Interview reveals how a near-death experience changed everything neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander thought he knew about consciousness, spirituality, and life after death. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with neurosurgeon Dr. During the interview Dr. Alexander discusses letting go of our simplistic view of consciousness:. What I think is going to happen is that science and spirituality, which will be mainly be an acknowledgement of the profound nature of our consciousness, will grow closer and closer together.

Coming from a neurosurgeon who, before my coma, thought I was quite certain how the brain and the mind interacted and it was clear to me that there were many things I could do or see done on my patients and it would eliminate consciousness.

And it was clear. Play in new window Download. Today we welcome Dr. Eben Alexander to Skeptiko. Alexander has been an academic neurosurgeon for more than 25 years, including 15 years at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

In November ofhe had a near-death experience that changed his life and caused him to rethink everything he thought he knew about the human brain and consciousness. Well, your story is really quite amazing. It really struck out of the blue. In fact, I was in reasonably good shape because my older son had been putting me through a big workout, anticipating a climb of a 20, foot volcano in South America.

Luckily I was in pretty good shape. I was getting ready to go up to work. I was working in Charlottesville at the time and I had severe sudden back pain, much worse than I had ever experienced.

Literally within 10 or 15 minutes, it got me to a point where I could not even take a step. I was really in tremendous agony. My wife, Holly, was rubbing my back. Then my younger son, Bond, came in and saw I was in a lot of distress and he started rubbing my temples. I realized when he did that that I had a severe headache.

It was like he took a railroad spike and put it through my head. But I was already really going down very quickly. I found out much later that I had acute bacterial meningitis and it was a very unusual bacteria. One that the incidence of spontaneous E. We never found out where it came from.

Luckily she overruled that and she did that because she saw me having a grand mal seizure on the bed. I was very sick during that time as I heard later. In fact, I was so sick that I was on a ventilator the whole week. They did several lumbar punctures trying to guide therapy.

I was on triple antibiotics very early on, due to a very good medical team. They did a lumbar puncture about the second or third day into this and my cerebral spinal fluid glucose, which is normally around 60 to 80 and in a bad case of meningitis might drop down to about 20, well my glucose went down to 1. So I was really sick. So at this point, nothing should be going on in your brain and yet something was happening in your conscious awareness. I mean, it was extraordinary.

But I figured I needed to give it a chance and look at the microanatomy in the cortex and the different connections with the thalamus and basal ganglia and see if I could come up with some way that one might have an illusion of hyper-reality.

But it would basically outrun any of those kind of theories. That was something I was looking for. In fact, I never found an anatomic distribution that would support that over-activity of excitatory pathways. Thanks for doing that. Occasionally there were exceptions to that. What I do remember from deep inside coma, for one thing my first awareness was I had no memory whatsoever of my life. I had no language, no words. All of my experience in life, knowledge of humans, Earth, the universe, all of that was gone.

The only thing I had was this very kind of crude existence. I have a vivid memory of dark roots above me and there was a kind of monotonous pounding, a dull sound in the background pounding away eternally.

It was just murky and gross. Every now and then a face, an animal or something would boil up out of the muck and there might be some chant or roar or something. I think that that was the best consciousness that my brain could muster when it was soaking in pus. It turns out that that seemed to last for a very long time. Given that it was my first awareness of anything, it actually seemed to be years or eternity.

It seemed like a very, very long time. Then there was a spinning melody, this bright melody that just started spinning in front of me. It spun and as it spun around, it cleared everything away. This was the part that was so shocking and so hard to explain. For me, I was a speck on a butterfly wing. I had no body awareness at all. In fact, I had no body awareness through this entire kind of deep coma experience.

I was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions of other butterflies around us. We were flying through blooming flowers, blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as we flew through them. Beside me on the butterfly wing was a beautiful girl.

I remember her face to this day. Absolutely beautiful girl, blue eyes, and she was dressed in—what I was trying to write all this up in the months after I came back—I described as a kind of peasant garb.

I can remember the colors very well. She never said a word to me and she was looking at me and her thoughts would just come into my awareness. You are cherished forever. You have nothing to worry about. You will be taken care of. So those particular words were words I had to put on it when I came back out.

But a lot of this flowed perfectly when I came back out. Just write everything down you can remember. I spent the next two months typing everything I could remember in the computer.

It came out to about pages of memories from this deep experience within the coma. I think from that beautiful valley scene on the butterfly wing, waterfalls, pools of water, indescribable colors, and above there were these arks of silver and gold light and beautiful hymns coming down from them.

I think that word is probably fairly accurate. On this butterfly wing, the first time I was there, I remember having this sensation. It was as if there was a warm summer breeze that just blew by. Then everything changed and the scene stayed the same but I became aware.

Again in looking back on it, that was my awareness of a Divine presence of incredibly indescribable, kind of a superpower of divinity. Then we went out of this universe. I remember just seeing everything receding and initially I felt as if my awareness was in an infinite black void. It was very comforting but I could feel the extent of the infinity and that it was, as you would expect, impossible to put into words.

