Music Therapy: Revealing Awareness and Awakening It in Doctors Too

Miracle Girl: Music Therapy: Revealing Awareness and Awakening It in Doctors Too

Music therapy reveals misdiagnosed 'vegetative' patients, reaching the supposedly unreachable. And it could stimulate improved awareness. 

But what can raise the consciousness of their blindfolded doctors? Can it teach a lesson to those that wrote them off as hopeless?

The Owen Lab: On the Road to Widespread Covert Awareness Testing

Miracle Girl: The Owen Lab: On the Road to Widespread Covert Awareness Testing

My mom thinks nurses were trying to nudge her toward eventually pulling my plug. She refused to even consider it. But what about the other covertly aware consciousness disorder patients?

False hope is a danger, yet false doom can be deadly. Mobile testing by the Owen Lab may save the lives of countless covertly aware vegetative patients.

Coma Chameleon: The True Drama of Covert Awareness

Miracle Girl: Coma Chameleon: The True Drama of Covert Awareness

I guessed that the play "Plasticity" might be about a similar coma experience to mine. But the playwrights missed the true drama of covert awareness. The comparison between their fictional depiction of covert awareness with my own coma experience suggests that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

Happy Coma Day!

Miracle Girl: Happy Coma Day!

Today is the third anniversary of my awakening, an event Keith has dubbed Coma Day. It awoke from a weird coma-dream into an almost as strange reality.

My doctors told my loved ones to give up all hope for my recovery, that I was profoundly brain-damaged and would never be the same. They were wrong.

I spent the rest of the day proving it.

My Life Was but a Coma-Dream

Miracle Girl: My Life Was but a Coma-Dream

As readers of Coma Chameleon know, I awoke from my bizarre and absurd coma-dream into a reality almost as unbelievable.

SfMCR: The final battle to speak

In my coma-dream, suctioning was represented as being immersed in a tank filled with science fiction-inspired oxygen-permeated gel, which I could barely suck into my airways. Once awake, it felt like my lungs were being sucked out with a vacuum. Still, the plugs in my lungs were getting so bad that I kept having to give in and ask to be suctioned.

But suffering through the waterboarding-like suctioning wasn't the worst travail I was facing.

The morning after my breathing crisis caused by the plugs (see SfMCR: Struggling to breathe because of my trach), Ricardo came to my bed and said, "We're going to remove your speaking valve."

As if a dam had burst, tears instantly poured forth. "Please don't." I interpreted that as meaning they were going to remove it permanently, silencing me once again. "I need it!"

"But we have to. We have no choice. The valve is what's causing the plugs to form."*

"Isn't there something else we can do? I have to be able to speak," I sniffled.

"If we keep it in, it's going to delay your recovery. Don't you want to get better?"

I paused to think of a way out of this. Suddenly, a solution popped into my mind, "What if I let you take it out between visits?" My loved ones visited me in regular shifts, and that's when I most needed to communicate well the most.

He looked at me a minute, and said, "We can try that." Ricardo didn't look enthused. "But if you continue with the plugs, we're going to have to take it out."

And thus, when my visitors arrived, I would ring for an RT to reinsert my Passy-Muir valve, and when they left, I would signal again for the valve to be removed.

In between, I had to do my best to communicate with medical personnel using leak talking, which is as difficult to understand as it is to produce.

This was complicated by my warp-speed speaking style, which is related to my ADHD. Try as I might, I just couldn't force myself to slow down my speech or break my comments into shorter utterances. The best I could manage was to reduce the speed to subsonic.

This was a particular problem when trying to communicate with physical and occupational therapists because doing the exercises sapped me of precious breath.

Still, it was worth it to be able to continue speaking normally with my loved ones.

I was on powerful (and painful) intravenous antibiotics. Every time the younger nurse administered it to me, I had to fight back tears from the searing pain. The older, more experienced, nurse knew how to slowly feed the antibiotic into the catheter so it didn't hurt as badly.

But the excruciating injections paid off. Before long, I tested free of MRSA, and I wasn't an untouchable anymore.

A couple of weeks later, I no longer needed the speaking valve. Ricardo finally removed my trach.

As he was taking it out, Ricardo said he had known I was ready to have it out for some time. Later that day, Joseph broke into a big smile when he saw me without the trach. He told me that he could always tell when patients are ready for decannulation, and he had known that I was from the start. That's why, when it looked like he would be leaving Country Villa Sheraton, he warned me of Ricardo's excessive caution and advised to keep pushing for further weaning.

After my trach was disconnected from the ventilator. They fed me supplemental oxygen as a precaution. 

If I had been weaned faster, I wouldn't have needed the speaking valve for nearly as long, and most of this frustrating saga never would've occurred.**

After I had been red-capped, in preparation for decannulation.

