Maybe, in the afterlife, we will relive every experience we've ever had, only with all similar moments grouped together (the seven months you spend having sex will inevitably be more fun than the six weeks you wait for a green light). Or maybe we finally learn that our free-market capitalist society has allowed us to buy a hereafter that sells what we most hunger for: better abs, perhaps, or jet packs and free-flowing booze. Or maybe we discover there are many gods, with one controlling bubble gum, another ruling spoons, yet another in charge of chrome, all of them constantly squabbling over territory.

The possibilities are endless in the fertile mind of author and neuroscientist David Eagleman, although he limits the number in his engaging new book. SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Pantheon, $20) is comprised of sometimes ominous but always amusing vignettes of what might happen when we die.

The way we obsess about what comes next reveals a lot about who we are, says Eagleman, who appears Wednesday at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

``The reason we think about this stuff is that our existence is so mysterious. We don't remember getting here, we don't remember a beginning moment, and we're told it's all going to end, and that's scary and disconcerting. So of course people make up stories, which is great. The part that's insanity is dying over those stories. If you're born in Saudi Arabia you're going to get Islam poured into your nervous system, and you'll believe as fervently as some kid in Iowa believes in Christianity or a kid in Tel Aviv believes in Judaism.''

Head of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, which studies ''how the brain constructs reality,'' Eagleman says he's surprised to find little resistance to his premise. Religious groups he has talked to have mostly embraced his imaginative walk on the spiritual wild side, while some atheists have told him they like it, too.

''It's hilarious to me that both sides have taken to it,'' he says. But perhaps that's because ``we appear to be hard-wired to take on stories. As a scientist I spend every day reveling in awe of life's mysteries. But I'm not interested in committing to a particular story. A much more rational approach is to be comfortable having lots of ideas in your head at the same time.''

Q: How do you describe the book?

A: I've used the afterlife as a playing field against which to explore ideas about what makes us human, what things we care about. Obviously the hardest part to describe is that it has nothing to do with the afterlife. . . . The stories are sort of funny, but the part that's serious is the meta message: What are we doing here on this planet, in this cosmos? None of us have any freaking idea.

When we're born we inherit a few stories, but there aren't that many stories to choose. Christian, Jewish and Muslim stories are all very much the same. What strikes me is that when you think of the size of possibility space, it's so much larger than any of these little stories. They don't even scratch the surface of the possibilities. So it's frustrating that people will fight and die over stories told by their community. The universe is so much more interesting than that, the number of things that could be going on here. . . . . There are so many possibilities. Why don't we have a celebration of our ignorance and really enjoy how insane and cool the comsos is?

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