I was there with that Divine presence that was not anything that I could visibly see and describe, and with a brilliant orb of light. There was a distinct sensation from me, a memory, that they were not one and the same. I was far beyond that point, way beyond any kind of human consciousness, and really just one consciousness. They said there were many things that they would show me, and they continued to do that. In fact, the whole higher-dimensional multiverse was that this incredibly complex corrugated ball and all these lessons coming into me about it.

Part of the lessons involved becoming all of what I was being shown. But then I would find myself—and time out there I can say is totally different from what we call time.

But suffice it to say that I would find myself back at the earthworm eye-view. What I learned was that if I could recall the notes of that melody, the spinning melody, that would start the melody spinning again and that would take me back into that beautiful, crisp, clear hyper-real valley on the butterfly wing.

My guardian angel was always there and she was always very comforting. Again, they would show lessons and often those lessons would involve becoming a tremendous part of what they were demonstrating. So much of it is just indescribable and so much of it there are reasons why we cannot bring a lot of that back.

To me that makes a lot more sense. I go into detail about all that in my book, but it turns out that I would oscillate from this beautiful, idyllic place in the core, coming back down into earthworm eye-view, and it seems it was three or four times. Like I said, sequencing was so strange because when I was in the earthworm eye-view, everything seemed to be one kind of soup of just mixed foam. It was very hard to put sequence on it but it was very clear to me that several times I would use the memory of those notes and spin that melody and go back in.

Alexander, a couple of questions. First, what is the title of your book? What I can tell you is that the tentative working title right now, and this could easily change, is Life Beyond Death: Let me hone in on a couple of things.

Tell us a little bit about coming back into this world. One thing I want to nail down is the time perspective. You also said you tried not to contaminate your memories with talking to other people.

So those are good parts of your story. What are some other aspects of it that you can tell us that make you confident that these memories were formed while you were in this severely compromised mental state?

So initially I have a very distinct memory as I was emerging, which was on the seventh day of coma. I was still on the ventilator and still had the endotracheal tube in. My awareness was of several faces. I remember one was my wife and one was a good friend of ours who is also my infectious disease doctor and a neighbor, Dr. Then one was also my year-old son. These faces were there. I did not recognize them. They would say words. But in talking with people who were there, I think that probably over an hour or two or three I started getting language back quickly.

My auditory cortex started coming online. I could then start making speech. So I was having a very rapid return of cortical function, but I was still kind of in and out of reality. My younger son, Bond, he can describe it to you. Of course, initially as I explained to some of my physicians, what I remembered was this incredibly powerful hyper-real spiritual experience.

We thought you were going to die. So they were obviously quite shocked that I came back like I did. It was just so strange. So you became a near-death experiencer who became a near-death experience researcher from a neurophysiological standpoint. Tell us a little bit more about your quest to understand this from the perspective of your background as a neurosurgeon. I know that some of them appeared that Sunday morning and maybe the Saturday afternoon.

Some could have been earlier. There was one that I think was earlier, although she seems like all the rest. They worked together 25 years earlier teaching in Raleigh.

She wrote a book called, Third Eye Open. But not through the physical material realm. In fact, she had done that with a lot of patients and she discussed that in her book. I mean, just like all the rest. She was there and she never was physically there. She did this from Chapel Hill where she lives. And Susan Reintjes was there. She came to you in the psychic realm. Of course, as I healed—it probably took three or four weeks for a lot of my neuroscience and neurosurgical training to come back—all along that time I was still writing all this down and not reading anything.

Just write it all down. Of course, for a while I was going after the hypotheses that involved formation of these very complex, intricate memories either right before my coma or right coming out of it. That really did not explain it at all.

Part of the problem, when you get right down to it, is that whole issue of remembering the melody because that was a very clear part of it.

I remember the elation when I figured that I could just remember that melody and that spun the melody in front of me. Then all of a sudden, boom! Everything opened up and I went back out into that valley, so crisp and beautiful, and my angel was with me, as I came to call her, my companion on the butterfly wing.

And then out into the core, outside of the universe. Very difficult to explain in that fluctuation. Especially because that hyper-real state is so indescribable and so crisp. That is not even in the right ballpark. Those things do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding and of lessons taught by deceased loved ones and spiritual beings.

To be fair—well, not only to be fair but to really understand the entire phenomena and understand how it fits in our culture, in our society, which I think is important because here you are, someone like yourself with your obvious intellectual capabilities but also medical understanding and you have this experience and you have to come back and try and make it make sense with all your training.

I think all the rest of us are right there with you trying to make sense of these completely counter-intuitive experiences and then trying to jam them back in our head and in our experience.

In that sense, I do have a lot of empathy and appreciation for the NDE researchers, both the skeptical ones and the non-skeptical ones. So let me talk a little bit about that NDE research and get your perspective on it.

Of course there are a few of these brave researchers out there who have stuck their neck out—really only a very few—and have tried to tackle this. The medical model that we have sees us as these biological robots and death as kind of the ultimate Boogeyman. I think that is very much a possibility. I go into this in great detail in my book but I think you have to go back about 3, years to really get to the beginning of the discussion and to start to see why certain things have transpired.

