Press Release Gold

This was accompanied by the message from the publicist: "Your audience might love this story" - "might" being the operative word.

Do Near-Death Experiences Alter the Brain?

Author Says It Definitely Changed Him Forever



Woodland Hills, CA, September 29, 2009 – After he drank a cobra venom cocktail to simulate death, Jamshid Hosseini knew his worldview was forever transformed, but he also believes his brain was physically altered – rewired into something different.


The experience led him to create a spiritual “roadmap to bliss” that he and co-author Dave Cunningham detail in their critically acclaimed self-help book, Travel Within: The 7 Steps to Wisdom and Inner Peace (O-Books, John Hunt Publishing, Ltd.).


“Why did my whole life and direction change after that? I know that my near-death experience gave me peek at the eternal Oneness,” Hosseini said, “but I also feel that my brain actually changed. I’ve been doing a lot of study on this.”


So has Dr. Willoughby Britton, Research Associate in Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University Medical School. She studied the brainwaves of people who have had near-death experiences and found evidence their brainwave patterns differ from those who haven’t had a brush with death. The near-death patients showed a distinct spike in activity in the left temporal lobe.


The brain’s left temporal lobe has been linked to feelings of peace and tranquility. Dr. Britton said the temporal lobe is sometimes called the God module, the part of the brain that connects with the transcendent.


During a spiritual quest that included studies of Baha’i Faith, Hinduism and Zen Buddhism, Hosseini followed a monk in India who asked a select few disciples to drink a concoction of tea, honey and milk laced with cobra venom. The idea was that experiencing near-death would free one of our most primal fear.


For Hosseini, at least, it worked. His life, philosophy, and perhaps even his brain were changed forever. Cunningham, an award-winning journalist, novelist and screenwriter, spent over a year interviewing Hosseini and researching how his new look on life – born of a near-death epiphany – was supported by current thought in the fields of science, philosophy and religion.


Travel Within: The 7 Steps to Wisdom and Inner Peace is not aligned with any particular religion, and its precepts don’t clash with any of the world’s major faiths. The book includes a roundtable discussion between Hosseini, a scientist, a philosopher and a theologian.


During his worldwide journey, Jamshid “Jim” Hosseini lived on a hill overlooking a king’s palace in Iran, was beaten by Muslims for practicing the Baha’i Faith, begged for food in India, and labored for a monk in Katmandu. He took counsel from the famous Rajneesh in Pune and built his own successful business in California.

2 Cleva Bi 1/2

Yesterday I had to put on my hip-hop rebus-solving hat when a CD arrived by S-PYanage. It took a minute to realize his name is pronounced "Espionage," though on the CD he seems to refer to himself as "Spy," so I guess the name works two ways. On the cover, he has been photoshopped to loom like Godzilla over the Saenger Theatre pointing menacingly as people photoshopped into the foreground point at his package. The album's title is on his T-shirt: "Str8 2 Da" and an "I'm with Stupid" hand - "Straight to Da Point".

It's better than the cover would suggest, and the one genuinely surprising moment is "Off n dat wata," where water inevitably brings floodwaters to mind after Katrina and becomes a metaphor for trouble. The moment that's sadly predictable is "Tea Baggin," which is the inevitable "I'm such a freak in bed" song. SPY gets credit for not trying to be coy about the phrase unlike cable news talking heads, but it's still gross posturing as he's caught up in the visual image to have anything more to say.

No Guilt

I don't understand Sally Shapiro titling an album My Guilty Pleasure, but I don't understand feeling guilty about pleasures either. Her relatively anonymous performance - more a set of modest vocal inflections than something that reflects a person - may not be the thing we're supposed to want, but when pure pop is as gorgeous as this Italian disco, it's tough to feel bad. She returns to the sound, style and subject matter of Disco Romance, but "Looking at the Stars," "Love in July" and "Miracle" are as engaging a trio of songs as I've heard this year with hooks that pay off repeatedly, no matter how familiar they seem. Sally Shapiro's not her real name, so there's nothing personal about the album, but self-expression is really overrated.

A Criminal Matter

During the Clinton presidency, Rush Pumpkinhead started each show with the day count for "America Held Hostage." The implication was that Bill Clinton seized an unwilling country, and now Republicans are similarly treating Obama's presidency as illegitimate. First, birthers claim he's truly illegitimate by challenging his birth certificate and his well-documented accounts of his own origins, while others have attacked him as a socialist and a Nazi out to undermine the American way of life. When he proposes to speak to schoolchildren to "challenge them to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning," many Republicans around the country see this as something suspicious - perhaps an occasion for indoctrination from the dark side.

The premise is absurd, but it's further evidence of Republicans' efforts to reduce American politics to a Holy War - a clash not of reasoned, evidence-based notions about what's best for the country but simple belief. Belief is the central tenet of Christianity - that you accept things you can't see, take them on faith, and act as if they're true. Over and over, Republicans retreat to this position, whether on large matters like the unquestionable rightness of the free market, or on specific issues like the non-existent "death panels" and the non-existent threats to seniors posed by health care reform. They choose to believe regardless of what evidence says to the contrary, and those who don't are heretics, spiritual outlaws whose ideas should be criminal because of the threat they pose to America as Republicans believe it to be.

Politics as Holy War can't be laid solely at the feet of Conservatives. Cable network news has long had an investment in a clash of the ideologues. After Michael Kinsley left CNN's Crossfire, Christopher Hitchens says he was asked to take his place on the left debating Pat Buchanan. He passed, he says, when he found out that his job wouldn't be to take the liberal position but to defend Clinton no matter what. And the Holy War fervor has prompted some Democrats to push back reflexively and others are equally automatic in the belief in their own rightness.

Still, it's instructive to remember that the one president whose claim to the White House was genuinely questionable was never treated by Democratic legislators as illegitimate or a criminal, and though his speech gave listeners reason to question his wisdom and his arguments for war in Iraq were as much propaganda as policy, he was never treated as an enemy of the state by the opposition. (The irony is that he was one. With the Patriot Act, he did more long-term damage to the American way of life than terrorists ever could. 9/11 was a remarkable success in that it scared the Bush White House and American government into changing itself in ways no outside force ever could.)