- [Host] Nobody knows what happens after death. Whether there's nothingness or something else, we each have to come to terms with that unknown by choosing how or what to believe, or just by trying not to think about it. But what if medical science could open up a window into the experience of dying? Believe it or not, that does seem to be happening. Breakthroughs in resuscitation research are changing the very definition of death. I'm Anne Strainchamps, and today on "To the Best of Our Knowledge: Beyond Death."
- [Announcer 1] From WPR.
- [Announcer 2] This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what, now you can call them on your auto insurance too, with the Name Your Price Tool from Progressive. It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you wanna pay for car insurance, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.
- [Anne] It's "To the Best of Our Knowledge," I'm Anne Strainchamps. We all know we're going to die. Most of us have no idea what that'll be like, but there are a few people who do.
- [Guest 1] Here there.
- [Anne] Hey. People who actually started the process of dying and then came back. Sebastian, it is so great to meet you.
- [Sebastian] Thank you.
- [Anne] Like Sebastian Junger, what happened to him began like this.
- [Sebastian] I'm a former war reporter, I gave that up years ago. And I started a family, and I was living at the end of a dead-end dirt road deep in the woods in a rural part of Massachusetts on Cape Cod, specifically, a property with no cell phone coverage. The landlines would go out when it rained. It was paradise, in other words. We had two little girls, who at the time were three years old and six months old. In June of 2020, in this remote place, I was woken at dawn by a absolutely terrifying dream. You know, I should say right now, right up front, I'm an atheist, I'm not mystical, I'm not woo-woo. I'm a relentless rationalist, right? Or like to think so. So that's the context for this dream. I dreamt that I was dead. Not that I was dying, not that something was happening, that I was already dead and that I was a spirit, and I didn't know it, and I was trying to communicate with my family, with Barbara and our two little girls, who were crying and inconsolable, and I was trying to signal to them, "It's okay, I'm here." I was waving my arms and shouting and they couldn't hear me. And I thought, "What is happening?" And I was made to understand that I was a spirit now, I had died, and I died through my own sort of carelessness, with my health, with my body, and there was no going back. I was on a huge, giant elliptical course that was gradually gonna take me further and further out into the darkness. It's hard to explain how devastating it is to have the experience of having died and there's no way back. I've confronted danger many times in combat. I've done things that were scary. I mean, that's all child's play compared to what this felt like. And I was so bereft and anguished that I woke myself up, and we co-sleep as a family, and I woke up right next to my older daughter. Oh my God, I sort of grabbed her, right, held onto her. Thank God that was a dream. 36 hours later, that's exactly what happened, I began dying.
- [Anne] That is how Sebastian Junger opens his book, "In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face "with the Idea of an Afterlife." And there are a couple of things to say before we hear this conversation. First, Sebastian Junger has a reputation as one of the bravest journalists alive. He spent years embedded with combat units in Afghanistan and other wars, so he's seen a lot of death and a lot of very scary things up close. And second, he's a stoical and unflinching realist. And when a guy like that tells you he had a near-death experience, there's nothing dreamy or floaty about it. His time of dying began on a warm day in June when Sebastian and his wife went for a walk in the Cape Cod woods, and he had an aneurysm. His pancreatic artery basically exploded.
- [Sebastian] This is how randomly and casually we die. Like, in mid-sentence. I felt this flash of pain in my abdomen. And I was like, "Oh, what is that?" And I stood up to sort of like walk it out, and I almost fell over. I didn't know it, but in that moment, I had turned into a human hourglass. The aneurysm in my pancreatic artery had ruptured, I was losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes. There's 10 pints of blood in your body, and you can afford to lose about half of it before you die. And we're an hour and a half drive away from the nearest hospital.
- [Anne] How'd you even get back? I mean, you're way out in the woods.
- [Sebastian] Yeah, well my wife sort of got me an arm around her shoulder, and she sort of half dragged me, and I half stumbled out of the woods, you know, it took about 10 minutes, and we got to the dirt driveway. She put me in the passenger seat of the car. You know, now I'm really circling the drain, right? I'm starting to go blind, I'm in and out of consciousness. She's holding my hand, screaming, "Stay with me, stay with me," as my eyes roll back into my head. And then a minute later I sort of come back, and I don't know that I'm in and out of consciousness, and there was no cell phones connection, the landline was down 'cause it had been raining, they're old lines, but we eventually got one bar of cell phone connection and called the ambulance. And the ambulance got there, took about half an hour, and doing pretty well all the way to the hospital, and right before we get there, I go off a cliff. I go into end-stage hemorrhagic shock, I start convulsing on the gurney. And I am, you know, the doctor said probably 10 minutes from dead. So a little bit of traffic, a little bit of this and that, and you know, I just wouldn't have made it. I mean, shall I continue with my-
- [Anne] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's completely riveting in reading and hearing this story. The thing is, even when you get to the hospital, even when you're, like, as you said, 10 minutes from death, you still didn't think you were dying, right?
