Bibliograph

Six feet over, science tackles the afterlife, Mary Roach

Type

Label

Six feet over, science tackles the afterlife, Mary Roach

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 297-309)

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Six feet over

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

1348187210

Responsibility statement

Mary Roach

Sub title

science tackles the afterlife

Summary

"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, the author brings her 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

Table Of Contents

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

Classification

Creator