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What Happens When We Die?: A Groundbreaking Study into the Nature of Life and Death | 
 enlarge | Author: Sam Parnia
Publisher: Hay House
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 260057
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 0.6
ISBN: 1401907113
Dewey Decimal Number: 133.9013
EAN: 9781401907112
ASIN: 1401907113
Publication Date: February 1, 2007
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Product Description
Dr. Sam Parnia faces death every day. Through his work as a critical-care doctor in a hospital emergency room, he became very interested in some of his patients’ accounts of the experiences that they had while clinically dead. He started to collect these stories and read all the latest research on the subject, and then he decided to conduct his own experiments. That work has culminated in this extraordinary book, which picks up where Raymond Moody’s Life After Life left off. Written in a scientific, balanced, and engaging style, this is powerful and compelling reading.
This fascinating and controversial book will change the way you look at death and dying. . . .
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
Where's the study? December 30, 2008
I have read most well-regarded NDE books and was very excited about reading Dr. Parnia's book since his claims to focus on a "groundbreaking study" that seeks to understand if medicine can prove NDEs. I read the first chapters with anticipation. I couldn't wait to get to the "results"; however, that never happened. I neared the end of the book in disbelief and feeling let down. The book IS a good review of the theories about NDEs, and Dr. Parnia is certainly a compassionate and inquisitive physician, but the title is misleading. The focus of this book is not on study results but on the process of undertaking the study. First, the reader learns all of the different NDE theories. Then, We learn about the study Dr. Parnia wants to undertake and even the process of that undertaking, including funding issues. There's even a very technical chapter illustrating and explaining how the brain works. All of this is very interesting and educational; however, these things take up most of the book.
We do get to read about some NDEs, but these few NDEs are often used as examples in theories and occurred mostly in patients who were not Dr. Parnia's but patients he discovered through research and interviews. These experiences were not a result of his very small study that is yet to be undertaken on a large scale. The book only includes his first attempt at a study, but this does not lead to revealing results, and it is not the focus of the book.
The book lead me to believe that Dr. Parnia intends to undertake this study on a larger scale now that he has learned what the kinks are in attempting to do so. I hope that he will write a follow-up book that shares his discoveries since this first book is really just an introduction to a groundbreaking study.
 Needs a Final Chapter December 5, 2008
Sam Parnia wrote a book without an ending. That is because he was unable to complete his research due to a lack of funding into near-death experiences (NDEs). The reason was simple--there is prejudice in the research community over the funding of projects of this type. Dr. Parnia raises thought-provoking questions about the nature of consciousness and is to be commended for trying to tackle the biggest problem facing us all--death. So we are left with a book that has no ending (but an intriguing beginning) that I suspect was written to raise money for further studies. The biggest problem the book raises is how people can have lucid thoughts (NDEs) during cardiac arrest when there is no blood flow and no electrical activity in the brain.
Dr. Parnia would benefit from reading Rick Strassman's book, "DMT: The Spirit Molecule," and noting that NDEs share some of the features encountered in other altered states induced by stress, temporal lobe epilepsy, and powerful entheogenic substances. (Dr. Parnia mistakenly glosses over these areas in his book.) Dr. Strassman brought up a viable link between these experiences and reports of UFO abductions suggesting a comparable process within the mind. A curious similarity in UFO abduction reports, shamanic (religious) experiences induced by physical stress or entheogens, and NDEs is reports of subjects' bodies being tied by a cord or beam of light to their "selves" in the heavens (a phenomenon similar the biblical story of Jacob's ladder). Implications of this type leave people uneasy about the possible examination of religion by science; two areas that merge as easily as oil and water. These links suggest a common source that hopefully will be investigated when barriers to this kind of research are removed and more open-minded, scientific investigators like Dr. Parnia are allowed to do their research.
 Hope I wont have to read it again in my afterlife June 24, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The beginning is fine since he was telling the NDE experiences of patients who had cardiac arrest. After he ran of out experiences to talk about, he basically focused on his attempt of his first research, which he didn't explain any further, then jumped into his struggles to raise funds for more advanced studies, repeating again and again the same thing about how people's NDE experience transformed them.
 Guess what? Dr. Parnia doesn't know.... April 4, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
This has to be one of the most diappointing books I have read on this subject. Basically, it is a bunch of theories by other researchers that are tossed around in a disorganized fashion (peppered by some anecdotal accounts from people who have experienced NDE's, which was somewhat interesting.) There wasn't even a study completed due to lack of funding, so nothing was ever examined. Very misleading and really a waste of time.
Not the Promised End December 30, 2007
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
I have seldom been so disappointed with a book, which was good enough to read all the way through. Much of the text has as much to do with near death experiences as the ribbon and wrapping paper have to do with the present inside. Much of the discussion is about (1) the author's training to become, a physician from M.D. through residency and Ph.D. with various job descriptions of the entailed steps, (2) experimental design for probing near death experience (rather than research findings!, more on this in a moment), and (3) the mostly futile quest for funding for this research. This book has been published prematurely. The first half, for instance, describes the author's attempt to design an experiment to test the validity of out-of-body experiences associated with cardiac arrest. He and a crew of friends hang from the hospital ceiling message boards whose messages can only be ascertained by a perceiver looking on from above, i.e., floating above the resuscitation attempt on that person's body. But the author reports in the book not one instance of these "messages" being viewed or, for that matter, not viewed! It is as if the first half of the book is a detailed description of an experiment being set up whose findings were completely inconclusive. What bothers me most is the hybridizing in approach to subject: joining the narrative techniques of fiction (i.e., the creating of suspense about the outcome of the experiment) with the prose techniques appropriate for a scientific article in a technical journal (i.e., dispassionate reporting of inconclusive results).
But, in fact, the book is overall an account of a weird set of circumstances of which the author himself appears unaware. He set out to design an experiment to probe near-death and particularly out-of-body experiences. The experiment came to naught, but a nurse unwittingly disclosed what was going on with the experiment to another nurse, and word of the experiment went the rumor mill of the hospital and eventually leaked to the press who persuaded the public relations person at the hospital to induce the author to interview. The resultant media coverage then triggered people who had had the experiences to write to the author. Their accounts are in fact the most interesting material in the book. He quotes them, and their prose is much more textured and nuanced than the dispassionate narrative voice of the text. So it was the experiment gone bad--i.e., its design was supposed to be kept from the hospital staff so that they could not affect or influence the accounts of would-be "out-of-bodiers"--that turned up the best evidence for or, at least, best probing of the near-death experience. The author seems unaware of the irony that the flaw in the experimental design led to the best material he has to report in this book. It is almost of if the author's consciousness has yet to grow into consonance with his material.
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