After A Doctor Explores What Near Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond by Bruce Greyson

265 Pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press, St. Martin’s Essentials
Release Date: March 2, 2021

Nonfiction, Religion, Spirituality, Near-Death

The book is divided into the following stories.

1. A Science of the Unexplained
2. Outside of Time
3. The Life Review
4. Getting the Whole Story
5. How Do We Know What’s Real
6. Out of Their Bodies
7. Or Out of Their Minds?
8. Are Near-Death Experiences Real?
9. The Biology of Dying
10. The Brain at Death
11. The Mind is Not the Brain
12. Does Consciousness Continue?
13. Heaven or Hell?
14. What about God?
15. This Changes Everything
16. What Does It All Mean?
17. A New Life
18. Hard Landings
19. A New View of Reality
20. Life before Death

This book is written by a physician and his experiences with patients. The first story with the spaghetti sauce on his tie has really affected me. There is no way Holly would have known about the stain on his tie unless she was not in her physical body. I was glad to hear that several of the attempted suicide patients changed their outlook on life after their experience. This is a wonderful book showing there is something after death.

Loved this book. 5 stars on every platform. So much information and research and hope and love. Thank you for the digital copy. It changed my life.

This was a very interesting book. While there is no way to draw conclusive evidence from its contents about what awaits us after death.

The people's tales of their near death experiences helped to bring the book alive. The authors explanation of how the brain works and his theory of the difference between brain and mind were down to earth and easy to understand

This was such an Interesting perspective on death and what happens next. I really enjoyed reading it and learning about different perspectives. It was very informative, educational and extremely interesting! Thanks so much to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

I had really high hopes for this book and would have really liked to have been convinced. Even though Greyson filled the book with anecdotes of his own experiences as a doctor and of people he interviewed over the years, it just didn't ultimately convince me. I believe those people believe they died and experienced something, but I also didn't feel that rigorous science was used to really look into it and he also doesn't really address why most other people who die and are brought back don't report anything at all. If you interview any group of people who believe anything -- reincarnation, alien abduction, seeing ghosts, whatever -- they're all going to believe it very fervently and usually be pretty convincing. My problem is that just because they believe it fervently and have really intriguing stories doesn't mean I'll believe it (even if I can't explain what happened to them, assuming they're telling the truth). The whole book just felt like one similar story after another and I ended up just getting kind of tired of it. I would still love to be convinced, but I'm still working on that.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for review.

Written from the perspective of a doctor who has made it his life's work to study near death experiences, After is the result of countless patient studies into the nature of consciousness. The idea of a medical approach to a more philosophical question is intriguing, but the author never really quite gets there. There is nothing really groundbreaking here, basically nothing new or transformative. In an attempt to express his objectivity, Dr. Greyson uses too much detail on matters that are not central to the issue at hand.

Having never had a near death experience himself, Dr. Greyson must rely on the recollections of his patients. Whether a person believes in the science behind the NDE, or the metaphysical connection to the spiritual world, there is no way of knowing without having experienced it first hand. I honestly wanted this book to be more about the medical science aspects, so I was disappointed in the book as a whole. Having heard a NDE from a loved one, I wanted to know more about the physical reasons.

Readers seeking answers are better off looking elsewhere, so I would not recommend After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond.

Disclaimer: I was given an Advanced Reader's Copy from NetGalley and the publisher, St. Martin's Essentials. The choice to review this book was entirely my own.

I received a complimentary digital copy of this book from the publisher, St Martin’s Press and NetGalley. My review is voluntary and unbiased.

After explores the stories of patients who experienced near-death experiences. Although raised by a practical chemist, the author was drawn to study experimental psychology at Cornell. He was initially interested in animal intelligence which eventually led him to medical school. Always maintaining his belief of methodological and statistical research, he was fascinated with what seemed to be a common universal theme of life and death. In 1976, he was teaching at University of VA where he met Raymond Moody, who was a student after teaching philosophy. Dr Greyson was intrigued by his book, Life After Life, in which he describes his life after a near death experience.

Dr Greyson began his own research and experimentation after several odd encounters with patients describing similar events. He was eventually convinced that these stories had some theoretical basis. He took history and science into consideration when formulating his own theories which he shared with others when he formed the International Association for Near Death Studies.

What I found interesting was the account in 1892 of Swiss geologist professor Albert von St Gallen Heim. He had been mountain climbing when his brain became deprived of oxygen due to the altitude. He reports a NDE where his thinking was rapid yet clear as if a slowing of time occurred. Psychologist Joe Green wondered if Heim’s experience played a role in Einstein’s theory of relativity. Heim wrote, “Time became greatly expanded” so time so that he was able to think through his situation as if time slowed down. Einstein’s theory of relativity sites that time slows down the faster you travel.