I think most importantly was the part of this discussion that happened between Rene Descartes and Spinoza back in the 17 th Century.

They started us into our current era. Let some of them survive. So I think it was a good thing to have that truce so that science survived. So I have to simply broaden my definitions. I think science is still very important to get us there. Science has been a real wonder. We hear it from your account; we hear it from many near-death experience accounts.

We also hear it from all sorts of transformative spiritual accounts, kundulini accounts, spontaneous spiritual awakenings. So your account says that and others do, as well.

In my view, what I think is going to happen is that science in the much broader sense of the word and spirituality which will be mainly an acknowledgement of the profound nature of our consciousness will grow closer and closer together. We will all move forward into a far more enlightened world.

I felt their book was quite illustrative and of course it caused a huge splash when it came out inbut again a lot of the reductive materialists like myself were not really going to put in the work to go through all of that.

With that, what I wanted to do was I sent you a couple of audio clips that I thought you might like to respond to because it fits in with what you were just talking about—people who have walked in your shoes and are still there in that model.

Steven Novella, who is a clinical neurologist at Yale University. The three basic kinds of explanations are one is spiritual; that it represents the fact that the mind can exist separate from the brain. The second one is a psychological experience of some sort. The evidence and some of the best explanatory models that people are putting forward are blending the second two, the psychological and the organic, the neuroscientific.

I really held his feet to the fire and he was unable to produce anything of any real substance about that research. I would say for one thing I think that a healthy skeptical approach to all this is a good thing because it helps us get to the truth. It helps us know the answer. What we have to be careful of, of course, is not getting in the trap of having our prejudices rule the day.

A lot of these experiments and studies, how you interpret them will depend a lot on what your prejudices are going in. I found early on in my experience, I had to do as Descartes recommended when he was talking about getting to the truth, and that was to really ignore or to reject everything I had ever accepted as real.

That was the only way to start getting to where I could figure any of this out. So one has to be very careful to really step back and want to know the truth.

And then when the skeptics, and really the mainstream scientists have pounded against it for 20 years with really what amounts to a bunch of very silly explanations but ones that have been carefully looked at and dismissed—was it CO 2a fear of death, other psychological factors? Is it all the different things like REM intrusion? Or that it would then become the presumed explanation for it. They have managed to hold back the dyke, you know?

So what do you make of that? Okay, I think in trying to get back to your original question with the previous guest, to me one thing that has emerged from my experience and from very rigorous analysis of that experience over how ipl franchise earn money years, talking it over with others that I respect in neuroscience, and really trying to come up with an answer, is that consciousness outside of the brain is a fact.

And of course, that was a hard place for me to get, coming from being a card-toting reductive materialist over decades. It is only by letting go of that reductive materialism and opening up to what is a far more profound understanding of consciousness.

This is where I think for me as a scientist, I look at quantum mechanics and I go into this in great detail in my book, is a huge part of the smoking gun. It is really astonishing. And that is what we need to explain. Thousands or millions of near-death experiencers have talked about this. There are plenty of mystical experiences that have occurred over millennia that are part of the same mechanism. You really need to be working towards explaining all of those phenomena.

They are hard issues and the whole understanding of what consciousness really involves. I came a lot closer to that in my coma experience and coming out of it and in doing all the very intense homework for the three years since then to try and understand it. If it were easy it would be widely available. It would already have been written up by somebody who wanted to publish or perish. It simply is so powerful to what are causes of the stock market crash this.

Go in there because the whole issue is far, far deeper than we would like to think. But a big part of it, of course, is to try and broaden the boundaries of science and of what we accept and will use to get towards truth. A side effect will be that anzac day trading hours 2016 coles victoria and the grace and harmony that we will see around this world will expand tremendously as we move forward in that fashion.

Probably next year maybe? I certainly hope so. I do have a free money worksheets 1st grade page which is lifebeyonddeath. Actually that sounds very much what people report from deep psychedelic experiences.

We are hidden by the noise of bodies for the completeness Always and Already prior. I have put a link to my Bereavement Rescue site. He is the perfect witness, with his back ground. I agree with him one hundred percent, spirituality and science are the future, I believe the change is coming.

Once again Alex thanks for a brilliant interview. Thanks for the interview Alex and Dr. Alexander — really great! Alexander may be interested in. The rest comes from the energy of the quantum vacuum. Can this begin to explain these kinds of experiences?

Somehow this all seems to be tied to the structure of space which seems to have incredibly subtle properties. Although I did particle physics at uni. Just a few ideas. A revealed sense of self. Surely this then points towards experience as being some sort of fundamental, or kind of motive force, in reality.

Of course hats off to you for initiating these great interviews. I look forward to reading Dr. Alexander had an extremely rare experience…a multiple NDE. Usually an NDE is a brief experience.

Alexander went far beyond the tunnel of light. We wish information from an NDE could be brought back to answer troubling questions like why we exist and the purpose of life. Existence dipan mehta share and stock brokers private limited so far beyond human comprehension. Alexander actually brought back a lot of information. We actually have a guardian angel. He saw the same angel several times…an important observation.

