Rethinking Mortality: Exploring the Intersection of Life and Death

[Music] well it is great to be back at the Morgan Library this beautiful setting uh for the final event in our series on spirituality in the age of Science and and the the topic of our conversation I think is especially fitting for the closing chapter in this series we're going to talk about death which is a subject that most people don't want to talk about they don't want to think about uh and yet it is one of the most significant life events that will ever happen to us or to our loved ones some years ago my radio show did a series on death and dying and we posed a question to our listeners suppose you know your death is imminent but you have a choice about how you will die and the premise of this is that uh you will die soon not when you're old and frail so you have three choices number one you die in your sleep it's painless without any knowledge of it happening and no chance to prepare two you die within one hour of a cataclysmic event while you're alone Outdoors maybe a bear mauls you on a hike something like that it's painful and intense but you have a brief chance to comprehend your own death or three you're diagnosed with terminal cancer and you will die within one year the first two to three months are relatively painfree but then the condition gets uh worsens over time over the last nine months as you approach death you will die in hospice with family and friends around you so I'll just pause uh as you think about this for a moment what you would choose so for the record 58% of our listeners said they would choose to die in their sleep 24% they would choose terminal cancer with a year to live and that cataclysmic event the the be mauling ouch uh 18% chose that now I mention this because I think it's really important to think about death and dying not just when we're on our deathbeds but throughout our lives it informs choices about how we live also what a good death might be I know there's a lot of controversy about that idea of a good death and to get to our subject for the evening what dying can tell us about how we find meaning in our own lives there is a new science of death and we will get into that in great detail here which also raises profound questions about the brain the mind and the nature of Consciousness and we're very fortunate to have one of the world's experts on these subjects with us Dr Sam paria is director of critical care and resuscitation research at the NYU School of Medicine in addition to his many scientific papers he's the author of erasing death and the forthcoming book Lucid dying the new science revolutionizing how we understand life and death he also has a documentary film called rethinking death which I highly recommend Sam it's great to be here with you it's a pleasure to be back we did this uh just over 10 years ago we were reminiscing so yeah it's great to see you again and I've always enjoyed chatting about this so um so you've spent years decades studying these issues trying to understand what happens when we die and I'm wondering if there is a a particular moment maybe early in your medical education when when this really hit home when you realize oh this this is what I want to do with my life no it's a good question I mean people often ask me you know what got you interested in what you do obviously as as you pointed out the idea of death doesn't is not exactly a a topic that people are going to gravitate towards their Runway um and so what I hope we can get out of this conversation is that actually death is not as we perceive it to be um and that it is not as negative as Society portrays it to be but in terms of what got me interested really it goes back a long time ago I I found multiple things came together and I think a lot of people have similar events in their lives uh but for me what sort of got me started as a teenager was first of all my father became very sick when I was young and he developed a a neurological or brain disorder that within a couple of years led him to essentially look like a vegetable he couldn't respond to us and I remember thinking to myself what's happened to him where is his selfhood you know is he able to understand me and I I had no idea so this idea of what makes us who we are really resonated with me the importance of it you know what happened to my dad who Am I who is everybody else I was young I was you know maybe 12 13 14 15 that sort of thing and then I went to medical school and I remember the thing that I found most interesting was again the brain and I thought that the answers to these questions all lay in the brain and long story short what happened towards the end of my medical training is that I started to go to Cardiac Arrest events these were people whose Hearts had stopped and were being revived and I noticed that there were disparities in their care which really bothered me because I realized for those people that means a death sentence because you can't come back from it and there was one specific case that really I think brought everything together I was a visiting medical student from England I was here actually in in in New York at Mount siai Hospital uh in 1994 and I got to know a patient very well on a personal level I loved this person and then unexpectedly there was a cardiac Ares call long story short I went there the team of white coat doctors were trying to save is but looked like a dead person to me after about 10 years I realized this was the same sweet human being that I was talking to and it really shook me because I thought well what happened to his Consciousness in this process while they're doing all these things to him what is he experiencing and I'd heard about people who had described you know hearing things seeing things when they were going close to death and I wondered whether he had that experience there was one other thing that intrigued me which was actually he was flatlined he was clearly dead and they tried for an hour but they didn't call him dead but I thought well somewhere along the line he must have died so when is is there really a moment of death like we like this idea of a separation between life and death but clearly there wasn't a clear separation so long story short those questions that evening triggered my interest being relatively young and naive I thought I'll graduate and I'll answer all these questions within 18 months and then I'll go on the rest of my medical career and here we are 30 years later you and I discussing it but it has shaped my entire life and my whole medical career I I became an expert in cardiac arrest and I've tried to build on those two issues one is bringing better Medical Care to save people's lives and their brains sending them back home to their families to to to society but at the same time I never forgot that question which is what happens to human mind Consciousness or selfhood when we Traverse into death so you've spent all of this time decades around Death Around sort of this you know when people are hovering between life and death it's not that's not too depressing to devote your life to this I hate to break the news to you the way you presented it sounds very depressing I don't see it that way you I have to talk marketing a little bit you know so I'm going to remarket myself to everybody okay so first of all my job became to become an intensive care doctor so my job I'm uh I work as an intensive care doctor which means my job is to save people's lives and what we do is this field is advancing and I became a subsp specialist in Cardiac Arrest resuscitation and so whether I like it or not my colleagues and I all of us are are take 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 I find it incredibly rewarding I don't see it that way um and at the same time not only do we Restore Life and and bring people back but we're also able to explore questions that have intrigued Humanity from the beginning of time and here we are in 2024 able to start to answer them so I find nothing more exciting than that actually if you want to join your welcome so my sense is that the the definition of of death has changed quite a bit in recent uh decades and I mean there was a time when I think it was it's when the heart stopped that was the definition defition of death and then there was when the brain stops functioning what is the current medical definition of death so so again I I hope you don't mind I'm not offending you or anything but um nothing's changed people think there's a change there's not a a change so let me explain if I may because I will help us address what we're really dealing with the 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 the