Sam Parnia’s medical specialty at the New York University Langone Health System is resuscitation. He also directs large clinical studies of heart attacks (cardiac arrest). That has brought him into contact with a lot of people who are on the brink.

It has also strengthened his conviction that near-death experiences show that death is not the end of human consciousness. Hence his new book, Lucid Dying (Hachette 2024), set to drop August 6. To judge from the online sample pages, Parnia makes clear that he bases his findings on the way advances in science have enabled us to bring people back from various states of death.

From early on, he was puzzled by the relationship between the mind and the brain:

Throughout medical school, I wondered: How can brain cells give rise to thoughts? They were cells just like any others, why should they produce thoughts? I wanted to know what made every single one of us so unique. At that time, I believed very strongly that the answers to my questions lay somewhere in the brain. I even contemplated formally pursuing a career on neurology, or psychiatry, but soon realized that neither would address these burning questions. That was because science did not yet have the answers. (page 7)

He came to see that the message “from science” was not what he had been led to expect:

Although life and death remain a mystery, science is showing that contrary to what some philosophers, doctors, and scientists have argued for centuries, neither biological nor mental processes end in an absolute sense with death. There is much more to be discovered, but science does, at a minimum, suggest that our consciousness and selfhood are not annihilated when we cross over into death and into the great unknown. In death, we may also come to discover that each of our actions, thoughts, and intentions in life, from the most minute, to the most extreme, do matter. (page 8)

He thinks that new innovations will enable remarkable discoveries in this area:

These innovations will allow us to peer inside people who traverse beyond death, to witness signatures of a unique hyperconscious lucid mental state emerge in their brains through bursts of activity. The way these brains reactivate and the specific types of activity we record, together with analyses of many thousands of people’s testimonies, will offer tantalizing glimpses into the reality of what we will all experience in death. (page 8)

Already, it has also become quite clear that death is a process, not a moment, one that involves many stages.

Many have assumed that science would demonstrate something different

Of course, many believe that science proves — and must prove — that life beyond death is impossible. Johns Hopkins cosmologist Sean Carroll for example, told Unilad last year,

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle.

The laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood. And there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die.

Ben Thompson, “Scientist says life after death is scientifically impossible,” Unilad, February 27, 2023

But it is difficult for science to refute, for example, veridical near-death experiences, where experiencers recount events that they could not have observed under natural circumstances.

One thing Parnia makes clear is that it is early days yet for his entire field. At this point, dogmatism will probably not provide an advantage to anyone.

You can read more from the sample here. Parnia has written two earlier books on this topic, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (Harper One 2013) and What Happens When We Die (Hay House 2006)

You may also wish to read: Near-death experience study: Brain is active after death. Science media are making surprisingly few efforts to attack or explain away the team’s findings. In their Discussion, the authors conclude, “The recalled experience surrounding death now merits further genuine empirical investigation without prejudice.” Also: One significant finding is that thought processes can remain active after clinical for much longer than thought — bad news for organ harvesters.