New Study Includes OBEs
h elmer | espeance
What Happens When We Die?
By M.J. Stephey
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 (AWAreness during REsuscitation), 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?
(See Pictures of the Week here <http://www.time.com/time/
picturesoftheweek/0,29409,1842518,00.html> .)
(Read about how many Americans believe in guardian angels here <http://
www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1842179,00.html> .)
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1842627,00.html
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