reason we have it is because for thousands of years throughout time we had a situation when whenever people's hearts stopped they couldn't be brought back to life again and because your heart is either beating or it's not it gives a perception that there is a sort of a life and then there is a death when it stops beating and we've all been conditioned to think that way now when I started my interest in this area so so to 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 aress which is what we use in hospitals and death are synonymous it's the same biological process we label it differently because it's hard to tell people your loved one died and we're trying to bring them back to life again so we call it cardiac arest when we try to bring them but what what has then happened is that after the discovery of CPR in 1960 so for the first time in history it became possible to restart the hearts of people who would otherwise be dead and it created a bit of a dissonance in people's minds and so we ended up sticking to these different terms and everyone felt happy oh you're not really dead you're having a cardiac arest no it's the same thing today 98% of people are declared dead when the heart stops so think of all the covid people who suffered people with accidents and so on and so forth but what also happened and I'll try to explain this quickly but it's important in the 1950s and 60s together with the discovery of intensive care medicine what happened was that uh 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 a legal 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 so 2% of people roughly are declared dead when they have had brain death criteria but that's really a legal issue so in other words we scientists doctors felt it was immoral to have to wait for somebody who's clearly got no brain left to have to wait days or weeks for their heart to stop which is what led to this legal issue there is now a third major Revolution our understanding of death which I hope we'll be able to talk about more but but that's the to to to sort of differentiate how we Define death okay but you are saying there's this gray Zone when I mean the terminology gets tricky here but I'll say when is it it's not exactly clear if someone is dead or not and it I mean kind of what you're saying is it's not as if there's a single moment when someone dies it's more of a process is that fair to say yeah sort of 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 and science doesn't work that way biology works as a Continuum there is nothing that works as a binary in that way so to sort of move forward maybe it's better if I explain my own journey in this you know when I started out in the 1990s I had a lot of 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 and because the perception of life and death was so rigid at that time and it's continued to this day for most people including most doctors and scientists there are Niche experts who understand perhaps more of what I'm trying to explain but the majority of people are conditioned by their social Concepts but what happened towards the end of the '90s early 2000s 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 mores 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 okay so they were doing that to find cures then the other thing that happened which as you know I I I love to talk about and I can either wait for you to ask me the question or I'll just go ahead and talk about it are we going to talk about pigs now we're going to talk about pigs we have to talk about the pig study so the pig St have one track mine that's all I ever talk about is the pig study so the pig St I mean I just I'll introduce this so a few years ago a group of scientists went into a slaughter house to find decapitated pigs and took away the heads and then grew brain or organoids no not quite not quite okay so let me go with the story then um so so but I want to explain that even in the early in the in the 80s it became very clear that you could have like you know animals cats who had no 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 but what happened as I said to you with the growth of this the need to find the ability to grow brains to replace diseased brains with healthy brains led to the brain organoid story at the same time groups of neuroscientists were looking at other avenues to explore you know dead brains and so we can fast forward I 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 NAD sestan from Yale and what they were able to do was absolutely astonishing and it shows the point I made they went to a a slaughter house these were not experimental animals these were regular animals that were turned into sausage meat uh they took decapitated ated brains and 4 hours after the animals were killed so these brains were left for 4 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 the brain in the bucket so they put it in a bucket they connected tubing and they put a special solution through the blood vessels and they waited 6 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 they didn't realize they're like oh so where's the Dead brain this is healthy brain they're like no no this was the Dead brain and one of the key things that came came out of this and it's important for our discussion is that these scientists and I've spoken to them at length there's nothing hidden it's all come out now um they were so concerned with the fact that they were restoring life to a dead pig brain um that they decided and this was a concerted effort by the National Institutes of Health Yale administrators and the scientist Dr NAD and his colleagues to significantly downplay their findings they came out with the term like they said well we've restored biological activity or as they said metabolic activity but this is not an this dead this brain is not alive which is total 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 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 and and to extrapolate from this presumably if you could do that with a pig brain you could do that with a human brain that's exactly right the technology exists now to do that with the human brain and the fact what they showed is that after we die so just to to end with that whole debate are you really dead are you partially dead no after you dead there is a long period of time remember this is the first time this is going to go further but 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 if we are able to put our science behind it and and move ahead from our sort of idea that oh you we labeled you dead therefore before it's it's the end you can't come back again so that that is a major major uh Discovery I I personally think it's the biggest discovery that and will undoubtedly lead to a Noel price wow so I want to I want to pick up the implications of that a little bit later but but I want to go back to resuscitation medicine which is what you've been uh spending so much of of your your career doing it used to be thought that uh if you you know you have a cardiac arrest uh you know oxygen has been cut off after about 5 minutes or so the thinking was either that was it or you're going to have serious brain damage right and but that thinking has changed quite a lot again I I have to tell you the the truth is that I would I don't want to say 99% but I think probably 99 plus percent of my colleagues still think that way and I tell you that because every time I round in the ICU and I ask my medical students my residents my fellows they all fall for the five minute rule um and the truth is that science thought we thought that after 5 to 10 minutes of oxygen deprivation the brain dies but now we've understood that is not true in other words what happens after we die or what we when we reach the point of death it's simply a state if we remove the label death it's a state of oxygen deprivation to the brain and we've discovered that the brain is much more resilient to remain in that state now I have to clarify when I say these things people think I'm saying the person's brain is working or they're you know they're awake they're not they're really dead the brain is not functioning but there's a difference between not functioning and having degraded to a point where it's gone the point is that death is no longer considered Society thinks death is rapid degradation doctors are taught when you die you rapidly degrade within five minutes from like a 100 to zero and then you're gone and the reality is it's just not that way you have this long gray Zone in which you are TR truly dead but your cells essentially your brain goes into like a hibernation state if you know what to do like the scientists