*As I said in my last post, the folks at Passy-Muir, makers of the talking and eating valve, tell me that if my ventilator had been properly humidified, it would've prevented the formation of plugs. I will delve further into this subject in the next installment in this Scenes from My Coma Recovery series. Here is Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and a related SfMCR: Gaining the Power of the Pen.

**On the other hand, I also wouldn't have sold the essay I wrote about the drama of repeatedly losing my ability to speak. "Voiceless" will appear in Kaleidoscope, a semi-annual online literary magazine about disability, in either in July of 2017 or January, 2018. I will post a link to the essay when it comes out, so watch this space...eventually.

Enjoying a tater tot after the decannulation. I was wearing a shirt because that afternoon I had gone on a walk outside the nursing home.

SfMCR Valentine's Day Special: "I will always love you"

Keith fanning me not with palm leaves, but a hospital whiteboard for patients (the heater was turned up too high in my room, and I was feeling stuffy). This was during my second bout of Legionnaires' disease, and he was there for me then, too.

I didn't know why I had stopped seeing Keith, even though I never ceased loving him. All I knew was that my new boyfriend looked almost identical to Keith, down to the clear band-aid bands affixing a loose lens to the frame of his glasses.

What a weird coincidence.

Keith had used one of the band-aids we had purchased in Sicily to cover the sores on my hands and arms to repair his glasses. What were the odds that David...or Michael--no, I already dated a Michael, how about Jonathan?...er, maybe Ricardo? would have made the same klugey repair?*

I loved the way Keith--did I say Keith?--I meant Ricardo, yes, Ricardo, gently kissed my eyelids or forehead. The way he barely made contact with the skin was both tender and somehow deeply erotic.

It was bizarre how much his body also resembled Keith's. But Ricardo had a full beard, while Keith had a goatee and moustache. I guess it was just my type.

How I looked forward to those kisses....

I marveled at how polite Ricardo was. "Thank you, sir" and "Thank you, Ma'am" were his refrain whenever someone else was in the room. I couldn't quite make out the other people said, but Ricardo's words, I heard loud and clear.

What a gentleman he was! 

Ricardo would tell me at length his plans for us. We would go on an Alaskan cruise. Keith and I had loved looking at the calving icebergs as we flew over Greenland on our flight back from Sicily.

I guess Ricardo loved icebergs, too.

He also spoke of future trips to tour Latin American ruins like Machu Picchu. I had always wanted to see place like that. What fun it would be!

When the time came for him to leave, Ricardo would plant the gentlest of kisses on my forehead or eyelid, and say, "Remember, I will always love you, and I will never leave you."

And Keith hasn't.

Later, after my awakening, Keith explained that with all the equipment I was hooked up to, lines, tubes, and my trach, I didn't have much space left for him to kiss. He was also deathly afraid of hurting me. Thus the oh-so-gentle kisses.

Nonetheless, the emotion expressed was unmistakable.

I will always love Keith, too.

The bouquet of a dozen long-stemmed roses that Keith gave me for Valentine's Day this year.

*This was a bit of lucid dreaming within my coma-dream. Even as my new boyfriend was my dream-reality, I debated what his name should be. I eventually settled on the romantic and faintly exotic, Ricardo, though a few times I slipped up and called him Keith. Obviously, this fake Ricardo has no relationship with the nursing home respiratory therapist whose name happened to actually be Ricardo.

Riding the Hippocampus Hobby-Horse with Santa and the Coca-Cola Polar Bears

The Secular Spectrum: Riding the Hippocampus Hobby-Horse with Santa and the Coca-Cola Polar Bears

I didn't realize that everyone wasn't sometimes aware when they were dreaming until several years ago, when I read an article about lucid dreaming. Later, as I was researching my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," I learned that according to the REM intrusion theory, my lucid dreaming meant I was far more likely to have a near-death experience.

I even lucid dreamed during my NDE. I noticed that my "new" boyfriend looked a lot like Keith--even down to the klugey repair of his glasses he was forced to make when they broke in Sicily. But Keith didn't have a full beard, so he couldn't be the person telling me all about his plans for us when I was better. I went through various names for this new boyfriend (which meant that I thought it was an ordinary dream). I finally settled on Ricardo, for some reason. Perhaps the name was inspired by Ricardo Montalban. I have no idea why, but I did note that he seemed to be exceedingly polite. He kept saying "Thank you, sir" to people. Oddly enough, Keith does that too, though I never really noticed it before my coma-dream.

Later, after my awakening, I was greeted by a respiratory therapist at my new nursing home. His name was Ricardo. Pure coincidence, of course, but weird nonetheless.

