Savants, Near-Death Experiences, and Enlightenment

The strange correlation between our brain and unexplainable phenomena

We live in a world that cannot be explained entirely by science. There are gaps in the woven fabric of our reality that just wouldn’t conform to logical explanations. We know these gaps as intuitions, miracles, medical mysteries, inspiration, genius, etc.

But the strangest of all is the supernatural ability of a few highly-spiritual people, who could pull an event from our future timeline and manifest it in our present reality simply because we were in need of a miracle.

Now, these are not some well-marketed magicians or crowd-amassing clairvoyants. They don’t have their hands hovering over a crystal ball or noses buried in horoscopes. They don’t break the internet with their popularity because it is not in their making to seek attention. They don’t even want to have anything to do with any of us, yet if our paths crossed with theirs and if their grace was upon us, they could rewrite our future with just their thought.

For the label-driven, logic peddlers like some of us, these people who go beyond the silence within them are famously known as the enlightened ones.

Alongside these miracle workers, there are a few other regular people among us — educated, rational, and intellectual individuals — who experience unexplainable phenomena, but don’t quite categorize them as spiritual.

Here are three tangents that touch upon three such groups of people who experienced unexplainable phenomena. Stick with the story long enough to find the three tangent points curve toward each other to form the bigger picture and an even bigger question.

Tangent #1 — Brain and enlightenment

Fair credits to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, author of the book My Stroke of Insight, because of whom I now believe that enlightenment is a flip of the switch, a covert action potential that resides in the right hemisphere of everyone’s brain.

Enlightenment is not an abstract accomplishment exclusive to the spiritually ordained. Meditation is not a prerequisite. It’s rather a lightning bolt of a sneak peek into something beyond us that could hit any John Doe or Jane Doe when they least expect it.

For me, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk is easily one of the best talks of all time where she narrates how her life turned upside down when she woke up one morning with a full-blown headache. What this Harvard-trained neuroanatomist was feeling was actually the oncoming of a stroke caused by a blood clot pushing on the left hemisphere of her brain. In her TED talk, she goes on to narrate how her brain altered her viewpoint as it deteriorated moment by moment, which she explains as, ‘seeing the workings of the brain from the inside out’.

The highlight of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s story is that when the logical left hemisphere started shutting down function after function and the brain chatter ceased causing her to feel like her mind had gone offline, she began to notice the sea of tranquility that belonged to the right hemisphere.

She perceived an engulfing silence where she felt like pure energy one with all that is, very much similar to the concept of enlightenment.

Tangent #2 — Savants

There is something called savant syndrome where people with mental disabilities from birth (congenital savants) or in some cases healthy individuals following a brain injury (acquired savants) show prodigious skills in areas like math, music, or art without any prior training.

According to Dr. Darold A. Treffert, the psychiatrist who studied the syndrome extensively refers to savants as people who “know things they never learned”.

Music

These unusual-minded people could comprehend the rules of music so intuitively that despite having never had a music lesson before, they could replay classical compositions flawlessly after hearing them only once.

The 18th-century prolific composer, Mozart, wrote down the Sistine Chapel’s much-guarded and exclusive composition, Miserere, entirely from memory after listening to it just once.

Math

These savants could do lightning arithmetic calculations and solve exponential math problems by visualizing numbers as three-dimensional shapes with colors and textures that make them see the answer in their minds instantly without having to actually solve it.

The gifted engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla solved arithmetic problems by envisioning a blackboard where the operations appeared step by step so rapidly that by the time the problem was presented by the teacher, he would have already arrived at the solution.

Inspiration

They can create original symphonies, write pages of structured poetry, and produce expressive paintings, not through conscious effort on their part but rather compelled by the urge of inspiration surging through them unbidden and unrestrained from a source they know is beyond their minds.

The intuitive mathematical genius of the 20th century, Srinivasa Ramanujan, claimed that his equations and formulae, which are now considered to be significant in understanding string theory and black holes, despite these things being unheard of during his time, were revealed to him in his dreams by his ancestral goddess.

