Except research conducted by men like Sam Parnia rules that out and shows that conciousness persists after death.

That's not what he showed though. What he was saying is that brain death isn't the hard on/off line that we think it is, and that in some cases, it's possible to restore some brain function in a brain that had been declared to have died.

Only problem is that even if the person is barely clinging onto life there's still the issue of conciousness being strong and present where none can exist.

Sam Parnia quite explicitly talks about "restoration" of brain function. This does not mean that consciousness exists independent of the brain, he's stating that he believes we can return consciousness to some brains that we believe are beyond that point, and the boundary at which the brain/consciousness "dies" isn't quite as clear cut as it seems.

He also claims that the experience of consciousness might not be centered in the brain, despite interacting with it, but at this point, he is no longer backed by research or medical experience, and is just theorising.

Which is to say, the research and experiences he talks about do suggest that our "time of death" and treatment of brain death as a binary yes/no situation may be incorrect.

However, it doesn't say anything new in regards to life after death, souls, or anything along those lines, and Sam Parnia's talk in these areas is supposition rather than evidence based.

Well, to begin with you would have to start nearly killing people. If it doesn't happen in a controller environment, the collected data doesn't mean much.

Not so! There’s been a lot of research done on near death experiences, many books written by distinguished scientists, over the last 30 years I have followed this field with great interest. The issue is: any phenomenon in NDE is easily explicable. Rather mundane theories suffice to describe what the brain goes through neurologically when they die. To be honest, after reading all the evidence, NDE theories belong in the realm of TCM, astrology, homeopathy and other human constructs: intriguing yet Hokuspokus.

Even after this gets reported thousands of times in various regions and the only thing that changes is whether people see Jesus, Grandma, or Shiva.. aside from that little detail they remain uniform.

This is why. They don't remain uniform. You're, I think unintentionally, glossing over the details. People aren't just seeing the version of their familiar cultural deity but otherwise experiencing the same thing. They all have different experiences when it comes down to the details, and they conspicuously seem to match cultural norms.

So what is more likely happening is a thing that's unique to human biology, not an indicator of something "more."

Another thing is that personal testimony is not good enough to prove almost anything. I can tell you I have a red dragon in my garage. I can even believe it with all my being. But my earnest belief doesn't make it real for anyone else.

Lastly, it's particularly hard to study, even if we accept the premise that there's something there to study. "Here, dying person. Let me stick a bunch of electrodes on your brain as you kick the bucket. I'm sure your spouse and children wouldn't mind if we poke and prod a bit as you pass. Also, they can't be here. It might taint the data." I'm sure you can appreciate the ethical difficulty in studying the dying.

Personally, there's still plenty about this life we don't know about, and it's the one thing most of us can agree exists. I generally have no problem with people believing in an afterlife, but I have no reason or objective evidence to believe in an afterlife, either, and it's not my burden to prove.

So I ask the scientifically trained what the real answer is, because obviously I missed something in all the data on NDEs that I’m simply too dense to figure out.

I'm not in the cohort you're asking, but Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame) had an interesting talk on one of his "Tested" Q&A shows about a myth they were testing that dealt with electric shocks to human. I think this is key the nature of your question:

There is no absolute scientific agreed upon "moment of death".

Sure, if your body is finally burned up in a crematorium there's no question you are dead, but when did you actually die? Was it from the moment you take your last breath? When your heart stopped? When your brain activity reaches zero? Something else entirely? There is no universal criteria that the entire scientific community agrees upon for the "moment of death". So with that, this goes to the root of your question about "near death experiences". How near are they? No one actually knows. So how can any of the reported experiences even be called "near death" to become accepted as legitimate?

All I can say is that the brain produces DMT when near death, and I have done DMT. Not a ton, but I have.

Until that is properly studied, we can't know much more about NDEs, in my opinion.

I'm sure DMT is but a small piece of that puzzle, but the feeling (whether real or chemically induced) of being in contact with cognizant entities on DMT is not uncommon.

Personally, I'm an agnostic atheist. I think we are entities that end. But I'm not so stubborn to consider that there is more to reality than what I know.

So I am inclined to dismiss NDEs and the like as being some kind of transcendent contact. Just full disclosure, no disrespect intended.

Our brain is very good at filling in. The human senses are be y flawed and our brain is working hard to emulate what would be most likely the things you should sense. So the easy answer would be, if you come back from a moment of sensing nothing our brain fills this period with stuff that make sense to the Individuum. Thats why everyone sees the things they belive in (god, Jesus, afterlife etc.)