The stories from patients range from mildly eventful to extremely spiritual in nature. Some report having “died” and actually seeing their body as well as other family who has passed away. Others report a less extreme experience which almost seemed like a “dream”.

Bruce Greyson didn't win me over with After. This collection of near-death experiences (NDEs) has many interesting cases in it, but the presentation of those cases is lacking. Since it reads like a text book, it's boring. Still, there are poignant facts worth taking notice of if you can manage to slog through the pages.

Do you remember that ending of the Lord of the Rings movies where it felt like it was ending, but then it didn't and fooled viewers three or four times? Reading After is like that. Even in Greyson's final chapter where he's specifically summarizing each lesson learned, there were too many false wrap-ups with "and that brings us to the next lesson," type of structure. There were at least seven lessons spelled out in the conclusion.

If the subject of what happens after we die appeals to you, there are certainly plenty of books on it. Due to the various ways in which people face death, take note that suicide is addressed sporadically. Greyson calls them "suicide attempters" which in 2021 when language has evolved to be more inclusive and sensitive, these subjects should be referred to as "suicide survivors" at the very least. The main conclusion of addressing suicide is that, even though people had pleasant experiences when they left their bodies, they were not compelled to try again and get to that peace any quicker. The opposite happened among that demographic. They were more inclined to appreciate every moment of living.

For others who were taken from their bodies by means of accident or natural causes, there were some cases where returning to their living state after having time in a state of complete peace left them utterly depressed.

Greyson does interview subjects who have set religious practices and others who have lapsed and atheists. Some people saw what they expected to see: deceased loved ones, Jesus, or a God of one form or another. Certain people were surprised by what they encountered.

Greyson has a passion for his psychiatric practice and for the NDE subject. That much comes through. The book just did not stick the landing in organization and presentation of people's deeply personal stories. His writing between the stories is extremely repetitive.

Author Dr. Bruce Greyson began. his exploration of near death experiences decades ago when an overdose patient related information to him that she could have only obtained during a period when she was unconscious in a hospital bed. From his extensive interviews with those who have experienced NDEs, Greyson has come to believe that our brains are not the source of consciousness but rather focus our attention on information necessary for us to function in our world.

The anecdotes are fascinating; however, anyone who has done much reading on the subject will recognize many of them. Greyson allows the reader to come to his own conclusions on the validity of NDEs and life after death, while presenting the subject from a scientific point.

Full Disclosure--NetGalley and the publisher provided me with a digital ARC of this book. This is my honest review.

After is a very interesting book on a topic that is little discussed and even less understood. Bruce Greyson has been investigating in this area for some 40 years, ever since he first encountered unusual behaviors in an unconscious patient early in his career as a psychiatrist. This book helps all who might be interested learn what his and many others’ years of research have revealed about those who have near death experiences (NDEs), how they may occur and some characteristics.

As it happens, there is evidence for NDEs in historical and literary records going back hundreds to thousands of years (the Greeks). There are mentions of injured people seeming to be dead, then being alive and reporting strange visions or experiences. It appears to occur in about 10 to 20% of those who come close to death.

Dr. Greyson presents extensive detail as he has set up a format to move methodically from the existence of NDEs, through the physiology of the brain, theories of brain vs mind, comparison of life pre and post an NDE, etc. There is an international association dedicated to this work now, one in which Dr. Greyson has been very important.

While absolute answers may never be possible, there are very intriguing results found here, such as specific information a person may bring back from an NDE that they didn’t know at the time of their illness/injury. This leads to questions about the possible existence of the mind without the brain. As I said, intriguing.

I do recommend this book to all who have any interest in this area.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

It's always a wonder to read about the abstract like religion from a professional point of view, especially in a field like medicine. Dr. Greyson's book was a joy to read from start to finish, and I was thoroughly surprised by how I didn't tire of the book throughout it's entirety.

The subject in this one was definitely eye catching as it demonstrates that near death experiences are differs yet similar for anyone who has experienced it. Most doctors won’t acknowledge near death experiences despite patients knowledge of things they shouldn’t.

What did I like? My father had a NDE and retold it many times over the course of my life. If it hadn’t been for a student doctor that saved my father after he’d already been cut open for an autopsy then I wouldn’t be here. Medical phenomenon has always been tossed around in our house since his NDE but he also said he saw pink elephants while detoxing from alcohol. I’m glad this doctor didn’t discount so many people’s experiences. Some things just can’t be explained. This book gives you a look at different experiences and allows you to look at the different qualities of a NDE.

