DOCTOR FINDS SOUL

Is the Soul Real? A Neurosurgeon Makes the Case

{A GREAT VIDEO. I don’t care for the exaggerated expressions many videoers put on their video OP’s, like the above, but oh well. I can live with it for a while.

I use AI quite a bit to help write video transcripts and some posts. AI lets writers and videoers be editors or publishers. It’s like how big companies who sell magazines or newspapers have staff writers who write stories and editors tell them what to write about and tidy up what they write or reject it. So AI makes it like writers get promoted from writing to editing, or publishing.

I was an atheist for a year, when I was 19. I came to think that physical existence was all that there was room for. It seemed that God and spirits were superfluous. I thought everything consisted of atoms and subatomic particles and the space between them and I guess I thought time was real too, if I thought about that. After a big rethink a year later, I noticed that I overlooked something previously, that my consciousness was my basic self and that atoms and time were only knowable through consciousness and might consist of consciousness themselves. Eventually, I concluded that the primary reality is caring, which in religion is called Love. If caring didn’t exist, nothing would have any meaning. With caring, everything has meaning.}

{PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO ABOVE}

Is the scientific evidence for the soul overwhelming? Our guest today is a former materialist who once rejected belief in the soul. However, because of his work and research as a surgeon, he now believes the scientific evidence is compelling.

Why did he change his mind, and what is that evidence? Well, you're about to find out. We welcome, for the first time, Dr. Michael Egnor, author of the new book that I endorsed and found fascinating. It's called The Immortal Mind.

Dr. Egnor, thanks for joining us today.

"Thank you, Sean, it's a pleasure to be here."

Well, the book starts with this fascinating, jarring story. When I read it, I went to my wife and said, "You've got to hear this story!" It's somewhat of a conversion story. Before you get into the scientific evidence for the soul — since you start the book there — let’s begin this interview with your powerful conversion story.

Sure. I was born into a non-religious family, and as a child, I fell in love with science at a very early age. I believed that all the mysteries of life, all the really meaningful things one could discover, could be found through science. So I embraced the Darwinian way of understanding mankind, physics, chemistry, and all those things.

I majored in biochemistry in college, wanting to become a doctor — specifically a neurosurgeon — because I thought that by understanding the brain and mind, I would gain deep insight into who we are. I graduated from medical school, trained in neurosurgery, and completed my residency in 1991. Then, I went into practice as a neurosurgeon.

Over the years, both as a neurosurgeon and as a husband and father, a number of experiences changed the way I saw the world. As a neurosurgeon, I encountered patients who had large parts of their brains missing.

A good example was a little girl who was born with only about half her brain. I counseled her family, saying that things didn’t look good — I couldn't predict how she would develop, but the outlook wasn’t encouraging. However, as she grew up, I followed her progress, and she was completely normal at every stage of development. In fact, she was rather bright. Now in her mid-20s, she is a vibrant, normal young woman with a great job. Her mother says she's too smart for her own good — and yet, she has half a brain.

I have other patients with major parts of their brains missing who are also fine, and that didn’t align with any of the neuroanatomy textbooks I studied in medical school. Strange things were happening.

One of the most striking moments came during surgery on a woman with a brain tumor in her left frontal lobe. We sometimes perform awake brain surgery, where the patient is given a local anesthetic — like Novocain — so they don’t feel pain. The brain itself has no pain sensation, so cutting into it is akin to cutting hair — there’s no feeling. We stimulate the brain’s surface to map its critical areas, helping us determine what must be protected and what can be removed safely.

She was awake as I removed much of her left frontal lobe, and we were having a normal conversation — just like the one you and I are having right now. Yet, despite removing a significant portion of her brain, her ability to converse remained completely intact. That was the goal, of course — to ensure she stayed healthy — but none of my textbooks explained how someone could lose so much of their frontal lobe and remain unaffected.

This experience led me to reconsider what we truly understand about the brain. I began to sense that something deeper was at play.