at Yale figured out you can Restore Life again to it now if you wait you know a couple of years clearly that's not going to work I'm exaggerating but you know there is a point in which the damage will lead to degradation but it is not ours possibly even not days of time it depends whether you a cold where other factors will come into your genetics and so on so forth but the point is it's opened up this window where you are truly dead and science whether it likes it or not has moved into that field and 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 so just to follow up on what what these uh recent discoveries have metant for people in uh in hospitals or in EMT units uh how how do you save a person who is you know suddenly has the heart attack and you know is in the state I mean it's you you're the first thing is to cool the body right well there's a lot that we can do unfortunately again that there's a lot of challenges one is that because we label this card acest and um the the usual practice across the world is Antiquated people are doing what they did in 1960 which is terrible okay nothing else in medicine has been so stagnant yet it has so many ramifications 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 forward and being happy that you're driving it's ridiculous frankly the way I would like to do this is to essentially do 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 the Yale scientist did that will preserve the brain further and 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 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 I should be if if people imp develop these techniques people like me people who are are otherwise healthy should be able to come back think of all the young people who die in athletic games think of people in war unfortunately who ex sanguinate and all these people are otherwise healthy are all salvageable if we how fast do you have to uh use these interventions to save someone well again we haven't gone into too many details of this but in principle again if you look at what the Yale scientist did and I'm talking about what should be done and what is possible rather than a big discussion of what's been currently done then clearly you see that there are hours of time available in which you can still Restore Life to a person and in other words maybe if someone for example had a laceration they had a blood cut cut and they were losing blood from a blood vessel then you preserve them and send them to a surgeon who can go and fix it if on the other hand as unfortunately we experienced with covid you know you have people who had lost their entire lungs and everything else was damaged then clearly we can't apply these at that time maybe in the future but so so it depends on the conditions but the point is that there is a window of hours of time if not longer you have not mentioned uh inducing hypothermia I mean sort of the whole cool one of the key things is to cool people we know that if you are cold the colder you are are that the less your cells will degrade a little bit like how you use a refrigerator I mean the concept makes sense I think to the whole audience but again appreciating that this is complex it's not a single thing it's about restoring blood flow but what causes the brain damage that you all alluded to is actually paradoxically putting oxygen back into a dead person's body so if I die and you leave me alone my cells will degrade very slowly even in my brain If you then come and try to be benevolent and be like you know I was having nice conversation where did you go he taught me how to do CPR let me get him back paradoxically putting oxygen back into my brain after it's been deprived of it causes very accelerated cell death and that's why people do end up with brain damage but they get but but the importance of distinguishing that it means that we don't give up we can find treatments to stop the secondary damage that occurs as a result of oxygen being put back into them rather than assuming that because five or 10 10 minutes just went by it's done Sam's gone like you see so that's that's the main thing that's come out of this so there's some very practical implications to what you're saying one is what is the technology that should be at hand in hospitals in EMT units and all of that so that you know when they're rushing someone in uh you know they can they can save them uh is that I mean what are are we set up with that kind of Technology we're not and honestly if we wanted to discuss that you know as you see get very passionate when we talk about these things like we could talk for hours about this um and as you you you alluded to that's was the premise of my book erasing death which was that people are not doing enough because they label it death and when they label it death everyone just thinks it's the end and then they go get coffee and it's ridiculous so there's a lot that can be done but I don't know if we can cover it in a lot of detail tonight but except that we need to change the way we Define and think of things and then we'll be able to make changes this death in the first phase is a medical treatable event it's like having a what we call a transient esic attack it's a transient period of oxygen deprivation if you leave it long enough we usually apply that to to people who are having a stroke if you leave it long enough then the damage becomes permanent but there's hours of time and that that's the key and then the other thing that of course is fascinating is what happens to people's Consciousness as they've traversed into that period of death what can we understand about that process so I'm going to come to that in a moment but first another very practical question what about the moment when the person is declared dead for good and uh the doctors say okay this is the moment when we harvest the organs for for transplants I mean that's a huge question because there's this very limited window of when those organs are viable right yes I mean you're highlighting a very important point we I hope I hope what I'm saying makes sense to the audience anyway these are complicated issues and I I recognize that people have very somewhat fixed ideas about things but I think there are three prongs of science that have independently come to explore the postmortem period so one of them is the brain organoids what scientists are now doing is taking these brains in a Petri dish and putting them or planning to put them into diseased human brains to to save people the other is the field of resuscitation can now expand vastly by recognizing that we have this huge Gray Zone this window of opportunity to develop new treatments for pharmaceutical companies Physicians scientists can now explore and develop treatments the third is what you alluded to which is that um there are many many people who need organs to be able to live and in order to do that we have to take organs from people who have newly died and so therefore there are many so the pig study we talked about was being done as part of a development of methods to improve organ preservation for transplantation purposes by the way but the key thing here is we have to integrate whether we like it or not the study of our our personhood Consciousness into what happens when we die because as you alluded to currently what happens is that when somebody's died who is an organ donor doctors will wait five maybe 10 minutes maximum usually five and then they will take the organs now I I want to also so I don't want to make anyone afraid I want to be very clear and we're going to talk about consciousness people who die do not when even though they have conscious awareness that we're going to discuss there is it's not the usual Consciousness that we have it's not like they're trapped in their body and they're feeling pain or discomfort so I would love for us to expand that but I do want to emphasize the fact that the idea of what is consciousness what the ancient Greeks called the psyche which was later translated into the word Soul into the English language in essence who we are our selfhood is no longer a topic for religion religion and philosophy and should now be into and has been pushed into the realm of science whether we like it or not even though everybody in this room I'm sure has some kind of religious philosophical spiritual idea of that but I think if we look back 100 years from now to the present we'll see this was the moment the inflection point in which we took this idea and put it into the realm of science so one last question before we plunge into this whole issue of what I talk about you keep why do you define death this way that it's sort of you know you're