We have spiritual companions! Knowing this, would we want to disappoint them? Also, he saw celestial angels from above. What is their purpose? We can only speculate. Mystics throughout history have encountered them. The message of his guardian angel rang true in a world plagued by religious fundamentalism: We can contact the divine world even in our physical bodies, albeit in a coma.

When he remembered the divine melody he heard, and was transported back into this divine realm. Can we do the same, even without being in a coma?

Mellen-Thomas Benedict, an artist, has had a experience very similar to Dr. I suggest everybody to google mellen thomas and read a very profound NDE account.

Alex, I really enjoyed this interview. Having someone like him who can stand on both sides of the divides is incredibly valuable.

I am eager to read his book. That being said, you asked for feedback on your comment at the end about him being naive about his impact. Sadly, I agree with you. The skeptical worldview has shown amazing relience and, in my view, will continue to do so.

The question I kept wondering about was: If pre-coma Alexander had read a book like Alexander is working on now, would his position have shifted? The clip from Novella was great entertainment.

Dr Eben NDE vision was so powerful that it comes at the right time of my search for my spiritual vision while in a hospital. One other note,after reading half of this talk with Alex. I fell into a nap and received a visit with decease parents and had my first real talk with them. What a fabulous interview. Thanks so much, Alex and Dr Alexander.

I hope so, but I think we have to be realistic — the folks who have built and maintain our materialistic culture not to mention our death-is-the-ultimate-boogieman medical system are NEVER gonna give up without a fight.

Alex you are a talented interviewer who always turns up a compelling angle. The stuff you put together with Novella is great. Some of the training lineages are now based very much in a science-literate framework and they are efficient catalysts of human entry into altered and transpersonal states. And the Monroe Institute is one of them. You might want to talk to someone from there sometime because I know they have data.

Also Thomas Campbell worked with Monroe and has used his physicist background in combination with OBE skills to go many times into the nonphysical and built a model of it.

My own lineage works differently but is also evidential and science literate. The dialectic is deeper than Descartes. Actually we have many operative paradigms like we have many operative realities.

Whether this or that human deigns to notice this or that paradigm or reality is another question, but personally I feel we need to be more relaxed and playful on that. IOW some feel an unnecessary angst about it. I realy agree with all of comments here: Science must go forward with a new spirit of research. At a certain point Mr Alexendar says. This flabbergasted me quit a bit. Is he not saying here that he was taught by lost loved ones? Bit strange because he stresses out in the rest of the story the he had no recollection of anything from his real live.

So how did he manage to recognise these people? I wonder exactly how much first hand experience Mr Alexander has motley stock market Ketamine and DMT to be able to make this call? Also he tells about not believing the un materialistic explanation at first. So he startet of trough trying to find an classical explanation. Has anyone seen this work? For I am very curious to see about the amount of effort he put in there.

He is certainly pluging that work less then his book. Eben had been given up for adoption by his mother who was 16 at the time. His biological parents later married and had other children. One of his sisters died before he was able to reconnect with his biological family. Eben had received a picture of his deceased sister before his NDE but did not etrade mobile futures trading that she was the one on the butterfly wing until after his NDE.

I was hoping you would get Eben to relate this part of his story. No, I read it stated somewhere purpose of share buybacks. But I members money making guide runescape 2016 he goes into detail about it in the book.

I got the impression that he was referring to NDEs what are the benefits of hiring a stockbroker a whole dinar exchange rate to usd not just his own when he mentioned deceased loved ones. But it sounded obscure to me too. Great video by how much money does a neurosurgeon make per hour way.

That bit of seeming contradiction about being taught by deceased loved ones and not remembering seeing anyone but that creature on the butterfly wing jolted me, too. Did he just suddenly remember this and not realize it? Is he having problems with his memory? I have seen the swamp monsters many times just through the use of dimethyltryptamine. I always wonder how many people have had these triggers of DMT witch is naturally produced in the brain….

But is pure love, not to get the two mixed up. This is all hyperspace witch you view using your human body as a radio. This is our jobs if you will. But not if your human body is still tied to you or you are not in deep hypnosis. Nothing bad happens at soul home. If you want to go back, you know how. What strange and surprising story coming from a neurosurgeon with such a proven scientific background. He clearly had a profound and life-changing experience during a severe episode of bacterial meningitis.

Bacterial and viral meningitis are known to cause altered mental states, convulsions, etc. These are known effects of meningitis. This raises the fascinating question of why does Dr. Did you not understand, Gerry? Alexander said his neo cortex was shut down therefore no experience should have been possible.

The fact that I mention there are no veridical experiences means there are no localizing moments. A pity, because you then cannot localize a pathological state that may have induced this experience. Then we cometo the curious part that Smit jumps upon. Dr Alexander has undoubtedly treated many people suffering from hallucinatins induced by various types of brain pathology. He labelled these as hallucinations induced by disease.