- [Sebastian] No, it never crossed my mind. I mean, I was sort of aware that the stakes were quite high, but I didn't know this was going down right now, right? Like, this is it, your last minutes. So, so the doctor came up to me, they desperately had to transfuse me, 'cause, you know, I was running on fumes. My blood pressure was 60 over 40, and I needed 10 units of blood, which is basically a full oil change. This doctor says to me, "I'd like permission to put a, "basically, put a large gauge needle through your neck "into your jugular." And-
- [Anne] That one sounds bad.
- [Sebastian] Right, how wonderful, right? And I'm like, "Ooh, that sounds unpleasant." So I said, "Why? "In case there's an emergency?" And he was like, "This is the emergency, Mr. Junger, "right now." I'm like, "All right, if you say so, but I'm not feeling it. "I, you know, I feel okay, I just, my tummy hurts," like that's it, right? So, so he starts working on my neck and prepping the neck. And while he's doing that, all of a sudden something happens, something very, very dramatic happens. I, suddenly, am aware of this black pit that's opened up underneath me, a kind of vortex that's pulling me in. And the mouth of this pit is directly underneath me but on the other side of the mouth of this pit, it's infinite, infinitely black, infinitely huge, and I'm getting pulled into it, into the abyss, right? And I didn't understand. In my fear, suddenly, I don't want to say I "see," I sense, I perceive my dead father, who was a physicist, born in Europe, a rationalist, et cetera, et cetera. I see him appear above me. And he is basically communicating to me, "It's okay, you don't have to fight it. "You can come with me, I'll take care of you." I was horrified. In my mind, I'm thinking, "You're dead. "I'm alive. "Why would I go with you?" Like, I'm just in for belly pain. Like, I... "You got the wrong, this isn't the right, "you got the wrong guy, Dad, you got the wrong moment. "We'll talk a lot later." And so I said to the doctor, "You gotta hurry. "You're losing me right now, I'm going." And then I was in and out of clarity and consciousness, you know, for the next six hours or so, and I'm in enormous pain. I'm in kidney stone level pain, like childbirth level pain. I'm in absolute agony. At one point, one of the doctors sort of shrugged and said, you know, "Basically, we tried, didn't work." And the other doctor was like, "Yeah, it's too bad." Couldn't believe that I was hearing this conversation.
- [Anne] God, you saw that.
- [Sebastian] Right. And then the first doctor, Dr. Dombrowski, said, "Why don't we try going through his left wrist? "Maybe that's a point of attack in his vascular system "that will get us through to the rupture." And the other doctor said, "I like the way you think." I remember him saying that, "I like the way you think." I was like, oh, to answer your question from 15 minutes ago, that was when I finally understood, "Oh, I might not survive."
- [Anne] Do you remember it working? Do you remember them-
- No.
- Anything? When you were there, you don't remember them saying, "Oh my God, we got it," or, "Okay, sealing it-"
- No.
- [Anne] Nothing like that?
- [Sebastian] No. No. So I woke up in the ICU the next morning to a voice with a very strong Boston accent, a middle, sorry, middle-aged ICU nurse. "Good morning, Mr. Junger," like that, that kind, that kind of accent, right? Like, whoa, where am I, right? And so, I sort of opened my eyes, and she said, "Congratulations, "like, you almost died last night. "In fact, no one can believe you're alive. "It's kind of a miracle." I mean, I was as shocked by that as if someone told you that right now, that you almost died last night. And then I remembered my father.
- Mmm.
- And I remembered the pit. And the nurse left, and I just sat there thinking about having almost died and how my family had almost had to go on without me, and my whole dream almost happens, you know? And what is happening, like what, what's real? Like-
- Yeah.
- I didn't know what real was. I worried that I actually had died in my dream and that everything else was a hallucination, I actually was dead.
- [Anne] Yeah.
- [Sebastian] So, and you know, I'm vomiting blood, I'm a total mess, I can barely lift my head, wires everywhere. Like, I still have a like, needle in my jugular, like, and the nurse came back and said, "How are you doing, Mr. Junger?" And I said, "Well, I'm okay, but what you told me "is terrifying and I can't stop thinking about it, "that I almost died." And she said, this is a remarkable thing, she said, "Instead of thinking about it like something scary, "try thinking about it like something sacred." Now, as an atheist, I sort of claim the right to understand the word sacred in secular terms as well, it's not just the domain of the faithful. And for me, something sacred information, sacred knowledge, a sacred task, is anything that helps people live their lives with more dignity, with less pain, less fear, more love, more connection. Anything that does that is a sacred process. You know, it could be school teachers, it could be therapists, you know, it could be, sometimes on our best days, it might even be journalists. Journalists go to these sort of extreme places and come back with information that helps the human race hopefully make better decisions and live better. So, I just thought, I've been going to front lines my whole life and I gave that up, but for some reason I was sent to the ultimate frontline, which is our mortality, my mortality, which is everyone's mortality. Like, right to the edge of the cliff, I looked over the edge into the darkness and I was allowed to come back, like I was allowed to come back from Afghanistan alive, and from Kosovo, and Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and et cetera. Did I come back with an understanding of life and mortality that might help other people live with more dignity and face their own mortality in maybe more comfortable ways? And so that was the task I set for myself, that was the sense I made of this wise woman's words.
