I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon.

Our spirit is not dependent on the brain or body. It is eternal, and no one has one sentence worth of hard evidence that it isn't.

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind - my conscious, inner self - was alive and well.

We want to understand what happens over time. The way the brain adapts and reorganizes after injury may be the best indicator of how a child will do.

A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out.