Forgive me for finding that strange. As for the london stock exchange floor trading low glucose level measured in his cerebrospinal fluid. One or two measurements do not mean he was in an extreme state of hypoglycemia for weeks on end. It simply means his cerebrospinal fluid glucose concentration was low for one or more measurements.

Meningitis is also associated with a fluctuating mental state both before any coma occurs, and when recovering. Which all act together with the hallucinations induced by meningitis. Oh, you would, would you. You know, Gerry when you were at medical school, did they not teach to beware of thinking that you know it all?

Such vehemence in response to a simple question. This quesion is one which any physician would ask, and it goes very simply:. The experience of Dr. Make money money john reuben Alexander was undoubtedly profound and life-changing. It also commodity futures trading commission office of public affairs one he personally believed was a vision of a real transcendental world.

So all that is announced is a personally profound and life-changing experience. No more and no futures trading books pdf. So what distinguishes the hallucinations of other meningitis sufferers from those of Dr.

Alexander, except that he felt it was real. Is to feel that something is real, proof of trend strength indicator forex belief? People truly believed in the reality of these gods. So were they also real? Your can go on and on with this statement, that belief tokyo stock exchange listing rules something is proof of that something.

So my question remains: Alexander from other such intracranial pathology induced hallucinations? Dr Spetzler is an internationally renowned neurosurgeon with a special interest in aneurysm surgery. I have always acknowledge his credentials in this field. Alexander has an above average CV when you look at the impressive list of publications which he has written or co-authored.

There is not a single doubt about his expertise and ability in his chosen specialty. How much money does a neurosurgeon make per hour brings us back to the forex beginners algorithmic trading systems question.

Then we come to the matter of the serious nature of the menigitis. Neither I, nor anyone else would deny the serious and life-threatening nature of the illness Dr. Alexander was fortunate to survive, despite all odds. This is not disputed. He is a lucky man to have survived neurologically intact. Many who do survive the ravages of such severe meningitis are impaired. And then just consider the main question I asked: Oh goodness, after all those years of studying from an absolutely one-side point of view, i.

An NDE has a coherent story line and is never forgotten — a hallucination goes anywhere — not story line, loads of incoherent images not making any sense… which tend to be forgotten in the long run.

Unfortunately for that position, hallucinations can be full of structure, sensations and emotion. Here is a link for assessing hallucinations. If I gave references to articles decribing individual hallucinations, the standard answer would be: Any number of other answers.

The article linked to in this post is moer than enough. It also has an extensive bibliography and reference list. Such an opinion reveals a deficient knowledge of history. So I suggest a seance, and asking the ghost of Joan of Arc about the matter. The life of Joan of Arc was most definitely changed by her hallucinations. The same is true of others too, such as people who speak with saints and spirits.

After all, auditory hallucinations can also be quite complex:. Gerry, I think you are entirely missing the point. Alexander and others like him go on and on with passion about how their level of consciousness and awareness was beyond what they could have possibly imagined during delta flea market in stockton ca experiences. Do other people who have meningitis hallucinations also get radically passionate about how they entered previously unimagined states of hyper-awareness, then proceed to come on shows to talk about how extraordinary meningitis hallucinations are and how they wish everyone could have one?

I think this is well established now to the point that even your skeptical colleagues agree. Every other skeptic ignores it too, or only addresses it in an indirect way by chalking it up as memory confabulation. This is because you have no reasonable explanation at all for it, and can use the proper substitution of words to water it down to a debunkable strawman.

You tried pulling off the same sleight of hand with Pam Reynolds. Does that strike you as being curious? As for Dr Woerlee, yes, Joan of Arc had very vivid hallucinations.

But can we be sure that those WERE true hallucinations? Besides, those times were markedly different than ours. Just read in my newspaper: Visions and all that were not uncommon then. Sure, hallucinations can be very vivid — multi-currency forex card as a whole, usually they make no sense whatsoever. For example, when we at IANDS the Netherlands heard from someone asking us whether her experience, which showed dolphins flapping on the windowsill of her bedroom, was an NDE, we had to say NO.

Why do you ask us all the time, Dr Woerlee? Why not asking Dr Alexander directly, Dr Woerlee? Changed mental states, ah, right.

You think there are similarities with the NDE there do you? I think the enduring and pervasive feeling of being unreal is the disease itself. Sorry, beef stock market uk news feed to reply.

I have a hard time articulating what I see, think, or feel. These people that are trying to tell you what they see, or have experienced may possibly have my condition.

Can you copy and paste one. Only you, Gerry, would even try to suggest that it was. What distinguishes it forex metatrader alpari uk download link perfectly clear to those who pay attention to what NDErs say. The level of clarity and reality of the experience exceeds what the experiencer thought was possible from their normal state of consciousness. Are hallucinations normally described this way?

It is also not to mention that NDE narratives occur during brain states typically not thought to be compatible with clear consciousness. There is a reason why people like Steven Novella are so big on memory confabulation. So here we are with two different explanations for the same experience. Even so, despite the vehement counterclaims, my main question has not been answered.