- [Anne] I mean, this question is triggered by the experience of seeing the pit and your dad. Like you could have gotten close to dying and not seen the pit, not seen your dad, that's what triggers all these questions, and so it seems like, as a journalist, you're gonna think, what was that, what could explain that? That was your process?
- [Sebastian] Well, you know, my father was a scientist and I believe in information as the answer to all things, right?
- Mmm.
- [Sebastian] I mean, I say that a little facetiously. So I thought, all right, I'm gonna, I can research my way out of this. I'm gonna research NDEs, near death experiences, which are worldwide in every society, and, you know, in historical accounts, they're remarkably consistent. It's impossible to say definitively, yes, these NDEs are evidence of an afterlife, or to definitively say they're not, but one of the plausible explanations lies in the realm of quantum physics, and my dad was a physicist. And it comes down to, as a totally legitimate question of science and physics and epistemology, what is consciousness? Because they know at the quantum level that particles act differently depending on if there's a conscious observer or not. And if you don't observe a particle, it's in all places at once. And once you observe it, it's in only one place. And, you know, there's a sort of half-baked idea which may have some merit that when we die, we pass from the macroscopic world of conscious observation where we can only be one thing, you know, in a dying body.
- Mm-hmm.
- We pass to this subatomic world where everything is all things.
- [Anne] Right.
- [Sebastian] I'm not phrasing it well, but something like that.
- [Anne] So, it seems like there are a few big things that are just so puzzling and tantalizing about all of this. One is, you can explain away a lot of NDEs by saying, "Well, it's brain chemistry. "You know, we hallucinate at the end of life," but it doesn't explain why so many dying people hallucinate the same thing, their dead loved ones. And that happens over and over again, right?
- [Sebastian] Right, and this is the part of it that didn't make sense, according to the rationalist sort of paradigm. If you give a room full of people LSD, they will all hallucinate, 100% will hallucinate. We know how that works, that's no mystery, but they will not hallucinate the same thing, right? They will not all see purple tigers. And the dying, with incredible consistency, see the dead, the dead appear to collect them. The rationalist explanation for that is, is the dying brain trying to comfort itself in a moment of what otherwise would be terrible terror. But I'm like, no, no, no, I didn't know I was dying.
- [Anne] Hmm.
- [Sebastian] And my dad was horrifying to me, right? He wasn't a comfort, he was repulsive to me because I had wanted nothing to do with death. You know, there are many cases, documented cases of dying people being visited by a person that they're close to who they didn't know had died because the person had died that day or the day before, like they didn't know.
- Really?
- And then, like, they didn't have that knowledge. And they're like, "Joe, what are you doing here?" And Joe had died in a car accident six hours earlier, like that kind of weirdness. So, so that's the one thing, the one thing that gave me pause and actually pushed me into sort of the quantum realm, like the rationalists did not have a good explanation for that.
- [Anne] Does the quantum realm have any kind of explanation for that?
- [Sebastian] Well, you know, they have a conversation about, well, we don't know how the quantum realm works and what happens to consciousness when we die, and is there a kind of universal consciousness, which, among others, Schrödinger, the physicist believed in universal consciousness. Very, very smart people who pioneered quantum physics actually believe in this sort of universalist idea of consciousness. So, how would the consciousness of a person who has died fit into that? The illusion of individuality that is our life would cease and would return to the broader reality that it's part of all consciousness and part of, unconsciousness is part of all things, of physical matter, and at that level, time doesn't exist. Everything is everything.
- [Anne] So many of the NDE stories I've heard are euphoric, you know, people see loved ones and more than that, they feel like, yeah, they're merging with this larger cosmic, more blissful state. There are stories of people who were really disappointed to wake up here again. You had kind of the dark version.
- [Sebastian] I sort of, I gotta say, I sort of don't trust things that make people feel euphoric, you know, on some level, some level, as a journalist, I'm like, "Oh, come on, that's-"
- Yeah.
- That's too good to be true. No, but seriously, I, you know, I didn't die. My heart did not stop, right? So it's possible had they been a little slower and had my heart stopped and they'd still somehow managed to resuscitate me, and I could have come back with my memories and my visions that I would've gone from the terror to just an absolutely ecstatic embrace of my father, right? I mean, I talked to one woman, who happens to be a friend of mine, a woman in her '70s. She had a car accident, she had a head-on collision of 40 miles an hour with another car going that speed, and it killed her. But it happened right in front, right in front of the fire rescue station of this little town where she lived. And the paramedics just came sprinting out with their gear and her heart stopped and they paddled her and brought her back. So she has no memory of any of this, she was driving along, the next thing she's aware of, she's running through this beautiful field towards two long dead friends, women she hasn't thought about in decades. And she's like, "Oh my God, Emily!" Rushing towards her long dead friends with this joy in her heart, and right before they meet, she's yanked back into this incredibly painful situation where her body is broken in the wreck of this car, and so, there are these ecstatic moments and I, maybe that's what would've been coming to me, had my heart stopped. You know, I just sort of didn't get far, didn't get far enough.
