Dr. Michael Egnor, a Columbia University, M.D., was a materialist and atheist until he began to look more carefully at all the things the brain cannot do but we do all the time. What makes all those things happen is what he calls the soul. It is not produced by the brain. It is not made of matter. Yet it is the most important part of us. It knows and thinks and feels. And it decides.
Most neurosurgeons assume the brain’s activity produces the mind. The wordsoul is not in their vocabulary. But one brain surgeon breaks rank with most of his peers. In his just released book, The Immortal Mind, he shows us why.
How did he arrive at this conclusion?
It began with a little girl, one of his patients, who was born with half her brain missing. Yet she grew up normal. Today in her mid-20s, she holds down a good job. The textbooks he studied in medical school did not prepare him for this.
As a brain surgeon he frequently had to cut away malignant tumors from the brains of his patients, yet many, like the little girl, matured normally after the surgery. This should not be happening, he reasoned, if the brain is the sole cause of consciousness. He wondered if the brain was overrated.
Nowadays it is common for some surgeries to be performed while the patients are wide awake—a procedure made possible because the brain has no pain-producing nerves. It is even possible for the surgeon and the patient to have a conversation as large parts of the brain are being cut away. Egnor wondered how a patient could be asking about the procedure or the weather outside or the price of eggs while he was cutting. “No textbook says that you can remove most of the frontal lobes and nothing unusual happens,” he wrote. But nothing unusual did. By now he began to suspect that the brain was not, after all, the cause of our conscious states. Something was missing in the way most of his colleagues were thinking.
Split-brain surgery introduced another puzzle. Neurosurgeons sometimes cut through the corpus callosum, a bundle of nerve fibers that connect the left and right sides of the brain, to relieve intense pain for patients suffering from epileptic seizures. Strangely enough, the two hemispheres manage to work together even though they are not connected. For example, when a patient is shown a baseball to the left hemisphere and a broken window to the right, they immediately make the connection as if nothing were amiss. the baseball broke the window. This should not be possible, Dr. Egnor reasoned. Something else must be making the connection.
Terminal lucidity presented another puzzle. Alzheimer’s patients whose brains are ravaged by the disease will sometimes perk up just before death and become their old selves, conversing with their loved ones as if their brains had been miraculously healed. The remarkable recovery occurred not because the brain momentarily regenerated–it did not. What, then, could account for the reawakening? Some other power made it happen. That was what Dr. Egnor eventually called the soul.
Free will is another reality that is hard to explain without a soul. Many materialists deny that it exists, not because it doesn’t seem to, but because, according to their understanding of science, it simply can’t. And why not? If the brain is a physical thing, a “meat machine,” it should be controlled by the chemicals that make it up. In other words, the brain would be an incredibly complex chemistry set that controlled everything we do. But free will is an experience we all have, even those who deny it exists. We don’t feel controlled, but controlling. Something nonphysical is needed to explain free will. That is the soul.
Perhaps the strongest evidence of a soul according to Egnor is the near-death experience (NDE). Many NDEs are uniquely vivid experiences that are remembered undimished and in detail even though there was no heartbeat, no blood flowing to the brain, and no respiration during the experience. Often the experiencer remembers seeing events that happened in the world around them when in a comatose state with their brain inactive. What is experiencing these events? Again, the soul comes to mind.
Egnor concluded that we are apparently a soul working through an instrument that we call the brain. We are affected by that instrument–it needs to be in good working order for a normal healthy life. But it is a mistake to equate the two or deny the existence of the better half. It is also a mistake to claim that because the instrument dies, the user must die with it. They are different kinds of things and follow different laws.
Is the soul immortal? There are good reasons to think it is. But that is for another day.
Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying? and Heaven and Hell Unveiled. His novels include The Imprisoned Splendor, The Afterlife Therapist and Guardians of the Afterworld. His latest book, The Hell Dwellers: A Novel about the Dark Side of the Afterlife is coming in 2026. Stafford can be found at staffordbetty.com.
Thanks for the review, Stafford. I bought the book a week ago and look forward to reading it, more so now after your review, as soon as I finish reading another book.