Near-Death Experiences: What Really Happens When You Die? | Sam Parnia

There are millions and millions of people who've gone to the point of death and beyond. We actually don't call these near-death experiences. That is a very ambiguous term and it's a term that's been grossly misused. But the reality is that people who go through death and come back to life have recalled universal and consistent features even though they don't know each other at all. And this is cross-cultures, cross so-called religious beliefs and non-religious beliefs and so on and so forth. It seems to be a universal human experience. And you have to realize we were never meant to go into death. We were never meant to scientifically start to parse through and beyond death. But that's exactly what science is doing now. And remarkably we find that when people go through there they have these lucid experiences of death that are not consistent with hallucinations. They are not consistent with illusions. They are not delusional. These are real experiences that are occurring. So what do you conclude from this? These are deep questions. You're an intensive care doctor. You're talking to us from the intensive care now. So I would forgive you that you might say I can't be interested in metaphysical questions that you're hurling at me. But there's two obvious areas that you're getting into. One is the mind-body problem. Is there a kind of something other than just the flesh operating here? Is there something more significant? And I suppose other people will be thinking, well, does this make you think about afterlives? Does it make you think about there's something more to us and for us when we die? What do you conclude from this? You see, the problem here is that we have very fixed societal views about what life and death is. And why? Because for thousands of years what used to happen was when the heart stopped people would be permanently dead. There was nothing you could do. You could draw a clear line between when they were alive and when they were dead. Because the moment the heart stopped they were lifeless, motionless. The brain would stop working. They would stop breathing. And they would be dead. And they would be permanently dead. The reality is that science now has gone well into death and into the post-mortem period. And what we've understood that actually is that you can be dead and I'm not playing with words. I don't mean close to death. I mean really dead and beyond death in the post-mortem period and still be brought back to life again. Because the cells in your body do not die the same time that you die. They go into sort of a hibernation state for hours of time and during that period you can be brought back to life. Which is why the experiences that people have are truly reflecting the experience of death not just near death. Now, to your other point that you raised is what on earth is going on? But that's a big question. What is going on with human consciousness? We are all conscious thinking beings. Everyone who listens to this program is thinking and conscious. And the reality is that going back thousands of years to Plato and Socrates and Aristotle and Democritus and all these other great philosophers and Avicenna and great thinkers, people have tried to understand what is it that makes us who we are? How do our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, our self come to be? And essentially there have been two very broad categories of belief system. And these are beliefs. Some people have always believed that somehow, magically, the body, the brain, will generate your thinking, your thoughts, your consciousness. Others have proposed that that may not address the problem because actually we can now study the brain in great detail. We know how every cell works. We know how the cells connect together. We know how millions and billions of cells connect together. Yet, we cannot find any evidence for how those cells can generate your thoughts. We cannot find how cells can start thinking and feeling. For instance, if I were to show you a brain cell in a laboratory and say, oh, yeah, this brain cell is now thinking I'm hungry. You'd say, well, that's kind of crazy. It's a brain cell. It produces proteins. It doesn't produce thought. But we are thinking conscious beings. And so I think to sort of go back to the point you raised, what's really remarkable here is that our consciousness itself is remarkable. We have things that other animals can't do. We can recite poetry. We can paint. We have people like Beethoven and Mozart. And we can go to the moon and to Mars. And we can cure COVID. And we can tackle even what happens when we die. So our consciousness is quite unique. And I think it's a little bit of a disservice to think that it's simply some sort of byproduct of the brain, a little bit like heat coming off of a fire. Really? Well, it really oversimplifies what is remarkable about human consciousness. So I think the scientific answer that many of us are veering towards is that I think that, and bearing in mind there is no evidence. We're scientists. We need evidence. There is no evidence for how brain cells or millions of brain cells can produce thoughts. And one alternative is that maybe consciousness, the thing that makes us who we are, is a separate, undiscovered scientific entity that interacts with the brain in the same way that you need a radio or a TV to decode electromagnetic waves and turn them into sound and picture. But they're not produced by the TV or the radio. And it might be your consciousness is a separate, undiscovered entity that is remarkable and can do all these remarkable things. And that might be a better explanation. That's why they call it the mind-body problem because no one can really truly solve it, perhaps. Richard Hammond talks about his wife shouting at him. He said that he was on the way towards death and his wife shouted at him and said, come back. Don't you dare die. You must have seen people in your job have that type of experience. Someone saying, please don't die. The relatives there, the loved ones around them. Do you feel that there is something that happens when there's a connection between two people that can draw people back? Is that a fair assessment, do you think? Well, I don't think so. If that was the case, you wouldn't need intensive care doctors like me. I think it sounds very nice and it's wonderful that his wife was screaming at him. It's good to know that your spouse will scream at you even if you're dying for a different reason. That doesn't end, it sounds like. But the reality is that I think what, you know, obviously, and I don't, unfortunately, this video doesn't give details of his medical condition. We don't know what was going on. But the reality is that as people are in a deep coma, if they're starting to wake up, depending on where he was, maybe he was improving and he was actually coming back, that they go into this sort of twilight zone where they can hear things but they don't process information quite correctly. They're a bit confused. And so it might be that he was having some interaction with his wife, but that was probably later as he was waking up from his coma rather than when he was deep in his coma. We have to leave it now, Sam, but you're going to go off and treat people in intensive care. How do you go about thinking about that? I mean, does it slightly blow your mind that in half an hour's time, you're going to be the difference between life and death for someone? How do you judge the boundary between the two now when you live it every single day? I think truthfully, I think it's a privilege because, you know, we are able to bring life back to people and then that obviously is an honour and it's a privilege. And we do our best. But what's also remarkable is that, and science has gone through and gone beyond the boundaries of death and we're exploring what happens to people in that state. And what I think is really happening, which is truly, truly remarkable to me, I think is as they're going through death, their brain is shutting down and normally the parts of their brain that are acting like a braking system, it's like an inhibition process, that allows them to do what they need to do, pay the bills, pay the mortgage, cook dinner, things that you do in your day-to-day life, those things that are prominent disappear. It's called the process of disinhibition. Those things go away. And then remarkably, they get access to their entire consciousness. Everything they've done, everything that they've said, everything that they've intended, and then they start to analyse themselves based upon morality and ethics. So it really is truly remarkable what is going on when you're going into death. And I think that is something that we're trying to explore further. Samuel, a pleasure to speak to you. Thank you for taking the time. We're not going to solve all these problems, I think, in our conversation, but there's a lot of big ideas to get people thinking. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure to talk to you.