Books by Mary Roach
“I like Mary Roach as an author, she makes me laugh. What I like about Spook is that it’s a rather fun, light-hearted tour through all the weirdness that researchers have tried to examine. She talks about near-death experiences, seances, experiments where they weighed dying animals in order to weigh the soul as it left the body. All these strange experiences are the kind of quirky psychology which I love…A near-death experience is where people think they’re floating away from their body, turn around and see their body lying there. In a near-death experience, there is often a tunnel of light you go down towards meeting your maker. The gods you see depend very much on the culture you live in. Then the god turns you back, you return into your body and you wake up. As we know more about how the brain creates a sense of where it is, we know more about how these experiences can be created. Now there are experiments where we can create an out-of-body experience fairly rapidly. Other researchers – and Mary Roach talks about these – write target numbers or words on pieces of cardboard and place them on top of cabinets and wardrobes in hospital wards, in the hope that somebody having a near-death or out-of-body experience will look down and see them. To date they haven’t.” Read more...
The best books on Debunking the Paranormal
Richard Wiseman, Psychologist
“The theme of Roach’s book is ‘How does gravity, or the lack of it, affect us as humans?’ So in Packing for Mars, she tries to get you to understand the physical and psychological impacts of going into space on humans. What does space travel do to your bones, your heart, your brain? What is it like to defecate in space? Have people had sex in space? She finds answers to lots of these questions, but not all. Some of them are personal enough that folks at NASA aren’t inclined to discuss them. Packing for Mars is not the type of book you want to read as you’re eating. A lot of the sanitation issues, for example, are pretty grotesque.” Read more...
James Riordon, Science Writer
Interviews where books by Mary Roach were recommended
The best books on Gravity, recommended by James Riordon
Since the 17th century, we’ve been aware that the force that causes apples to fall from a tree is the same force that holds the planets in the sky, but we still don’t know everything there is to know about gravity, says James Riordon, a science writer at NASA and author of Crush: Close Encounters with Gravity. He picks his favourite books on gravity—from the equations you need to understand it to a funny book about what it’s like to live without it.
The best books on Science in Society, recommended by Deborah Blum
The Pulitzer prize-winning writer Deborah Blum says science is too important to be left for the scientists. She recommends books that show how much it matters in our daily lives.
The best books on Debunking the Paranormal, recommended by Richard Wiseman
Psychology professor Richard Wiseman explains why mediums, spoon bending and near-death and out-of-body experiences are all baloney.
