"NOT to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true." Philip Larkin's evocation of death in his poem Aubade is bleak, even chilling. But Larkin was notoriously gloomy: ask a bunch of psychology students to imagine being dead and you'll get a rather different perspective. "It will suck" or "I'll just rot" are typical responses. It's not just that scientists are less articulate than poets. The truth is that most of us do not experience the all-pervading existential angst that haunted Larkin. Far from being terrified by the prospect of annihilation, most of the time we go about our daily lives as though it will never happen.

And that is very strange. Here we are, the only animals on the planet capable of anticipating the day when we will no longer exist, yet mostly we ignore this insight. Why are we not constantly paralysed ...