Would I recommend or buy? I’d definitely buy a copy and recommend to people curious about things that happen when your body is clinically dead. My father has since passed but this book also gave me peace and made me feel closer to him. I simply believe there is a veil between this world and the next and we must lose our earthly bodies to pass through. Scientists are becoming more convinced as well. Four stars! Interesting book!

I received a complimentary copy to read and voluntarily left a review!

Interesting take on death, how we "get there" and what happens once we're there. I felt almost like the book read like a textbook, but I don't mean this negatively at all. It's like the very clinical, yet tying to emotions, way of describing death. I thought it was very informative, education, and at times, even fascinating. I really enjoyed it.

4/5 Stars

While near death experiences are an interesting phenomenon, there's nothing new in this book that I haven't heard before about them. The individual accounts and research information shared is nothing insightful. I ended up skimming through most of the book. For someone who has no background knowledge of NDE, this may be an interesting book. Otherwise, it's nothing new.

Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson was shaken by an incident early in his career. Working in a hospital, he was called to speak with the roommate of a young woman who survived a suicide attempt, and the next day with the woman herself. She described perfectly the scene of him speaking to her roommate, even mentioning a detail impossible to know: he’d been called away mid-lunch, resulting in a spaghetti stain on his tie.

This incident, which he tried from every angle to explain away or make sense of, led Greyson into decades of research to apply rigorous scientific logic to near-death experiences, or NDEs: when a person brushes close to death and experiences certain seemingly-impossible events, like being able to watch a scene including their physical body from above, or the stereotypical playback of their life. He identifies a number of such things that appear repeatedly among experiencers.

He thoroughly breaks down his research and any testing methods, but mainly shares a number of stories in NDE experiencers’ own words, as they relate what happened, what they witnessed, and how it changed them. Then Greyson provides some analysis about what may have been happening and what he’s analyzed from it. I really appreciated that he establishes his own background firmly: he was never taken by the woo-woo, has a solid scientific education, and isn’t religious, which all felt like important points to be clarified as they’ve colored other writers.

The biggest takeaway is quite a reassuring, consoling one: death isn’t to be feared. Those who have come close aren’t scared or traumatized, or even if they did see imagery that alarmed them, they were reaffirmed about life afterwards. As Greyson himself emphasizes, “if you take only one thing from this book, I would want you to appreciate the transformative power of these experiences to change people’s lives.”

I’ve long wanted to find a book that gives this kind of scientific look at life after death, the best I’ve read being Mary Roach’s Spook. This is definitely the book I was searching for, and maybe the only disappointment is how uncertain so much remains. I mean, what can you really expect, to be fair. But in terms of rigorous scientific analysis, as far as that’s possible, After is it.

Greyson shows so well how difficult this research is, but how scientific principles can be applied in some areas and how even if we don’t have definitive answers, it can tell us a lot that’s applicable to the living. He shows how culture and preexisting religious belief can influence what people say they saw, but science lacks the ability to test the accuracy of it. They also frequently experience life reviews, in which they not only see their own behavior in situations, but can feel what those they interacted with were experiencing. Again, the takeaway is how this can influence our behavior going forward.

It’s interesting how much is the same across reported NDEs. It’s undeniable that there’s something going on, but science hasn’t pinpointed the particulars yet. Greyson has done an incredible lifetime of work in cataloging, listening, and analyzing these stories as far as possible.

I felt like I learned something from this book. Near death experiences are definitely fascinating and the doctor's experiences really made me think of life and the big picture..

Thank you Net Galley for allowing me to read this story in exchange for my honest review!

As Dr. Greyson points out in the book, the plural of anecdote is data. This book is a data-driven compendium of the state of the science regarding near-death experience. It doesn't pretend to offer explanations for what is so far unexplainable. It doesn't speculate. It classifies and organizes NDEs into different types. It reveals what is known: That NDEs are not hallucinations nor signs of mental illness. That the experiences can be life-changing, but positive outcomes require acceptance from loved ones and the medical community. That experiencers can develop a deeper sense of empathy and lose their fear not only of death, but of life.

I was struck by how closely some NDEs resemble Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's descriptions of her stroke: the vibrancy, the sense of oneness. Dr. Greyson touches on this but doesn't explore it. He avoids the speculation that some NDEs could result from a loss of blood flow to the left hemisphere of the brain while the right hemisphere (for some moments at least) remains active. It seems the implication is there, but he's careful not to state it outright.

However, this does not adequately explain other types of NDEs, like out-of-body experiences. So we're left with what's still a great mystery—the profound question of whether consciousness is a function of the brain or something else—and whether consciousness can continue even after the brain has died.

