Have you ever seen "The Princess Bride"? There’s a great scene when the hero, Westley, has been tortured and is presumed dead. He’s taken to a kind of medicine man, Miracle Max, played by Billy Crystal, who tells one of Westley’s buddies, “It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead."
It turns out Miracle Max was onto something. Bringing a person back from the dead is now a regular occurrence in hospitals. It happens whenever patients are revived after their heart stops beating, which, according to Dr, Sam Parnia, is the clinical definition of death. So every time someone recovers from cardiac arrest, whether through CPR or some other means, that person has quite literally died and come back to life.
“The concept of a binary separation of life and death is incredibly antiquated,” Parnia told me at a recent live event at the Morgan Library in New York City. He’s an intensive care physician at the NYU School of Medicine and one of the world’s leading experts on resuscitation medicine. And what he said about this gray zone between life and death was mind-blowing. Recent advances in medicine have dramatically lengthened the period after a heart attack when someone can survive without brain damage.
Parnia also talked about his research on near-death experiences, though he prefers the term “recalled experiences of death” – those extraordinary stories of traveling to unearthly realms and even meeting dead relatives. I’ve always been fascinated by these accounts, which blur the line between science and mystical experience.
This event at the Morgan Library was part of TTBOOK’s collaboration with the nonprofit Nour Foundation to host a series of public conversations called "Spirituality in the Age of Science." You can watch my conversations with Parnia and our previous guests, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann and physicist Alan Lightman, here. And maybe your sense of what’s possible will also get shaken up.
— Steve