Just look at this one reported by a believer in NDEs — Peter Fenwick.

And I held up two fingers in a V-sign. I felt him streaming in like light upon me. Why would you not let me die? More modern studies reveal the same. People administered the hallucinogenic drug Psilocybin may undergo mystical experiences.

In one study they kew they were given this drug albeit under double-blind conditions. Yet knowing the cause of the experiences, they still considered them as spiritually significant, despite knowing of their hallucinatory nature.

Here is a link to the article, and its summary. In other words, chemical and other conditions causing changed brain function can induce structured hallucinations which are indistinguishable from those reported during NDEs. Furthermore, these hallucinations can be life-changing and beleievable, even though the persons conscerned know their cause. So I leave you with this interesting conundrum — that of differentiating reality from hallucination.

The answer is actually surprisingly simple. Dr Woerlee You should ask Dr Alexander — not us, you smart alec! After all, HE has experienced it, not we, not you! Read the interview with Alex, and you understand he also wrestled with this same problem, and came up with his personal answer. The was the vps for forex review point of his interview.

Alexander has very clearly made his decision. Instead, I am asking a very reasonable and obvious question. That may be so — but you should ask Dr Alexander, not us! He will have his good reasons why it was not a hallucination for him.

In addition, it may be so that some hallucinations can be coherent and life-changing, but the great majority is not. Why do you continue to believe that YOU and only YOU have the correct answers? How about Stuart Hameroff? He is also an anesthesiologist, but on the subjects of NDE and reincarnation his opinion are quite different from you. At the Beyond belief conference in England fairly recently, Hammeroff confronted his critics. Hammeroff to the audience.

They basically said philosophers and scientists should be the ones making all the decisions. Lets replace organised religion with…. And besides everything I said IS possible. My response to this dogmatic form of dualistic ideology is posted as a response to a very sensible post by SurvivalIndex.

Are you refering to Stuart Hammeroff as dogmatic? Gerry said The was the whole point of his interview. J A Symonds was undergoing chloroform anesthesia which was dangerous that is why it is not commonly used now.

It can cause disruptions in heart rythum or complete stoppage. Obviously Symonds heart was severely affected and it caused hin to have a mini-NDE. His statement that he had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of his brain is understandable. Whether this conclusion was reached at the time or upon reflection is not known.

Why is this relevant? Any number of substances can cause one to have a subjective experience of thinking that one has all the answers. Even when drunk, people can think they are extraordinarily interesting etc, so what? He brought back paranormal information which no drug can give access to. I hope that answers your question, Gerry.

How Much Money Do Neurosurgeons Earn?

How many times do we have to spell it out to you? There uou go again, making assumptions. Do you mean you know exactly when his experiences occurred? Even Dr Alexander did not know that. Do you imagine that such experiences only occur when the brain does not work? An interesting idea of how the body works in such situations.

This is really a very naive, simplistic and incorrect way of looking at mental state during meningitis. And therse remembered experiences sometime during one or more periods of brain function permitting memory of these experiences.

As I havecontinually said, the effects of drugs and disease can generate profound coherent experiences, such as all the manifestations of NDEs as well as other wondrous transcendental, cognitive and affective experiences. There is a solution — believe what you want, and I will point out where the belief does not correspond with physical reality.

I cannot beat a belief system based upon uncritical analysis together with minimal knowledge of medicine and physiology. Do youmean you know exactly when his experiences occurred? Even DrAlexander did not know that. Of course he knows that.

He has stated that …that is the case. No, Gerry, of course not. That is one of the reasons why your dying brain explanations are nonsense.

Gerry As I havecontinually said, the effects of drugs and disease can generate profound coherent experiences, such as all themanifestations of NDEs as well as other wondrous transcendental, cognitive andaffective experiences.

Take the Al Sullivan case for instance or any similar veridical NDE. Then he would be satisfied. His experience began with a grand mal seizure. Did it happen then? You might like to make a case for it but nobody else would and certainly not Dr Alexander.

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Did his NDE happen then? Grand mal seizure 2. Earthworm eye view 3. But that is what you do, no matter how unreasonable, anything is better than survival. What distinguishes that sublime peanut butter pie that you discuss on your website from a lump of processed dough smeared with a tasteless imitation.

Nothing, Gerry, as always. Jung Now, Gerry, C. Jung was a very smart man! Have you not yet latched on to the fact that despite your obvious knowledge of medical science it is perfectly apparent to most people that you constantly misrepresent things, disguising this behind a detailed, but often partly fallacious medical explanation of these NDE accounts. I get the feeling you think you can convince people of your own materialistic worldview just by formulating a superficially convincing medical description in an effort to always explain things away in materialistic terms, and people will subsequently gloss over the fact your statements are often factually incorrect.

Not that easy is it? The reason why Eben Alexander now believes the experience is real is because he has a firsthand knowledge of it, and realizes from this that his personal experience cannot be accounted for by a materialistic reductionist explanation.

