Consciousness, Awareness & Psychological Outcomes after Cardiac Arrest

0:00 Speaker 1 With us today is doctor Sam Parnier and he’s at NYU Leon Medical Center and I’ve heard him speak in the past, and he’s got some new revelations. The revelations are that when you die, your brain lives on for at least an hour.

0:19 Speaker 2 Uh.

0:20 Speaker 1 Doctor Parneer, how are you this Sunday morning?

0:24 Speaker 2 Very good? Thank you for having me on the show with I.

0:27 Speaker 1 Understand you’re going to be writing a book and uh uh and once once you write a book, we’re gonna review it with you again. But tell us about your new findings and and uh what you have learned.

0:42 Speaker 2 Yeah. Well, I’m a I’m an intensive care doctor and my job, of course is to save people’s lives when they’re facing death and to prevent them from going to death. But unfortunately, sometimes people’s heart stop. That’s called a cardiac arrest, and that’s the same as what happens to anyone when they’re transitioning from life to death, and my job is

1:03 to save them and bring them back. I’ve also been researching this for many years and we have just released the results of our latest study, which was carried out in twenty five major medical centers with five hundred and sixty seven patients, and we tried to study for the first time in a very comprehensive manner what happens to

1:24 the human mind and consciousness and the brain as people are transitioning from life to death as their undergoing cardiac chorrest resuscisation. And the reason for that was because for many decades now, millions of people who’ve been brought back to life have reported that even though from the perspective of the doctors they were actually sort of in phase

1:47 of death and they looked like they were totally unconscious, from their own perspective, they feel that their consciousness in death becomes heightened, it becomes more vast, and they’re able to recall watching and hearing doctors trying to save their lives.

2:05 And also then they undergo a deeply purposeful and meaningful reevaluation of their entire life or their thoughts or their intentions and all of their actions and interactions with other people, and they evaluate themselves through the prism of morality and ethics.

2:25 And so we tried to objectively and scientifically study this phenomena in people using brain monitoring, very sophisticated brain monitoring systems across as I said, twenty five major medical centers, mostly in the United States and the United Kingdom.

2:42 Speaker 1 And in doctor Worth. Which incident impressed you the most? How long was the door? Was the patient technically dead and you brought them back.

2:53 Speaker 2 One of the key discoveries that we found with this project, which was very important, was that although for years some scientists, again not understanding why people are having these heightened lucid conscious experiences with death, had assumed that there were probably some sort of imagination, some sort of a trick of a dying brain, essentially thinking that they weren’t real, even

3:17 though all of the patients, and I’m talking millions of people have adamantly said that they felt this experience was more real than anything they’ve ever experienced before, which is completely different to a hallucination. With hallucinations, people generally recognized afterwards that it had not been real. So what we were able to do using brain monitors was to actually

3:37 show that even though when people had gone through death that their brain had flatlined and stopped working, that with time as they were getting resuscitated, even up to an hour later, we were able to show the emergence of normal looking brain waves, brain electrical waves, the same as what you see in someone like myself or your own brain.

4:02 In other words, in people who are conscious, who are thinking, were evaluating their lives. And so this confirmed for us the validity of the lucid reports of consciousness that people are having while they are seemingly unconscious and they’re traveling through from life to death. And that was one of our key key discoveries.

4:22 Speaker 1 So when you brought some of these patients back, how much of their original thoughts remained intact? Was it some all? Are? Were you able to bring back the entire brain.

4:38 Speaker 2 It’s important to point out that these people who are being revived back to life again, they are not having any pain, they’re not having any distress, and they are seemingly unconscious from our perspective, but from their own perspective, they’re describing an inner experience. But what happens is that because of the fact that they’re so ill and they’re

5:00 given different medications together wipe out their memory after they recover. What we were able to identify is that people recall a spectrum of memories. It’s not viv it’s not absolute recall. There’s a spectrum of recall. So, for instance, forty percent of people had a perception that they had been aware of things, but they couldn’t recall anything in more detail.

5:25 And then twenty percent of them had they what we call a transcendent recalled experience of death. These are the recollections of having these very profound experiences where they think they realized that they’ve died, they review their own lives, they have a memory of watching doctors and nurses reviving them.

