{"id":175799,"date":"2023-11-10T18:37:27","date_gmt":"2023-11-11T00:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/is-a-near-death-experience-like-a-dmt-trip-one-neurosurgeon-experienced-both"},"modified":"2023-11-10T18:37:27","modified_gmt":"2023-11-11T00:37:27","slug":"is-a-near-death-experience-like-a-dmt-trip-one-neurosurgeon-experienced-both","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/is-a-near-death-experience-like-a-dmt-trip-one-neurosurgeon-experienced-both","title":{"rendered":"Is a near-death experience like a DMT trip? One neurosurgeon experienced both"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/is-a-near-death-experience-like-a-dmt-trip-one-neurosurgeon-experienced-both2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In 2008, Dr. Eben Alexander contracted a rare case of bacterial meningitis. As the pathogen wracked his brain, causing it to swell and suffuse with pus, Alexander entered a deep coma. He was not expected to survive. But live he did, and with a tale to tell. For in Alexander\u2019s stricken state, he underwent a <a href=\"https:\/\/bigthink.com\/the-well\/near-death-experiences-300822\/\">near-death experience<\/a>, a profound out-of-body event. Four years later, the neurosurgeon detailed it in a best-selling book.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI had no real center of consciousness,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI didn\u2019t know who or what I was or even if I was simply\u2026 there, a singular awareness in the midst of a soupy, dark, muddy nothingness\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>More recently, Alexander\u2019s popular account of his near-death experience attracted the attention of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gre.ac.uk\/people\/rep\/faculty-of-education-and-health\/pascal-michael\">Pascal Michael<\/a>, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Greenwich. Michael met Alexander after seeing him speak at an academic conference and was informed that Alexander had experimented with 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic closely related to DMT, secreted from the glands of the Colorado River toad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 2008, Dr. Eben Alexander contracted a rare case of bacterial meningitis. As the pathogen wracked his brain, causing it to swell and suffuse with pus, Alexander entered a deep coma. He was not expected to survive. But live he did, and with a tale to tell. For in Alexander\u2019s stricken state, he underwent a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175799\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}