tickling the ivories of the brain, performing "cognitive caresses"
　　　　  of the cortical neurons. Fellow brain-mapper Wilder Penfield called
　　　　  it "the ultimate of ultimate problems." He came to believe that "the
　　　　  dualist hypothesis (the mind is separate from the brain) seems the
　　　　  more reasonable of explanations."
　　　　  I recently attended a Harvard Medical School seminar on the
　　　　  frontiers of mind-body medicine. During the question period, a
　　　　  doctor from Cambridge rose from the audience and described her
　　　　  cardiac arrest during her own Cesarian section. She had had no
　　　　  heartbeat. Her eyes had been taped shut. Still, the obstetrician
　　　　  told her rapt colleagues, "I could see everybody in the room, hear
　　　　  the swearing as they tried to revive me, just as if I were standing
　　　　  at the head of the operating table.
　　　　  "But I could see nothing was working. My brachial artery had
　　　　  narrowed too much to get a line through my neck. Suddenly I saw the
　　　　  chairman of the department, whom I had never met, reach in and
　　　　  through my abdomen and put his ungloved hand around my aorta. I felt
　　　　  a powerful surge of energy. He held my aorta in this very firm and
　　　　  loving way until it started to beat again." Later, she said, every
　　　　  detail of this account was confirmed by those who were present at
　　　　  her operation.
　　　　  Michael B. Sabom, M.D., cardiologist and professor of medicine at
　　　　  Emory University, staff physician at the Atlanta VA Medical Center,
　　　　  was skeptical of increasingly common accounts of such out-of-body
　　　　  experiences, or OBEs. He set out to compare a group of heart-attack
　　　　  patients who had never had OBEs to those who claimed that they had.
　　　　  He found, to his surprise, that those who had ostensibly experienced
　　　　  OBEs were able to provide far more accurate descriptions of cardiac
　　　　  procedures, and that some were able to give highly specific,
　　　　  verifiable details of their own particular resuscitations.
　　　　  At end of his 1982 book, Recollections of Death: A Medical
　　　　  Investigation, he states, "If the human brain is actually composed
　　　　  of two fundamental elements--the 'mind' and the 'brain'--then could
　　　　  the near-death crisis even somehow trigger a transient splitting of
　　　　  the mind from the brain in many individuals? My own beliefs are
　　　　  leaning in this direction. The out-of-body hypothesis simply seems
　　　　  to fit best with the data at hand."
　　　　  The NIH's Dossey told me, "How mind might operate beyond the
　　　　  physical brain is not comprehensible. But the inconceivable has