- [Anne] How do you live with just the giant question mark? 'Cause I think that not knowing what happens after death may be the centrally difficult thing for humans. We can handle believing that there is something, we can handle believing that there is nothing, we have a really hard time handling just not knowing and living with that. What have you learned about how to deal with that?
- [Sebastian] So, it's not that I don't have an explanation. You know, I have several good ones, and I don't know which one is correct, and maybe none of them are correct. Religion being one explanation. Like, it can't be tested, so I don't trust it. There's other explanations that sort of can be tested. And to me, the most plausible explanation, if there is something rather than just nothing after death, revolves around the idea of a universal consciousness, that we sort of rejoin that. And there is something slightly comforting, like it's all one thing, don't worry about it.
- [Anne] That's journalists, Sebastian Junger. His book is called "In My Time of Dying: "How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife." Multiply Sebastian Junger's experience across thousands, maybe millions of people who have also hovered on the verge of dying, and a vague outline begins to emerge, hazy, tremulous, but still, the beginning of a new consensus view of what the experience of dying and even of being newly dead is like.
- [Guest 2] Actually, death is not as negative as society portrays it to be.
- [Anne] NYU Intensive Care doctor Sam Parnia.
- [Sam] I was young, I was, you know, maybe 12, 13, 14. My father became very sick, and he developed a neurological brain disorder. He couldn't respond to us. So this idea of what makes us who we are really resonated with me, the importance of it. And then I went to medical school. I was a visiting medical student in New York at Mount Sinai Hospital, and I got to know a patient very well on a personal level. I loved this person. Unexpectedly, there was a cardiac arrest call. The team of white coat doctors were trying to save what looked like a dead person to me, and it really shook me. While they were doing all these things to him, what was he experiencing? He was flatlined, he was clearly dead. They tried for an hour, but they didn't call him dead. And I thought, well, somewhere along the line, he must have died, so is there really a moment of death? Those questions that evening triggered my interest. Being relatively young and naive, I thought, "Oh, I'll graduate and I'll answer "all these questions within 18 months, "and then I'll go on with the rest of my medical career." And here we are, 30 years later, you and I discussing it.
- [Anne] Meet the medical researcher whose work is changing the very definition of death. What happens during and maybe after it? Next. I'm Anne Strainchamps, it's "To the Best of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio... and PRX. It's not exactly common knowledge, but there's a scientific revolution going on in the field of death and dying. Breakthroughs in resuscitation medicine are prolonging life far beyond what used to be possible to the point of reviving some patients even hours after they were declared clinically dead. Steve Paulson's been following one of the world's leading researchers in this area, NYU intensive care doctor Sam Parnia. So Steve, I wanna ask you to set this up. Who is Sam Parnia? What do you want people to know about him?
- [Steve] Well, Sam is a British-born physician who's really, for 30 years, has been on the front lines of this new science that's redefining how we think about death, and he really wears two hats, and the other big thing that he studies is near-death experiences, what actually happens, and he's just written a book called "Lucid Dying," where he is bringing all of this work together.
- [Anne] You've known him for a while, what's he like?
- [Steve] He has strong opinions. He does not shy away from controversy. For instance, he doesn't actually like that phrase, "near-death experience." He thinks-
- No, what does he want?
- [Steve] Well, he thinks it's too fuzzy, too imprecise. People can sort of say, "Oh, they came close to death. "That's an NDE." He prefers the phrase, "recalled experience of death," and he's a very precise definition. These are experiences that specifically happen after cardiac arrest.
- [Anne] So he would say Sebastian Junger didn't actually have a near-death experience because he didn't die.
- [Steve] Exactly, yes.
- [Anne] So you talked with Sam at a live event in New York recently, and before we hear the interview, I just want people to be able to picture the setting. Can you describe the place?
- [Steve] Yeah, so this was at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, which was the home of JP Morgan, the famous banker, one of the great figures of the Gilded Age who ruled over Wall Street, and he had a private library filled with books, renaissance tapestries, stained glass windows. It is truly one of the most spectacular rooms in New York City, but it's also a very intimate space, the perfect place for a conversation about one of the most sacred experiences in our lives, death. And I have to say, this was truly mind-blowing. So you've spent all of this time, decades around death, when people are hovering between life and death. It's not too depressing?
- Well-
- To devote your life to this?
- [Sam] I hate to break the news to you, the way you presented it sounds very depressing. I don't see it that way. You and I have to talk marketing a little bit, you know? So, I'm gonna remarket myself to everybody, okay? So first of all, my job became to become an intensive care doctor, which means my job is to save people's lives. This field is advancing, and I became a subspecialist in cardiac arrest resuscitation. And so, whether I like it or not, my colleagues and I, all of us, are following people and trying to prevent them from getting to the point of death, but yet we don't leave them alone when they go beyond death, and we bring them back to life. And so I find it incredibly rewarding. So I find nothing more exciting than that, actually. If you wanna join, you're welcome to.