Winning the Everlasting Gobstopper of Life

My latest post for the Secular Spectrum: Winning the Everlasting Gobstopper of Life

This is my brain on strokes. But despite what my doctors proclaimed, the damage wasn't "profound." They knew that my damage was in the watershed areas--as my hospital records attest--but didn't take into account that my relative youth and the nature of watershed-area stroke damage gave me a better chance of recovery, which they listed as poor.

My neurologist told me that the watershed areas tend not to control the most vital systems and they tend to bounce back faster after they've been damaged. My relative youth also meant that I had a better chance of recovery.

To me, the fact that the less important systems blink out first and recover better strongly suggests that this is an evolutionary triage system,

Natural selections saved my life, even though I was hardly the fittest.

“Please Put a Blanket on Me” — I Was Aware in My Coma

This photo was taken on the day I was transferred to a nursing home, five days before my awakening.

My second post for the Secular Spectrum explores covert cognition, like I experienced, and explains why it negates the arguments for mind-brain separation. NDE true-believers insist that the brains of experiencers couldn't generate what they perceived because their brains weren't functioning. Well, my doctors claimed that I was profoundly brain damaged and wrote me off as a vegetable even as I was experiencing a rich fantasy life. My brain certainly was active enough to produce my coma-dreams.

Here's the link to the post: “Please Put a Blanket on Me” — I Was Aware in My Coma

My first Secular Spectrum post

The theme of my first post for the Patheos Atheist Channel group blog The Secular Spectrum will be somewhat familiar to my regular readers, but I took a particularly satirical tack to introduce my story to a unfamiliar readership. It's not hard to satirize the fact that so many believers think God bestowed a miracle upon such a committed atheist. Here's the link: Miracle Girl?

About face

Today's blog harks back to some points I made in a previous post about the claim that Phyllis and Betty Alexander saw a "perfect rainbow" heralding the awakening of Eben. This was proven to be impossible by the famous Esquire expose of Alexander. I argued that they could've I either mixed up the timing of the rains and the rainbow, or the memory could've been implanted in their minds by the very suggestion that it had happened. My hypothesis was based on the groundbreaking research misinformation effect research of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus and many others.

This is a related phenomenon. Alexander claims that soon before his awakening, he saw six faces in the muck of the Realm of the Earthworm's-Eye View. All but one of them had been praying for him that day or the night before. He draws the conclusion this this is due to their prayers reaching him in Heaven. I would counter that he was simply hearing their voices, just as the voices of my loved ones leaked into my coma-dream. These were all people familiar to him, after all.The other face belonged to Susan Reintjes, a long-time friend of Eben's wife. She calls herself an intuitive and claims to be able to psychically reach people in comas. I intuitively think she's a flake. She says she contacted him remotely from her apartment, and Alexander believes he picked up the call in Heaven. Coincidentally, he learned about this after his awakening.

Proof of Heaven ends with what is supposed to be the big reveal. The girl on the butterfly was actually his long-lost dead sister Betsy, whom he never met because he was raised by adoptive parents. How does he know it was her? He was sent a photo of Betsy. So, he immediately recognized her when he saw the photo, right? Nope. He says that the next morning he was reading Elizabeth Kubler-Ross' book On Life After Death when he was struck by the story of a young girl recounting her near-death experience to her parents. She tells them about being comforted by her brother, only she didn't have a brother. Wait for it...yup, it turns out that she did have a brother who died a few years before she was born. (You think maybe she could've overheard something about the brother, or that it's a complete coincidence?) Then, suddenly, it dawns on Alexander that the woman in the photo--the sister he never met--was the very girl on the butterfly! Wooooooo! It was the clothes that threw him off. Yeah, that's it. It couldn't be that image the girl on the butterfly, after all those months, suddenly morphed in his mind into his dead sister? And perhaps the same thing happened after he was told the story of Susan reaching his spirit while he was in the coma?

Nah.

I guess his brain fell out

"Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out" is a popular saying among skeptics. Eben Alexander continually proclaims himself to have been a skeptic before his coma-based near-death experience. But his writing throughout Proof of Heaven proves the lie to that claim.

I'm the one who was labeled as profoundly brain-damaged, but if Alexander truly was a skeptic before his NDE, then I can't help wondering about the extent of his meningitis brain damage. Has he had an MRI of his brain since then? And would he release the results if he had? After all, he's yet to show the world the medical records he claims proved that his brain wasn't functioning during his NDE. If it's that incontrovertible, you would think he'd release the records to silence the doubters. Finally, proof of an actual Miracle of God! If his mission is truly to inform the scientific establishment of his important new discoveries, then what's holding him back? Doesn't he have an obligation, as he repeatedly states, to give witness to this groundbreaking development in the understanding of consciousness and reality itself?

