A Neurosurgeon’s Near-Death Experience | Dr. Eben Alexander
The Mary Zilba Podcast · February 15, 2026
When a neurosurgeon's brain shut down from a rare infection, he found himself journeying through realms that conventional neuroscience says shouldn't exist—and returned with a radically different understanding of consciousness, the afterlife, and what we actually are. Dr. Eben Alexander sits down to explore how his week-long coma became a gateway to experiences that transformed him from a skeptic of anything beyond the physical brain into someone convinced we're fundamentally spiritual beings. If you've wondered whether consciousness survives death, or what happens when the scientific materialist worldview encounters the unexplainable, this conversation offers both a gripping personal account and a scientist's honest reckoning with the limits of what he thought he knew.