- [Steve] So my sense is that the definition of death has changed quite a bit in recent decades. And, I mean, there was a time when, I think it was when the heart stopped, that was the definition of death. And then there was, when the brain stops functioning, what is the current medical definition of death?
- [Sam] Nothing's changed. The problem we have in society is that we have an antiquated concept, the concept of a binary separation of life and death is incredibly antiquated. So, to address your question, how do we define death? Death is very clearly defined, it's very easy. Any medical condition, accident, disease, anything you can think of that becomes so severe that it causes a person's heart to stop is death. That's why the term cardiac arrest, which is what we use in hospitals and death are synonymous, it's the same biological process, but what has then happened, in the 1950s and '60s, people who would otherwise have had catastrophic brain injuries were being kept alive on ventilators, life support machines, and so what doctors began to discover is that while they're on the ventilator, they can have a situation where their brain damage becomes so severe that the brain actually dies, but they're still on a ventilator, so they look like they're alive. So it led to illegal, and this is important, it's a legal notion that you can be declared dead if your brain has died while you happen to be on a ventilator.
- [Steve] Okay, but you are saying there's this gray zone, it's not exactly clear if someone is dead or not. It's not as if there's a single moment when someone dies, it's more of a process, is that fair to say?
- [Sam] Yes, sort of. I think that the reality is that, again, the problem we have, and I keep saying this, is that we want to think of this binary notion of life and death, and once you give someone the label of death, it's supposed to be the end, like there's nothing. To sort of move forward, maybe it's better if I explain my own journey in this. When I started out in the 1990s, I had a lot of resistance from people because they thought I was crazy. You know, "Why are you interested in this? "It makes no sense. "Is this religious, is this spiritual?" And so on and so forth. But what happened towards the end of the '90s, early 200Os, was a revolution started to take place in this field. And what happened, first of all, was that scientists, looking for options to find better ways to grow brain cells, to deal with diseases like dementia or Parkinson's and stroke, started to go to mortuaries, and they took biopsies of dead people's brains. So my point is, they are really dead, this is not a play with word, it's not like, oh, they were close to death. They were really dead. And they took their brain and they were able to grow brain cells from Jack, Joe, Smith, whoever you can think of, in the Petri dish in a lab. And over time, that field has grown into what we now call brain organoids. And there are growing brains in the lab from cadavers, from dead people, that are reaching the size of a fetus brain, and it's fully functional. So they were doing that to find cures. Then the other thing that happened, which, as you know, I love to talk about, and I can either wait for you to ask me the question or I just go ahead and talk about.
- [Steve] Are we gonna talk about pigs now?
- [Sam] We're gonna talk about pigs.
- Okay.
- We have to talk about pigs.
- The Pig Study. So, the Pig Study.
- I have a one-track mind, that's all I ever talk about, is the Pig Study.
- So, the Pig Study, I mean, I just, I'll introduce this. So, a few years ago, a group of scientists went into a slaughterhouse to find decapitated pigs and took away the heads and then grew brain organoids.
- No, not quite.
- No.
- Not quite.
- Okay.
- [Sam] So let me go over the story then. So, but I wanna explain that even in the '80s it became very clear that you could have animals, cats, who had died and who had no blood circulation for over an hour, and scientists were able to restore activity again, but most people didn't realize it. And so we can fast forward, we don't have enough time to go through all of it, but we'll fast forward to 2019, where a study was published in "Nature," which is probably the most, or one of the most prominent scientific journals, by a group of scientists led by Dr. Nenad Sestan from Yale. And what they were able to do is absolutely astonishing, and it shows the point I made. They went to a slaughterhouse, these were not experimental animals, these were regular animals that were turned into sausage meat. They took decapitated brains, four hours after the animals were killed. So these brains were left for four hours, and you can't be more dead than decapitated dead. And then they took them to their own laboratory and they connected special tubing, they actually called it a brain in a bucket, so they put it in a bucket, they connected tubing, and they put a special solution through the blood vessels, and they waited six to 10 hours. And so what do we think happened? All of the brains, 32 times, all of those pig brains came back to life. They restored full activity. There was biological activity, metabolic activity. The blood vessels were responding appropriately. It was so astonishing that when they showed other scientists those dead brains, they thought they were looking at healthy brains. These scientists, and I've spoken to them at length, there's nothing hidden, it's all come out now. They were so concerned with the fact that they were restoring life to a dead pig brain that they decided to significantly downplay their findings. They came out with a term like they said, "Well, we've restored biological activity," or as they said, metabolic activity, "But this brain is not alive." Doesn't make any sense, you know? A brain that has biological activity is alive. They were also so concerned, and you can appreciate this, by the possibility of restoring consciousness. So imagine you're a pig, now you wake up, you find your brain in a bucket, and you're conscious. You can't squeal, you can't move, you can't do anything, and you're trapped. So what they did was they gave sedative drugs. They gave drugs to block any signs of consciousness emerging in the brains, and they declared that the brains had not been conscious. We have no idea what happened, but the fact was that they did it.
