Sam Parnia > Quotes

“Dr. Chandan Sen, a world-renowned regenerative medicine expert and pioneer of novel wound care technologies from the University of Pittsburgh, is one scientist studying the way genes can be inhibited and disinhibited in the body. He identified a series of genes whose function is to repair damage to the fetus body while it is in the womb. He explained to me that these genes are quickly activated if a fetus is cut. They then help repair and heal the damaged areas, so much so that after the birth of the baby you cannot find any evidence of a cut. However, if you make a similar cut in adults, then it leaves a permanent sign of damage. The reason is that after birth, those repair genes are shut down and inhibited. They are not activated again after a baby is born. Yet remarkably, Sen and his team discovered that the only time those genes are activated again is after death. Why? Through the process of disinhibition: the body automatically activates these dormant repair pathways, presumably to help repair any damage and help restore life again.”
― Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

“death is not a moment. It’s a process—a process that can be interrupted well after it has begun.”
― Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life & Death

“I hope that people will begin to understand that when the brain loses global function just before or after death, this is less “brain death” and more brain hibernation of sorts. The brain has hours yet when full function could be restored after being lost. In the meantime, through the process of disinhibition, the brain pours all of its resources into activities that will maximize its chances of staying alive—namely, getting the heart to beat again. It also activates abilities that existed merely as potential, yet dormant, states. For instance, the genes that repair any damage to fetuses but are “turned off” at birth. In death, these genes flip back on, presumably to join the brain’s battle to stay alive. In the same way, as already discussed, when people enter the ocean of death, there seems to be an inflection point of brain dysfunction, which triggers disinhibition and activates certain functions that were lying dormant in a sort of “sleep mode.” This provides access to extreme, yet otherwise hidden, capabilities in the depths of human consciousness that in turn give access to other realities that are now more relevant in preparation for this new state of being. While the doctors and nurses fight to save the individual, the dying person’s sense of their own consciousness becomes enormously vast: like the cosmos compared with the Earth. In this state of hyperexpanded and hyperlucid consciousness, people are filled with a deep and profound understanding of themselves and of life: they are liberated from their body yet have a hyperconscious awareness of all events around and beyond themselves all at once and in 360 degrees. They realize that their real self is their consciousness, not the body. In this new, expanded state, their consciousness and selfhood feels like a field of energy, analogous to an electromagnetic field, one that can penetrate the thoughts of others and objects. Yet people still feel connected to the body through a metaphorical cord of sorts. Linear time loses meaning. Instead, people experience millions of realities, almost downloading them like computer data, simultaneously. They review and judge their life based on the quality of actions and intentions. They realize that there has been a cause for everything in their lives. They recognize that they are responsible for their own actions and intentions, and they relive the downstream consequences, or domino effect, of their actions on other living beings. They relive their own actions through the eyes of the other living entity, human or animal, and deeply feel how they felt in that moment. Thus, they appreciate the positive and negative value of their actions. They also recognize that the value of their actions was determined by the intentions behind them.”
― Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

“Here’s another twist of the recalled experience of death: in all our interviews and all our research, there is as much that we never hear as there is of what we do hear, which also suggests these experiences are not constructed in people’s minds. We learn as much from what is not said to have been experienced as we do from what is recalled. We have never heard a survivor discuss experiencing the recognition that the sociocultural aspects of death—the religious traditions, language, or rituals—were found to be valuable. In all these testimonies that we have studied, many were from people who followed a religion. Yet none came back to say that “in my review I learned how important it had been that I was following all the rituals of my religion.”
― Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

“Today, the tantalizing question for science is, If the human consciousness or soul does indeed continue to exist well past the traditional marker that defines death, does it really ever die as an entity? Our”
― Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life & Death

