I've been seeing and hearing some talk about Eben Alexander's new book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife. It's based on his "near death" experience, and claims to be proof of life after death and the existence of God -- a Christian God, very specifically. My first thought was that no one could possibly taking this seriously...but the press seems to be eating it up. It reminds me of the success of Beyond And Back in the 1970s.
Sam Harris does a good job of taking Alexander's claims apart into itty-bitty pieces, in a blog post titled "This Must Be Heaven"
Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science....In his Newsweek article, Alexander asserts that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like neuroscience.
The problem, however, is that “CT scans and neurological examinations” can’t determine neuronal inactivity—in the cortex or anywhere else. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case. Obviously, the man’s cortex is functioning now—he has, after all, written a book—so whatever structural damage appeared on CT could not have been “global.” (Otherwise, he would be claiming that his entire cortex was destroyed and then grew back.) Coma is not associated with the complete cessation of cortical activity, in any case. And to my knowledge, almost no one thinks that consciousness is purely a matter of cortical activity. Alexander’s unwarranted assumptions are proliferating rather quickly. Why doesn’t he know these things? He is, after all, a neurosurgeon who survived a coma and now claims to be upending the scientific worldview on the basis of the fact that his cortex was totally quiescent at the precise moment he was enjoying the best day of his life in the company of angels. Even if his entire cortex had truly shut down (again, an incredible claim), how can he know that his visions didn’t occur in the minutes and hours during which its functions returned?
So why does Alexander, a neurosurgeon, say such ignorant things? Isn't the fact that he's a brain expert why he's grabbed such media attention? Harris quotes Mark Cohen, a professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Science, Neurology, Psychology, Radiological Science, and Bioengineering at UCLA, as well as Harris's thesis advisor. Cohen says, "Neurosurgeons...are rarely well-trained in brain function. Dr. Alexander cuts brains; he does not appear to study them."
It's worth remembering that ultimately, surgeons and physicians of all stripes are technicians, not scientists. Some few, of course, are both physicians and researchers; but by-and-large, the medical profession likes to adopt the authority of science (or at least scientism) without the actual process.
Beyond that, as Harris points out in another post on Alexander's claims, it's not just about Alexander not having credentials:
When debating the validity of evidence and arguments, the point is never that one person’s credentials trump another’s. Credentials just offer a rough indication of what a person is likely to know—or should know. If Alexander were drawing reasonable scientific conclusions from his experience, he wouldn’t need to be a neuroscientist to be taken seriously; he could be a philosopher—or a coal miner. But he simply isn’t thinking like a scientist—and so not even a string of Nobel prizes would shield him from criticism.
Both of Harris's posts are worth reading, with interesting points about relationship between psychedelic drug states and the NDE, and about the nature of memory.
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