- [Steve] And to extrapolate from this, presumably, if you could do that with a pig brain, you could do that with a human brain.
- [Sam] That's exactly right. The technology exists now to do that with a human brain, and the fact what they showed is that after we die, for hours of time, postmortem, it is possible to restore brain activity, and of course the rest of the body is part of that equation too. So that means we can revive dead people. So that is a major, major discovery. I personally think it's the biggest discovery that will undoubtedly lead to a Nobel Prize.
- [Steve] Hmm, wow.
- [Sam] The point is, we're making incredible discoveries that will help us not only find how to save people's lives, but also explore these deep questions as to what happens to all of us when we go through death. So no longer should we think of this as a religious question or a philosophical question, we have science. And that's why I, again, will tell you, I find my job incredibly exciting and I do not like your marketing of my job. So if you invite me back in 10 years' time, please bear that in mind.
- [Steve] So just to follow up on what these recent discoveries have meant for people in hospitals or in EMT units, how do you save a person who suddenly has the heart attack and, you know, is in this state? I mean, your first thing is to cool the body, right?
- [Sam] Well, there's a lot that we can do. Unfortunately, again, the usual practice across the world is antiquated. People are doing what they did in 1960, which is terrible. What we should do, so people, everyone's familiar, you know, you do chest compressions, you give oxygen, you may shock the heart, you may give drugs that are very powerful and so on, but that's really, to me, that's ancient. That's like driving a Model T Ford and being happy that you're driving it. It's ridiculous, frankly. The way I would like to do this, recognizing the science means that we take people who die and we should connect them to catheters that will enable us to distribute oxygenated blood, nutrients, but also a cocktail of drugs, like the Yale scientists did, that will preserve the brain further and enable us to bring them back to life, assuming that the underlying condition that caused them to die is treatable. I can't do this to somebody who's 90 years old with metastatic cancer, whose body is completely devastated. But if I, myself, have a heart attack, which being a man and of my age, I'm at risk of, I shouldn't die.
- [Anne] Steve's talking with Sam Parnia, an intensive care doctor at the NYU School of Medicine, and we'll hear the rest of their conversation after the break. I'm Anne Strainchamps. It's "To the Best of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio... and PRX. We think of life as synonymous with a heartbeat, and death is the moment when it stops. But when medical science figured out how to bring at least some people back from death, everything we thought we knew began to change.
- [Announcer 3] Prompt action and careful attention to the details of CPR have restored the pulse of life to another heart that is too good to die.
- [Sam] Think about it. For thousands of years, life and death seemed very black and white, very clear. Your heart stopped, you were dead, that was it.
- [Announcer 3] With every breath, you should see the chest rise and fall.
- [Sam] CPR was discovered in 1960. By the mid-1970s, so only about 15 years after that, a book was published that had the testimonies, particularly of 50 people in detail, who had come close to death.
- [Interviewee 1] I saw that what was there was love and nothing else. Loving perfection.
- [Sam] They were describing similar, very profound experiences.
- [Interviewee 1] There are no sins, not the way you think of them on earth.
- [Sam] Even though the doctors thought they were dead from their own perspective, not only were they not dead, their thinking becomes clearer than usual.
- [Interviewee 1] It was so simple.
- [Sam] And their consciousness feels vast.
- [Interviewee 1] Complete love and acceptance for everything.
- [Sam] They're gaining visual and auditory knowledge of what's happening to them.
- [Interviewee 1] Knowledge that I had known before.
- [Sam] But it's not in the way that we see things, like, "Oh, this is how I'm looking directly." They describe 360-degree vision. And then, what I find absolutely remarkable, is the ability to recall everything that they have done in their entire life.
- [Interviewee 1] Everything.
- [Sam] All their intentions, their thoughts, their emotional states, in an instant.
- [Interviewee 1] How on earth did I ever forget anything that important?
- [Sam] So that's what I'm saying is, you know, the way people talk about near-death experiences, it really does a disservice. They're reliving themselves in the context of how they conducted themselves.
- [Interviewee 1] What is in your heart?
- [Sam] and whether what they did was right or wrong.
- [Interviewee 1] And the next thing I knew, that was it, I was back.
- [Sam] They're reliving it, not just from their own perspective, but from the perspective of other people they interacted with.
- [Anne] So let's go back to Steve's conversation with Sam Parnia at the Morgan Library in New York and to the question of why so many reports of near-death experiences describe this kind of profound moral reckoning.
