HarperOne

The longest-lived people in the world get an average of 10 percent of their total calories from protein. Our average is as high as 15 to 20 percent, and of course, if you’re on a high-protein diet—Atkins, Paleo, or the diets recommended by many of my colleagues, and formerly by me—that figure goes up to 40 or 50 percent.

For example, the German physiologist Dr. Carl von Voit studied the diets of late-nineteenth-century laborers and found that they ate about 118 grams of protein per day. Von Voit then made a couple of classic errors. He confused description with prescription, and he extrapolated from heavy laborers to the population at large. He assumed that the workers ate what their bodies needed, so therefore 118 grams of protein must be the optimal daily amount for everyone

Some scientists do not believe in questions that cannot be answered, but they do believe in wrongly formulated questions. In 2005 the journal Science published a special anniversary issue featuring 125 questions that scientists have so far failed to answer.3 The most important unanswered question, What is the universe made of? was followed by, What is the biological basis of consciousness? I would like to reformulate this second question as follows: Does consciousness have a biological basis at all? We can also distinguish between temporary and timeless aspects of our consciousness. This prompts the following question: Is it possible to speak of a beginning of our consciousness, and will our consciousness ever end?
In order to answer these questions, we need a better understanding of the relationship between brain function and consciousness. We will have to find out if there is any indication that consciousness can be experienced during sleep, general anesthesia, coma, brain death, clinical death, the process of dying and, finally, after confirmed death. If the answer to any of these questions is yes, we must try to find scientific explanations and analyze the relationship between brain function and consciousness in these situations. This raises a series of other questions that will be addressed in this book:
Where am I when I sleep? Can I be aware of anything during sleep?
Sometimes there are indications of consciousness under general anesthesia. How is it possible that some patients under general anesthesia can later describe exactly what was being said or even done, usually at the moment when they suffered complications during surgery.
Can we speak of consciousness when a person is in a coma? A recent article in Science looked at the scientific evidence of awareness in a patient in a vegetative state.4 This is a form of coma with spontaneous breathing and brain-stem reflexes. Brain tests showed that when this patient was instructed to imagine certain activities like playing tennis or moving around her home, the monitors recorded changes identical to those in healthy volunteers who carried out the same instructions. This means that the identified changes can be explained only by assuming that this patient, despite her vegetative state, not only understood the verbal instructions but also carried them out. The research demonstrated that this coma patient was aware of both herself and her surroundings but that her brain damage prevented her from communicating her thoughts and emotions directly to the outside world. In her book Uit coma (Out of Coma), Alison Korthals Altes also describes seeing staff and family in and around the intensive care unit during her three-week coma following a serious traffic accident.5

Can we still speak of consciousness when a person has been pronounced brain-dead? In his book Droomvlucht in coma (Dream Flight in Coma), Jan Kerkhoffs tells us about his conscious experiences after neurologists declared him brain-dead following complications during brain surgery. Only because his family refused organ donation was he able to write about his experiences because, much to everybody’s surprise, he regained consciousness after three weeks in a coma.6
Does brain death really equal death, or does it mark the start of a process of dying that can last anywhere between hours and days? What happens to our consciousness during this process of dying?
Does clinical death equal loss of consciousness? Many of the reports of near-death experience covered in this book suggest that during a cardiac arrest, that is, during a period of clinical death, people may experience an exceptionally lucid consciousness.
Can we still speak of consciousness when a person is confirmed dead and the body is cold? I will look more closely at this question below

What is death, what is life, and what happens when I am dead? Why are most people so afraid of death? Surely death can be a release after a difficult illness? Why do doctors often perceive the death of a patient as a failure on their part? Because the patient lost his or her life? Why are people no longer allowed to “just” die of a serious, terminal illness but instead are put on a ventilator and given artificial feeding through tubes and drips? Why do some people in the final stages of a malignant disease opt for chemotherapy, which may prolong life for a short while but certainly does not always improve the quality of their remaining life? Why is our first impulse to prolong life and delay death at all costs? Is fear of death the reason why? And does this fear stem from ignorance of what death might be? Are our ideas about death accurate at all? Is death really the end of everything

According to people who have had an NDE, death is nothing other than a different way of being with an enhanced and broadened consciousness, which is everywhere at once because it is no longer tied to a body

The term autoscopic, as used by Sabom, is actually incorrect for an out-of-body experience. In the event of an autoscopy, a patient (usually with psychiatric symptoms) observes a kind of double of the self from the vantage point of his or her own physical body. In the event of an out-of-body experience, however, people see their body, including verifiable details, from a position outside and above the lifeless body

1. Ineffability
What happens in a life-threatening situation is often totally unfamiliar and indescribable and lies outside our normal sphere of experience. It is not surprising, therefore, that people run into difficulties when they try to put their experience into words.
“I was there. I was on the other side.” For a long time that was all I could say. I still get tears in my eyes thinking about the experience. Too much! It’s simply too much for human words. The other dimension, I call it now, where there’s no distinction between good and evil, and time and place don’t exist.

And an immense, intense pure love compared to which love in our human dimension pales into insignificance, a mere shadow of what it could be. It exposes the lie we live in in our dimension. Our words, which are so limited, can’t describe it. Everything I saw was suffused with an indescribable love. The knowledge and the messages going through me were so clear and pure. And I knew where I was: where there’s no distinction between life and death. The frustration at not being able to put it into human words is immense.

The psychologist Abraham H. Maslow offered a fine definition of what such an inclusive science should entail:
The acceptance of the obligation to acknowledge and describe all of reality, all that exists, everything that is the case. Before all else science must be comprehensive and all-inclusive. It must accept within its jurisdiction even that which it cannot understand or explain, that for which no theory exists, that which cannot be measured, predicted, controlled, or ordered. It must accept even contradictions and illogicalities and mysteries, the vague, the ambiguous, the archaic, the unconscious, and all other aspects of existence that are difficult to communicate. At best it is completely open and excludes nothing. It has no “entrance requirements.”9
The American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn claimed that most scientists are still trying to reconcile theory and facts within the routinely accepted (materialist) paradigm, which he describes as essentially a collection of articles of faith shared by scientists.10