What Happens When a Rational Neuroscientist Has a Near-Death Experience? – An Interview with Dr. Daniel Branco

Does the brain create consciousness, or is the brain created by consciousness?

Most of us never stop to ask the question; we simply assume the brain is in charge and consciousness is just along for the ride. In this conversation, Dr. Daniel Branco, a Harvard-trained neurologist who once mapped the human brain for surgeons, challenges that assumption from hard-won experience. He shares the story of the heart attack that left him unconscious for ten minutes, and the profound peace he found in that silence, an experience that sent him searching for answers science alone couldn’t give him.

Whether you come from a place of scientific skepticism or spiritual curiosity, this dialogue invites you to sit with that opening question a little longer than you’re used to, and to consider whether you’ve been living as a creation when you were always meant to be a creator.

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What was your childhood like spiritually? Did you grow up with a particular faith or spiritual background, and how did that shape your journey into consciousness?

Dr. Daniel Branco: I was born into a very Catholic family in southern Brazil. My parents were deeply Catholic, and my mom made sure my sister and I went to Mass every Sunday. So my childhood was what you’d probably consider a fairly typical Catholic upbringing, not just for Latin America but for Catholics around the world.

At the same time, Brazil has a very unique relationship with spirituality. Even though it’s a predominantly Catholic country, there’s also a tremendous openness and curiosity toward different faiths and traditions. You’ll find African religions like Candomblé and Umbanda, as well as Spiritism, founded by Allan Kardec in the 1800s. Spiritists often describe it less as a religion and more as a philosophy blending spirituality and science, yet it functions as a religion in many ways.

What makes Brazil different is that it’s completely normal for people to participate in more than one spiritual tradition. Many people don’t see those paths as mutually exclusive.

What about you? As you got older, did you begin exploring those other spiritual traditions yourself?

Dr. Daniel Branco: Yes. My extended family included people involved in some of those other traditions. Although my parents remained Catholic, they would occasionally visit Spiritist centers, especially when someone in the family became seriously ill. That was common—people would look beyond conventional medicine, hoping to find healing or answers somewhere else.

For me, though, it was never driven by that kind of search. I never became a committed Spiritist. What drew me wasn’t faith—it was curiosity. I wasn’t really a person of faith growing up. In fact, I think I’ve only become more of a person of faith over the past few years as I’ve become more spiritual.

As a child and teenager, I was fascinated by the unknown. I carried this deep inner sense that reality wasn’t what we thought it was, that religions weren’t fully explaining what was really going on. I often felt like an outsider—almost like an alien on this planet.

Eventually, I found a community of like-minded people in Brazil, and during my teenage years, I went through a spiritual phase. But that gradually faded as I immersed myself in science and academia. I studied electrical engineering first, then went to medical school. Once you’re deeply immersed in that scientific world, unless your spiritual foundation is incredibly strong, it’s easy to lose that connection.

Looking back, I paid a price for losing it.

What motivated you to pursue medical school?

Dr. Daniel Branco: In Brazil, medical school is an undergraduate degree, as it is in most of the world. By the time you’re finishing high school, you’re already deciding what profession you want to pursue.

Initially, I chose electrical engineering and computer science. As a research assistant, I designed microchips and electronic circuits, and I really enjoyed it. But at some point, I found myself asking, This is fascinating—but what about the brain? I wanted to understand how the brain creates consciousness.

I wasn’t particularly excited about my future in engineering, so I made a pretty dramatic decision. I dropped out, retook the entrance exams, and applied to medical school—not because I dreamed of treating patients, but because I wanted to study the brain and understand consciousness.

That question became the driving force behind my entire career. During five of my six years in medical school, I conducted brain mapping research. After graduation, I completed a neurology residency, then went to Harvard for my postdoctoral work, where I continued researching brain mapping for neurosurgical planning.

The same question has driven everything I’ve done professionally: How does the brain create consciousness?

For readers who aren’t familiar with this field, what exactly is brain mapping, and how were you using it to help people?

Dr. Daniel Branco: There are several different techniques that fall under the umbrella of brain mapping. More specifically, what I did was map the brains of patients who were candidates for epilepsy surgery or brain tumor surgery—people who were about to have parts of their brain removed to treat disease.

My role wasn’t to perform the surgery. I wasn’t a surgeon. My job was to provide the surgeon with detailed information about where critical functions were located in each patient’s brain—functions like language, memory, and movement.

For example, if I’m moving my right hand, an area on the left side of my brain becomes active. That’s true for most healthy people. But when the brain develops abnormally because of conditions like epilepsy or tumors, those functions can shift. Sometimes the anatomy stays the same while the function moves to a different location. Other times, entirely different areas of the brain begin compensating for the damaged region.

So the brain mapping you were doing wasn’t about creating a general map of the human brain. It was specific to each patient, helping the surgeon know exactly what could be safely removed. Am I understanding that correctly?

Dr. Daniel Branco: Exactly. In general, we already have a good understanding of where these functions are located in the average brain. What we needed to know was where they were in that particular person’s brain.

We did that using functional MRI, or fMRI. Unlike a standard MRI, which only shows the brain’s anatomy, functional MRI also shows which areas become active during specific tasks. You see these colorful activation patterns overlaid on the brain, allowing you to identify where different functions are actually taking place.

Today, that’s a fairly common technique, but when I was doing this work about twenty years ago—especially mapping memory—it was still very innovative and technically challenging.

Essentially, my job was to tell the surgeon how far they could safely go during surgery before removing tissue that would significantly affect the patient’s cognitive abilities.

Were you identifying those areas by having patients perform specific tasks while they were inside the fMRI scanner?

Dr. Daniel Branco: To identify which part of the brain is becoming active, you have to ask the patient to perform a task that’s associated with the function you’re studying.

My research focused on memory encoding. We studied different types of memory—images, words, patterns, and other forms of information—because different kinds of memories tend to rely more heavily on one hemisphere of the brain than the other.

During the scan, I would present different types of stimuli while the patient was inside the MRI. From that, I could determine how much memory reserve existed on the right and left sides of the brain for different kinds of information, which helped the surgeon make more informed decisions before operating.

After the surgery, did you follow up to see how the patients were doing?

Dr. Daniel Branco: Yes, although that wasn’t the primary focus of my research. I knew the outcomes because I was part of the neurosurgery department. I was a neurologist, which means I specialized in diagnosing and treating neurological conditions with medication rather than performing surgery.

The neurosurgeons operated, the neurologists managed the clinical side, and together we worked as a multidisciplinary team. Not everyone in the lab was a physician, but we were all working toward the same goal—understanding how the brain functions.

Did you develop an emotional connection with the patients, or did your role feel more clinical?

Dr. Daniel Branco: It was much more clinical because the patients belonged to my supervisor, Dr. Alex Golby, who is still a neurosurgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard. I was there as a researcher. I wasn’t treating patients directly, and I’m not licensed to practice medicine in the United States. In fact, becoming a practicing physician here was never part of my plan.

So I didn’t develop close personal relationships with the patients. But I certainly cared about them. Medical training teaches you to approach patients with empathy, and I believe I genuinely have that empathy as well. Even though my role was primarily research, I always tried to treat every patient with compassion and respect.

Talk to me about the path from neurologist and neuroscientist to entrepreneur. You’ve built multiple businesses that serve the healthcare industry. What motivated that transition?

Dr. Daniel Branco: The original motivation was always the same: understanding consciousness. That’s why I pursued medicine, neurology, neuroscience, and brain mapping in the first place.

Toward the end of my postdoctoral fellowship, I reached a crossroads. I received an offer from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Cornell University to join their faculty in neuroradiology. It was an incredible opportunity, and it would have meant spending the rest of my career researching brain mapping and helping patients with serious neurological diseases.

The problem was that it wasn’t my original goal.

My real motivation had always been to understand consciousness and, ultimately, to help humanity better understand our true nature. At some point, I realized academia can be a very conservative environment, especially if you’re asking questions that fall outside the conventional framework. That’s exactly where I found myself.

So instead of accepting the position, I made the difficult decision to leave academia altogether.

By then, I had already begun questioning one of neuroscience’s fundamental assumptions. I no longer believe the brain creates consciousness. If anything, I had begun to suspect the opposite—that consciousness creates the brain, along with physical reality itself. In other words, perhaps we exist in consciousness first, rather than existing only as physical bodies that somehow generate consciousness.

You’re introducing a profound idea there, Daniel. One of the headlines on your website asks, “Is consciousness created by the brain, or is the brain created by consciousness?” What does that question actually mean?

Dr. Daniel Branco: At its core, it’s a choice—an assumption about reality. It’s not something science can definitively answer, but it’s one of the most important assumptions humanity makes.

The challenge is that most people don’t even have a clear definition of consciousness.

For me, consciousness is the space in which our experience of being exists. It’s where all experience happens. It’s not abstract or imaginary—it’s something profoundly real.

Most people assume the brain creates consciousness. In that view, consciousness is simply a byproduct of neurons firing and electrical activity inside the brain. Our awareness, our thoughts, our emotions, our sense of self—even our experience of pain—are all considered products of brain activity.

If that’s true, then when the brain dies, consciousness disappears as well.

But consciousness is also the very thing that allows you to know you exist. You only know you exist because you’re conscious.

Take an ant, for example. I don’t know whether an ant knows it exists. If it does, it’s because it has some form of consciousness. The same applies to dogs and cats. I believe they have conscious experiences, but I have no way of knowing what it actually feels like to be a dog or a cat.

I can recognize that a dog appears happy or frightened because I’ve experienced happiness and fear myself. I can relate through my own conscious experience. But I can’t truly know what happiness feels like from a dog’s perspective.

So what does it mean to say that the brain might actually be created by consciousness?

Dr. Daniel Branco: To answer that, we first have to recognize that there are at least two kinds of reality.

The first is what I’d call third-person reality, or consensus reality. This is the physical world—the world we all agree exists. It’s measurable. We can point to a table and say, “This is real.”

The second is first-person reality, which is conscious experience.

Nothing could be more real than your own consciousness because every experience you have—your experience of the external world and your inner world—exists there.

Pain is a perfect example.

Pain exists only in first-person reality. It doesn’t exist in consensus reality as an object you can measure directly. We all agree pain is real because we’ve all experienced it.

Imagine there were only one person on Earth who could feel pain. No one else would know what they were talking about. Science wouldn’t even know pain existed because there would be no instrument capable of detecting the experience itself.

From that simple example, we can see there are at least two forms of reality: consensus reality and conscious experience.

The question then becomes: Are they equally fundamental, or does one give rise to the other?

Some people argue they exist independently, but that’s difficult to reconcile because they’re so deeply intertwined. Right now, I’m using a physical body to have a conscious experience as I speak with you. They clearly interact.

Humanity has largely assumed that physical reality is fundamental—that atoms and particles come first and that consciousness somehow emerges from them.

I’m questioning that assumption.

Perhaps consciousness is the more fundamental reality, and the physical universe emerges from it.

One of the challenges is that science can measure only the correlates of conscious experience—not the experience itself.

Take pain again. Science can measure neural activity that’s associated with pain, but it can’t measure the experience of pain directly. To know what’s happening, the scientist still has to ask the conscious person, “Are you in pain?”

Without that first-person report, the measurements alone don’t reveal the experience.

In that sense, consciousness itself becomes the instrument. We know pain exists because conscious beings experience it. Pain doesn’t exist for science as an object—it exists for scientists because scientists themselves are conscious beings.

So what you’re really saying is that there are limitations to neuroscience—and really to science in general. That brings us to your book, Spirit Duality: Spiritual Initiation for Rational People. As you started recognizing those limitations, how did that change your own life and your understanding of consciousness?

Dr. Daniel Branco: Exactly. That’s a good segue from your previous question.

When you realize that science can only deal with certain aspects of reality—but not all aspects of reality—your perspective begins to change.

Take pain, for example. Science can measure the brain activity associated with pain, but it can’t discover the experience of pain itself. Or think about the dog we were talking about earlier. What if dogs have a completely different kind of conscious experience than humans? How would science ever discover that? The reality is that it can’t.

That doesn’t mean science is wrong. Science is amazing. We’ve achieved incredible things through science. The danger is assuming that science can give us all the answers.

Science is a method, and every method is limited by its own assumptions. One of those assumptions is that matter is fundamental. But science can’t prove that matter is fundamental because that’s an assumption of the method, not a discovery.

Realizing that changed my life.

I wanted to understand what exists beyond the limits of science—beyond what science can reveal about reality. That naturally led me into the world of consciousness, and from there, into spirituality.

What began to unfold in your own life as you came to those realizations? Did you start reading different books, listening to teachers, or having spiritual experiences yourself?

Dr. Daniel Branco: It was really a combination of all of those things.

I’d had unusual experiences growing up as a teenager, but during my scientific years, I pushed them aside. I basically pretended they weren’t there.

Then, about ten years ago, I had a heart attack that led to a near-death experience.

I was physically unconscious for about ten minutes, but from my perspective, I was completely conscious. It was the best experience I’ve ever had.

Tell us about it. What did you experience?

Dr. Daniel Branco: It’s actually difficult to describe because it wasn’t an experience filled with information.

There wasn’t much to report. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t see anyone. I had no memories, no identity, no language. It felt as though I was floating in a dark space—a very primal kind of existence.

But there was one thing.

It was the most profound sense of peace I’ve ever experienced. I didn’t want to come back.

There was nothing to analyze, nothing to understand, nothing to do. For someone who had spent his entire life analyzing everything and approaching the world through science and reason, it was a gift.

For the first time, I could simply be.

It felt like pure existence. Pure peace.

That experience completely changed my life.

For several years afterward, I wanted to return to that peace. Not because I wanted to die again, but because it was like coming home from the most beautiful vacation you’ve ever had—you simply want to go back.

Over time, though, I realized the goal wasn’t to return to that place. The goal was to learn how to create that same peace here in my own life.

That journey led me to books, videos, channelers, and a great deal of personal reflection.

That’s quite a leap—from being a neuroscientist to exploring channeling. How did that make sense to you?

Dr. Daniel Branco: I don’t channel myself. I became interested in listening to channelers.

Part of the reason it wasn’t so strange for me is that I grew up around those kinds of experiences in Brazil.

I had relatives involved in Spiritism and Afro-Brazilian traditions, where mediumship was common. I’d seen people go into trance states, become completely different personalities, and afterward have no memory of what had happened.

So those experiences weren’t entirely foreign to me.

When I went into science and academia, I left all of that behind. But when I eventually returned to spirituality, I wasn’t really interested in the phenomena themselves. I was interested in the quality of the information.

One distinction I make is between a medium and a channeler.

In the traditions I grew up around, mediums often appeared to be completely taken over by another being. It was a much more intense, physical experience. From what I remember, those communications didn’t really answer the deeper questions I was searching for.

With modern channeling, I found the information to be much more refined. The person remains very much themselves, and I was interested in the ideas being shared rather than the phenomenon itself.

That’s why it wasn’t such a strange transition for me. I had grown up around these experiences—I had simply left them behind for many years before returning to them from a very different perspective.

How would a rational neurologist or neuroscientist explain channeling? How would they explain it from a scientific perspective?

Dr. Daniel Branco: I don’t think most neuroscientists would explain it because they don’t know what it is. It doesn’t really belong to the world of science.

Based on my own observations—not necessarily speaking as a scientist—the explanation depends entirely on your starting assumption. That’s why I think that assumption is so important.

If you assume the brain is fundamental, then you can come up with all sorts of explanations involving neurotransmitters, neurochemistry, or psychology. Scientists are expected to provide answers, so they naturally look for explanations within the framework of science.

But if you invert that assumption and begin with the idea that consciousness is fundamental, then everything changes.

I’m not saying that Daniel’s consciousness creates Daniel’s brain. What I mean is that consciousness is a realm of reality—a space that contains physical reality. In that sense, physical reality is a consequence of consciousness, not the other way around.

One idea you can infer from quantum physics is that observation plays a fundamental role. Quantum physics doesn’t literally say that observation creates reality, but it does suggest that we only know certain properties of reality through observation. So it’s reasonable to ask whether observing reality is, in some way, also participating in its creation.

From that perspective, I see the brain as a filter of consciousness—a transducer that consciousness uses to have a human experience.

I don’t think of consciousness as Daniel’s consciousness or your consciousness. Consciousness itself is one. Things like measurement, numbers, and mathematics belong to physical reality. Consciousness is the source of physicality. It’s the source of creation.

So, in my view, the brain filters consciousness into the experience of being a particular individual. If consciousness wants to experience being Daniel, or being a dog, or being David, it has to filter out everything that is not Daniel, not a dog, or not David. That’s what allows it to have the direct experience of being one specific being.

That’s a fascinating thought. I’ve never heard it explained that way—that consciousness filters out every other aspect of itself to experience being a specific person.

Dr. Daniel Branco: Exactly. One specific being.

A common idea in spiritual circles is that we create our own reality. Usually, people mean creating more money, better relationships, health, or the kind of life they want. How do you understand our ability to create our own reality?

Dr. Daniel Branco: That’s actually a more complicated question than it sounds because, first, you have to define who “I” am.

If I were my brain, then I’m hopeless. I’m not creating any reality—I’m simply a consequence of brain activity. From a neuroscientific perspective, there is no free will because the brain is a rules-based machine. It’s always following the rules. So if I can’t change those rules, then who is? Is it the brain, or is it something beyond the brain?

I think that’s where many people become frustrated. They try to create a new reality or make more money through action alone. That’s the brain trying to create reality in the physical world.