It’s difficult to make real science based on anecdotal accounts. The best that can be done is some meta analysis, but that has its limits. There must be a systematic process to collect robust evidence (i.e experiments). Other scientists should be able to look at the same data and reach the same conclusions.

Well, systematically putting people at near death and bring them back for questioning isn’t exactly ethical.

I don't know the numbers but I don't immediately believe that all or most people report these events.

To my knowledge most people report no memory of "being dead", or only remember what are likely akin to dreams from a wider period of time when they were mostly unconscious but alive.

If my computer's power supply was on the fritz and stopped working for a second yet my computer remained just as functional as ever during the few moments the PSU wasn't working. I'd consider that an oddity. I wouldn't say "Oh the PSU still kinda works, the fact that it completely tapped out for a solid three-minutes yet my PC stayed on is not weird at all."

Hard disagree with that analogy.

You are not "working" as a human just because you have supposed memories of the time when you were dead.

The idea of a soul is very spiritual and links only come up in fields that are not generally deemed well established, therefore the existence of a soul is a different discussion.

While I agree NDEs are interesting, they are really hard to research. As other comments are saying, there's no controlled environment. Also the only source of information are the people's memories, there's no other way to understand their experience, and memories can be very unreliable as every lawyer will be able to tell you. Also consider for a second the idea that every human who shares these experiences is talking about a time where their whole buddy was neither in a normal functioning state, nor even alive. They did come back to, but in that timeframe their brain might as well have produced absolute garbage to fill in gaps of their memory. I wonder how different short and long-term memories are of that same time frame.

If we consider your analogy why not change it. Imagine you run your PC and then your power goes out. Your PC is out for 3 minutes, afterwards it turns back on. It will boot fresh ("wake up"), tell you it knows something's wrong because it never properly shut down, and maybe some programs will greet you with error messages. I file you wrote at that exact moment not has gibberish in it because encoding errors destroyed the legible parts of it when your PC crashed from the blackout. But would you consider that document a normal representation of what the PC "saw" during the blackout? What it "experienced"?

Of course people with NDEs telling you what they remember can be valuable and interesting, but unless you can validate that from the outside, their memories are first party accounts of their experience at best and "encoding errors" at worst, so taking them at face value with no ability to cross-check is a no-go for scientists.

It's too much room for subjectivity and wrong inferences, and we already know that when we look of the people associated with the idea of NDEs.

It really does require non scientific information to address.

Consciousness is not fully understood. Without that, anything regarding consciousness is still at least a little unanswerable. You can't point to when and where consciousness ends if you don't know what it is, what defines it in the first place. Death isn't exactly at consensus either.

That means NDEs can't be pinned down with 100% accuracy yet.

Here's what I know. Nobody that has had the cells of their brain break down, as in begin decomposition, has ever come back.

So, based on that, I think the NDE experience is going to be based in some kind of brain activity. If the neurons are "melting", they can't function if enough of them aren't melting and you can jump start things again, they weren't dead at all. That, to me, is the definition of death that matters: if you can come back, it ain't death.

Considering the general amount of precise experimentation in measuring the brain and body during the process of dying is extremely thin and limited by the very process, I don't think we have the right tools to measure anything that would "prove" anything about NDEs, only indicate some probabilities.

But those probabilities lean much harder to it being a chemical and/or electrical event.

Now, if you want to bring souls into it, you aren't dealing with science in the first place because it is currently impossible to even detect whether or not souls exist, it is a matter of faith. It's essentially impossible to prove they don't exist, but there's absolutely nothing ever measured that points to anything resembling credible proof that they do. So souls just don't matter for NDE discussions in a framework of science. You might as well factor in what granfaloon a person is mixed up with as a soul.

I'm not saying you can't believe in souls and still attempt science regarding death, just that souls aren't studyable with science.

Since nothing in any NDE has ever been unique to NDEs, it does make it harder to put faith in them as something other than a physical process. Everything anyone has ever described (at least in any useful setting) as happening has also happened with the influence of drugs, magnetic fields, meditation, or spiritual practices. Probably others my brain isn't pulling up as well that aren't under one of those headings, but I think it shows what I mean well enough.

And that point is that if the experiences aren't different from things you can experience while alive, why would they be useful for determining if the person had died?

@QueenHawlSera Warning: long and verbose reply ahead.

