![]() He studied his own medical charts and came to the conclusion that he was in such a deep coma during his NDE, and his brain was so completely shut down, that the only way to explain what he felt and saw was that his soul had indeed detached from his body and gone on a trip to another world, and that angels, God, and the afterlife are all as real as can be.Īlexander has not published his medical findings about himself in any peer-reviewed journal, and a 2013 investigative article in Esquire questioned several details of his account, among them the crucial claim that his experience took place while his brain was incapable of any activity. It was Alexander who really upped the scientific stakes. Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon who taught and practiced at several prestigious hospitals and medical schools, including Brigham and Women’s and Harvard. Mary Neal was, a few years before her NDE, the director of spinal surgery at the University of Southern California (she is now in private practice). And the recent books by Mary Neal and Eben Alexander recounting their own NDEs have lent the spiritual view of them a new outward respectability. Parnia and his colleagues published results from the latest such study, involving more than 2,000 cardiac-arrest patients, in October. ![]() Recent books by Sam Parnia and Pim van Lommel, both physicians, describe studies published in peer-reviewed journals that attempt to pin down what happens during NDEs under controlled experimental conditions. The medical conditions under which NDEs happen, they say, are too varied to explain a phenomenon that seems so widespread and consistent. NDErs dismiss these explanations as inadequate. The causes posited include an oxygen shortage, imperfect anesthesia, and the body’s neurochemical responses to trauma. Over time, the scientific literature that attempts to explain NDEs as the result of physical changes in a stressed or dying brain has also, commensurately, grown. ![]() Some embark on radical career shifts or leave their spouses. Many NDErs report that their experience did not feel like a dream or a hallucination but was, as they often describe it, “more real than real life.” They are profoundly changed afterward, and tend to have trouble fitting back into everyday life. Many of these stories relate the sensation of floating up and viewing the scene around one’s unconscious body spending time in a beautiful, otherworldly realm meeting spiritual beings (some call them angels) and a loving presence that some call God encountering long-lost relatives or friends recalling scenes from one’s life feeling a sense of connectedness to all creation as well as a sense of overwhelming, transcendent love and finally being called, reluctantly, away from the magical realm and back into one’s own body. Western near-death experiences are the most studied. Though details and descriptions vary across cultures, the overall tenor of the experience is remarkably similar. Their stories are similar to those told in dozens if not hundreds of books and in thousands of interviews with “NDErs,” or “experiencers,” as they call themselves, in the past few decades. (The subject of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, published in 2010, recently admitted that he made it all up.) ![]() Neal, who had her NDE while submerged in a river after a kayaking accident-have spent 94 and 36 weeks, respectively, on the list. Two recent books by doctors- Proof of Heaven, by Eben Alexander, who writes about a near-death experience he had while in a week-long coma brought on by meningitis, and To Heaven and Back, by Mary C. The book it was based on, published in 2010, has sold some 10 million copies and spent 206 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The 2014 movie Heaven Is for Real, about a young boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery, grossed a respectable $91 million in the United States. N ear-death experiences have gotten a lot of attention lately. ![]()
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