The pinochle game on your snout, however, remains to be seen.

What happens to us after we die is the all-time great question of humanity. It's been answered, over and over, in many ways: by great religions, fraudulent mediums, science and pseudoscience, and, of course, Hollywood.

To some believers, the matter is settled. But for author Mary Roach, raised a Catholic and now an agnostic, it's anything but. So she went out to see what evidence there was about life after death or the soul or continued consciousness -- there isn't even one concept that embraces it all. And, not incidentally, to put all that into her latest book, "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife" (Norton, $24.95).

"Simply put, this is a book for people who would like very much to believe in a soul and in an afterlife for it to hang around in, but who have trouble accepting these things on faith," she writes. She's looking for proof, she says, scientific proof. Or at least evidence. Like Fox Mulder on "The X-Files," she wants to believe.

The search takes her to India, where a researcher investigates claims of reincarnation and tries to prove or disprove them; to universities, where parapsychology experiments are conducted in modern labs despite academic stigma; and back into history, for a delightful romp through seances, spiritualism, Ouija boards and Harry Houdini.

The Big Reaper of scientifically testing for a soul was Duncan Macdougall, the Scottish physician who weighed dying patients on a finely tuned scale. It was Macdougall's experiments in 1901 that gave rise to the notion that a soul departing a body weighs 21 grams (cue Hollywood movie of that title). Roach shows that what he did wasn't very rigorous by today's standards, and his experiments have never been replicated, because of ethical and practical issues.

One area she doesn't address is the traditional Christian view of heaven. "It isn't something you can prove or disprove."

These days, the research has gone well beyond mediums at seances making tables go thump in the dark. She cites the First Law of Thermodynamics -- "energy is neither created nor destroyed" -- as a sort-of, kind-of proof that what we call our consciousness does not disappear at death. The question isn't "is it still there," a physicist tells her. It's "where does it go?"

After all the exploration, Roach emerges as cautiously encouraged by some studies into near-death experiences at the University of Virginia, where patients are clinically, but temporarily, dead, and report themselves floating above their bodies. Such anecdotes, which comprise the most common near-death experience, have been around for years, and the UVA scientists are trying to test them.

Some of those studies led the highly skeptical Roach to believe more than she did when she started.

"Some of the studies of the near-death experiences left me leaning toward acceptance of a something after life," she says.