saying death is you know at the moment of cardiac arrest basically and but yet people can come back whereas I think the the lay understanding of death is death is really when it's when it's over there it's you know every you know everything has died there's no chance of coming back why not Place death at that point so so I think this is you know one of the things I have to be I tried for years to understand quantum physics and I never could it was too complicated I gave gave up uh but this is a little bit similar I think for a lot of people because we say things that sound contradictory to me they're not but they sound contradictory I'm going to try to explain why they're not contradictory we had a case um maybe six months ago a year ago something like that I was working in the ICU in the Intensive Care Unit and there was a cardiac arrest so I went there and we started doing the nurses had started doing CPR and we were saving this person we five minutes or so we were doing this and then suddenly somebody came in the room and said oh this person did did not want to be resuscitated he actually had cancer and it made sense he was elderly and it made sense but we just didn't the nurses didn't know his wishes so we started and so honoring his wishes we stopped CPR and his heart obviously had stopped he had wasn't breathing his brain wasn't functioning which is the criteria we used to declare somebody dead so I declared him dead and then we have a huddle usually after these events where we discuss what we did right what we did wrong you know we discussed things so we talked and the nurses discussed and and the doctors and so on and then I said I was just curious I said well um so he's dead right and they said yeah of course he's dead I said well so it's like 9:25 right yeah so I said well if we put him now on a gurny and you're going to take him to the Mory um is it possible to bring him back to life again and they said of course not he's dead I said well but what if his family just called and said oh I I made a mistake we think we should try and they were like why they were really flabbergasted by this so so the point I wanted to make to you is that yes clearly that person could have been resuscitated if we really wanted to and the issue here is that he was permanently dead because we stopped trying so his death was irreversible and permanent but nonetheless as he was being wheeled away to the Mory the potential to bring him back to life existed we didn't do it because in this case he didn't want wanted in another circumstance it could be because the medical knowledge or technology isn't available if my heart were to stop in the Sahara and somebody tries to save me there's only so much they can do if my heart stops in my Intensive Care Unit then there's a lot more that can be done so there is also a disparity in medical care knowledge it's not like everyone has access to everything as you appreciate then the other reality is that many of the things needed to to to do what I'm talking about may not have been discovered yet because again people thought there's no point going beyond the end like makes no sense which was you know how you were addressing the beginning of this conversation and so for those reasons um people think that way but the reality is then that you are dead and you're permanently dead but when you first die you remain permanently dead yet you can come back and if you don't come back it's because either medical um methods are not being applied to you or they haven't been known or developed or Advanced and so on and so forth but at some Point later much much much much later your body will degrade but it hasn't degraded initially and when it degrades no matter what we do today tomorrow or a thousand years time we can't bring people back so so to address another question people ask me we can't conquer death even though they ended up calling my book erasing death we can't quite erase it we can sort of hold it a little bit but that that's the key thing to to understand about that okay so let's talk about extraordinary experiences that some people report after they've died after they've had a cardiac arrest uh the the reports of I mean I'll just anecdotally say that you know the the the stories of you know floating out of the body looking down from the top of the operating room you know seeing the doctors you know working on the body overhearing the conversation sometimes seeing the white light going through the tunnel in extraordinary cases meeting dead relatives uh you know you know what are often called dear death experiences I know you don't like that term and we will come back to that in a moment but what's going on there so you know again if we look back in history so think about it for thousands of years life and death seem very black and white very clear your heart stopped you were dead that was it end of question let's go and do whatever we need to do CPR was discovered in 1960 and then you had a group of people who would otherwise be dead who were being brought back to life again and more and more people around the world start to apply this by the mid 1970s so only about 15 years after that a book was published that um had the testimonies particularly of 50 people it was 150 but really 50 people in detail who had had come close to death for whatever reason and they were describing similar very profound experiences as you alluded to what we Now understand if we fast forward to this day is that um and they you know Raymond Moody wrote a book and he called it a near-death experience there were other terms actually a French philosopher who had been interested in this 100 years previously actually called it imminent death experience um and others called had different names for it but For Better or Worse the term near-death experience has stuck uh in the popular mind what we Now understand and I've been engaged in this research now for more than 30 years actually so starting for those questions I developed my own line of research I've carried out the largest studies in the world with 25 major medical centers in hundreds of patients and then I've looked at testimonies from thousands of people through these years so there's a lot of work that we've put into this and I'll address what happens so so from the perspective of the doctor scientist looking at the person who's died they look like they are absent there is nothing there interestingly now from the perspective of the person who's died there is a fascinating experience that develops so from their own perspective they may be aware of what's going on and then suddenly their heart stopped and they lose awareness As We Know normally do but yet paradoxically what they tell us and I want to emphasize these are not anecdotes we have millions and millions of people around the world who don't know each other who are saying the same thing and what they describe is that in that sense even though the doctors thought they were dead from their own perspective not only were they not dead as in they were not annihilated their Consciousness their selfhood continues but it becomes sharper than usual more their thinking becomes clearer than usual and their Consciousness feels vast and you and I talked about this is hardly talked about one of our my colleagues actually Dr Montgomery who who survived seven cardiac rests himself was telling me by analogy it felt like the cosmos the size of the cosmos compared to the earth so suddenly it's there's there's like a release it's almost like their Consciousness has been held back and suddenly in death the shackles are removed and it becomes vast and the other things that occur in this situation for them is that they're able to suddenly understand so much more than they could so they're able to for example watch doctors or nurses trying to save them they also recognize that they're dead they say I think I'm dead I think but I feel fine and at that same time they're gaining Visual and auditory knowledge of what's happening to them 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 so they can see and understand everything it's almost like their thoughts are like a flux and it's penetrating it's a bit like I analogize it to like electromagnetic waves that is able to penetrate and is gaining information that way and is released what they then talk about which is absolutely fascinating so again 360 degree vision and then what I find absolutely remarkable is the ability to recall everything that they have done in their entire life so so with all respect to you and and our audience members here I hope I don't offend anyone if I were to ask anyone to recall their entire life they would struggle maybe an