THE DILEMMA FOR CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCHERS IS THIS: How do you tease apart the mind from the brain? For most of us, the brain and the mind cannot be distinguished: if the brain stops, so does the person’s consciousness and perception of reality. Little surprise, then, that most scientists believe the physical brain and nonphysical consciousness are two sides of the same coin. But a healthy number of people say that assumption is flat wrong. No doubt you have met a few of them, perhaps unwittingly: people whose consciousness kept ticking after their brains shuddered to a halt. These people have approached the border of death and lived to tell the tale, and their stories suggest that mind is more than matter. By his own account, Michael Sabom was an unlikely candidate to launch a methodical investigation into the murky world of consciousness. In 1976, a friend gave Sabom a copy of Raymond Moody’s block-buster book about near-death experiences, Life After Life. Sabom, a cardiologist, announced his assessment.