I know that this argument is a bit at odds with my recent posts that suggest that Alexander's NDE is basically a hyped-up and retrospectively interpreted coma-dream. And, to be honest, I'm not completely convinced that his story isn't an absolute crock, instead of simply a deluded one. Still, if he's utterly convinced that what he experienced really happened, isn't it odd that he hasn't presented the proof of what he states is his new-found calling? Isn't this supposed to be the reason he was sent back to earth, a messianic prophet spreading the word of God's love? Indeed, he all but states he's on a mission from God...just like the Blues Brothers.

He believes it's no coincidence that God booked a neurosurgeon a return flight to Heaven. Who else would be better suited to spread the word to the unbelieving masses in the neuroscientific community. I dunno, maybe give the same experience to an actual neuroscientist like Sam Harris? Sorry, I don't mean to give ideas to the god we agree doesn't exist.

But then, Sam Harris would've undoubtedly filtered his experience through a skeptical lens. Certainly, he wouldn't have spewed the kind of Deepak Chopra, New Age, pseudoscientific claptrap Alexander does, claiming quantum mechanics proves consciousness affects matter. He states that he now believes in such psychic phenomena as--cue the theremin--remote viewing, precognition, psychokinesis, and clairvoyance. Perhaps instead of dying, his brain really did fall out. Alexander actually states that there is overwhelming evidence for these phenomena. Um, no, unless you think flakey supernatural "reality shows" constitute evidence. If so, watch out for old houses with attics.

Here are a couple of other candidates. They would be at least as credible apostates to the skeptical cause. And they're certainly adept at making magic appear believable....

Casting about for an answer

As I've stated before, the first dateable element in my coma-dream was the MRI voice. It was July 22, 2013--the day my brain began to reboot. "Hold your breath...exhale," reverberated the calming baritone. I couldn't make out the words, nor could I hold my breath because I was on a respirator. But I recognized that distinctive low monotone once I awoke. It's clear from reading Proof of Heaven that Eben Alexander did much retrospective interpretation of his near-death experience of his own. I believe that the bulk of my coma-dream occurred in the last few weeks before my awakening. Those MRI voice segments tended to be brief. Interspersed with the more detailed coma-dream serials of my increasingly conscious mind, they were dispatches from an earlier, barely aware state.

I feared a serial killer had implanted a chip in my head. But that voice was different from the stalker/serial killer who kept whispering all those encouraging things in my brain. Could two serial killers have implanted chips in my head? The second one was a kinder, gentler sort of serial killer, praising my every movement. "Good job! You're getting stronger every day. I will always love you. And I will never leave you." That last one certainly sounded like something a stalker might say. It didn't make sense that a stalker/serial killer would say such positive, supportive things, but who else would plant a chip in my head? My brain was instinctively trying to make sense of what it was perceiving, grabbing ideas from movies and TV shows I had watched.

My awareness was likely flickering in and out at this point. At first my eyes were closed, as they would've been during the MRI. Later, when they were open, I couldn't focus my gaze. As often as not, I was still hearing instead of seeing the people around me. In the earlier state, I sensed only a deep, sonorous voice and a feeling of being dragged. This vague memory remained with me as that encouraging voice morphed into my "new" boyfriend (who wasn't Keith because he had a full beard), Far from being a stalker, he planted soft kisses on my forehead and told me all about his future plans for us. He, too, said he would never leave me. And he hasn't.

You may say that this is nothing like what Eben Alexander experienced. But his NDE--or coma-dream--started out simple, vague, and confused. It became progressively more detailed...just like mine did. Needless to say, it took me weeks longer to slowly emerge than his piddling seven days. And like Eben's NDE, I alternated between scenes from a higher state of consciousness and ones where I was barely aware, covertly or otherwise.

Alexander claims that his cortex had been destroyed, a medical impossibility considering that he's not lying in a hospital, a candidate for organ donation. On the contrary, his brain was every bit as functional as mine was. If it weren't, he wouldn't be able to remember his NDE. That requires a working brain. Duh. His brain was straining to piece together a story, as mine was, cobbling it together from whatever it could perceive, based on his own influences. He may not have been religious before his coma, but unlike me he grew up steeped in the Christian tradition. He says so himself in Proof of Heaven.

Was the first segment of his NDE--the so-called Realm of the Earthworm's-Eye View--simply his brain's attempt to visualize its struggle to emerge from a vicious bacterial attack? That's close to what Alexander once thought before abandoning the idea. Yeah, like that's less likely than flying on the wings of a butterfly. Gee, that kind of sounds like a dream, doesn't it? He actually calls his consciousness at this time "limited." Exactly. To me, his NDE seems more like a long coma-dream than a pitstop in Heaven. It even had revolving segments, as he travelled back and forth between the realms of the Earthworm's-Eye View, the Gateway, and the Core. I had some control over my set group of coma-dreams, as well. When I got bored, I could switch the channel to another favorite program. Perhaps, like me, his coma-dream occurred near the end, as he was beginning to emerge from his coma. And it began with an element from his earlier state...one where his consciousness was still mired in muck.

