After Life

A Journey to the Scientific Frontier of Death, Consciousness, and Being Human

After Life begins with a seemingly simple question: what happens in the brain when we die? The surprisingly rich answer launches us into the remarkable story of the human quest to define and diagnose death. As fresh discoveries and medical innovations outstrip our basic intuitions about biology, that quest has become ever more urgent. In some ways, we are now even further from a definition of death than we have been at any other point in history.

In the second part of the book, the stories of patients who have come back from the brink of permanent death reveal how the science of dying is enlarging our understanding of the mind. We encounter new models for thinking about consciousness, and evidence that suggests that not only near death, but in everyday life, our experiences of reality are far more fluid than we previously imagined. Mind-bending research leads us to challenge our understanding of the relationships between perception and reality, our bodies and our senses of self, and the extent to which we can rewire our brains to change our minds.

After helping readers rethink the nature of death and consciousness, the third part of the book expands our understanding of life by exploring cutting-edge resuscitation techniques and extraordinary new technologies that may one day help to reverse death completely. Finally, in the book’s epilogue, I reflect on how the new science of death may fundamentally change our understanding of what it means to be human, and consider what the future might hold for the preservation of life and the expansion of consciousness.

After Life will be published in the US by Crown, in the UK by Allen Lane, and in eighteen other countries around the world.