hour 45 minutes would be done but yet how is it that in death somebody is able to recall every minute detail is being processed so millions of pieces of data are that's how they describe it are being processed and that includes they describe experiencing and reliving all their intentions their thoughts their emotional states and the situations they found themselves wait you're saying all I mean that's that you know if someone's lived 80 years I mean every moment of the 80 years right well that's that's exactly they say that they're able to relive and re-experience all of it in an instant so that's what I'm saying is you know the way people talk about near-death experiences it really does a disservice like oh it's like your life just flashes past you like some sort of movie it's not like that at all it's your entire life is being relived and re-experienced as if you're there again but what's fascinating is that they are not reliving it in a chronological way that you and I might think like a movie like oh that was that evening 10 years ago when you and I were chatting at the New York Academy of Sciences and you know we did this and we said that they're reliving themselves in the context of how they conducted themselves and whether what they did was right or wrong so they're judging their own actions because they're reliving it and importantly they're reliving it not just from their own perspective but from the perspective of other people they interacted with so for example if I say something tonight that goodness forbid may have offended offended you in my death experience I will relive this but I will feel what you felt so if I hurt you I feel the exact same pain and so I understand that that was awful and I feel humiliated at what I have done you see that's how again these are what they say I'm not so I mean what what you're saying is this is an entirely different Universe reality of space and time and our experience in that I mean this what you're describing defies what I would call the laws of physics since I'm not a physicist I'm going to defer that one um but I'm going to describe to you what millions of people have said consistently they don't know each other some is from a village in the Middle East somebody's from from a little town in England somebody's from in the US somebody's from India somebody's from China they have no idea and they don't talk to other people because they're ridiculed so they live with this little secret but because I'm studying them and thousands of them I'm astonished at the the the consistency of what they say and the other things I I do want to highlight which are important is that in that state um they also relive what they have done which they perceived to have been good and so those states that were of help to others it gives them immense joy and so they themselves judge the quality of their life based upon moral and ethical principles and again I just if you don't mind I want to emphasize this point too it's not based on what they thought was correct because you know how we are we do all sorts of stuff and then we blame other people and we we justify why we did things in death they evaluate themselves based upon how true that was irrespective of how they may have Justified it in their life so there's a different kind of Consciousness here it's their Consciousness but it's different than their what I would call their kind of dummer um Consciousness during waking I mean during the normal you know course of living it's you know I again I've thought about this a lot again I've been doing this for 30 years my understanding of it when I started was more along the lines of how you initially talked about it but through these analyses of these experiences and studying them in in great detail and we've also used natural language processing and you know artificial intelligence methods and so on so so these are not my opinions these are facts of what people say um these are their testimonies but they describe it almost like as if you've been I describe it as if you've been almost trapped and then you're released and liberated so some of the things they say for example I felt like death for me that process was like shedding my coat I felt I was free and in that state like I said it becomes vast and everything that they have done is being relived understood as well as other things for example they describe understanding when they evaluate things they understand evaluating the cause and effect relationships in their life what led to certain events why did those things occur so there's a lot that comes out of it that unfortunately um most people don't you know appreciate but it it's fascinating so so let me run through some of the explanations that I've heard uh commonly to explain uh what are typically called near-death experiences you prefer the term recalled experiences of death but anyway so for instance the body floating up you know what what is referred to as outof body experiences you know you can uh stimulate that with an electrode to the brain uh that's not true but people say it uh just the the the bright lights the the tunnel of that has been explained by hypoxia you know the the loss of oow to say that's not true yes you please please I I and but people believe it some people believe it there the sense that uh you know when you're in coma the the brain totally flatlines the question is you know 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 you know come back online regain Consciousness um why is not that a legitimate explanation so again you ask wonderful questions which I appreciate and I'm just joking with you by the way I tease you a little hope you don't mind um so the 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're either fabricating you're just making up these stories or you're basically hallucinating ating the the issue with the story of Hallucination is that 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 a live in a awakened state where other people cannot confirm what they've said that they're seeing so you may say I'm seeing somebody walking up there and the rest of us would say well that's not really happening so because we're in an awakened state it doesn't apply to people who are in a coma and so on but nonetheless you or I reliving our life is not a hallucination me somebody being able to re recall accurate details of what was happening during their resuscitation or conversations and so on which many doctors have have confirmed is clearly not a hallucination if they're describing reality the other issue with hallucinations which is important to point out is whenever somebody hallucinates which occurs of course there's no doubt um 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 that is absolutely always the case with the death experienced and and the recall 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 this is the only situation in life that I know of where they consist ly 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 so um it doesn't fit with the idea of hallucinations at all the the other thing and and and as you pointed out again I was pulling your leg a little bit but you know people have come out with all kinds of theories what you talking about with theories but none of them have been able to show or demonstrate this experience 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're 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 let me just just while I'm throwing out these of these biological explanations another one is that there's this phrase of what's been called terminal Lucidity you know it's sort of like right as someone is dying suddenly like everything comes alive and you know maybe they were kind of fuzzy and sort of losing cognitive function and then the explanation that I've heard is that it's sort of like uh you know it's 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 so we're beginning to come to a point where we might start to agree a little bit um so so I think that let me just if I may so the reality I have to sort of again I hope I don't offend anybody but I the problem we have is that um and I'm going to address your question but I want to explain this first we as humans are incredibly Limited at what we can perceive and understand if you think about our brain it's only able to understand things within a three-dimensional world and even that we struggle if you put up an optical illusion in front of me I get confused my senses as a human being are incredibly limited you know animals can see beyond what we can see and they have they can have other senses beyond what we have and most important of all I found recently is that actually um um psychologists