Is the mind an extension of the brain or its own entity? The relationship of the mind to the body has been a debate that’s raged on for centuries. Dr. Sam Parnia, critical care doctor, director of the Human Consciousness Project and author of “What Happens When We Die,” seeks to settle this debate through AWARE (AWAreness during Resuscitation), a division of the Human Consciousness Project. Find out what Parnia had to say when AOL Health sat down with him for an interview.

How long have you been interested in the dichotomy of the mind and brain?

I first got interested in it when I was a medical student fifteen years ago. When you’re dealing with life and death issues on the wards, doctor’s decisions [on whether to resuscitate a patient] are based on subjective opinions, and there’s a lot of a gray area. I was taken aback by that because there’s no real science about when you get to that real point.

At the end of my training as a medical student, there were a number of patients who had gone into cardiac arrest and died. There was one case in particular, a patient that I got to know personally. I left him one day when he appeared to be well and 30 minutes later, there was a cardiac arrest call. Unfortunately, it was him, and the doctors were working to bring him back.

I remember seeing him in a flat lined state, thinking to myself, “What’s happening to his mind and consciousness? Can he hear us or see us?” I had heard of people who had near death experiences, but there was no scientific answer. That was the defining moment.

Even as a medical student, I was interested in understanding what is the mind and its relationship with the brain. Why are we unique as individuals with personalities, feelings, emotions? I used to believe it was all cut and dry until I started to look into it in more detail. It’s the last completely undiscovered area of science.

What do you hope to achieve through this research? Medical advancement? A better understanding of death?

What we do in medicine benefits in society. If you suddenly discovered a cure for cancer, it’s a medical advancement but ultimately a social advancement. This is a medically-driven study that will benefit all of society. It’s important because we know very little about the mind and brain. In most circumstances, we can’t separate them. Only in clinical death and cardiac arrest, the mind and brain may be separated from each other. If they can be separated, then there are further implications in neuroscience.

A lot of what we do is to study what happens to the brain and the way we can improve resuscitation during cardiac arrest and improve the way we manage patients whose heart has stopped. If we do manage to get patients back to life, there could be less incidents of neurological deficits, cognitive impairments, abnormalities.

It’s really a spectrum. One is pure cardiac and the other is neuroscience. Over all it should benefit everyone.

How can you explain near-death experiences?

The evidence so far suggests that when the heart stops beating, there’s no blood flowing in the body, everything goes still. The University of North Carolina brain shuts down in about 10 seconds. The interesting thing is – when we as doctors intervene and do vigorous chest compressions, and give drugs and shock the heart – despite all our best efforts, studies have shown we cannot get enough blood flow into the brain to get it started. This may go on for tens of minutes or an hour.

Well, what happens to the mind at that time? In my case, what happened to that patient? Is his mind there or not there? We expect the mind to stop working in a few seconds, and interestingly, though – in 5 independent studies, one of which was mine, 10 to 20 percent of people who have gone through clinical death will report some activity of their mind. It appears that some people have some form of consciousness present when there’s no brain activity.

What they describe is a near-death experience. It’s subjective and a dream-like state. They say, “I saw a tunnel, I saw a light,” the usual stuff. We can’t validate that. I can’t say whether your dream is not real or is real. A proportion of them come back and describe watching doctors and nurses doing specific things. The question is – does that really happen? Is it real? Doctors and nurses have confirmed what patients have said. People recall seeing things. Did they really see it? How did they see them? Or were they really at the ceiling?

The key point is that no one really in their right mind can deny this experience occurs. The easiest answer is that it must just be a trick of the mind, an illusion. The problem with that is when people come back and tell us exactly what happened [in the hospital room]. It’s not so easy to say it’s an illusion. It could be that it’s happening just as the brain shuts down or as the brain is recovering. For example, you might have a dream that you’ve been somewhere for a year, but it could be a microsecond in real time. It could be that as the brain was shutting down you had a quick experience. You felt like you were there the whole time. Putting aside the tunnels or lights, they come back and tell us specific details, “At 9:15 a.m., this may have happened.” And that was 10 or 20 minutes into the event.

The alternative explanation is that they do see things. People have their eye closed, maybe they happen to open their eyes, and they’re just gathering information and their brain collects that information. The point is that they did see things.

The mind is a mystery. We don’t understand, and it may be possible that the mind is non-local to the brain. If you ask quantum physicists, this is possible because we know at that level things can be non-local. They behave in a weird way.

How do you scientifically validate their reported experiences?

We set up a shelf just above the head of the [hospital] bed. On the side facing down – the side you can see while looking up – there’s a triangle. On the other side, which you can only see if you’re looking from the ceiling looking down, is a complex picture.

Imagine you’re lying in the hospital and above you is the shelf. If nobody [who reports a near-death, out of body experience] describes seeing an image, it’s most likely the case that it’s a trick of the mind, an illusion. If somehow they come back and say they saw the triangle, they could have seen it if they opened their eyes. If they come back and say they saw the more complex picture, then their consciousness was continuing.

We want to preinstall 50 to 100 shelves in a minimum of 25 hospitals. We have probably started in about half of those – the majority being in the United Kingdom. We have nine centers in the United States, and we’ve been piloting the method in the United Kingdom for 18 months. While we can’t foresee where cardiac arrests will take place, we expect them to happen in the emergency room and intensive care units. Once they’re preinstalled, we just monitor them. We interview survivors. If we catch a cardiac arrest in real time, we can put a brain monitor on.

We’re also using sophisticated brain technology called INVOS [in-vivo optical spectroscopy] to measure oxygen levels in the brain. All the studies say that whatever we do, we can’t get blood into the brain. How do you know? Maybe there was blood in the brain, but you don’t know. INVOS will tell us how much blood is getting in the brain, so we can correlate near-death experiences. It’s never been done before.

What kind of data have you gotten so far?

It’s very preliminary data so far. We’re just fine tuning the methodology. We have had a small number of people, but we want to recruit about 1,500. The reason is because the incidence of an out of body experience for [cardiac arrest] survivors is only about 2 percent. In order to make the study work, that’s why you have to have so many patients and hospitals. Not only are survivors rare, but out of body experiences are even more rare.

What do you personally believe the mind is?

Right now, of course, I don’t have an answer for you. The mind is the biggest mystery. One possibility is that although most of us produce electrical activity, no one’s been able to show an experience or a plausible, biological mechanism.

If I tell you to look at a brain cell down a microscope, and I say, “This brain cell is now thinking of tired,” you’d say to yourself, “He’s crazy. It can’t produce a thought.” What happens if you connect two or 100 or 1,000 or 1 million brain cells? Where do thoughts come from? No one knows. No one can explain this. This led to the problem of consciousness.

There are two camps out there. One camp is more conventional, who says it’s electrochemical activity in the brain, but they can’t explain how. The alternative group says that it’s an undiscovered scientific entity that can’t account for the known processes of the brain. It’s like math or gravity. You can’t break down gravity. Gravity is gravity.

Ninety-nine percent of the time in life, you cannot separate mind and brain from each other. But in rare circumstances, you can separate them out because the brain stops itself and you can observe what happens to the mind. If the former is correct – that it’s activity of brain cells – when you shut the brain off, the mind should go away. It’s like a light. When the switch is off, it goes away. When it’s on, it comes back on. Alternatively, if we switch it off and the light is still on – that means that that isn’t the source of it. It’s a new scientific entity. It’s so exciting because it may once and for all answer this question that goes back to the ancient Greeks. They’ve all debated this through every civilization in the world. They’re still debating the same thing, and the camps are still the same.