- [Sam] I'll give you an example. There's a young lady who we interviewed, her name's Rachel Finch, she's in our film. She was only about 20 when she was in this state when she almost died, she was in hospital and she became unconscious and she had this experience. And I said to her, I said, well, you know, 'cause, you know, she's a very sweet person. I said, "Well, what have you done?" She said, "Well, you know, I was young. "I haven't done anything really that bad in my life, "but as a teenager, I used to go into fits of rage "with my father, my sister, and in that state "I was experiencing all the things I was telling her "and the hurt I was causing her, just through my words. "And I felt them all, "I felt the pain that they were feeling." You know, another thing she talked about, which was really incredible was she talked about how she had, when she was an 8-year-old kid, she had a pet guinea pig. And she said one day the pet guinea pig came to bite her, did bite her, and she threw it onto the sofa and nothing happened, you know, and she forgot about it. In her death experience, she relived that whole experience, and now she felt the fear that the guinea pig had felt, which is why it initially bit her, and when she tossed the guinea pig onto the couch, she felt how much worse the guinea pig, how much more afraid the guinea pig felt. Now think of something as simple as that, an 8-year-old tossing their pet guinea pig. So, what I find amazing is that these people, even though they've had tremendously humiliating experience, 'cause they relived everything, when they come back, they all use it as a stepping stone to become better. Like a scientist who fails and says, "Okay, I need to do this better, I need to learn from this." So it's really, the details of the experience are fascinating.
- [Steve] So let me run through some of the explanations that I've heard commonly to explain what are typically called near-death experiences. You prefer the term "recalled experiences" of death. But anyway, so for instance, the body floating up, what is referred to as out of body experiences, you can stimulate that with an electrode to the brain.
- [Sam] That's not true. But people say it. I'm just saying.
- [Steve] The bright lights, the tunnel, that has been explained by hypoxia, the loss of oxygen.
- Am I allowed to say that's not true?
- [Steve] Yes, please, please.
- [Sam] People believe it, some people believe it.
- The sense that when you're in a coma, the brain totally flatlines, and then you report these extraordinary experiences, you know, how is that possible if the brain has flatlined? Or is it because actually these experiences are sort of being remembered as people are starting to come back online, regain consciousness? Why is not that a legitimate explanation?
- [Sam] So, again, you ask wonderful questions, which I appreciate, and I'm just joking with you, by the way, I tease you a little, I hope you don't mind. So, the reality of this is that when these people first started to describe these experiences, people rejected them, some scientists rejected them, and simply said, "You are either fabricating, "you're just making up these stories, "or you're basically hallucinating." They can't be hallucinating, and I'll explain to you why. One, because it's impossible to tell somebody that you reliving your entire life is a hallucination. A hallucination is something that occurs to people in an awakened state. It doesn't apply to people who are in a coma and so on, but nonetheless, you or I are reliving our life is not a hallucination. The other issue with hallucinations, which is important to point out, is whenever somebody hallucinates, even if the hallucinatory experience feels incredibly real to them while it's happening, after they recover, they realize that it was not as real as ordinary real events in life. With the death experience, and the recalled experience of death, what happens is completely the opposite. So not only are they recalling real events that occurred, or their own life, but importantly, when they come back, they consistently will always say that this was more real than the most real experience you could ever think of. So, my graduation, or my daughter's wedding, or whatever you can think of, really meaningful, real events pale into insignificance. Again, there's a huge difference between how real that feels and how these feel. And I think as we move forward in time, what we found is that some scientists started to no longer sort of reject and say, "Well, you are making this up," and say, "Well, it must just be a trick of your brain. "As your brain is dying, it's creating "all these wonderful images." But, again, it doesn't make sense. Like, how would you suddenly know everything you've done? It's not really the case.
- Well, let me just-
- Sure.
- [Steve] Just while I'm throwing out these biological explanations, another one is that there's this phrase of what's been called "terminal lucidity." Right as someone is dying, suddenly, like everything comes alive, and, you know, maybe they were kind of fuzzy and losing cognitive function and then this is the last gasp of the brain and the body sort of trying to fire everything up, everything is jolted, and then suddenly that's why you have this brief period of lucidity before you die.
- [Sam] So we're beginning to come to a point where we might start to agree a little bit. The problem we have is that when you come across something that doesn't make sense to you, and it challenges your beliefs or your value systems, or what you've come to believe, naturally, what people often do is just reject it, or come out with theories like, "Oh, well you're clearly," you know, "There, there, Mrs. Smith, "I know you think you saw the doctor, "but you are clearly hallucinating." And so that's why people came out with this idea of a lack of oxygen or, you know, "I can just stimulate your brain "and I'll make you have an illusion." But none of them were confirmed. So that's why those theories came about. The way our brain works, right now, audience, yourself, our brains are developed in a way that we try to make the most meaning and optimize our situation for what we need. So right now, many of the functions of our brain are shut down, they're inhibited through braking systems, so you and I can concentrate on this conversation. In different circumstances, other pathways are activated and those ones are shut down. So, in death, what happens is, paradoxically, because people think death is this rapid degeneration, which it is not, what actually happens in death is remarkable. When a person dies, the brain switches, so things that no longer matter, like what you're gonna eat, your job, your career status, and so on and so forth, are lost. People don't have any awareness of that. Your brain stops functioning from what we can measure. There's no pupilary reflex, your brainstem is gone, so the person is dead. But in that state of death, or as we go into the state of the gray zone of death, other braking systems are removed. We call that disinhibition. And so one of the things you see, for example, is that the brain actually spews out tremendous amounts of hormones that are trying to save a person's life. It releases steroids and adrenaline and so on and so forth, and in many cases, it can spontaneously restore life again. So appreciate that. Your brain is designed to bring you back to life again. At the same time, genes that you had that were last active when you were a fetus, that repair damage and have been dormant your whole life, suddenly become active post-mortem. They're trying to repair any damage that's occurring. One of the other things that's happening in this state of disinhibition, the pathways that get activated, we think, is that it's removing the braking systems to your consciousness, as you pointed out, is holding you down, and suddenly a person finds that their real consciousness is vast, and it had been held down, and they're suddenly able to do things they couldn't do before. So it looks like in death, your brain is preparing you for a new reality. And in that state, you are gaining access to new dimensions of reality, which suddenly become more important to you, and we have to ask ourselves, and you asked me this question, why is it that suddenly in death, the only thing that seems to matter to people is how they were from a moral and ethical standard? Nobody in death, for example, in this death experience that you talked about, looks at their career status. What it all boils down to is how they conducted themselves.
