Sam Parnia

There is nothing we can do wrong.

In Lucid Dying, Sam Parnia recaps her search on the near-death experiences of thousands of people.

Shortly after death, people evaluate their life in a deeply reflective way based on how they treated others.

Which religion they did or did not follow doesn't matter.

So in that case of a shared death experience, you have at least three witnesses, not counting the people who were in the operating room.

In 2014, an international research team led by Dr. Sam Parnia published the results of the AWARE study, which examined more than 2,000 cardiac arrests across 15 hospitals.

One survivor described observing his own resuscitation from above.

He accurately recalled the appearance and movements of the medical staff, along with instructions from the automated defibrillator.

There have been no brain scans during an episode, nor blood work to accompany them.

A group of researchers at New York University Langone Health, led by Sam Parnia, has been planning continuous EEG monitoring of 500 dying dementia patients, which might someday tell us what brain activity looks like during lucid episodes.

If the video evidence holds up, and if some future study finds a physiological signature to match that evidence, the picture of dementia we currently have would need rethinking.

Memory and identity would need to be understood as more distributed, more redundant, and more recoverable than the standard neurodegenerative story

But there's another significant element to this story.

Aufderheide shared this experience at the end of one of resuscitation researcher Sam Parnia's talks at a conference in September 2012.

He presented this account publicly to Dr. Parnia and the other audience members.

After he finished his story, someone from the audience asked Aufderheide whether he had perhaps shared with the nursing staff the thought that he had been thrown to the wolves, so to speak.

There have been no brain scans during an episode, nor blood work to accompany them.

A group of researchers at New York University Langone Health, led by Sam Parnia, has been planning continuous EEG monitoring of 500 dying dementia patients, which might someday tell us what brain activity looks like during lucid episodes.

If the video evidence holds up, and if some future study finds a physiological signature to match that evidence, the picture of dementia we currently have would need rethinking.

Memory and identity would need to be understood as more distributed, more redundant, and more recoverable than the standard neurodegenerative story allows.

So I have this clinical or scientific mindset as well as this spiritual one that sometimes come into conflict.

And so the studies that have been done by Parnia and others have been one in 1987 of children actually that had cardiac arrest.

And there have been a recent one in 2024 that was done.

It was called on the Lancet.

Others are attempting to do that as well.

And I mean, you look at Gary Habermas's work and some of J.P. Moreland's work and work of people like Sam Parnia and Bruce Grayson and, you know, Pim van Lommel in over in Europe, people who are just looking at things objectively and trying to make an argument of what is true based on the evidence rather than based on their presuppositions.

Where do you think, Michael, that this evidence gets us? I mean, I'm sure there's some Christians that would love for this just to be like, oh, look, here's Christianity confirmed through these near-death experiences.

Where do you think when you look at what you've seen with near-death experiences, it seems like we're pushing beyond there being just a material world and there is something more like heaven.

No, of course not.

Sam Parnia and others have been able to do that in a hospital context for legitimate reasons, but I don't do that.

Can you do something similar with TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation?

Well, I have colleagues that have been doing that.

Some research has been done into testing out-of-body experiences in hospital settings, but as nobody's been shouting about how real they are, you can probably guess how these have gone so far.

Medical researcher Sam Parnia has tested the out-of-body aspect by putting tablets, i.e. screens, not pills, near where patients are lying and playing a series of 10 random images on them.

If the patient's consciousness left their body, they would presumably be able to look down and see and report back on the images.

Nobody ever has.

The question behind that image was almost disarmingly simple.

If a patient truly experiences a resuscitation from outside the body, can that patient identify information unavailable from the ordinary position of the body? Sam Parnia and a multinational group of resuscitation researchers used this design while studying 567 in-hospital cardiac arrests across 25 sites.

The patients outwardly showed no ordinary signs of consciousness.

Their hearts had stopped producing effective circulation.