“In 2009, Dr. Lakhmir Chawla, an intensive care doctor then working at George Washington University Medical Center, and his colleagues examined brain waves in seven critically ill patients who had died; Chawla noted a mysterious and unexpected surge in electrical activity after death. He initially dismissed his own findings, as he couldn’t make sense of them. Surely, “the brain cannot be activated after death,” he had thought. “That goes against everything we have ever presumed about death.” But after he studied the brain waves on the EEG machines in more detail, he surmised that it wasn’t simply a seizure or a “last-gasp attempt” of the brain to save itself. The reason for the sudden change in his thinking? Gamma waves. As he looked at the EEG results, he realized the electrical signal was of a very high frequency. “To see gamma wave activity, which is associated with consciousness, was massively unexpected,” Chawla later explained.”
― Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

“Additionally, around 40 percent of the study participants, on whom our team of researchers were able to complete those first-of-their-kind second-by-second brain monitoring tests, showed signs of brain waves consistent with consciousness and some lucid thought processes at some point. Though their brains had flatlined, they exhibited sudden spikes in brain activity even up to one hour into the resuscitation. These were the so-called delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves. This was significant because, as already mentioned, some of these brain patterns ordinarily occur in people who are having lucid conscious thought processes and performing higher mental functions, such as memory retrieval and information processing. Now their detection for the first time in people undergoing CPR supported and validated the testimonies of millions of survivors of encounters with death, who like Admiral Beaufort, had recalled experiencing a state of lucid hyperconsciousness.”
― Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

“Even the most convinced skeptic is tripped up by the simple universality of the recalled experience of death. We have interviewed people who entered the grey zone on a rural road in Iran, a busy street in London, a market town in Mexico, or a farm in the American Midwest. They have had these experiences at four years old, twenty-two years old, forty-eight years old, and seventy-five years old. Some died years before social media and the internet. Some are young people who live “terminally online” today. Some are devout, some agnostic, some atheist. No matter what their background, these vastly disparate individuals describe the same experiences, in similar terms, and using almost identical vocabulary. If a recalled experience of death is simply a “long, strange trip” or a dream, then how is it that a young student in the Middle East in the 1970s might dream the same dream as a world-renowned surgeon in America ten years ago? Or a child comes to share the same experience as a grandmother?”
― Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

“For Borjigin, the quest to answer these questions had started a decade earlier, in 2013. While working in the laboratory at the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and Neurology at the University of Michigan, she had implanted six electrodes into the brains of nine rats. Then she and her team had begun administering lethal injections to each one. With the rats hooked up to machines, she had begun collecting detailed measurements of their brain activity as the rats’ hearts slowed and they finally took their last breaths. She waited and watched as both the hearts and brains of these rats flatlined and ceased functioning. Then, to Dr. Borjigin’s amazement, thirty seconds after the rats died, without a heartbeat, their brains suddenly and paradoxically experienced a burst of electrical activity. They seemed to go into overdrive and, in her words, showed “all the hallmarks not only of consciousness but a kind of hyperconsciousness.” In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States, she said, “We found continued and heightened activity; measurable conscious activity is much, much higher after the heart stops—within the first 30 seconds” after death. Her work with dying rats had led to a lot of news headlines, and now, ten years later, she was generating headlines all over the world again. This time because she had started to study the brains of dying humans connected to an electroencephalogram (EEG) brain monitoring system. These are sensors that attach to one’s scalp to detect electrical activity in the form of brain waves. She found that just like in the rats, electrical waves in the human brain had slowed and stopped with death. Then, intriguingly and inexplicably, a sudden burst of activity had emerged somewhere between thirty seconds and two and a half minutes after the heart had stopped.”
― Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

“and”
― Sam Parnia, The Lazarus Effect: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death

“One of the key things to come out of AWARE-II was that it solved the mystery of why and how the recalled experience of death occurs and established a scientific explanation to put the earlier discovery of spikes of brain activity in and around death by Drs. Borjigin, Chawla, and Zemmer into context. AWARE-II concluded that as we die and our brain is shutting down and undergoing dysfunction, many of its natural braking systems stop working. This leads to disinhibition and allows for the activation of other parts of the brain, which had been dormant. This means that you access extreme yet otherwise hidden capabilities that provide you with an awareness of new dimensions of reality. This includes your entire consciousness, which has risen up like an iceberg and suddenly feels so much vaster. All your memories, thoughts, intentions, and actions toward others, from early childhood to death, are experienced not as random flashbacks but as a deep purposeful evaluation of your entire life. In this state, what matters to you is your moral and ethical conduct in every circumstance in life. The spikes of brain activity after the brain has flatlined are the “signatures” of this powerful inner hyperconscious and hyperlucid experience.”
― Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

