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I tell my students that research ideas can come from anywhere, not just scientific literature. My own “simulation constraint hypothesis,” which contends that afterlife beliefs are cognitively grounded in our basic inability to imagine the absence of consciousness, itself came from a fictional story. This passage from Sartre’s short story “The Wall” (1939), about a resistance fighter in the Spanish Civil War in a jail cell contemplating his execution by firing squad in the morning, helped to inspire an entire line of studies, continuing to this day, on the psychology of afterlife beliefs:
Something’s the matter. I see my corpse; that’s not hard but I’m the one who sees it, with my eyes. I’ve got to think… think that I won’t see anything anymore and the world will go on for the others. We aren’t made to think that.
By the way, I couldn’t squeeze it into the SMH piece, but I still consider The Changeling (1980) to be the most quietly terrifying movie ever made. For those who’ve seen that ominous classic, featuring George C. Scott as a grieving widower in a Victorian mansion being haunted by the spirit of a murdered child, you’ll appreciate the irony in this. While watching it spellbound in our den, with everyone in my family accounted for, the piano played in the next room. It was the cat walking on the keys—something (and this is odd in itself) she’d never done before or would ever do again.