M.M. You are a famous neurosurgeon that in the past, didn’t believe in NDEs. You even wrote papers against any remote possibility of life after death. What was your theory in this period of your past?
E.A. As a surgeon, I was used to believing in what I could see, feel, and measure. At the time, NDEs and consciousness independent of the brain seemed like wishful thinking to me, and I never really looked for
proof of what happens after death. But after my experience, when I started really looking for scientific papers— not necessarily papers that had made it into the news, but papers and research with rigorous 4
science behind them—I found a wealth of information that revealed a firm grounding in science and belief in NDEs are not mutually exclusive.