Did they feed him Miracle Gro brain food?

This was Eben Alexander on Oprah. He looks awfully articulate for someone without a cerebral cortex.

Proof of Heaven is far from it. But I'm going to take a different tack from the Esquire expose of Eben Alexander. To me, what Eben Alexander claims to have experienced was nothing more than a coma-dream. Certainly, fraud comes to mind when you consider his indefensible assertion that his cerebral cortex was basically dead. As neuroscientist Sam Harris said in a cogent blog post, that would imply that his brain grew back. Now that would be a miracle. Though Alexander continually asserts that he's a man of science, his approach to his own case shows that he's anything but.

If he could acknowledge that his brain was still functioning during his near-death experience, he might be able to see patterns that parallel my own coma-dream. When I began reading Proof of Heaven, I was immediately struck by his description of the continual, deep, rhythmic pounding that rang out in his Earthworm's-Eye View segments, which he likens to a distant blacksmith pounding an anvil. That blacksmith must get around, because I heard him too. But then, I imagined the sound coming from as a giant bell that slowly struck out the melody of "Rocky Mountain High." Usually, that is. Sometimes it would lose the beat, but if I listened long enough, it would eventually pick up the melody again. (I was of course imagining the pattern in the first place.) I would often focus on the sound as I attempted to lull myself back to sleep. As I mentioned in my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," a running theme of my coma-dream was that I was in suffering through a miserably sleepless night. That sound was undoubtedly the machinery keeping me alive. But this supposed man of science never considered that as a possibility. I had my own personal production of Stomp performed in my honor, with my ventilator, heart monitor, feeding pump, and dialysis machine, all rhythmically whooshing, clicking, and beeping, punctuated by the frequent wailing of alarms. It's no wonder that I dreamed I couldn't sleep.

Coming up in Friday's blog, the rest of the low-down on Alexander's so-called Earthworm's-Eye View segment of his NDE and what it has in common with my coma-dream.

Lost in the rainbow

In the true-believing International Association of Near Death Studies (IANDS), near-death experience researcher Robert Mays writes that Phyllis and Betty Alexander (respectively Eben Alexander's sister and mother), insist that they saw the "perfect rainbow" supposedly heralding Eben's awakening. We're in the midst of a record drought here in California, so there were no rainbows to be seen in during my awakening. And, indeed, as Luke Dittrich showed in his famous Esquire expose of Eben Alexander, according to the head NOAA meteorologist for the region, it was impossible in Alexander's case, as well.

Mays argues that Dittrich never interviewed Phyllis and Betty to hear their corroboration of the rainbow story in Proof of Heaven. He uses this as an example of the alleged hatchet job done to Alexander's reputation. But there is another explanation.

Both may be true.

The recorded weather on the day of Alexander's awakening indicates that a rainbow couldn't have appeared. Mays' sketchy excuse is that there are many causes of rainbows. Leprechauns, maybe? But just because the usual trigger for rainbows--it's baked right into the name--couldn't have occurred, that doesn't mean Alexander's sister and mother are lying. They may well have conflated memories. Or, the rainbow may have been imprinted on their memories after the fact by the very suggestion that it had occurred.

The pioneering studies of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, as well as many other researchers, have shown that simple suggestion can implant memories that people will later swear actually happened to them. The most famous example of the misinformation effect is of course Dr. Loftus' groundbreaking lost in the mall study. 24 participants were given four stories from their childhoods and asked to flesh them out with additional details. Unbeknownst to them, one of the stories was false--the tale of getting lost in the mall at the age of 5. When they were later told that one story was false and asked to pick which one, five of the participants chose a true story. These result have remained consistent through many different experiments. Generally, 25-30 percent of subjects will pick a true story over the planted one.

Add to that the brain's natural habit of conflating events, and it's entirely possible that the Alexanders honestly believe they saw a rainbow. Perhaps they saw a rainbow a week or two after Eben's awakening, and they commented that this was a message from God. Later, they recalled the rainbow as happening just before he woke up. Or maybe Eben misremembered something Phyllis said about seeing a rainbow, and the very act of Eben writing about it set the vision of the rainbow into her's and her mother's memories. I've done the very same thing with my mother. Like Loftus' subjects, her new memory wasn't as definitive and detailed as it would've been for a true memory. But the fact remains that the very act of imagining events can make them seem real, especially upon repetition. Have you ever found yourself "remembering" something that happened, only to realize the event actually occurred in a dream? I certainly have.