“Nonetheless, after installing 1,000 shelves and following 2,060 cardiac arrest cases over ten years—which had yielded just two out-of-body cases—with our luck, both of them had been in areas of the hospital without a shelf! So our research staff were unable to ask if they had “seen” any of the independent objective images; and once more, the images were not able to be used. This is the reality of very low rates of survival after cardiac arrest, combined with the rare recall of the out-of-body phenomenon among survivors. However, our findings did support the results of another significant scientific study that had been published in 2001 in the The Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, by Dutch cardiologist Dr. Pim van Lommel. He and his team had studied 344 cardiac arrest subjects and found one patient who had also reported a so-called out-of-body experience. As the man’s mouth was opened to insert a breathing tube during CPR, his doctors noticed that he had dentures. One nurse then removed them quickly and placed them in a specific drawer before continuing to help with the resuscitation. After ninety minutes the man’s heartbeat was restored, and he later recovered. A week later, he was transferred back to the ward where that same nurse happened to be working. The man recognized her, even though he had been unconscious the entire time during his CPR. This really baffled the nurse. He then recounted where his dentures had been placed. He later told Dr. van Lommel that during the cardiac arrest: “I was floating up near the ceiling, and I was trying to let everyone know I was still alive because I was afraid, they were going to stop trying to resuscitate me.” Based on this description alone, he, too, had likely maintained conscious awareness for some minutes while his heart was not beating and he was undergoing CPR.”
― Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

“To better understand what is happening in a newly deceased person’s body, let’s go back to you, in the hospital, or wherever you had headed to death. No matter how it happens, your body—assuming it is still intact—is now in a desperate battle for life. Immediately, triggered by chemical signals released by the body, it enters a state of severe medical shock with unconsciousness—heralding entry into the proverbial ocean of death. This illustrates how the brain automatically attempts to optimize and derive the greatest meaning for the person. It switches from what can be called “life mode” to “death mode.” As this state of medical shock worsens and the person descends further into the ocean and the heart stops and the person dies, the total loss of blood pressure, down to zero, further activates tiny receptors, which in turn trigger the brain to release even higher—mega—doses of several potent and potentially lifesaving hormones into the bloodstream. The period immediately after death is when the highest levels of adrenaline (epinephrine) are released by the body: one thousand times more than the amounts normally found in the bloodstream. As well as adrenaline, the brain also spews out steroids and other potentially lifesaving hormones, including norepinephrine and vasopressin, which work synchronously to try to raise the blood pressure by tightening blood vessels, squeezing more blood toward the heart and brain. These potentially lifesaving responses start when the blood pressure drops with medical shock but become far more vigorous in death after the heart stops. Some of these hormones also act directly on the heart by trying to stimulate it to beat again. At the same time, after detecting low oxygen levels, the brain stimulates the lungs to initiate last gasp breaths. These are called agonal breaths and are an automatic reflexive response, seen in people as they die, that can help draw more oxygen into the body. But importantly, they create a vacuum in the chest that sucks blood away from the arms, legs, and abdomen and directly toward the heart and brain, where it is needed more. This is like an army calling up its reserves in the time of war. So, as mentioned, instead of an absolute loss of activity in a linear manner from 100 to zero across the whole brain in death, we see there is a dynamic process. There is dysfunction and loss of activity across much of the brain. This in turn facilitates activity in other normally dormant parts of the brain, which are better adapted to deal with the new reality of death. Even now, the brain strives to make meaning out of this situation and its efforts are focused on kick-starting the heart back to life through autoresuscitation.”
― Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death