5:43 And then about two to three percent of people will describe having had full awareness of what was happening, but again without any pain or distress. And so we were able to show that it’s not a black and white thing, it’s sort of shades of gray. There were different amounts of memories that people are able to recall, but it

6:02 definitely suggests that there’s some inner conscious activity going on in people as they’re transitioning from life to death.

6:12 Speaker 1 And the one thought I’m trying to get is once they recovered, Let’s say you will recover a patient that was theoretically dead for forty five minutes, Was he almost normal when you run.

6:27 Speaker 2 Back, well one of these.

6:31 Speaker 1 Was he normal and functional.

6:34 Speaker 2 One of the key things that has come out in recent years with our understanding of this phenomenon of cardiacress. This is when the heart stops, and the heart stopping is how doctors actually will declare people dead. It’s just that if they get resuscitation, we call it cardiacress while we’re trying to bring them back to life. If we

6:53 don’t resuscitate them, then they’re declared dead. However, generally there is a lot of room for improvement in care because people are still practicing what was done around nineteen sixty unfortunately, and so the survival rates remain very poor, only about ten percent if people survive, but and among them there is a risk of brain damage. But what we’ve discovered

7:18 actually is that this brain damage doesn’t occur because of the period where they were deprived of oxygen. It actually occurs when oxygen is put back into the brain. And so our discovery one of our discoveries.

7:32 Speaker 1 In this, In other words, when the oxygen is put back into the brain, does the normal brain functions come back?

7:40 Speaker 2 Well, as I said, so the oxygen itself, when you put it back into the brain, the oxygen can cause toxicity. It can become poisonous, and in those people, if they’re not treated properly, they may not get their full brain function back.

7:54 Speaker 1 But is there a point doctor? Is there a point doctor, when you have somebody on the on the bed and they’ve died, that you give up on trying to resuscitate them.

8:08 Speaker 2 Unfortunately, a lot of doctors give up. This is what I was trying to explain because traditionally, doctors have been taught that the brain becomes damaged after about five to ten minutes of oxygen deprivation. But what we have demonstrated in our study, and other people have demonstrated the same thing, is that actually the brain is quite resilient to the

8:27 effect of oxygen deprivation even up to an hour of time. What happens is in order for us to save people and prevent any brain damage, we need to learn how to manage the effects of putting oxygen back into the brain that had been deprived of oxygen, because it’s that that will cause damage potentially if it is not treated appropriately.

8:48 Speaker 1 So, in other words, put oxygen back into the brain while the person is dead in the first ten twenty thirty minutes. Can you put oxygen into the brain somehow?

8:58 Speaker 2 But when people are delivering a CPR, you know, cardiopomer resusciation. That’s the goal is to put oxygen back in the brain, but they’re only able to put in about en to fifteen percent of the amount of oxygen that is normally there.

9:13 So there’s always an oxygen deficit. And because of this deficit and how much oxygen is getting into the brain, eventually it leaves it in a situation where if you put if you managed to then restart the heart later, let’s say half an hour, an hour later, you restart the heart. Unfortunately, that although it’s great because it puts

9:35 full oxygen back on now, it’s like putting a full tank of gas back in there. But that tank of gas, that tank of oxygen, becomes flammable and it causes damage. So it’s not the period in which you weren’t without gas.

9:50 It’s the fact that you were without gas for a long period of time and then suddenly you splurge a lot of gas into the brain.

9:56 Speaker 1 So are you looking for a way to control are you looking for a way to control the speed of which the oxygen goes back in To avoid damage, you have.

10:08 Speaker 2 To find treatments that will work against the flammability, let’s say by by analogy. Obviously, it’s not truly flammable, but by analogy, you want to find treatments that prevent oxygen toxicity. And that’s very important because what it means is instead of to your question, instead of giving up and assuming it’s a lost cause, it now opens up a whole

10:28 new window of new therapies and new drugs that can be given to prevent the effects of oxygen damage and to send people home without any brain damage.

10:38 Speaker 1 Understood, Doctor Sam Parnia and of the Lengo Medical Center, NYU. Thank you for coming on and this Sunday morning, and I look forward for your book to come out so we can talk about it more extensively.

10:58 Speaker 2 Thank you for having me. Thank you