Memories are not Memorex moments; they're more like Play-Doh. Certainly, the human brain is a marvelous organ. It provides nightly entertainment shows for us, and for some people, dreams that last for days on end or even weeks. Indeed, there are numerous aspects of Alexander's NDE that remind me of my own coma-dream, and I will detail them in Wednesday's blog.

Wishing neuroscience into the cornfield

These are the words of Eben Alexander in a Newsweek article in advance of the publication of Proof of Heaven:

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

A dimension not of sight and sound, but of mind. Brain-free, indeed.What about covert cognition? Leave aside the fact that he gives the definite impression that he was in a natural coma, when, as I've discussed repeatedly, his own treating physician said he was in a medically induced coma in the famous Esquire expose of Alexander.

Not so fast, says an NDE true-believer. According to NDE researcher Robert Mays, Alexander was in a natural coma after all. Of course, I'm suspicious of anything appearing on the International Association for Near Death Studies website, which is not exactly the Association for the Advancement of Science. Still, Mays has a few good points--especially about the Dalai Lama's remarks quoted in the Esquire article, though it was hardly an important part of the piece. But Mays does a good deal of his own cherry picking, with numerous leaps of logic and biased interpretations of his own.

But even if Alexander did fall into a natural coma, current neuroscientific knowledge indicates that his brain was still functioning. He has yet to show any evidence to the contrary. Don't tell me that cognition during comas is impossible. I had my own strange experiences during my coma, and my brain was still functional. The only difference is that he simply decided that his mind was switched off due to his meningitis-infected brain. My legionella-riddled brain was working, despite the fact that my doctors said the same discouraging things that Alexander's doctors told his loved ones. His doctors also pronounced him hopeless, but Alexander chose to believe the pronouncements and call his recovery a miracle. Our situations were quite similar, actually, except the images my brain provided were stripped of religious imagery due to my atheism and nonreligious upbringing. My conclusion was that my doctors were simply wrong.

For the record, though a Glasgow Coma Scale wasn't performed on me, my neurologist estimates, based on my hospital records, that my score at the time of my strokes would've been 6 or 8. And, remember, I was already in a coma when the strokes occurred. Alexander's score was 8. My brain was still conscious (albeit at a low level) at 6 or 8; he has no basis to claim that his brain was totally offline just because he was given a score of 8.

Think of it as an old dial-up modem (sorry, I don't mean to bring back traumatic memories). There was a long wait, but eventually my brain connected. For a while, the signal was spotty--going in and out--but eventually it stabilized and stayed online for good. And until my awakening, I was in a coma. (Actually, I think I was in a minimally conscious state by the time of my awakening, but I was still officially comatose.)

What we have here is a  fundamental difference in worldviews. Granted, he clearly knows nothing about covert cognition, but I doubt learning about it would change his mind. Far from being as scientist, he's chosen to toss out the well-established scientific understanding of brain function. Indeed, in a follow-up article on the "science" of his near-death experience, he stated that consciousness affects matter, a complete misreading of quantum mechanics. He and Deepak Chopra would be a match made in Heaven. Alexander seems to believe that you could actually wish people, or at least matter, into the cornfield. A neurosurgeon is no more qualified to engage in neuroscience than he would be to become president. Here is what neuroscientist Mark Cohen told Sam Harris regarding Eben Alexander's story:

This poetic interpretation of his experience is not supported by evidence of any kind. As you correctly point out, coma does not equate to “inactivation of the cerebral cortex” or “higher-order brain functions totally offline” or “neurons of [my] cortex stunned into complete inactivity”. These describe brain death, a one hundred percent lethal condition. There are many excellent scholarly articles that discuss the definitions of coma. (For example: 1 & 2)We are not privy to his EEG records, but high alpha activity is common in coma. Also common is “flat” EEG. The EEG can appear flat even in the presence of high activity, when that activity is not synchronous. For example, the EEG flattens in regions involved in direct task processing. This phenomenon is known as event-related desynchronization (hundreds of references).As is obvious to you, this is truth by authority. Neurosurgeons, however, are rarely well-trained in brain function. Dr. Alexander cuts brains; he does not appear to study them. “There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness ...” True, science cannot explain brain-free consciousness. Of course, science cannot explain consciousness anyway. In this case, however, it would be parsimonious to reject the whole idea of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. Either his brain was active when he had these dreams, or they are a confabulation of whatever took place in his state of minimally conscious coma.There are many reports of people remembering dream-like states while in medical coma. They lack consistency, of course, but there is nothing particularly unique in Dr. Alexander’s unfortunate episode.

Well said. In fact, he made many of the same points as I did in a recent post. Sam Harris is also a neuroscientist. Here's his take on Alexander's unscientific assertions: This Must Be Heaven, from which the quote was drawn. Yes, Harris is an atheist and a skeptic, and we have our own biases. But like me, he doesn't reject personal accounts out of hand. Nonetheless, the fact remains that being in a coma doesn't mean your brain in has ceased to function. Period. That is, unless you allow your critical faculties to shut down and embrace pseudoscience. Especially when you can channel it into a bestseller.

