Dr. Eben Alexander, a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon, shares his experience about returning to life after being in a coma for 7 days.
Dr. Alexander has never believed in afterlife stories, rather he thought that these experiences were just products of someone’s fantasy or hallucinations.
However, while he was in a coma because of bacterial meningitis, he underwent a journey that has changed his perception of the existence of an afterlife.
Dr. Alexander’s Afterlife Experience
After returning to his body, Dr. Alexander published a book about his unusual experience, called “Proof of Heaven”, which rapidly became the New York Times number one bestseller.
According to the scientist, the life on earth is only a test that helps our souls to grow and expand, which can be accomplished through love and compassion. In his book, he lists several points about his afterlife experience:
- The essence of the afterlife is love which dominates to the point that it destroys the presence of evil. This love is in its strongest and purest form, and it is completely selfless and not jealous at all. It is a kind of love that is familiar to anyone, rather than an abstract kind of love. Those who are unaware of this love are unable to understand who they are.
- In the afterlife, the communication is telepathic and the words are unnecessary.
- Dr. Alexander’s existence as a human on the Earth is just an artificial dream compared to the real afterlife experience.
- The unconditional love of God affects everyone, so the people in the afterlife are never alone and always safe. They are more loved than anyone can ever imagine.
Scientific Explanation about Dr. Alexander’s Experience
In Appendix B of “Proof of Heaven”, Dr. Alexander outlines 5 potential scientific explanations about his afterlife experience:
His experience was a primitive brain stem program to ease the excessive pain and suffering. This does not explain the rich nature of his recollections.
He experienced an unclear recall of memories from deep parts of the limbic system which has enough overlying brain that is relatively protected from the bacterial inflammation, which mainly occurs at the surface of the brain. However, this also doesn’t explain the nature of his memories.
This might have been a DMT dump which is a natural serotonin that produces visions. Nevertheless, the doctor states that this was not a DMT experience. His recollections are real and vivid, and such reality requires visual neocortex and functioning audio as target regions where his rich experience is produced. The prolonged coma has damaged his neocortex that affects the audiovisual experiences, and since his cortex wasn’t functioning, the possibility that this was a DMT dump is excluded.
This was a reboot phenomenon which is a random dump of disconnected memories that occurs as a result of old memories in the affected neocortex. This may occur when the cortex restarts into consciousness after a prolonged failure of a system, in his case meningitis. This option is unreliable because his recollections were vivid and detailed.
He experienced an unusual memory generation through an archaic visual pathway. This also seems unlikely since it can only be accomplished in birds while the humans can experience it only when they are cortically blind.