Earlier this year, Robert Lawrence Kuhn hosted ER specialist Sam Parnia on Closer to Truth to talk about why Parnia, based on his ER experience, believes that consciousness survives clinical death.

It seems a somewhat tense interview. Parnia, author of Lucid Dying (Hachette 2024), held his own against his skeptical interviewer, principally by defending very narrow, research-based ground. One aspect of that defense is deeply significant, as we shall see.

Parnia starts by clarifying what he means by “soul.”

Parnia: Nobody can deny that they have a [1:36] sense of self. Robert is Robert. Sam is Sam … I [3:05] think any rational being would not deny that there is a soul, in the sense that you wouldn’t deny that you are a conscious thinking being. That’s really what the soul is. There’s nothing more to it. If other people have different definitions of soul, that’s not my definition, that’s not what I’m talking about. The soul is the self.

So scientifically yes I think we all accept that it exists. The question is what happens to it; where is it produced from and what happens after death?

Of course, we don’t know scientifically how it comes to be. That’s the big problem of consciousness that we talk about. But the evidence, certainly from research that is being done in cardiac arrest patients — people who have gone beyond the threshold of death — suggests that consciousness, psyche, or soul does not become annihilated when people have gone beyond the threshold of death, at least not in the early stages of death.

Science media have so far made few efforts to attack Parnia and his colleagues’ findings around lucid dying and near-death experiences. But then he has been careful to defend only what he can demonstrate.

Which raises an interesting question: Does the soul continue to survive the death of the body? Parnia is agnostic about that. He is even prepared to see the soul as something material, in a subtle way:

Parnia: What I do think is important is that for [5:04] the first time in history, our opinions and beliefs should be guided by the results of research rather than the way it is today, which is that, basically, you probably have millions or billions of different opinions about what happens when we die. The viewpoint that I think is probably most consistent with the results of our research so far is the view expressed by eminent scientists such as Professor Sir John Eccles (1903–1997), the Nobel Prize winner, more recently Professor Baram Elahi who’s given a series of 5:36 lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris, which is basically that consciousness/psyche/ the soul exists.

Yet it’s a separate undiscovered entity to the brain. It’s [5:45] most likely a very subtle type of nature. It’s not immaterial, it’s not weird and magical; it has some materiality but it’s very subtle. This is what Professor Baram Malahi has proposed and that it is who we are and that it should be studied with the objectivity of science rather than the sort of vague or, you know, ways that people discuss it today

Narrow ground but firm

In the discussion, Kuhn continues to ask Parnia to confirm that his view is not that of orthodox religions. Parnia replies, “ I can only explain what our [6:47] studies have found. I can’t comment on how it may be interpreted by people.”

And what have his studies found?

Parnia: All I can simply say [8:54] is that we’ve made enormous inroads through objective science in determining the relationship between… consciousness, psyche, or soul and the brain. And that it appears that consciousness, there’s at least growing evidence to at least raise the question that it’s possible, contrary to many people’s beliefs, that actually consciousness, the psyche, or the soul may continue and may exist independent of brain function.

Kuhn seems irritated by the underlying implication of the clinical evidence that Parnia insists on sticking to: The human soul is a fact, not an illusion. What sort of fact is very much under discussion, of course. For example, souls could survive the body’s death only to fade away shortly afterward. We have accounts of near-death experiences only from those who were revived in this frame of reality.

But any such evidence at all is breaking a pattern that many assumed was inviolable. Science was only supposed to explain away traditional beliefs like the existence of, or survival of, the soul. It was not supposed to confirm any element of them. That may be what is bothering Kuhn. Parnia, to his credit, sticks narrowly to the results of his own research, resisting the pressure to deny them.

Confirmation of post-death consciousness during trauma might seem like a little thing. But in science, persistent little discrepancies are often the ones that matter. As a physics teacher once told me,

Lord Kelvin remarked in 1900 that there were just “two little dark clouds” on the horizon of Newtonian classical physics of the day, namely, Michelson and Morley’s measurements of the velocity of light and the phenomenon of blackbody radiation. Kelvin was certain that these troubling little clouds would be blown away shortly. Yet all of modern physics—relativity and quantum mechanics—derives from these two little dark clouds. The Spiritual Brain, pp. 172–73

You may also wish to read: Heart attack doctor: Science shows that death is not the end. Sam Parnia began by wondering how brain cells can give rise to thoughts. He came to see that the message “from science” was not what he had been led to expect. Parnia concludes that science suggests, at a minimum, that our consciousness and selfhood “are not annihilated when we cross over into death.”