0393059626
Page Count: 288

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Ghost Hunters

We’re hiding the errata, movie connections, books that influenced this book, books influenced by this book, books that cite this book and books cited by this book sections. If you would like to add content to them, you must first make them visible.

© 2006-2012 Shelfari | Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy | Copyright Policy

Close