and behavioral economists have be begun to show more and more how the way the human mind works is somewhat illogical they talk about various mental shortcuts or horis STS these are biases that we have in the way we understand things so confirmation bias is the most best known one where we humans tend to gravitate towards things that we already accept and believe and we reject everything else or we don't look for it the other thing that we have is something termed cognitive dissonance which is where 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 and then they come out with an alternative that they think explains and then they just move on and forget about it forever so why am I saying this in the context of your question when again Society thought you could never go beyond death science started to go beyond death people came out with Incredible testimonies it challenged many scientists views which were limited in what they could understand about death so what option do they have one is to either spend a lot of time trying to figure this idea that they thought wasn't possible the simpler solution is just to reject it or come out with theories like oh you're clearly you know there there Mrs Smith I know you think you saw the doctor but you were clearly hallucinating we know from the history of medicine it's awful to reject people's testimonies you know 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 but none of them were confirmed so that's why those theories came about um and then just finally to address it if I may sort of what do we now think about what really happens and I think we finally discovered why these experiences occur what they really mean so instead of having this rejectionist idea of oh well there're there you know and trying to fit it into models that don't make sense like hallucinations and so on what we've understood now is if you imagine this is death the person goes into death 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 breaking system 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 going to 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 pupillary reflex your brain stem is gone so the person is dead but in that state of death or as we go into the state of the gry zone of death other breaking systems are removed we call that dis inhibition 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 it releases uh steroids and and adrenaline and so on and so forth and in many cases it can spontaneously Restore Life again so 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 postmortem 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 with think is that it's removing the breaking systems to your Consciousness as 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 be become more important to you and we have to ask our ourselves and you ask 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 nobody talks if you think this is an imaginary experience it should reflect what they believed in life even religious people their description of this death experience is not in accordance to what their religion taught them nobody relives any of the ritual ritualistic aspects of their religion for example how many times did I go to a place of worship what it oil boils boils down to is how they conducted themselves so so why do you think these questions this focus on the moral the ethical life and how you've lived your life why do you think that emerges at this this time I I think what I can say for sure is that it emerges which I think is is a big enough discovery I think hopefully you can leave it at that with me um maybe you I need something for you to invite me back in 10 years time again um but I think it's a question we have to ask and think about it so what where we're at now today is we're in this gray zone of death science is exploring it and we find that there is meaning in this state and so the question we have to ask ourselves the human brain that is always optimized to make most meaning out of every circumstance in life why is it that in this state of inhibition not degeneration in this state of gry zone of death it's preparing us for this what looks like a new reality so and what we also know clearly as I've explained to you right now is that again put aside these sort of social ideas oh you're dead that's it when we die and we go beyond the threshold of death neither biological processes die nor the cognitive processes your Consciousness is not annihilated when you go through death it's absolutely clear now clearly there is I mean there's the question of for how long I was about to come to that you read my mind probably very talented so I think there's clearly there is a point and other words what we always thought of is that brain dysfunction is absolute and what we're now seeing is that in this dysfunctional State other functions emerge now again if you wait long enough there's this almost like this inflection point there's this optimal state in which after that we can no longer study like we can't study people who go Way Beyond at this point we can't bring them back but it is clear that there is a point in that dysfunctional state in death that is leading to a heightened sense of Consciousness and that Consciousness does not become annihilated and that it develops into a new sort of capacity that was otherwise felt to be dormant 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 because they've been sort of distorted uh 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 few hours after someone has died has had cardiac arrest and the question obviously is what happens to Consciousness after that 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 so think about it if if you think of death here and now you're 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 what would you 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 as I said paradoxically people's Consciousness does not start to wither away if anything it becomes released more vast and and more powerful than it has been so it tells us something which is that obviously human consciousness is a mystery and the idea that it's simply produced by the brain and therefore dies when the bra when the brain is dying or dies is clearly questionable and not correct in my opinion um and we've opened up a whole new vast and New Frontier scientific research and so what it means is that we need to explore this question and you talked about religion and philosophy and so on of course science doesn't just own what happens when we die people have thought about this for Millennia you know from from religious Traditions to philos philosophical traditions um more recently psychologists anthropologists so everyone's interested in this who isn't interested in this question right so the thing to realize though is that there is a new science and it's not as people perceived and it is not the end and from what we can see there's a whole vast new area that is being developed so Sam we started with your own story how you became interested in this whole area of death and resuscitation medicine what happens after this um what are your takeaways from 30 years of studying all of this I mean what what does that mean for you how you think about life how you think about death I I think you know you you you raised a very important point unfortunately you're highlighting the fact that aging is going on here so um and again as I said to you when I started out and it was a good thing that I was very young because when you're young and naive you do crazy things that you would otherwise not do and sometimes they turn into something useful I don't think you know my current self would have probably done what I did then but I'm glad I did but now as I look at it you know I've reached about 50 and um I realize that I'm not going to be around forever neither professionally maybe I have another 20 years left professionally and then at some point I'm not going to be around and so what I take home from all of this is not only is there incredible opportunities for scientific progress as we've already talked about but how does this apply to each of us how does it apply to me as a human being and I really re and I really live this I don't think you and I talked about this but during covid because I was on the front lines of the ICU and when it first started and it hit New York as you remember we were inundated and and nobody understood what was going on and doctors in China were dying doctors in in Milan were dying in Italy and when we were called to serve many of us thought and recognized that as we looked at each other some of us will not be around in two months and so many of us started to ask these