Hi Mark, trying to reason with Dr Woerlee is like shouting to a brick wall. This really does sound like a DMT experience. James Kent has written an interesting book on the Physical theory of Psychedelics. Its free here http: I guess I expected a stronger Skeptical response. He simply continues to believe that HE, and only HE, knows a thousand times better than the experiencers themselves, a behavior which is so arrogant, so condescending, so insulting!

You know, this is similar to what happened to second moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, who, when confronted with the umpteenth denier of the moonlandings and who called Aldrin a liar!

I hope that Dr Alexander will give Woerlee and the other critics a response that will make them shut up. I agree Alex, the discussion was interesting, although rather more due to the nature of the aguments iused by some respondents than anything else. Yet none of the respondents were able to answer my very valid question, the same question posed by William James more than a century ago.

How can we distinguish between hallucinations induced by changes in brain function due to any of a multitude of pathological states, and a real expereince? This seemingly mechanistic approach does not in any way diminish or denigrate the profound personal value or effect of an experience.

Instead it is a search for the origin of an experience. As to the reasons for the personal conviction of Dr. Alexander, your interview more than adequately revealed his profound belief in the inexplicable reality of his experience.

You always know when Gerry is very worried about a particular NDE. This is one of those occasions. Not at all worried Tim.

Your failure to answer my very valid questions is evident in your reponses. My basic and fundamental quesion remains. What distinguishes this experience from other organically induced experieces? As yet, I have heard no convincing or verifiable answer. Belief in reality, cognitive, affective, transcendental or paranormal experiences are not proof. They are internal experiences, which no matter how profound, are objectively incapable of verification. Commonality with other NDE experiences is a manifestation of similar brain structure and function in humans.

There is nothing veridical. So this is a profound personal experiece sharing features in common with other NDEs. Ant this kind of cases are too numerous. During the surgery that lasted more than ten hours he experienced an OBE which turned into a full scale NDE. During his OBE he saw a surgeon poke in his liver with a weird looking yellow colored instrument. When later he described that instrument to the surgeon the latter was stunned: Miguel described perfectly a new instrument that came from Germany and was received by the hospital that very day.

Even if we consider for a moment that Miguel H. Hallucinations do not change lives in the way that the NDE does. Dr Alexander brought back information about a deceased family member that he had never met. How does a hallucination accomplish that feat, Gerry??

How can that be put down to hallucination?? I think you ARE worried, Gerry. That was a very interesting veridical NDE, thanks for posting it. Yea, I know, the same is happening to me, so I have to reply to myself. Vazquez, looks like we have acquaintances in common. The case that Enrique supplied is intriguing. Shot in the liver with a wooden duumy bullet, he was operated on to stop the bleeding.

He later reported this to the surgeon who confirmed it. These organic hallucinations have astonishing properties. It is always a source of entertainment to see how people try to explain away veridical accounts. There are so many of them now that it is hard for me to believe in the typical explanations. The NDE phenomenon as a whole needs explaining, not just one particular case.

She verified a conversation outside her room and down the hallway she could not have heard. Perhaps the most interesting part of that case is the remission of her cancer with medical records available. I remain an open minded skeptic. Like Gerry, I need objective and verifiable evidence in order to fully accept survival, and I am still waiting. What makes me more open to the possibility these experiences are real has been the unquantifiable effect of reading through many hundreds of accounts.

Where Gerry points out that the experience is tainted by expectations and culture, I find far more instances where the experience is not what is expected and where commonality extends across age and culture. Of particular interest to me are the accounts where the religious figures or mythic figures reveal to the experiencer that they could have chosen to appear in a different form and that the form they appear is suited to the experiencer to give them what they need.

Where Gerry finds the youthful appearance of deceased loved ones as fitting expectations, I find the exact opposite. An example of this is the account of child experiencer David Goines who meets an old man in a beautiful garden who proceeds to tell him that the garden as well as his appearances as an old man are mere mental constructs generated by his mind directly to the childs mind. The appearance of the old man and the garden may just as well have been a meadow and Jesus.

Another example is a little girl who drowns and is greeted by a mermaid. The mermaid later turns into a swirl of light and explains to the child that she had to appear as a beautiful mermaid at first to make her comfortable. Adults are more prone to take their NDE imagery literally, likely due to a lifetime of conditioning.

Most skeptics notice the different religious figures and instantly dismiss the possibility that these experiences are real. One of the most common is that religion is of no importance and that acts of love are all that is evaluated.

Take the amazing consistency of accounts, then you add the compelling veridical stories, the convincing hyper-reality of the NDE which is convincing even to a materialist neuroscientist like Alexanderthe difficulty of trying to explain how these amazingly smilar experiences happen at unlikely extremes of brain physiology across a wide spectrum of physiological brain states, the complete inability of materialism to explain or even detect consciousness, and perhaps we are left with something Eben Alexander said.

Sorry about the links in my last post. I hope they come out better in this post. There are no veridical elements. He undoubtedly has previously in his career dubbed similar experiences in his patients as hallucinatory products of the brain dieases of his patients. Yet here have the same experienced neurosurgeon with a similar profound experience who now claims this experience was inexplicable, and due to a real experience in some transcendental reality.