Handing out presents on Santa's trusty...butterfly?

This is my brain on strokes. At least the MRIs finally proved that--despite all evidence to the contrary--I'm not completely brainless.

The MRI images of my brain after my strokes on both sides of my brain are pretty horrifying. But, contrary to what my doctors proclaimed, it didn't signify "profound brain damage." The proof is that I'm writing this now.

On the other hand, Eben Alexander was not even in a natural coma. He was in a medically-induced coma because his meningitis made him so mentally altered that he was lashing out at the doctors trying to save his life. Therefore, the only reason he was unconscious was because of the drugs his doctors gave him. Here are the words of one of the doctors treating him, as quoted in the famous Esquire expose of Eben Alexander.

"And of course he was still in an induced coma," she says. "On ventilator support. They tried to let him wake up and see what he would do, but he was in exactly the same agitated state. Even if they tried to ease up, a little bit even, on the sedation. In fact, for days, every time they would try to wean his sedation—just thrashing, trying to scream, and grabbing at his tube."

The doctor's report clearly shows that Alexander was most certainly not brain-dead. Every time his doctors attempted to remove him from sedation, he became uncontrollable again and they were forced to put him under once more. Here's a quote from Proof of Heaven.

"During my coma my brain wasn't working improperly—it wasn't working at all."

Yet, his brain worked perfectly fine--if manically so--every time his sedation was lifted. My brain, on the other hand, wasn't supposed to be working at all, at least according to my doctors after they viewed my MRIs. This is ironic considering that I think my consciousness was actually restarted by those very MRIs. (The distinctive MRI voice was the first datable element in my coma-dream.) Or, more accurately, it was activity related to the MRIs--especially moving me--that jumpstarted my cognition.

Near-death experience true believers like to cite the fact that Alexander is an neurosurgeon to bolster his literally unbelievable claims. But if he were being a true man of science, he never would've claimed that his brain was actually dead during his experience. His brain was no more dead than Claire Wineland's was when she had her non-spiritual coma-dream. She was in a medically induced coma too. The web is rife with coma-dream experiences told by people who were in drug-induced comas. Eben Alexander's story is simply one of them. It's such a common experience that it's not covert enough to be considered covert cognition. Here's a Livescience article about medically induced comas, which ends with the dreams and hallucinations often experienced by patients: What is a Medically Induced Coma?

My favorite account was from a Disqus member called NoAZPhilsPhan. It was in the same article about Claire Wineland's video What It's Like To Be In A Coma I've referred to repeatedly. People were always telling him that he had an NDE, but he had reasons to doubt it.

I was in a 10 day coma, medically induced the last few days, after I passed away on the OR table during emergency surgery. Many of my organs, like my kidneys shut down. I remember walking down a very, very wide hallway. On each side there were massive doors that opened up to beautiful scenes like valleys, fields with lakes, tropical beaches and the like. I remember hearing someone playing the guitar and singing, over and over again, "Knock, knock, knockin' on Heaven's door". After a little while I realized it was a dear departed friend of mine who was a musician so I said "Bob, is that you?" ( I could not see him only hear him). He said "Yea, it's me buddy, but we don't need you right now why don't you go home." So I turned around and walked back.I had many people say to me that it was an afterlife experience. I'm not so sure of that because all of this happened around Christmas time and during my coma I also helped Santa Claus deliver presents to Norway and England. Oh, by the way... those soda drinking polar bears are real as well.... I met them and we went sledding.

Coincidentally, his coma came around Christmastime. He didn't he ride on the wings of a giant butterfly, as Alexander claims, but perhaps he could've combined the two. Instead of using Santa's trusty sleigh, they could've given Rudolph the night off and hitched a ride on a giant butterfly.

Confessions of a stupid bitch

A while ago, a friend shared an opinion piece on Facebook positing the right to comment on what you think was the gist of an article, even you didn't have time to read it, tl;dr;ca (too long; didn't read; commented anyway). It was tongue-in-cheek, but was seriously arguing that this was okay because you are creating your own interpretation of what the piece said, or didn't say, as the case may be. I suppose it was a postmodernist kind of argument. I am not a postmodernist, and I didn't like that post, in either the usual sense or in the Facebook one. I don't think my friend was actually advocating that position...I hope.

To me, there's no excuse for incivility, but even less so if you haven't bothered to read what you're attacking. Perhaps there should be a Godwin's law-like rule for the inverse relationship between the amount a poster has read of what they're commenting on and the quantity of invective they spew. Let's call it Savage's law for now.