Around that same time, I experienced a religious conversion, which was intellectually linked to my growing doubts about Darwinism. I started reading more about the Darwinian explanation for human development, and frankly, it struck me as weak science. I wasn’t viewing it through a religious lens at first — I simply thought that, of all the scientific disciplines, Darwinism seemed the least rigorous.

Meanwhile, I had four children, and when my youngest son was born, I became deeply troubled. In his first couple of months, he wasn’t making eye contact, smiling, or behaving as if he recognized my wife and me as people. We were just objects to him. I feared he might be autistic. Autism has always terrified me — the idea of having a child whom you love deeply but who doesn’t even know you exist, who sees you like a piece of furniture.

We took him to some neurologists, who said it was too early to tell — he was only a few months old. But by six months, he still wasn’t making eye contact or interacting with us.

One night, while consulting a patient at a Catholic hospital, I felt emotionally distraught. I kept thinking, I’m never going to have my son love me. He’s never going to know me. After seeing the consult, I stopped by the chapel inside the hospital. I knelt before the altar and prayed: "God, I don’t know if you exist. I don’t make praying a habit. But if you do exist, could you take this away from me? Please. This is something I can't deal with. I can't have my son be autistic and not know me."

And I heard a voice — the only time in my life I’ve ever heard a voice. It was very clear, and it wasn’t me saying it. The voice said, "But that's what you're doing to me." I collapsed and said, "Okay, I won't do it to you anymore. I won’t be autistic to you. But please, make my son not autistic to me." I went home, and a few days later, it was his six-month birthday — and he was perfectly normal. He was perfectly fine. He’s currently a law student and anything but autistic.

{I want to insert a thought here. Does that mean God made the doctor’s son seem to be autistic in order to make the doctor eventually realize that he was acting autistic toward God?}

That experience complemented, in some sense, my discoveries as a surgeon and in neuroscience. There’s a lot more to man than just meat. We do have souls — there’s a spiritual aspect to us.

So, I converted to Christianity and got baptized. Many people in my family also got baptized. Since I had spent several decades of my life as an atheist and a materialist, I feel like I have a debt to repay. I wouldn’t call it vengeance, but I want to convey to people that atheism and materialism are wrong — that God exists, that He is real, and that we truly do have souls.

I began looking more deeply into the neuroscience of the brain and the soul to try to explain why I had seen these strange cases — people with missing parts of their brains who were perfectly normal, or how I could remove part of a woman’s frontal lobe while speaking to her and it wouldn’t change her.

I discovered that other neurosurgeons and scientists had observed similar phenomena — I wasn’t the first to notice this. One of the greatest scientists in neurosurgery was Wilder Penfield, who worked in Montreal in the mid-20th century. He pioneered epilepsy surgery, and one of his most common operations was awake brain surgery — the same kind of procedure I performed on the woman with the tumor.

Penfield conducted awake brain surgeries on 1,100 patients — no one has come close to that number. Awake brain surgery is still performed today, but if you complete a few hundred in your career, that's considered a high volume. Because of the sheer number of surgeries he performed, Penfield was responsible for much of what we know about brain mapping today.

During his procedures, he stimulated different areas of the brain with a small electrical probe while patients were awake, and he would ask them what they felt, saw, or experienced. He made a startling discovery that surprised him — especially since he had started out as a materialist, just as I had.

Through more than a million stimulations across 1,100 patients, Penfield found that he could only stimulate four things in the brain: He could make a person move by stimulating the motor area. He could make them experience a perception — see a flash of light, smell something, or hear a sound. He could induce an emotion — fear, joy, laughter. He could trigger a memory — a patient might recall their mother’s face or a conversation from years ago.

But that was it. And what was missing? Everything we’re doing right now. He couldn’t stimulate abstract thought. He couldn’t make a person contemplate philosophy, the meaning of life, or mathematics. No area of the brain, when stimulated, could cause a person to say, "Ah! 1 plus 1 is 2." He couldn’t stimulate logic, history, or music. None of the higher-level abstract thoughts we engage in.

Penfield, being an honest scientist, concluded: "Maybe I can’t stimulate abstract thought because it doesn’t come from the brain." He theorized that while the brain may be necessary for its expression — just as excessive alcohol or a head injury might impair cognition — that doesn’t mean abstract thought originates in the brain.