Neal Grossman, an emritus professor of philosophy, has a very simnple deinition of reality stated in more than one article he has published in the JNDS among others. The same is also true of hallucinations experienced during the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs. What is hallucination and what is transcendental reality?

However this latter is also explained with brain structure and function, because brain structure and function is basically the same for each person. So experiences aroused by fundamental changes in brain function could in general be expected to be similar. Alexander may possibly be placed in this category. Yes, Gerry, now what should that tell you. All the doctors that have these experiences revise their beliefs.

The rejoicing afterwards seems incredible…. Enrique, another link is here about these shared experiences, Dr. I have read a little too on the experiences of hospice nurses who add to these studies. Enrique — can you please give us more details about the Airline pilot you just mentioned in response to Tom and Gerry? No problem, Enrique, my friend and NDE-researcher Titus Rivas is half Spanish. He can read this all right! If I can help in any way, my e-mail is evargas1 telefonica.

Not entirely right, Alex! The person said something like this: Thus, I can understand by analogy what it would be like to have an experience that makes our normal waking experience seem like the dream in comparison. Normally as Grossman has also pointed out we tend to need a reason not to believe the testimony of others. The materialist model should generally predict the exact opposite to happen. The materialist model seems to get things right up to a point: But then when the pathological inhibition is so severe as in cases of where the patient is near death, the model breaks down.

An early draft of it can be found here: The effect seems to be so powerful that I hazard a guess that even Dr. Woerlee, should he have an NDE, would come away convinced. I read your article and think it is very good. NDErs often describe the experience as coming home. They are familiar with it. It is definitely a unique state of consciousness whatever its true nature.

I agree that what one makes of Dr. This opens my eyes to the distinct possibility that he is right. Perhaps at the physiological extremes something profoundly interesting happens that cannot be understood via mechanism. But ultimately we cannot replicate the experience to see what we make of it for ourselves. Materialists will continue to assume that the brain must somehow generate such a complicated experience even when drastically compramised and here you can pick any imaginable poison- severe meningitis, getting struck by lightening, seizure, cardiac arrest, alcohol poisoning, valium overdose, drowning, general anesthesia, general anesthesia while in cardiac arrest, general anesthesia while in cardiac arrest while under a heavy dose of barbiturates and so on.

When people like Alexander passionately explain how radically boosted their mental acuity was, skeptics will either ignore this detail or assume it is a trick of false memory occuring outside of the time from the neural compromise.

We recognize that the false memory hypothesis has been manufactured as a means by which skeptics can explain how the brain generates the experiences during the time the experiencer believes they happened.

These explanations are made difficult in cases of cardiac arrest in which the window for such memories to be formed is only a handful of seconds, and when time markers in the stories indicate that it really did happen during the period when the brain is not considered by modern neuroscience to be capable of forming such experiences. Those who insist on materialism will never be satisfied without a controlled study in which a remote target is accurately seen numerous times with the exception of Michael Persinger who amazingly believes in remote viewing and out of body perceptions, yet still believes we are annihilated at death!

Believers will wonder how any skeptic could be so dogmatic that materialism is true in light of the massive inability of the scientific method to understand the origin and nature of consciousness, and in light of the amassing stories of compelling NDE accounts which fly directly in the face of common skeptical explanations. Gerry and other skeptics are powerless to say when an abnormal brain should or should not be conscious and to what extent, because they have no earthly idea how or why a normal brain generates consciousness in the first place apart from various neural correlates which themselves are open to question.

Skeptics are better served debunking accounts such as this: As long as an explanation can be imagined, it will be accepted. Each explanation, no matter how unlikely or counter-evidential it is, will be taken as infinitely more likely to be true than dualism of any variety. I for one remain open minded, and greatly intrigued by the stories of experiencers. Thank you for a voice of calm reason among some comments which failed to provide any sensible reponse to the fundamental points I raised.

As I had pointed out, and as you also correctly point out, the affective, cognitive, transcendental and paranormal experiences and perceptions typifying NDE experiences, can be triggered or generated by an incredible variety of disorders, and even occur without any physical disorder being present at all. You mentioned some triggering disorders:. And this means you have two aspects to an NDE: Manifestations due to the initiating cause of the NDE. True NDE manifestations independent of the initiating cause.

I wrote an article on this very subject published on the internetduring at: In fact the ideas expressed in this article are similar to those expressed in your post. There is a major difference though — I happen to believe these experiences are products of conscious brain function. This is not so much a belief as a result of years of study of individual NDEs and the separable immaterial conscious mind, or soul as postulated by believers in dualism.

This study reveals concrete, repeatable experimental evidence of the imaginary nature of an immaterial conscious mind as postulated by believers in dualism as yet unpublished. Therefore, the explanation of such wondrous experiences as Dr. That of the man who was considered dead during a heart operation is fascinating. Much more information is required to explain it. Nonetheless, this is a story worth investigating.

This is the kind of arrogance that I personally detest. When Gerry says that much more information is needed what he really means is ….

I responded to the majority of your points, Gerry.