This neurosurgeon believed scientific explanations only for heavenly out-of-body journeys, until a very rare bacterial meningitis shut down his entire cerebral cortex. When his eyes miraculously opened on the 7th day of his coma, the experience he describes is nothing less than heavenly.
He was the son of a neurosurgeon who followed his father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon teaching at Harvard Medical School. He had always believed there were good scientific explanations for out-of-body experiences, since the brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism. That it was no big surprise that people who had undergone severe trauma would return from their experiences with strange stories but that didn’t mean they had journeyed anywhere real.
But then it happened to him. When very early one morning he awoke with an extremely intense headache and within hours, his entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down. Doctors determined he had contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that had penetrated his cerebrospinal fluid and was eating his brain.
During seven days in a coma the human part of his brain, the neocortex, was inactivated as he lay in a deep coma, his body unresponsive, and higher-order brain functions totally offline. But it was then that he experienced something so profound that it gave him a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.
Then on the morning of his seventh day in the hospital, as his doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, his eyes popped open. And he described an experience where as his body lay in coma, his conscious, inner self—was alive and well, with his brain-free consciousness journeying to another, greater dimension of the universe he said was truly heavenly.