Proof of Heaven

minutes to hours in cardiac surgery and occasionally neurosurgery, using
cardiopulmonary bypass pumps, and sometimes cooling the brain to
enhance its viability under such stresses. No brain death occurs. Even a
person whose heart stops on the street might be spared brain damage,
provided that someone starts performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation
within four minutes and the heart can eventually be restarted. As long as
oxygenated blood travels to the brain, the brain—and therefore the person
—will stay alive, albeit transiently unconscious.
This piece of knowledge was all I needed to discount Moody’s book
without ever opening it. But now I did open it, and reading the stories
Moody reported with the reference of what I myself had gone through
made me completely shift my perspective. I had little doubt that at least
some of the people in these stories had genuinely left their physical
bodies. The similarities with what I myself had experienced beyond the
body were simply too overwhelming.
The more primitive parts of my brain—the housekeeping parts—
functioned for all or most of my time in coma. But when it came to the
part of my brain that every single brain scientist will tell you is
responsible for the human side of me: well, that part was gone. I could
see it on the scans, in the lab numbers, on my neurological exams—in all
the data from my very closely recorded week in hospital. I quickly began
to realize that mine was a technically near-impeccable near-death
experience, perhaps one of the most convincing such cases in modern
history. What really mattered about my case was not what happened to
me personally, but the sheer, flat-out impossibility of arguing, from a
medical standpoint, that it was all fantasy.
Describing what an NDE is is challenging, at best, but doing so in the
face of a medical profession that refuses to believe it’s possible at all
makes it even harder. Due to my career in neuroscience and my own
NDE, I now had the unique opportunity to make it more palatable.