Spook by Mary Roach

Another week on the same topic... So sorry about that, but I've really been having trouble reading this book in my spare time. I'm in a state where if I have free time, I want to do something completely mind-numbing and effortless. I've read another chapter though entitled "Can You Hear Me Now?: Telecommunicating with the dead".



My favorite part concerned a Wilson Van Dusen who worked in an institution for the insane, senile, etc. Apparently through interviews with his patients who claimed to hear voices, he determined that these voices came from another world (as in heaven, hell or purgatory). However, through scans of brains during auditory hallucinations, it was determined that the speech part of the brain was activated, meaning these voices are a sort of inner-speech. It's kind of disappointing each time Roach puts forth another theory and then disproves it. They're all so crazy and exciting. The more I read this book, the more I think that nothing interesting ever really happens...

The rest of the chapter focuses on the time when things such as the telephone and telegraph were invented. Roach points out that the belief in mediums was of the same plausibility as the belief in these gadgets at the time. Out of the inventors, however, Edison, Tesla, and Bell all seemed to think that a human spirit would most likely leave the body and not fool around with mediums while the assistant of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Watson was convinced that the dead did communicate to the living. He also thought that he had a halo...Weird...Obviously, he never got anything proven.

It's incredibly interesting though, to think how skeptical people must have been about that new technology. At this day and age, I'm willing to believe basically anything that's invented. We're moving at such a rate of innovation that nothing really seems impossible to a certain degree. Obviously I wouldn't believe a teleportation machine could be made at this time, but in a couple of generations, who am I do say it can't happen? I wonder if our minds are more open nowadays. It seems kind of presumptuous to consider all people before our time incapable of thinking as clearly as us, but all of our strides in humanity must've somehow raised the average intelligence of people, right? Actually, apparently not with our sophomore class...I'm still hanging my head in shame...