Mary Roach is a writer, a nonfiction writer, who is a bit obsessed with death.

But not so much the dying part of death as what comes afterwards.

Her first book, Stiff, is about the secret life of cadavers.

In her follow-up book, Spook, she goes looking for evidence of the afterlife.

Of particular interest is the thing we call the soul.

How real is it?

What happens to it when we die?

And where is it located when we're alive?

Now big thinkers have been thinking about the soul forever.

And Mary Roach says there have been some interesting ideas.

Oh yeah, well Aristotle had this notion of Numa, like as in pneumatic wind, and it was

this spirit, this thing that brought life where life didn't exist.

And it started out in the sperm.

And so when the sperm was sort of on arrival inside the woman's body, get busy kind of

building something where there was nothing, and they would sort of breathe life into

it with this Numa, this spirit.

Now if you don't like the Aristotelian view of the soul, Roach has some more you can

think about.

The ancient Egyptians thought that the heart was the center of the spirit that the soul

resided there.

The Babylonians identified the liver, and I think the stomach was a secondary seed of

the soul.

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