In October 2012, Newsweek magazine published the following article by Dr. Eben Alexander, an account of his near-death experience. It provoked an enormous reaction, partly because Dr. Alexander is a practising neurosurgeon and was advocating the survival of consciousness after death on the basis of his experience, a position that isn't held in medical and scientific consensus.
Various responses to Alexander's account were published, but I have here collected those responses by esteemed neuroscientists and neurologists, who present an effective rebuttal of the account as well as question the validity of near-death experiences (NDEs) as a genuine medical and neurological phenomenon. Starting with Alexander's own account (below), we will see two responses from
Dr. Sam Harris and one from
Professor Oliver Sacks.
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by Dr. Eben Alexander
Oct. 7, 2012
As
a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death
experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon.
I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon,
teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. 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.
The
brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate
mechanism. Reduce the amount of oxygen it receives by the smallest
amount and it will react. It was no big surprise that people who had
undergone severe trauma would return from their experiences with strange
stories. But that didn’t mean they had journeyed anywhere real.
Although
I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in
actual belief. 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. I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there
was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I
envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided.
But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself.
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. 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. Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an
extremely intense headache. 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. 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. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid
and were eating my brain.
When I entered the emergency room that
morning, my chances of survival in anything beyond a vegetative state
were already low. They soon sank to near nonexistent. For seven days I
lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain
functions totally offline. Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the
hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, my
eyes popped open.
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. 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.
But
that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless
subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there.
It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite
literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains
and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a
chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey. I’m not the
first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists
beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as
human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled
to this dimension (a.) while their cortex was completely shut down, and
(b.) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was
for the full seven days of my coma.
All the chief arguments
against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the
results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex.
My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was
malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the
severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical
involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.
According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there
is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and
limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the
hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent. It took me
months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical
impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more
importantly—the things that happened during that time. Toward the
beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy,
pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.
Higher than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent,
shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines
behind them.
Birds? Angels? These words registered later, when I
was writing down my recollections. But neither of these words do
justice to the beings themselves, which were quite simply different from
anything I have known on this planet. They were more advanced. Higher
forms. A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from
above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Again,
thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these
creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this
noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would
simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable and
almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t
get you wet.
Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place
where I now was. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies of
those scintillating beings above, and I could see the surging, joyful
perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or
listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it—without
joining with it in some mysterious way. Again, from my present
perspective, I would suggest that you couldn’t look at anything in that
world at all, for the word “at” itself implies a separation that did not
exist there. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of
everything else, like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian
carpet ... or a butterfly’s wing.
It gets stranger still. For
most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young,
and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high
cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely
face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an
intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the
wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around
us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming
back up around us again. It was a river of life and color, moving
through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a peasant’s, but
its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had the same
overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She looked
at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your
whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened
in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of
friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all
the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was
something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself
while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.
Without
using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a
wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same
way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy,
passing and insubstantial. The message had three parts, and if I had to
translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like
this:
“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”
“You have nothing to fear.”
“There is nothing you can do wrong.”
The
message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was
like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life
without ever fully understanding it.
“We will show you many
things here,” the woman said, again, without actually using these words
but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But
eventually, you will go back.”
To this, I had only one question. A
warm wind blew through, like the kind that spring up on the most
perfect summer days, tossing the leaves of the trees and flowing past
like heavenly water. A divine breeze. It changed everything, shifting
the world around me into an even higher octave, a higher vibration.
Although I still had little language function, at least as we think of
it on earth, I began wordlessly putting questions to this wind, and to
the divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it.
Each
time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came
instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew
through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts
was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them.
They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts
entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth.
It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and
immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I
was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would
have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.
I
continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void,
completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting.
Pitch-black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light
that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. The
orb was a kind of “interpreter” between me and this vast presence
surrounding me. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and
the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the orb (which I
sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to, the woman on
the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it.
Later, when I was
back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry
Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this vast,
inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself.
“There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”
That was it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.
I
know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this
sounds. Had someone—even a doctor—told me a story like this in the old
days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of
some delusion. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional,
as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding
day and the birth of my two sons. What happened to me demands
explanation.
Modern physics tells us that the universe is a
unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of
separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface,
every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every
other object and event. There is no true separation. Before my
experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not
only is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by
love. The universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see
with both shock and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were
speaking of in their (very) different ways.
I’ve spent decades as
a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in
our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself did—to the
theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates
consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of
emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the
universe have toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken
at our feet. What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the
rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and
making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as
clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large. I
don’t expect this to be an easy task, for the reasons I described above.
When the castle of an old scientific theory begins to show fault lines,
no one wants to pay attention at first. The old castle simply took too
much work to build in the first place, and if it falls, an entirely new
one will have to be constructed in its place.
I learned this
firsthand after I was well enough to get back out into the world and
talk to others—people, that is, other than my long-suffering wife,
Holley, and our two sons—about what had happened to me. The looks of
polite disbelief, especially among my medical friends, soon made me
realize what a task I would have getting people to understand the
enormity of what I had seen and experienced that week while my brain was
down. One of the few places I didn’t have trouble getting my story
across was a place I’d seen fairly little of before my experience:
church. The first time I entered a church after my coma, I saw
everything with fresh eyes. The colors of the stained-glass windows
recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I’d seen in the world
above. The deep bass notes of the organ reminded me of how thoughts and
emotions in that world are like waves that move through you. And, most
important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked
the message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved
and accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably
glorious than the one I’d learned of as a child in Sunday school. Today
many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost
their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before
my experience I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.
But
I now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is
that the materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers,
rather than the vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place
a new view of mind and body will emerge, and in fact is emerging
already. This view is scientific and spiritual in equal measure and will
value what the greatest scientists of history themselves always valued
above all: truth.
This new picture of reality will take a long
time to put together. It won’t be finished in my time, or even, I
suspect, my sons’ either. In fact, reality is too vast, too complex, and
too irreducibly mysterious for a full picture of it ever to be
absolutely complete. But in essence, it will show the universe as
evolving, multi-dimensional, and known down to its every last atom by a
God who cares for us even more deeply and fiercely than any parent ever
loved their child. I’m still a doctor, and still a man of science every
bit as much as I was before I had my experience. But on a deep level I’m
very different from the person I was before, because I’ve caught a
glimpse of this emerging picture of reality. And you can believe me when
I tell you that it will be worth every bit of the work it will take us,
and those who come after us, to get it right.
Although he didn't specificy what for, presumably Tredinnick suggests that acupuncture may have some application for psychotherapeutic strategies and neurological conditions too? In which case, I need only point to James Coyne's two-part sparkling rebuttal to claims that acupuncture may have any special efficacy for mental health conditions such as depression. And as for the neuroscience (the more research-minded can enjoy this 2007 review), I recently acquired an online copy of Val Hopwood & Clare Donnellan's Acupuncture in Neurological Conditions (2010), and it's a very interesting read. Especially this amazingly revealing little tidbit listed as a 'key point' of Chapter 1:
Although he didn't specificy what for, presumably Tredinnick suggests that acupuncture may have some application for psychotherapeutic strategies and neurological conditions too? In which case, I need only point to James Coyne's two-part sparkling rebuttal to claims that acupuncture may have any special efficacy for mental health conditions such as depression. And as for the neuroscience (the more research-minded can enjoy this 2007 review), I recently acquired an online copy of Val Hopwood & Clare Donnellan's Acupuncture in Neurological Conditions (2010), and it's a very interesting read. Especially this amazingly revealing little tidbit listed as a 'key point' of Chapter 1:
