A fellow at New York City’s Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one
of the world’s leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week
Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their
first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind
“out-of-body” experiences. The study, known as AWARE , involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through
Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac
arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project’s origins, its skeptics and
the difference between the mind and the brain.
What sort of methods will this project use to try and verify people’s claims of
“near-death” experience?
When your heart stops beating, there is no blood getting to your brain. And
so what happens is that within about 10 sec., brain activity ceases —as you would imagine. Yet paradoxically, 10% or 20% of people who are
then brought back to life from that period, which may be a few minutes or over
an hour, will report having consciousness. So the key thing here is, Are these
real, or is it some sort of illusion? So the only way to tell is to have
pictures only visible from the ceiling and nowhere else, because they claim
they can see everything from the ceiling. So if we then get a series of 200 or
300 people who all were clinically dead, and yet they’re able to come back and
tell us what we were doing and were able see those pictures, that confirms
consciousness really was continuing even though the brain wasn’t
functioning.
How does this project relate to society’s perception of death?
People commonly perceive death as being a moment — you’re either dead or
you’re alive. And that’s a social definition we have. But the clinical
definition we use is when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working, and
as a consequence the brain itself stops working. When doctors shine a light
into someone’s pupil, it’s to demonstrate that there is no reflex present. The
eye reflex is mediated by the brain stem, and that’s the area that keeps us
alive; if that doesn’t work, then that means that the brain itself isn’t
working. At that point, I’ll call a nurse into the room so I can certify
that this patient is dead. Fifty years ago, people couldn’t survive after
that.
How is technology challenging the perception that death is a
moment?Nowadays, we have technology that’s improved so that we can
bring people back to life. In fact, there are drugs being developed right now
— who knows if they’ll ever make it to the market — that may actually
slow down the process of brain-cell injury and death. Imagine you
fast-forward to 10 years down the line; and you’ve given a patient, whose heart
has just stopped, this amazing drug; and actually what it does is, it slows
everything down so that the things that would’ve happened over an hour, now
happen over two days. As medicine progresses, we will end up with lots and
lots of ethical questions.
But what is happening to the individual at that time? What’s really going on?
Because there is a lack of blood flow, the cells go into a kind of a frenzy to
keep themselves alive. And within about 5 min. or so they start to damage
or change. After an hour or so the damage is so great that even if we restart
the heart again and pump blood, the person can no longer be viable, because the
cells have just been changed too much. And then the cells continue to change
so that within a couple of days the body actually decomposes. So it’s not a
moment; it’s a process that actually begins when the heart stops and
culminates in the complete loss of the body, the decompositions of all the
cells. However, ultimately what matters is, What’s going on to a person’s mind?
What happens to the human mind and consciousness during death? Does that cease
immediately as soon as the heart stops? Does it cease activity within the
first 2 sec., the first 2 min.? Because we know that cells are
continuously changing at that time. Does it stop after 10 min., after half
an hour, after an hour? And at this point we don’t know.
What was your first interview like with someone who had reported an
out-of-body experience?
Eye-opening and very humbling. Because what you see is that, first of all,
they are completely genuine people who are not looking for any kind of fame or
attention. In many cases they haven’t even told anybody else about it because
they’re afraid of what people will think of them. I have about 500 or
so cases of people that I’ve interviewed since I first started out more than
10 years ago. It’s the consistency of the experiences, the reality of what
they were describing. I managed to speak to doctors and nurses who had been
present who said these patients had told them exactly what had happened, and
they couldn’t explain it. I actually documented a few of those in my book
What Happens When We Die because I wanted people to get both angles —not just the patients’ side but also the doctors’ side — and see how it
feels for the doctors to have a patient come back and tell them what was going
on. There was a cardiologist that I spoke with who said he hasn’t told anyone
else about it because he has no explanation for how this patient could have
been able to describe in detail what he had said and done. He was so freaked
out by it that he just decided not to think about it anymore.
Why do you think there is such resistance to studies like yours?
Because we’re pushing through the boundaries of science, working against
assumptions and perceptions that have been fixed. A lot of people hold this
idea that, well, when you die, you die; that’s it. Death is a moment — you know
you’re either dead or alive. All these things are not scientifically
valid, but they’re social perceptions. If you look back at the end of the 19th
century, physicists at that time had been working with Newtonian laws of
motion, and they really felt they had all the answers to everything that was
out there in the universe. When we look at the world around us, Newtonian
physics is perfectly sufficient. It explains most things that we deal with. But then it was
discovered that actually when you look at motion at really small levels — beyond the level of the atoms — Newton’s laws no longer apply. A new
physics was needed, hence, we eventually ended up with quantum physics. It
caused a lot of controversy — even Einstein himself didn’t believe in it. Now,
if you look at the mind, consciousness, and the brain, the assumption that the
mind and brain are the same thing is fine for most circumstances, because in
99% of circumstances we can’t separate the mind and brain; they work at the
exactly the same time. But then there are certain extreme examples, like when
the brain shuts down, that we see that this assumption may no longer seem
to hold true. So a new science is needed in the same way that we had to have a
new quantum physics. The CERN particle accelerator may take us back to our
roots. It may take us back to the first moments after the Big Bang, the very
beginning. With our study, for the first time, we have the technology and the
means to be able to investigate this. To see what happens at the end for us.
Does something continue?
