Mary Roach - Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife  

S OMEWHERE THIS past year, I read that the most powerful influences upon your opinion about paranormal phenomena are your friends and family. The closer you are to the teller of a ghost story, the more likely you are to believe that the ghost in the story was a ghost, and not a raccoon or a temporal lobe seizure. Your beliefs are formed not by researchers or debunkers or television psychics, unless perhaps one of them is your mother or your good pal. Your beliefs are formed by your own experiences and those of your inner circle. And then validated by the researchers or the debunkers or the television psychics.

Now that youve spent 291 pages with me, I suppose I almost fall into the category of a friend, or anyway, someone that you know. And you might be wondering what it is, at this point, I believe. Has my year among the evidence-gatherers left me believing in anything I didnt believe in a year ago? It has. It has left me believing something Bruce Greyson believes. I had asked him whether he believes that near-death experiences provide evidence of a life after death. He answered that what he believed was simply that they were evidence of something we cant explain with our current knowledge. I guess I believe that not everything we humans encounter in our lives can be neatly and convincingly tucked away inside the orderly cabinetry of science. Certainly most things canincluding the vast majority of what people ascribe to fate, ghosts, ESP, Jupiter risingbut not all. I believe in the possibility of something morerather than in any existing something more (reincarnation, say, or dead folks who communicate through mediums). Its not much, but its more than I believed a year ago.

Perhaps Im confusing knowledge and belief. When I say I believe something, I mean I know it. But maybe belief is more subtle. A leaning, not a knowing. Is it possible to believe without knowing? While there are plenty of people wholl tell you they know God exists, in the same way that they know that the earth is round and the sky is blue, there are also plenty of people, possibly even the majority of people who believe in God, who do not make such a claim. They believe without knowing. I remember once standing in the kitchen of my friend Tim, having a conversation about organic milk. I explained, in my usual overagitated, long-winded way, why I wasnt yet convinced of the need to part with an extra dollar a quart. I didnt believe in organic milk. Tim, who buys organic milk, listened to me for a while, and then he shrugged. Its just a decision, he said. In other words, you dont have to go out and read every published paper on antibiotics and bovine growth hormone, weighing those that speak for milks safety against those that warn of its dangers, before you can decide to believe in buying organic. You dont need proof. You just need an inclination.

Perhaps I should believe in a hereafter, in a consciousness that zips through the air like a Simpsons rerun, simply because its more appealingmore fun and more hopefulthan not believing. The debunkers are probably right, but theyre no fun to visit a graveyard with. What the hell. I believe in ghosts.

Chapter 1: You Again

Angel, Leonard. Empirical Evidence for Reincarnation? Examining Stevensons Most Impressive Case. Skeptical Inquirer 18: 48187 (Fall 1994).

Bertholet, D. Alfred. The Transmigration of Souls. Translated by Rev. H.J. Chaytor. London and New York: Harper & Brothers, 1909.

Hopkins, Edward W., ed. The Ordinances of Manu. London: Trbner, 1884.

OConnell, Rev. J. B. The Celebration of Mass: A Study of the Rubrics of the Roman Missal. Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1944.

Stevenson, Ian. Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation , 2d ed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980.

. Reincarnation and Biology . Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997.

Tucker, Jim B. A Scale to Measure the Strength of Childrens Claims of Previous Lives: Methodology and Initial Findings. Journal of Scientific Exploration 14 (4): 57181.

Chapter 2: The Little Man Inside the Sperm, or Possibly the Big Toe

Ackerknecht, Erwin, and Henri V. Vallois. Franz Joseph Gall, Inventor of Phrenology, and His Collection . Wisconsin Studies in Medical History, No. 1. Translated by Claire St. Lon. Madison, WI: Department of History of Medicine, University of Wisconsin Medical School, 1956.

Bailey, Percival. The Seat of the Soul. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine , Summer 1959: 41741.

Dobell, Clifford. Antony van Leeuwenhoek and His Little Animals. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932.

Ford, Norman. When Did I Begin? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Gall, Franz J. Sur les fonctions du cerveau et sur celles de chacune de ses parties Paris: J. B. Baillire, 1825.

Grsser, O. J. On the Seat of the Soul: Cerebral Localization Theories in Mediaeval Times and Later. In BrainPerceptionCognition: Proceedings of the 18th Gttingen Neurobiology Conference , edited by Norbert Elsner and Gerhard Roth. New York and Stuttgart: Georg Thieme Verlag, 1990.

Kaitaro, Timo. La Peyronie and the Experimental Search for the Soul: Neuropsychological Methodology in the Eighteenth Century. Cortex 32: 55764 (1996).