Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We're Nearing Death by Lisa Smartt

Author:Lisa Smartt [Smartt, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2017-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

Enlightenment Changes Your Brain

Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman have done extensive research into how altered and transcendent states correlate with brain function. They describe having observed immediate decline in activity in the language areas of the frontal lobes of Pentecostal participants speaking in tongues. They explain, “Normally when you talk and listen to others, the communication centers in your brain turn on, but when a person begins speaking in tongues, these areas shut down.” Similar changes in brain activity occur during trance states in shamans and mediums. Newberg and Waldman say that these neurological changes create the pathways to enlightenment experiences.

On his website, Eben Alexander shares some interesting research on hallucinogens and the brain that supports Newberg and Waldman’s findings and sheds light on the language used at the end of life. Research at Imperial College in London in 2012 revealed that among people under the influence of psilocybin, those whose psychedelic experiences were most profound had “greatly diminished” activity in the “major connection regions” of the brain. Alexander also references a Brazilian study completed in 2015 that researched the effects of ayahuasca and confirmed a decrease in activity throughout an important region of the brain called the default-mode network. Alexander cites yet another study at Imperial College, this one on the effects of LSD on the brain, which found that a diminished integrity of certain regions of the brain seemed to be associated with extraordinary states of consciousness.

About his coma and near-death experience, Alexander writes:

As my neocortex was destroyed by the invading bacteria, my conscious awareness greatly expanded to levels unprecedented in my normal waking experiences of my entire life. That shocking reality nagged at me especially in the early months after my coma, at a time [when] I was trying to explain the whole experience as a vast hallucinatory trick of the dying brain (defaulting to my pre-coma reductive materialistic scientific beliefs, honed by several decades working as a neurosurgeon).

My doctors knew from the medical evidence in my case that my neocortex was far too damaged to be supporting any mode of robust conscious experience, including any elaborate hallucinations, drug effects or dream states. After extensive review with some of the doctors who cared for me, and with several interested colleagues in neurosurgery, it became apparent that that ultra-reality occurred because the experience was real, although it did not occur anywhere in our 4-dimensional space-time of the observable physical universe.

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