Dead Minds by Jesse Bering

NEW DEALS

DEAD MINDS Why Thinking about Immortality Breaks our Brains JESSE BERING

Jesse Bering is the best science writer at work today – Dan Savage

An invitation to us all to interrogate our most cherished beliefs, exploring the curious operations of our own mortal minds as we try to steal a glimpse behind the veil.

With concrete proof of the afterlife perennially, some would say revealingly, just out of reach, are stories of near-death experiences, apparitions, and young children’s memories of previous lives tantalizing glimmers of actual conscious minds beyond death, or are they reflections of our own living brains giving credence to the patently absurd?

So asks the award-winning writer and psychologist Jesse Bering in DEAD MINDS, his wide-ranging enquiry into the single most elusive, and in many ways the strangest, question that human beings ask: what happens when we die? With expertise, irreverence, and genuine compassion, Bering masterfully disassembles the subtle mental machinery involved in this deepest of existential riddles. Because whether it’s all 'in our heads' and a grand illusion, or 'out there in reality' and objectively true, there’s no debate that the way we think about life after death – the way we’re able to think about it – is a product of our brains.

Why are at least eight out of ten of us so unbothered by the idea of consciousness surviving death, given that it violates the most basic premise of neuroscience – that a functioning brain is required for every twinge and ripple of subjective experience? Did evolution favour a cognitive system that convinces us that we are psychologically everlasting? And if you pop a breath-mint into your mouth right before you die, can you still taste it on the other side?

Like many scientists, Bering has had anomalous experiences that strain logical explanation, and he addresses this ongoing tension head-on rather than ignoring it. Drawing from some of the most baffling cases in the annals of empirical paranormal research, he juxtaposes his own trailblazing work with the storied career of the late Dr Ian Stevenson – perhaps the most polarizing parapsychologist of the past century, whom admirers continue to see as the 'Galileo of souls' and critics argue was a pawn to his own delusions.

DEAD MINDS is a book for the true sceptic: those who are willing to set aside their preconceptions and enter into a new kind of conversation, one that sets out the scientific issues on the table but does not ignore the pieces that do not fit.

JESSE BERING is a research psychologist and author. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, Slate, New York magazine, Guardian, and The New York Times, among others, and his work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and more. He has appeared on ‘Conan', 'Chelsea Lately', and 'Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman'. The author of THE BELIEF INSTINCT, WHY IS THE PENIS SHAPED LIKE THAT?, PERV, and SUICIDAL, he is the director of the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. He lives in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Agent: Peter Tallack

Publisher: To be confirmed Delivery: January 2023 Publication: Autumn 2023 Status: Proposal Length: 85,000 words

All rights available excluding World English (publisher(s) to be confirmed)