deeper existential questions because suddenly nothing else mattered other than what was the purpose of my life what was I here for of course it's important to be active in society with my job my career and so on but what was it all about and and what I've T and TR truthfully what I was really touched by at that that moment was I'm like oh my goodness my work really does matter to everybody because here I was suddenly no longer that doctor or scientist I was the human being who was potentially facing death and I realized we need science to tell us what really happens and so I think when you look at all these testimonies again these millions of testimonies the purpose that they talk about is that ultimately it looks like what they judge themselves what they evaluate themselves based upon is what they did as a human being how much how much time did they spend how much time did I spend did we spend trying to better ourselves it's almost like again we didn't talk about it when they die they described as almost like a curriculum of developing positive attributes um of humanity and so on and so honestly I don't think there's a day that goes by that I don't think about those lessons that I've heard from these people and and when I'm dealing with others you know again people frustrate you you're at home at work and so on but I always try to remember I'm like how would you look at yourself when you're about to snap at somebody are you being empathetic to their problems are you being more understanding about the pain and I try to put picture of myself and I try to change the way I am um to the best of my ability which is obviously not always easy we we still obviously fail a lot but my point is that's the message that I have taken away from this work um can I just say that being the way you've talked about death here it doesn't sound so bad in fact it sounds kind of wonderful you're the one who said it was bad I never said it was bad so I guess I'm wondering I mean do you look forward to your own death so I don't know I mean I've heard I'll be honest with you the people who've had um death Rec called experiences of death and the reason I don't call it near-death experience by the way is because as I've tried to explain to you when people die they're really dead biologically and we need to get away with this idea of you know you can't go beyond death you really can go beyond death um and also because it's more accurate in other words we're recognizing people's recalled experiences of their death so it's a much more accurate way of looking at it and we don't have to debate anymore whether it was before death after death here or there or you know a quote near-death experience during a psychedelic experience during a dream that you're saying no that's a whole different kind of thing yes yes um I now forgot what you ask me first but respect psychedelics well I was asking are you looking forward to your own death so 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 um they develop a greater sense of meaning and purpose to their lives um 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 um but also I I want to take this field somewhere in the next 20 years before I'm forced to retire probably or or ill health forces me to do that so I don't necessarily look forward to to it but I'm not afraid of it if that's what you're asking me I 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 um again I don't think my Consciousness is going to die and I think I'm going to experience something much more powerful that I'm able to experience right now okay with that I think we should open it up to questions from our audience here because I'm guessing that people will have a few things to say and you have to wait for microphones here so we have some roving mics and uh let's go to the front right here Steve asked me a question you know so do you believe in life after death he asked me and I said I don't really like the way you asked that question because I've been so engaged in what I do that I've actually put aside belief I I don't even like the word belief I only I'm I'm everything I said tonight is based upon data research and science that I've been engaged with now if you go through to the testimonies of people that we've studied what they describe and again I couldn't cover everything but they describe an understanding in that state that there is a source and they talk about a source they describe seeing entities that are luminous kind and compassionate who have a much higher gr of magnitude than they do who help them and guide them with their review of their life and at the same time they recognize that and those are considered to be way higher than themselves they sometimes describe them as perfect they describe them as being incredibly compassionate kind and so on but yet underlying it all they recognize a source from which all knowledge and so on comes but they don't have access to it so I think that most of us would find it difficult to because ultim what you're asking is so that's that answer and the other point is that um if you don't think there is a source then you have to assume that something came out of nothing um and that's beyond the remit of this discussion um so so what I've what I've encountered in these testimonies is that the same person and and and if you if I mean Steve mentioned we have a documentary it's on YouTube rethinking death we have a couple of testimonies we have a lot more we're going to try to expand on it and so on you need to listen to these people it's very important otherwise it's hypothetical when you listen to the same person is describing when I was doing something good I suddenly was overcome with this incredible ecstasy this happiness that I was feeling and then I saw myself doing something else that was not good and I then felt the same pain so the same person is experiencing all of those moments in their life I give you an example there's a young lady who we interviewed her name is Rachel Finch she's in our film she was only about 20 when she was in this state where she almost died she was having a a reaction and she was in hospital and she became unconscious and she had this experience you know and I said to her I said well you know cuz you know she's very sweet person I said what have you done she said well you know I was young I haven't done anything really that bad in my life but I used to go into as a teenager I used to go into fits of Rage with my my father my sister and in that state I was experiencing all the things I was telling her like her sister and the hurt I was causing her and and the hurt I caused my father just through my words and I felt them all I felt the pain that they were feeling and so when she came back interestingly she completely changed she also experienced other stuff that were very personal that I'm not allowed to disclose about her marriage and so on that we won't go into but but my point is that um she experienced so it's each of us will experience what we have done and and it becomes heightened um 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 bit her actually not came to 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 this 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 and so she realized how poor her action had been now think of something as simple as that an 8-year-old tossing their pet guinea pig so it's much more complex than that and and and the other thing you highlighted which is worth you reminded me is you see none of these people talk about the religious idea of Heaven and Hell what their their experience becomes a sort of Heaven or Hell to themselves but but interestingly also which I find really fascinating and you really have to invite me back again I think is that normally if if I were to frankly you know I've been humiliated I've done things wrong I feel embarrassed and in that state you feel awful you feel sort of depressed you don't want to what I find amazing is that these people even though they've had tremendously humiliating experience because they relived everything when they come back they all use it as a stepping stone to become better it's not like oh I'm awful or it's like okay I have to do better I realized I needed to learn that I didn't do it I needed to be better at this be better at that 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 um I think that one of the things we were hoping to talk about is actually the whole concept of what is consciousness who we are and um in a nutshell you know a lot of sort of I would call should we say mainstream scientists these days who are more vocal um proposed an a philosophical idea which is that you know your Consciousness