This book doesn't reveal any great secrets of the universe. But it does offer great insight on how to offer compassionate care to patients and loved ones who've had NDEs, and how the experiencers can process the NDEs and integrate them into their lives.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

What happens to us when we die? That’s a universal and age-old question. At my church, we talk about people who have died as moving from the “life beyond this life.” Whether there’s an afterlife or some sort of consciousness that exists in people after death, though, seems to be the great unknown. Or is it? Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson has been studying near-death experiences for more than 40 years and brings the results of his decades-long study of the phenomena to the fore in his new book After. It’s a slightly complicated and challenging book because it is stuffed to the gills with stories from what Greyson calls “experiencers” (those who have experienced a near-death or out-of-body experience) and conclusions on what data gleaned from these people might all mean.

How did Greyson — who is an atheist and self-described skeptic — come to study near-death experiences? One day, while eating spaghetti in a hospital cafeteria, his pager went off and startled him. He wound up getting a spaghetti sauce stain on his tie, which he promptly hid under his lab coat. He’d been called to see a young woman named Holly who had tried to commit suicide and was now unconscious in a hospital bed in one room of the hospital. He then went to a nearby room to talk to the woman’s friend about what had happened. The next day, he went back to talk to Holly, who was now conscious, and Holly indicated that she was in the same neighbouring room as Greyson and her friend the day before and heard the conversation. Holly also mentioned that she saw the spaghetti sauce stain on his tie. Greyson was puzzled. How could have Holly known about the stain unless someone had told her about it? And why would they mention this to her as part of a complicated plot to befuddle the doctor into believing she was awake when she clearly wasn’t? It just didn’t make too much sense. Why would anyone want to play such an elaborate trick? However, Holly’s insistence that she was in the same room as both people while she was actually unconscious in the next room didn’t make much sense, either.

This incident led Greyson to study near-death experiences as a bit of a hobby throughout his medical career. It turns out he doesn’t have any answers to whether the phenomenon is real; he’s more concerned about what the phenomenon does to people who have experienced these experiences. It turns out that there’s no way to scientifically measure whether or not there’s an afterlife where people will meet God or Jesus outside of their bodies before being told to go back to their physical bodies on the operating room table. This turns out to be a blessing because Greyson doesn’t beat you over the head with an insistence that heaven is real. He simply presents his facts and his case about what might be happening and lets the reader come up with their own conclusions. Thus, there are no claims in this book that the experience is a mystical or spiritual experience that proves that God exists. Instead, Greyson seems to think there is enough evidence to suggest that the brain is separate from the mind, and the mind can continue thinking after the brain has shut down and become clinically dead.

It’s a complicated theory to be sure, and, to be honest, I’m not sure if I understand it fully. While Greyson’s prose is easy to understand and meant for the lay reader, he also is guilty of forgetting that he isn’t talking to other doctors from time to time, and so the book could have been a little more focused and offered more explanation at times about topics such as the mind and brain relationship. The other thing that I could offer as criticism about this book is the fact that there are so many stories from experiences in the volume that these anecdotes threaten to topple the entire book! Greyson might have been better served by using the stories from five or six experiencers throughout the book whose experiences illustrate the points he is trying to make as a whole. Instead, we get page after page of testimony from different people — and the result is that we don’t get invested in these people as characters because they abruptly leave the text as soon as they enter it.

Still, After is entertaining and does offer some food for thought. I think I have more questions about near-death experiences now than before I read the book. I’m curious to know more about the link between these experiences and mental illness, and how different the two things are from one another. I also liked the point of the book: Greyson wants people to read about near-death experiences and take home the message that such experiences prove to everyone that it is important to treat each day as though it could be your last. After is just as much about living in the present, as it is an examination of whether God exists or if that existence could ever be scientifically measured.

All in all, I’d say that you should read After if you want to learn more about near-death experiences and what they mean. Just be prepared for more storytelling than clinical research. (In bringing up this criticism, I do concede that the book is meant for the average person, so it may just be that the stories are meant to make the work relatable to a wide audience.) I did enjoy reading about out-of-body experiences and learning how the mind might be processing these experiences. I also enjoyed learning more about the different types of near-death experiences and wondering about the similarities and differences between these experiences from person to person. In the end, After is both an informative and enjoyable read. Is it the last word on this fascinating subject? I don’t think so. Until then, though, what we have in After is a richly rewarding and sometimes confounding tale of life beyond life as seen from those who have come back from the brink.

Fascinating! Dr. Greyson has throughly studied NDE (Near Death Experiences). He takes a close scientific look over multiple decades. I finished the book with a peace about the unknown. Dr. Greyson definitely has a scientific way about him but the book never feels cumbersome with technical speak. I would highly recommend this to anyone with a fear of dying or someone that works with the sick or elderly. It gives a wonderful perspective and hope that there’s more after this.

Some very compelling and convincing storieon life after passing. This was a bit long but quite interesting.