If my computer's power supply was on the fritz and stopped working for a second yet my computer remained just as functional as ever during the few moments the PSU wasn't working. I'd consider that an oddity. I wouldn't say "Oh the PSU still kinda works, the fact that it completely tapped out for a solid three-minutes yet my PC stayed on is not weird at all."

While this exact scenario is highly unlikely to happen for a computer, the phenomenon behind it happens with many electronic devices (e.g. USB chargers) and it's well-known in electronics. I'm not an electric/electronic engineer (I tinkered with electronics but I'm just a DevOps), but I'll try to explain it below.

In a nutshell, electricity isn't just "inside" the wire: a field emanates around it due to the flow of electricity, the electromagnetic (EM) field. A wire conducting electricity will emanate an EM field, while the EM field can be absorbed by a wire, inducing a current through it.

This is how, for example, voltage transformers work: there are two coils (spiralling wire), labelled primary and secondary, electrically insulated from each other and wrapped around a ferromagnetic piece (the iron core). As alternate-current electricity goes back and forth through the primary coil, an EM field is emanated, which is then "chanelled" by the ferromagnetic piece to the secondary coil, where the EM field will induce another alternated current.

A "similar" thing happens inside DC (direct current) motors and loudspeakers: there's a coil around a permanent magnet, and the coil gets repelled or attracted by the magnet whenever a current passes through the coil, depending on the electric current's direction/flow (Right-Hand Rule), and this happens because the flow of electricity makes the coil to emanate an EM field, roughly speaking.

Inductors, a type of electronic component, will emanate EM fields, and they will absorb their own EM field back when current stops flowing through them, and that's the principle behind LC oscillators. Similarly, capacitors can hold plenty of charge because they're roughly "fast batteries", and that's why people were advised not to disassemble CRT televisions, because their capacitors used to hold high-voltage even after a long period of being unplugged... Similar risks and advices are found for UPSes and computer PSUs as well.

Why am I explaining this? See, powering off a device isn't something instantaneous, it takes time before all capacitors get depleted by the circuit and before all EM fields disappear. Energy can't be created nor destroyed (First law of thermodynamics), so it must be transformed, and it's often a gradual transformation, sometimes taking a few nanoseconds, sometimes taking hours to weeks (e.g. gigantic industrial apparata).

As I said initially, a PC is highly unlikely to hold enough charge to continue functioning after being cut from its main source of electricity, but it will have some charge for up to a couple of seconds due to dozens-to-hundreds of capacitors and inductors across the circuitry, as well as the EM fields emanated from its DC motors (coolers / computer fans, HDD spindle for computers with mechanical HDDs).

I'm probably digressing and ackchuallying in my explanation, but the phenomenon you described does have a fundamentum.

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As for NDEs, I can't offer much of a scientific point about it, because I hold plenty of beliefs and uncertainties when it comes for death and The Death. I mean, while I personally believe in a "metaphysical realm" through syncretic spiritual concepts (Luciferian, Gnostic, "Thanathoeism" and "Lilitheism"), I've been leaning towards a Cosmicist Pessimistic/Nihilistic Apatheism lately: not Atheism, but "Apatheism", when the existence of deities, even when believed, doesn't really matter. I've been leaning (or trying to lean) towards the rationality and scientific explanation lately, even though I still hold some beliefs deep inside.

Deep down, I personally want to think there's nothing but ultimate darkness and nothingness after the bittersweet kiss of Death's dark-red lips, I personally want to believe in non-existence and annihilation after the last synaptic activity from my biological brain, even though I sometimes feel (and fear) that my consciousness might linger for a bit (seconds? minutes? aeons?) against my own will. Because "energy can't be created nor destroyed, so it must be transformed, and it takes time", and both the synaptic activity and biochemical reactions, interactions from which sentience and consciousness emerges, are energy (electrical and chemical, respectively).

Couple this with concepts like Quantum Superposition, Quantum Entanglement, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, among other concepts, and you end up with a fairly creepy uncertainty on whether a dead brain is definitely gone or if there are some "reverberation" from its past synaptic activity across the spacetime continuum, akin to how we can still hear the echoes of Big Bang nowadays or how many "stars" we see on the night sky are just light from past celestial bodies now long gone. I'm not justifying "spirits" or "haunting ghosts", but more of expressing some personal anxiety regarding the residual energy that could be interacting enough to keep some complexity inherent to the very phenomenon we refer to as "consciousness", one that couldn't even "manifest" as a living being, one that couldn't help themselves but watch and "experience" as they're still undergoing the process of dying.

(Edited to fix and clarify some of my previous statements).