In this scheme, the woman who labeled as bogus Claire Wineland's story of her own version of a coma-dream had read only a portion of the article or watched parts of Claire's video before her blinkered mind said, "No way!" If she was especially closed minded, it's possible that she read the entire article, watched the video, and still couldn't accept the idea of Claire's mind translating the ice treatments for her fever into an Alaskan landscape. I had ice treatments too. The only reason I didn't mention the ice packs as another potential source of my ice cream-related coma-dreams in my Skeptical Inquirer article was I didn't know about it then.

The woman who said of my coma-dream, "Didn't experience anything so stupid as this bitch's overactive imagination," clearly got no further than the phrase "near-death experience." She thought I was claiming to have seen Heaven, but had no idea that I had actually said that I didn't see angels or dead relatives precisely because I'm an atheist. Yet she felt perfectly entitled to call my story stupid and label me a bitch.

It's hard to say how much the guy who said of my story, "Does anyone really believe this shit?" had read. Did he even get past the title or only a single word? He refused to name what part of my story he disbelieved. Was "this shit" the story as told in the VICE interview or my article? Or both? Was it stupid and did he also think I'm a bitch? And if it was shit, it was almost certainly bogus, as well. Perhaps it was all of the above.

Yes, these are the same examples I used in my last post. And you may be thinking that these are relatively mild considering the bile often dished out online. But I'm new to being a semi-public figure, and I imagine this is barely a taste of what's to come. I can't help wondering, if this is a form of postmodern online argument, will post-post-post modern online debate bring rational discourse or will it make us envy Socrates his cup of hemlock?

Coping with the not-so-covertly unaware

I was uncommonly annoyed by a one word comment made in an ABC news article thread about Claire Wineland's video, What It's Like To Be In A Coma.That word? Bogus. What about Claire's account was bogus to that woman? Did she think that adorable, bouncy, 18-year-old with cystic fibrosis was lying about her account of integrating things going on around her during her coma into her own version of a coma-dream? Was covert cognition too far outside of her limited mindset? Of course, it was my own experience that made me feel so outraged. I didn't respond to that woman, but I quickly clicked the down arrow to disapprove her comment.

So, I wasn't surprised that my own story would draw similar comments. As a skeptic, knowing that memory is not like a recording but a mixtape or heavily edited document, you always have to keep in mind that your memory is far from infallible. But what do you do when a fellow skeptic challenges your experience using the same logic? Yes, science cannot credit one person's experience because it's anecdotal. But we all have to proceed through our lives as if our memories are at least somewhat reliable. Otherwise, we would be paralyzed with inaction. A true skeptic, however, will acknowledge when their memory is proven wrong, instead of doubling-down like so many people do.

So far, I haven't received much of this kind of logical challenge to my story, however. Some objections I've gotten to my account of my coma experience in my VICE interview and my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience" were clearly not from skeptics, even though that's how they self-identify. Perhaps they rejected my coma experience because it was too much outside their understanding, like the woman in the news article comment thread. Indeed, one woman who had had no memory of the three days she spent in a coma when she was 12 opined, "Didn't experience anything so stupid as this bitch's overactive imagination."

Okay, I admit it. I do have an overactive imagination. When did that become a bad thing? I am a fiction writer, after all. I'll let you decide if I'm a bitch. I opted not to respond to her, but since this was in a thread posted by Skeptical Inquirer's Facebook page, which was sharing my VICE interview, a bunch of skeptics came to the rescue. They correctly surmised that she hadn't read the article. In fact, as it turned out, she thought that I was recounting a visit to Heaven during my NDE. There's no point in bothering to read the article before spewing venom online, right? So, her comment was not about my actual account at all.

However, it's hard to know what was going on in the mind of the person who said, "Does anyone really believe this shit?" A skeptic tried to draw out his explanation in a long thread, starting with, "What, specifically, don't you believe?" But a second poster probably called it when she said, "Another commenter who seemingly didn't read the article."

A third man's objection I've mentioned before. On the surface, he was being a skeptic when he said, "One person's comatose recollection does NOT a true story make." But in another thread he revealed that his son had been in a coma for fourteen years, and he hoped his son wasn't covertly aware.

Most skeptics who have actually read my article seem to be accepting my anecdotal personal recollections. Why? In my article, I presented the science of covert cognition. In didn't say that it's real because of my experience, only that this was how I experienced it. A good skeptic should question anecdotal accounts, but not reject out of hand covert cognition because it's outside their conception of the vegetative mind. The woman commenting on the Claire Wineland article wasn't being a true skeptic because a skeptic would've laid out her objections instead of flatly labeling Claire's story as bogus.

We all (at least those who aren't jerks) have to operate on the assumption that most people are giving the best, most honest recollections their faulty, non-Memorex memories can provide. Even the stupid bitches.