“ It’s possible that the reason I've never experienced a ghostly presence is that my temporal lobes aren't wired for it. It could well be that the main difference between skeptics (Susan Blackmore notwi… Mary Roach
“ …he was doing a breath hydrogen test. If you know the amount of hydrogen someone is exhaling orally, it's a simple matter to extrapolate the amount they're exhaling rectally. This is because a fixed p… Mary Roach
“ While he attends to his rats, Persinger gives me the lowdown on the haunt theory. Why would a certain type of electromagnetic field make one hear things or sense a presence? What’s the mechanism? The… Mary Roach
“ Pet foods come in a variety of flavors because that's what humans like, and we assume our pets like what we like. We're wrong. Mary Roach
“ With the rise of classical Greece, the soul debate evolved into the more familiar heart-versus-brain, the liver having been demoted to an accessory role. We are fortunate that this is so, for we would… Mary Roach
“ Silletti and I, for instance, chewed out cotton wads for the same amount of time. I produced .78 milliliters of stimulated saliva; she produced 1.4. She tried to reassure me. It doesn't say anything a… Mary Roach
“ It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat. Mary Roach
“ Cadavers' intestines hanging like a parade streamers off the sides of tables, skulls bobbing in boiling pots, organs strewn on the floor being eaten by dogs..... Mary Roach
“ I don't write on topics that require a lot of urgency. But in 'Stiff,' I wanted to change people's hearts about organ donation. Whenever I get a chance, I try to talk about that. Mary Roach
“ Please beware, came his reply, There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don't have an explanation for something, it's quantum mechanics. Mary Roach
“ Masters points out that the heterosexuals were at a disadvantage, as they do not benefit from what he called gender empathy. Doing unto your partner as you would do unto yourself only works well when… Mary Roach
“ [Kinsey's studies included] stutterers, amputees, paraplegics, even those with cerebral palsy were observed. Kinsey wanted to document the full spectrum of human sexuality, but it was more than that.… Mary Roach
“ Weightlessness is like heroin, or how I imagine heroin must be. You try it once, and when it's over, all you can think about is how much you want to do it again. But apparently the thrill wears off. Mary Roach
“ In my experience, the most staunchly held views are based on ignorance or accepted dogma, not carefully considered accumulations of facts. The more you expose the intricacies and realtities of the sit… Mary Roach
“ US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army. Mary Roach
“ In retrospect, it was silly to think that the experience of traveling in space could be approximated by a repurposed walk-in freezer. To find out what would happen to a man alone in the cosmos, at som… Mary Roach
“ We are biology. We are reminded of this at the beginning and the end, at birth and at death. In between we do what we can to forget. Mary Roach
