As a neurosurgeon with medical training, Dr. Eben Alexander III did not believe near-death revelations of God and heaven exist, and they cannot be explained by the human brain.
However, in 2008 Dr. Alexander contracted bacterial meningitis and this deadly infection sent him into a coma for a week. After he woke up, he claimed that his mind was working intensely during the whole time and he had some kind of unbelievable thoughts and feelings that felt very real, even more real than the actual life on earth. The experience was so incredible that he felt he needed to write a book, ‘’Proof of Heaven”, in which he recounts what happened while in a coma.
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He was fully aware that by writing it he could lose his professional reputation among his colleagues. He taught and practiced as a surgeon at Harvard, and he knows the brain. However, he admits that his version of heaven is more psychedelic than the usual tales of light at the end of a tunnel, and it cannot be explained by science. His entire neocortex, or the outer surface of the brain, was not working. This is the part of the brain that makes us human and his was entirely inoperative.
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Exploring Scientific Explanations
Dr. Alexander offered some potential explanations at the end of the book, but he refuted them all since they would still not explain why he experienced audio and visuals since they cannot happen if the neocortex is shut down completely.
- Generation of unusual memory through an archaic visual pathway is only possible in humans if they are cortically blind. However, this does not explain the sounds and what he saw as well as how real it all was.
- A reboot phenomenon – a place in the brain full of bizarre memories that are there due to old memories in the neocortex. They can appear if the brain has been unconscious and for a longer period of time and then it has been restarted. However his neocortex was damaged, so the possibility of having those memories is no longer an option.
- DMT dump, which is serotonin agonist that causes hallucinations and you feel like you are in a dream. However, this would still require the neocortex to be in function so that there are audiovisual experiences, like he had while in a coma. But due to the damage that coma caused to the neocortex he could not have audio and visual experiences in this part of the brain that can be caused by the serotonin. Therefore, the DMT could not act in his brain.
- Distorted recall of memories from the deeper part of the limbic system, he thought, can be a fair explanation if it wasn’t for the fact that this could not explain the rich interactive nature of the memories and recollections he had.
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He Tells His Whole Experience in the Book
According to him, the afterlife was so real that the life on Earth seemed like a dream. Everything was dominated with love to such a high degree that evil did not even exist. There were no verbal communications, everything was telepathic. After that, he believed that no one is alone, that people are always safe and that God has unconditional love for all. You might believe that as a brain surgeon, he does not have a reason to make this all up, since most scientists believe in science and radical explanation as the only religion. Either way, Dr. Alexander’s encounter with death makes this story credible.
