Sam Parnia is a British[1] associate professor of medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center, where he is also director of research into cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
[4][5] He maintained an honorary research fellow title at the University of Southampton and continued his collaboration through the Human Consciousness Project, which he founded and directs.
[17] The other side of his work, which he conducts with a team at the State University of New York and across multiple other medical centers in the United Kingdom, is consciousness during cardiac arrest.
He has stated: “contrary to perception, death is not a specific moment but a potentially reversible process that occurs after any severe illness or accident causes the heart, lungs and brain to cease functioning.
He has mostly studied those who have no heart beat and no detectable brain activity for periods of time and believes cardiac arrest is the optimal model to help understand the human experience of death.
[15] This study, which concluded in 2012, included 33 investigators across 15 medical centers in the UK, Austria and the USA and it tested consciousness, memories and awareness during cardiac arrest.
[22] One such test consisted of installing shelves, bearing a variety of images and facing the ceiling (hence not visible to hospital staff), in rooms where cardiac arrests were more likely to occur.
[31] Science writer Mike McRae (2014) suggests that "While Parnia's work contributes valuable data to understanding NDE as a cultural phenomenon, his speculations do indeed sit on the brink of pseudoscience.
"[32] Neurologist Michael O'Brien (2003) writes that "most people would not find it necessary to postulate such a separation between mind and brain to explain the events," and suggested that further research is likely to provide a physical explanation for near-death experiences".
[5] Psychologist and lecturer Susan Blackmore (2003) appeared with Parnia and Peter Fenwick on a BBC documentary called "The Day I Died" and disagreed with their interpretations of NDEs, finding purely physical explanations to be more plausible.