We see dead people?

I'm on your side in the need for proof to believe, and you had some statistics in your book that there's something around 5 percent of us in this country; everyone else is on one side or the other.

I know, which doesn't bode well for my book sales. Having alienated everyone on either side, Mary Roach tries to sell her book to the five people out there! I think everyone who tries to write about this thinks they're an unbiased, neutral observer. I tend to think of myself as the only person standing here in the middle, but Gary Schwartz thinks of himself that way, and everyone I spoke to thinks of themselves that way. But if someone has a Ph.D. and a background in quantum mechanics, I'll listen to them. I take them more seriously than someone who doesn't have a degree. So that's a bias of sorts.

Something else that struck a chord with me: When you're at Arthur Findlay College doing a three-day course in mediumship, you write, "There are moments, listening to the conversations going on around me, when I feel I am going to lose my mind. Earlier today, I heard someone say the words, 'I felt at one with the divine source of creation.'" I have the same problem with spiritual talk. Do you think it would be easier to believe if the language of belief were more sophisticated?

Yes! I am so put off by the way people write first-person experiential pieces about trips to the afterlife, or angels. The way that they write about it makes them sound so naive. Sometimes when I'm talking about this book I'll have to use a term like "energy field," and I feel really embarrassed. I'm much more comfortable with the language of quantum mechanics. Negentropy, I don't even understand what that is, but I'm comfortable saying "negentropy" and I'm not comfortable saying "energy fields." It's very much tied up with language.

Which is one of the reasons why I found Gerry Nahum's research so fascinating, because he was talking about proving the existence of the soul using the first law of thermodynamics.

Yeah, and if energy is neither created nor destroyed, what he's saying makes perfect sense, that this energy should persist. But whether or not it should persist as a being that can fly around the room and communicate with you, that's something else entirely. What would it be like to be that energy? That's the question nobody can really answer. But it just seemed sort of evident when he talked about it that the energy of your consciousness is going to persist. It has to. I wish I had a background in quantum mechanics, because I think that if one day we do have an answer that's where it will come from.

And yet, oddly, the linchpin of your investigation is an insight into belief. At the beginning of the book, you're in India and watching a father hold a boy who he believes is the reincarnation of his dead son, and you write, "If believing it eases the grief he feels, then this is what matters."

I think probably most people have at the same time a healthy skepticism for reincarnation, or mediumship, but would really love for it to be true and are comfortable buying into some of it because it serves them in some way or another -- either it's entertaining or it's nice to know that your mom or dad is still around. I think it's possible to believe and disbelieve at the same time. I definitely think it's possible to apply critical thinking and be skeptical and at the same time ignore critical thinking and believe in a ghost in your house. No one can study love in the laboratory, or even human memory -- OK, we understand the parts of the brain connected with memory, but to me the fact that you can even call up an image from 10 years ago, and, boom, there it is in front of your eyes, in your head, that'll never be fully explained to me. Or dreams -- even though we have an explanation, it seems like a bizarre mystery.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

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