![]() ![]() While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I'd never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.īut that dimension-in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states-is there. There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind-my conscious, inner self-was alive and well. Photo illustration by Newsweek Source: Buena Vista Images-Getty Images ‘You have nothing to fear.’ ‘There is nothing you can do wrong.’ The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline. When I entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in anything beyond a vegetative state were already low. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. Within hours, my entire cortex-the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human-had shut down. Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache. I know how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my story with the logic and language of the scientist I am. In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. I didn't begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. But that didn't mean they had journeyed anywhere real.Īlthough I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. It was no big surprise that people who had undergone severe trauma would return from their experiences with strange stories. Reduce the amount of oxygen it receives by the smallest amount and it will react. The brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death. I followed my father's path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences.
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