What happens after we die? People wonder.
Sum provides the answers, literally. For better or worse, it is not what you think.
Author David Eagleman teaches neuroscience at Stanford University, and while straightforward and unbiased in approach, these forty (one or two page) answers are provocative and imaginative.
In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but shuffled together and grouped: 30 years of sleeping, 18 months waiting in line, 200 days of showering, 14 minutes of pure joy... / The afterlife is just the same - except only people you remember are there. It's lonely and empty with such a small group - just like it was when you were alive. / God is a married couple - He created in his image, and She in hers. Now, you live in their house and they try to be good parents, marvelling at what you have learned, how you turned out. / If the afterlife is a neighbourhood like home, you know you are a sinner. Everything is the same, except there are not altruists, samaritans, or selfless. Only sinners get life after death. / In the afterlife you can make any single change you like, and then live your life over. You choose to abolish death, but what seems like a good choice quickly turns south. / The afterlife splits you like a prism into multiple selves, all ages at once, existing, meeting, and sometimes holding reunions in your name. / The afterlife is all possible states at once. To still the shock, an angel agrees to place you and your lover in a closed room where you both talk while thinking of something else, she gives of herself and is closed at the same time, you love her and you find her objectionable. This you are used to. / In the afterlife you are not judged against others but against yourself - what you could have been. The more you fall short of your potential, the more annoying these selves become.
In the afterlife you can choose what you would like to be - after a hard life you choose the peaceful life of a horse. You relax being a horse, and loose the capacity to return to being a human. What soul chose being a human as a simpler, peaceful life?
These are a few of scenarios you may encounter - this is like a choose-your-own-adventure book for the deceased.
Sum is quickly engaging, offering mind-opening scenarios written in accessible language. Witty and wistful, Eagleman has managed to inject depth into these forty vignettes, while adding quirky humour. He is a Guggenheim fellow with eight other books on the brain, he hosts the Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman podcast and TV series The Brain with David Eagleman.
2009 / Hardcover / 128 pages
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