What is striking is that in most of these savants, neuroscientists have observed that the disability was always in the left hemisphere of the brain while the hidden magic that it brought forth belonged to the right hemisphere — similar to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s story.

Tangent #3 — A near-death experience

Dr. Anthony Cicoria is one such acquired savant, an orthopedic surgeon by profession, who was struck by lightning following which he developed an insatiable desire to listen to piano music.

Soon thereafter he started hearing original compositions in his head, initially in vivid dreams and later whenever he listened to or played others’ works. This eventually compelled him to learn to play the piano and write music.

He claims that his compositions are being ‘given to him from the other side’ and that he finds his experience to be a virtual rebirth of sorts for the purpose of “tuning into” the music that flows through him spontaneously.

But Dr. Cicoria’s spiritual reboot happened well before music came into the picture. It happened when the lightning hit him.

Dr. Cicoria describes that at the same moment the lightning hit him sending him flying backward, he sensed himself moving forward. Confused, he turned around to see his body on the floor and everything he experienced from that point onward was classic near-death in nature.

Near death is a phenomenon described by many who had a brush with death that typically includes-

• being immersed in a bright but pleasant light
• feeling an overwhelming sense of peace and love
• seeing flashes of various scenes from one’s life, and
• meeting spiritual beings or long-lost relatives and communicating with them, not with words, but by simply “knowing” in a manner that is clearer than hearing.

Brain — the point where the tangents meet

The brain is a biological instrument. It is an amazing and complex instrument made up of a hundred billion nerve cells called neurons. Each neuron is connected to 10,000 other neurons that pass information via 1,000 trillion connections every second.

The brain sits in a dark, hard place and has no clue what the outside world is like. Yet it perceives the world by receiving information through our sensory portals and transforming them into electrical impulses. Using the electrical signals, it interprets patterns from the database perfected over eons of evolution, thus painting our reality as we know it.

The neurons don’t contain data but only positive and negative ions. So when we see a red rose, what really happens is that photons of light enter the retina and stimulate the photoreceptor cells to exchange the ions, thus generating an electrical signal that is transmitted among other neurons and cross-referenced with patterns stored in a phantom place called memory to ultimately make us go, “That’s a red rose.”

Everything is an electrical impulse — a rose, a face, a fragrance, a touch, even a thought is an electrical impulse.

The big picture and an even bigger question

1. The brain cannot think on its own. The brain is not capable of creating a subjective experience. When we see a rose, our brain doesn’t create the thought of seeing the rose, but only receive the input to stimulate the relevant neurons. Then will it be fair to say that when we think a thought, our brain did not create our thought but only received it as a stimulus?
2. There are people who were declared to be clinically dead because they had a cardiac arrest that halted blood supply to the brain, therefore killing any neuron firings. But when resuscitated, they were able to recall events that happened during that flatline period. When they had no brain functions or brain wave activities, how could they have experienced those images of peace, light, memories, and events? Even if their brains did have some residual active neurons that were undetected by the brain scanners, from where did those neurons get the stimulation to generate electrical signals that interpreted those thoughts of peace?
3. In the case of savants, some experts claim that the artistic abilities surging forth without any prior learning could be the result of genetic memory stored by some dormant neurons, which were released into action by a damaged left hemisphere. But genetic memory can only resuscitate the neurons on the rules and technicality of music and math. It cannot create an original composition or complex math equations. Then from where does the brain receive its first-hand ideas?
4. Not every person that has tasted eternal peace had to receive a clout on the left side of his/her head to experience that. Most of them spontaneously experience the sensation through life-long meditation practice. Upon conscious determination to stay in that space and having made it a way of life, they continue to feel peace and also rake up extraordinary abilities like seeing things beyond one’s timeline or folding events from the future onto the present like it was soft caramel. Russell Targ, an American physicist who worked on remote viewing with the CIA in the 1970s and ’80s so plainly states, “People can quiet their mind and describe and experience what is happening at a distant place or in the future.”

So if the rewiring in the brain enables us to access information that is beyond the physical like inspiration, miracles, and premonition, where is that information streaming from?

“My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”

Nikola Tesla

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