But I don’t think reality is that simple. Between the physical world and consciousness, there are layers. The mind is produced by the brain, and the mind produces what we call the ego. That’s where all of our identities live: I’m an MD. I’m a father. I’m American. I’m Brazilian. Those are all constructs of the ego, and the ego has a very limited ability to create reality.

The real creative power comes from what people generally call the higher self. The higher self has free will. The higher self creates reality. So when we try to create from the ego—I want that house. I want that car.—It’s difficult because we’re limiting ourselves to the rules of the physical world.

Physical reality is very rules-based, whereas consciousness is the space that creates the rules.

If people focused more on how they want to feel than on what they want to have, it would become much easier to create those realities because those realities are created in consciousness.

Free will is different from wanting. Wanting is very ego-based. Free will is more like choosing who you’re going to become. You don’t achieve things outside yourself first. You create the person capable of experiencing those things.

Ironically, once you become that person, those things are no longer as important as they once seemed.

It’s really about elevating your consciousness, living from higher values, and building a beautiful garden within yourself. The rest becomes a consequence of that.

No one else can build that inner garden for you. That’s completely your responsibility. And when you do, synchronicities begin to happen. They may not bring exactly what your ego originally wanted, but they bring what’s aligned with who you’ve become.

Everyone is capable of creating that inner reality, and ultimately, that’s the only reality we ever truly experience. Everything else is just a simulation—an illusion.

What I hear you saying is that we’re constantly creating ourselves. If we focused less on creating things and more on embracing the fact that we’re creators, we’d have a very different experience of life.

Dr. Daniel Branco: We’re always creating ourselves. There really isn’t another option. Whoever we’ve become is our own creation. Other people may influence us, but even the amount of influence we allow is our own choice.

The problem begins when we become attached to things outside ourselves. Most people want three kinds of things: material possessions, relationships, or status. They want money, love, or recognition. All of those involve attachment.

The first question is: Do those desires actually serve you? Why do you need them in the first place?

That’s when people begin to discover who they really are—the creator.

I use AI as an example. AI is our creation, yet it’s constantly creating. In that sense, it’s both a creation and a creator.

We’re the same.

The more we see ourselves as creators, the more power we have over our lives. The more we see ourselves only as creations, the more powerless we become.

Many people say, I didn’t ask to be here. I’m God’s creation. Life happened to me. That’s choosing to see yourself as a creation rather than a creator.

When you see yourself as a creator, your perspective changes. You may not know exactly why you’re here, but you know there must be a reason, and your purpose becomes discovering it.

Those are two completely different ways of living.

I don’t think that’s a choice the brain makes. The brain is concerned with survival, pleasure, and the physical world. That deeper choice comes from a higher level of consciousness.

Toward the end of your book, you shift from the individual to organizations and corporations. Why did you make that turn?

Dr. Daniel Branco: Because I believe we need to become a more spiritual civilization. Otherwise, we’ll eventually destroy ourselves.

When we see ourselves as nothing more than our bodies, we become afraid of losing them. Fear drives us to accumulate more resources, compete, and fight over them. That’s how fear-based societies are created.

What we need instead is a society that sees itself as the creator of its own future.

One of our biggest attachments is our identity—our job, our title, our role. People believe they are their work. They lose a job and immediately wonder who they are without it.

But your job isn’t who you are. Even your body isn’t who you are.

That’s why I believe these ideas have to reach organizations, governments, and businesses. Otherwise, it’s very difficult for individuals to change because so much of their identity is shaped by those systems.

In my view, an organization is a collection of conscious beings. In that sense, it becomes a kind of conscious being itself.

Just as the cells in our body are part of a larger organism, people within an organization are part of something larger. If the overall consciousness of that organization doesn’t evolve, it becomes much harder for the individuals within it to evolve as well.

That’s why I believe organizations themselves need to become more spiritual.

You’ll be speaking at the San Diego Transcendence Retreat this September. What can people expect from your presentation?

Dr. Daniel Branco: I’ve been thinking about how to make these ideas practical. They’re interesting concepts, but the real question is how to apply them in everyday life.

I don’t know exactly what I’ll be speaking about yet, but whatever I bring will be built around these ideas and focused on practical application.

Where can people connect with you online?

Dr. Daniel Branco: Everything is now in one place, DanielBranco.com. My books, social media, and everything else are there.

Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Thank you for writing the book and for everything you’re contributing to the world. I look forward to meeting you in person.

Dr. Daniel Branco: Thanks so much, David. It was a pleasure. I’m looking forward to seeing you in September.