He coined the term "mind action" to describe abstract thought and noted that it could not be triggered through brain stimulation. Only movement, perception, emotion, and memory could be stimulated.

Penfield then reviewed thousands of epilepsy cases and found the same pattern. When people have seizures, they exhibit movements, perceptions, memories, or emotions — but never abstract thought. There were no "calculus seizures." No one had ever experienced a seizure where they uncontrollably performed mathematics.

Penfield posed a powerful question: "Why not? If mathematics originates in the brain, then out of hundreds of millions of seizures, shouldn’t there be at least one instance where a person couldn’t stop performing calculations?" Yet, it never happened.

The same limitation he observed in seizures matched what he discovered in awake brain surgery. The brain functions as an organ that facilitates movement, perception, memory, and emotion — but it does not serve as the source of abstract thought. This was an extraordinary finding — and yet, it has largely been ignored by the neuroscience community.

{END OF TRANSCRIPT. REMAINDER IS A.I. SUMMARY.}

After the 13-minute mark, the conversation delves into remarkable cases where people in deep comas — despite severe brain damage and being unable to move, speak, or interact — can still demonstrate cognitive abilities. Through techniques like functional MRI, researchers have found that up to 40% of these patients can respond to questions or perform arithmetic by activating specific brain regions. This suggests a disconnect between the physical state of the brain and the persistence of conscious thought, hinting at the existence of a non-material aspect of mind. ICU nurses often observe that comatose patients react physiologically to upsetting statements, reinforcing the idea that some awareness remains even when outward signs are absent.

The discussion then shifts to the concept of free will. Dr. Egnor argues that free will is self-evident and universally believed, even by those who claim to deny it. He uses thought experiments — like pouring coffee on a free-will denier’s laptop — to illustrate that people instinctively hold others responsible for their actions, which only makes sense if free will exists. He also points out that denying free will undermines moral responsibility and renders all opinions meaningless, as they would be the mere byproducts of chemical reactions rather than conscious choices.

Dr. Egnor addresses the materialist argument that determinism in physics leaves no room for free will. He references the work of physicist John Stewart Bell and subsequent experiments by Alain Aspect, which demonstrate that the universe is not strictly deterministic; there is room for randomness and, potentially, genuine choice. This undermines the claim that physical laws preclude free will.

Further, he cites neuroscience research, particularly the work of Wilder Penfield and Benjamin Libet. Penfield’s extensive brain stimulation experiments never produced abstract thoughts, suggesting that such thoughts originate outside the physical brain. Libet’s studies showed that while certain brain signals precede conscious decisions, people can still veto these impulses — a phenomenon he called “free won’t.” This ability to override impulses aligns with traditional views of free will and moral responsibility.

The conversation also touches on the philosophical implications: if free will and reason are not physical, they could not have evolved through Darwinian processes, which only affect material traits. Dr. Egnor argues that the soul — defined as the seat of intellect and will — is a created, immaterial reality that cannot be explained by evolution or materialist neuroscience.

In summary, Dr. Egnor claims the scientific evidence for the soul is overwhelming. He points to split-brain studies, the cognitive abilities of comatose patients, and the inability of brain stimulation to generate abstract thought as strong evidence for a non-material mind. He concludes that the findings of modern neuroscience are best explained by the existence of a spiritual soul, echoing the views of thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas.

The host wraps up by recommending Dr. Egnor’s book, The Immortal Mind, as a sophisticated yet accessible resource on the scientific case for the soul, and encourages viewers to subscribe for future discussions on related topics like near-death experiences and the afterlife.

References:

Egnor, M. (2024). The Immortal Mind.

Penfield, W. (1975). The Mystery of the Mind.

Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8(4), 529-566.

Bell, J. S. (1964). On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox. Physics Physique Физика, 1(3), 195–200.

Aspect, A., Dalibard, J., & Roger, G. (1982). Experimental Test of Bell's Inequalities Using Time‐Varying Analyzers. Physical Review Letters, 49(25), 1804–1807.