- [Steve] So earlier you said that these were science questions now and that we should take some of these questions out of philosophy, out of religion-
- Yes.
- Because they've been sort of distorted, and yet it seems like we're back there, in philosophy, in religion, in what we make of what I would call spiritual experience here, because there's only so much that science can explain about these probably a few hours after someone has died, has had cardiac arrest, and the question obviously is, what happens to consciousness after that?
- [Sam] Well, again, I think we can only extrapolate what we've learned so far, but if you think about the way we perceive about death, if you think of death here and now, you are degrading, what would you anticipate, based upon that model, that consciousness is produced by the brain, if people believe that, which is debated, of course, but if you believe that for a moment, as your brain function is degrading, what would you expect to happen to your consciousness? Would it become heightened and vast and more powerful than it's ever been in your normal living state? Or would it also become diminished and degraded? And the reality that we see is that in death, as I said, paradoxically, people's consciousness does not start to wither away. If anything, it becomes released more vast and more powerful than it has been. So I think that my own understanding of what occurs with consciousness and how it relates to the brain is that I think human consciousness, our selfhood, is more like something like an electromagnetic phenomena. So, in other words, it can carry sound, pictures, it's a very subtle type of entity, and it interacts with the brain. It's not magical, it exists. We need the brain to show it, like the same way you need a computer to be able to get the content off of the internet, but the brain, or the computer, doesn't produce that content. If we accept that for a moment as a hypothesis, then it explains everything. It explains why in death, suddenly, because communication is occurring through this sort of flux of energy, flux of electromagnetic phenomena, and so I think that may explain why that young girl was able to understand her pet guinea pig's emotions. Again, if this was an anecdote, I would've rejected it, but there are so many people who don't know each other who say the same thing.
- [Steve] Can I just say that the way you've talked about death here, it doesn't sound so bad. In fact, it sounds kind of wonderful.
- [Sam] You are the one who said it was bad. I never said it was bad.
- [Steve] So, I guess I'm wondering, do you look forward to your own death?
- [Sam] So, the people who have had these recalled experiences of death, I've heard some of them say that, "I'm not afraid of death." They really are transformed and changed. They develop a greater sense of meaning and purpose to their lives. They become less materialistic, they're more altruistic, they're more engaged with helping others and so on, and they're not afraid of death. I don't think of it that way so much myself. I'm still, I guess as you've seen, I'm so engaged with my life in terms of both my family, I have a small child, but also, I want to take this field somewhere in the next 20 years before I'm forced to retire, probably, or ill health forces me to do that. So I don't necessarily look forward to it, but I'm not afraid of it, if that's what you're asking me. I now recognize that it's nothing to be afraid of, and I recognize that, again, based upon all the data that we've studied, I don't think my consciousness is going to die, and I think I'm gonna experience something much more powerful than I'm able to experience right now.
- [Steve] We could go on, but we don't have more time. So, thank you, and thanks to Sam Parnia. Thank you to our wonderful audience.
- [Anne] That's Steve Paulson talking with Sam Parnia, the director of Critical Care and Resuscitation Research at the NYU School of Medicine. This was part of our series, "Spirituality in the Age of Science," recorded at the Morgan Library in New York in partnership with the Nour Foundation. And if you wanna see some of this conversation, there is a link to the video of the complete thing on our website at ttbook.org. "To the Best of Our Knowledge" is produced at Wisconsin Public Radio by Shannon Henry Kleiber, Charles Monroe-Kane, and Angelo Bautista. Our technical director and sound designer is Joe Hardtke, with help from Sarah Hopefl. Additional music this week comes from Only the Ghosts, Lobo Loco, The E.N.D., Nihilore and Nankotsu Teacher. The executive producer of "To the Best of Our Knowledge" is Steve Paulson, and I'm Anne Strainchamps, hoping that you also find wonder and curiosity in the mysterious dimensions beyond death.
- [Announcer 4] PRX.
