hemorrhages or brain tumors—are not nearly as efficient at completely damaging the entire surface of the neocortex. These tend to involve only part of the neocortex, leaving other parts unscathed and able to function. Not only that, but instead of taking the neocortex alone out, they tend to also damage the deeper and more primitive parts of the brain as well. Given all of this, bacterial meningitis is arguably the best disease one could find if one were seeking to mimic human death without actually bringing it about. (Though of course, it usually does. The sad truth is that virtually everyone as sick as I was from bacterial meningitis never returns to tell the tale.) (See Appendix A.)
Though the experience is as old as history, “the near-death experience” (regardless of whether it was seen as something real or a baseless fantasy) only became a household term fairly recently. In the 1960s, new techniques were developed that allowed doctors to resuscitate patients who had suffered a cardiac arrest. Patients who in former times simply would have died were now pulled back into the land of the living. Unbeknownst to them, these physicians were, through their rescue efforts, producing a breed of trans-earthly voyagers: people who had glimpsed beyond the veil and returned to tell about it. Today they number in the millions. Then, in 1975, a medical student named Raymond Moody published a book called
I couldn’t claim complete ignorance of Moody’s book, but I had certainly never read it. I didn’t need to, because I knew, first of all, that the idea that cardiac arrest represented some kind of close-to-death condition was nonsense. Much of the literature about near-death experiences concerns patients whose hearts stopped for a few minutes—usually after an accident or on the operating table. The idea that cardiac arrest constitutes death is outdated by about fifty years. Many laypeople still believe that if someone comes back from cardiac arrest, then they have “died” and returned to life, but the medical community long ago revised its definitions of death to center on the brain, not the heart (ever since brain death criteria, which rely on crucial findings of the patient’s neurological examination, were established in 1968). Cardiac arrest is relevant to death only in terms of its effect on the brain. Within seconds of cardiac arrest, cessation of blood flow to the brain leads to widespread disruption of cooperative neural activity and loss of consciousness.
For half a century, surgeons have routinely stopped the heart for minutes to hours in cardiac surgery and occasionally neurosurgery, using cardiopulmonary bypass pumps, and sometimes cooling the brain to enhance its viability under such stresses. No brain death occurs. Even a person whose heart stops on the street might be spared brain damage, provided that someone starts performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation within four minutes and the heart can eventually be restarted. As long as oxygenated blood travels to the brain, the brain—and therefore the person—will stay alive, albeit transiently unconscious.
This piece of knowledge was all I needed to discount Moody’s book without ever opening it. But now I did open it, and reading the stories Moody reported with the reference of what I myself had gone through made me completely shift my perspective. I had little doubt that at least some of the people in these stories had genuinely left their physical bodies. The similarities with what I myself had experienced beyond the body were simply too overwhelming.
The more primitive parts of my brain—the housekeeping parts—functioned for all or most of my time in coma. But when it came to the part of my brain that every single brain scientist will tell you is responsible for the human side of me: well, that part was gone. I could see it on the scans, in the lab numbers, on my neurological exams—in all the data from my very closely recorded week in hospital. I quickly began to realize that mine was a technically near-impeccable near-death experience, perhaps one of the most convincing such cases in modern history. What really mattered about my case was not what happened to me personally, but the sheer, flat-out impossibility of arguing, from a medical standpoint, that it was all fantasy.
Describing what an NDE is is challenging, at best, but doing so in the face of a medical profession that refuses to believe it’s possible at all makes it even harder. Due to my career in neuroscience and my own NDE, I now had the unique opportunity to make it more palatable.
30. Back from the Dead
And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.
Everywhere I went in those first few weeks, people looked at me like I had risen from the grave. I ran into one doctor who had been present at the hospital the day I’d come in. He hadn’t been directly involved in my care, but he’d gotten a good eyeful when I was rolled into the ER that first morning.
“How can you even
I smiled, reached out, and shook his hand firmly, to let him know it was really I.
Though he was of course joking about whether I had a twin brother, this doctor was actually making an important point. For all intents and purposes I still
My memory went back to a phone call I’d received one morning several years before, from the mother of a patient who’d called as I was examining a digital map of a tumor I was to remove later that day. I’ll call the woman Susanna. Susanna’s late husband, whom I will call George, had been a patient of mine with a brain tumor. In spite of everything we did, he died within a year and a half of diagnosis. Now Susanna’s daughter was ill with several brain metastases from breast cancer. Her prospects of survival beyond a few months were remote. It wasn’t a good time to take a call—my mind was completely absorbed in the digital image in front of me, and with mapping out exactly what my strategy was going to be to go in and remove it without doing damage to the brain tissue around it. But I stayed on the line with Susanna because I knew that she was trying to think of something—anything—to allow her to cope.
I’d always believed that when you’re under the burden of a potentially fatal illness, softening the truth is fine. To prevent a terminal patient from trying to grab on to a little fantasy to help them deal with the possibility of death is like withholding pain-killing medication. It was an extraordinarily heavy load to carry, and I owed Susanna every second of attention she asked.
“Dr. A,” Susanna said, “my daughter had the most incredible dream. Her father came to her in it. He told her everything was going to be all right, that she didn’t need to worry about dying.”
It was the kind of thing I’d heard from patients countless times—the mind doing what it can to soothe itself in an unbearably painful situation. I told her it sounded like a wonderful dream.
“But the most incredible thing, Dr. A, is what he was wearing. A yellow shirt—and a fedora!”
“Well, Susanna,” I said good-naturedly, “I guess there are no dress codes in Heaven.”
“No,” Susanna said. “That’s not it. Early on in our relationship, when we were first dating, I gave George a yellow shirt. He liked to wear it with a fedora that I also gave him. But the shirt and hat were lost when our luggage failed to arrive on our honeymoon. He already knew by that time how much I loved him in that shirt and hat, but we never replaced them.”
“I’m sure Christina had heard lots of wonderful stories about that shirt and hat, Susanna,” I said. “And about your early times together…”
“No,” she laughed. “That’s what’s so wonderful. That was our little secret. We knew how ridiculous it would sound to someone else. We never talked about that shirt and fedora after they were lost. Christina never heard one peep from us about them. Christina was so afraid of dying, and now she knows she has nothing to fear, nothing at all.