your selfhood your thoughts who you are is simply a byproduct of your brain it's they they say like an epiphenomena as if uh like um heat coming off of a fire the problem with that is that there has been no scientific evidence to show how brain cells can generate a single thought any kind of feeling or emotion can arise from brain cell activity um furthermore um the there are many scientists who actually don't agree with that including for example I was talking with Steve a neuroscientists who discovered brain cell connections and and won a Nobel Prize for it or at least discover the mechanism by which brain cells communicate with each other s John Eckles who W won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1962 or 63 I can't remember who who say that actually um the brain is probably a modulator but it doesn't produce Consciousness doesn't produce Who We Are now what we find with these death experiences but but the key I want to get across is that nobody understands the nature of who what makes you into who you are and me into who I am yet we are all thinking conscious beings what we discover with death which is fascinating is that in this state of this vastness of Consciousness people are uniquely able to understand other people's emotions as well I've had many testimonies where people have said like I could experience what the nurse the despair the nurse was feeling when she looked at me I was experiencing what she was thinking I've had many Physicians again in our rethinking Death documentary Physicians who've had their patients come back and tell them what they were thinking in that state so I think we have one of two options either we have to just say it doesn't make sense we have to just reject it but I think with the amount of testimonies that's not very wise so I think that my my own understanding of why Consciousness what occurs with Consciousness and how it relates to the brain is that I think human conscious 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 through this sort of like a 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 pigs emotions again if this was an anecdote I would have rejected it but there are so many people who don't know each other who say the same thing I think the reality is a number of different things one is that um 10 to 20% of people uh bpot figure have these more Vivid Recollections but actually when we conducted our aware 2 study uh which was carried out and just published a few months ago um over many many hospitals um we found that there's a spectrum of awareness in people when you interview them so roughly 40% of people think of it like this have a vague perception of having been aware but they can't remember any details then about 20% have these types of memories with more explicit recall of specific elements of what we talked about and then roughly about 3% of people have full visual awareness of events that doctors and nurses can have verified which in our study was also we were able to verify so I think to address your question is that and I think all of us have experienced this our memory which I also confess to you our memory doesn't reflect everything that we've experienced so um also in death what I think happens is that everyone has the experience but they later forget it and the reasons they forget it it seems to be one in relation to this process of being sort of insulated back within their body within the process that was going on but also remember everyone who's come back from a a period when their heart stopped by definition has massive brain swelling inflammation and that wipes out your memory circuits and then when they come to the Intensive Care Unit we usually give them drugs to keep them calm which also like sleeping medications wipes out memory circuits so there are many things that cause people to forget and that's why when you interviewed I I gave you the overall because we didn't have time but people recall fragments it's fragmented memory because when we interview them they're not like us where they were Wide Awake they've had different memories wiped out but the way we're able to develop this picture is by interviewing more and more people you start to see that themes emerge everyone's describing the same thing some people remember more of it some people remember less of it and so that's um I think what really is going on it's not that there are 10% to have the experience there are 10% who recall the experience which is somewhat different 10 to 20% so one of the things that you know people have people have tried to find models to explain this one of the things and sometimes these are published in very reputable journals but unfortunately they're not very accurate one of the things that's become in Vogue right now is that people say oh you can have one of these experiences if you just take a psychedelic like silos cbin or DMT or Academy well and so on so I became intrigued by this and we actually studied all of the published literature um with different types of psychedelic drugs and what you find is that people who take psychedelics all do have very incredible unusual experiences but they're totally different they're not even not even similar so what for example what they say is they will describe a sense where they're losing awareness of their body in the same way that when if you and I went to the operating room and they gave us a drug and we were sort of phasing out you sort of they describe bodily perceptions like nausea and so on and so forth and then what you find is they describe things like geometric shapes neon lights they describe if they describe seeing beings they're usually like alien type beings or unusual beings very different to what the death record experience of death is which you also find is that they have all kinds of halfhazard things like I saw zombies somebody described seeing a lighter somebody described a 1940s movie and these are all published these are not my personal these are what is published in medical literature and then what you find is that if they do see a being of of some sort like I said it it's very different it might be humanoid it might have different eyes and it's really things they also describe things like um um like if they see a being it might be like a a sensual woman let's say you know or they if they describe going to a place it's often described as being something um that is again somewhat like being in a sort of an alien space or some other planet or something else like that so my point is that they're very very different and and one of the things that's really remarkable not only are these completely halfhazard because the death experience follows a very clear narrative Arc it's you have a sense of separation from your body Liberation you recognize you've died you review your entire life you go to a place you travel to a place that feels like home you are in this place that feels like home and by home I mean it's somewhere where you belonged you are going back there and then you have a sense that you're told you have to come back you had a higher purpose and your purpose seems to be to have developed your humanity and then you come back this is the arc and there are many sub themes as we talked about within each of those with drug induced hallucinations and others they're totally halfhazard and they're very very different but yet some people claim that they're the same and the reason they do it is because yeah the guy who took a drug said I saw a being but when you get into the details they're totally different and actually to address this question as I was alluding to we worked with the NYU data science group um and we use natural language processing so think of the things we use in our iPhones and Androids which you can if you give enough data it can interpret what people are trying to say and so we collected thousands of people's recalled experiences of death thousands of dream experiences and thousands of drug induced hallucinations we put it into this mathematical model I didn't do it those who know how to do it did it but it came back with 98% accuracy able to distinguish between a recalled experience of death from ordinary experiences from dreams and psychedelic drug induced experiences so the key thing to appreciate is that despite what people may say if you get into the details the experiences are fundamentally and totally different we could go on uh but we don't have more time so thank you thanks to par and thank you to our wonderful audience

Channel: NourFoundation

Views: 14,873

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Id: nSYdCRhnZN8

Length: 78min 0sec (4680 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2024