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off with what turns out to be the first line of explanation for NDEs: the people who experience them are not actually dead! This is, in fact, why they’re called near-death experiences. Gupta recalled that when he was in medical school the residents were taught to mark the time of death to the minute, as if one moment someone is alive and in the next moment … dead. “I mean, it just seemed so arbitrary even back then. And I think, in many ways, you know, that’s been the hunt for me. That’s what I’ve been searching for.” What Gupta has discovered is that death can often take anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours to occur, depending on the conditions. As he demonstrates in his book (and CNN specials based on the book), people who have fallen into near-freezing lakes and rivers and “died” were actually not quite dead. Their core body temperatures were reduced so rapidly and dramatically that their vital brain and body tissues were preserved long enough for subsequent resuscitation. What appears to be something as miraculous as the resurrection of an actual dead person in fact has a nonmiraculous explanation in medical science.

So much of this debate on life after death turns on what is meant by death. People who believe in the afterlife and search for empirical evidence through NDEs, for example, will use such phrases as “he was dead and came back to life,” or “she died and saw what was on the other side.” When Probst introduced the football referee, for example, he said, “A man died on a football field seven years ago and came back to life.” Gupta reinforced the point by explaining that Schriever “was dead for two minutes and forty seconds” (between collapse and revival). Schriever described what happened next: “It’s very peaceful. It’s very serene. And it’s extremely, extremely bright. I mean, it is bright. And I was—I saw a place that I was supposed to go. I saw that halo, and something was saying, go toward the halo.”

When I was asked for a scientific explanation for this apparent miracle, I gave the obvious answer that Gupta had earlier provided: “He wasn’t dead. You started this hour off with Sanjay Gupta explaining we can’t say somebody’s dead at one given moment at a particular time on the clock. That’s not how it works. It takes two, three, five, ten minutes to go through a dying process. The ref wasn’t dead. He was in a near-death state.” In fact, as the rest of the story revealed, the man had his heart restarted right there on the field by a portable automated external defibrillator available on the sidelines, and the entire event from collapse to revival was less than two minutes long. In this case, as in so many others, there is nothing miraculous to explain. The man was not brought back to life because he was never actually dead.

Whenever I appear on such shows I try to come up with a single message to leave viewers with, because in the chaos that is talk television a cacophony of voices often leads to confusion and obfuscation. For this show, the message I tried to convey based on what the other guests were saying is, in fact, a point that should be repeated like a mantra every time we encounter any mysteries: the fact that we cannot fully explain a mystery with natural means does not mean it requires a supernatural explanation.

Deepak Chopra made this error during the show when he responded to my argument that without the brain there is no mind because people who lose brain tissue due to injury, stroke, or surgery also lose the mind function associated with that brain tissue—no brain, no mind. Chopra challenged me with obviously intentional irony: “Well, I have to say of Michael that he is very superstitious. He’s addicted to the superstition of materialism. The first thing he said about the brain, you know, that you destroy a certain part of the brain and that function will not come back—he hasn’t kept up with the literature. There’s a whole phenomenon called neural plasticity.” Yes, indeed, I rejoined, and that makes my point even stronger: it’s the neural rewiring of the brain that saves