American Thought Leaders: with Neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor (Transcript)

It gives us an ability to move and to have memories, and to have sensations and have emotions. It also gives us a power to use reason and free will.

The brain specifically causes our movements, our memories, our emotions, our perceptions. They come from the brain. That’s organ things the brain does. But the brain doesn’t cause reason and free will. The brain allows us to express our reason and express our free will by talking, by writing, by things like that. But reason and free will are not material powers of the soul. So they’re powers of us, but they’re not powers of the brain.

JAN JEKIELEK: How can you tell?

The Evidence: Seizures and Brain Stimulation

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: There are several ways of figuring out whether an organ does something. One way is to stimulate the organ and get it to do it, so you can prove it does it. The other way is to inhibit the organ from doing it and prove that when the organ’s inhibited, it doesn’t happen.

Well, that can happen with the brain. While it is true that if you suppress the brain, we can’t use reason or free will very well—if you get hit on the head with a baseball bat, your reasoning and your free will is going to be a little messed up for a while—there’s a way of stimulating the brain to test whether reason and free will come from it using electrical stimulation.

And there are different kinds of electrical stimulation. One kind of electrical stimulation is seizures. Seizures are just random sparks that happen inside the brain out of the blue. That can have all kinds of effects. And one of the things that I’ve looked at rather carefully is the phenomenology of seizures—what happens when you have a seizure.

And I’ve looked over the past couple hundred years, reviewed the medical literature of that, and what we find is rather remarkable. First of all, not all seizures make you go unconscious. There are many seizures that leave you conscious, and your body does things that you can’t control. And they’re called complex partial seizures.

And there have been probably a quarter of a billion seizures in human beings over the past 200 years, if you just look at the incidence of seizures in the world population. And there’s never been a recorded case of a seizure causing someone to express reason or free will.

That is, there are no mathematics seizures. There’s no logic seizures, there’s no moral seizures. When people have seizures and they’re awake, they may move their arm, they may have tingling on their skin, they may have a powerful emotion. You can even have a memory that recurs when you’re having a seizure.

But you never do mathematics when you’re having a seizure. You never do logic. You never think of the Ten Commandments when you’re having a seizure. And that’s odd, because a lot of our mental content, a lot of the stuff we do every day in our thinking, involves reason and free will. But it never, ever shows up when a seizure focus sparks brain activity, which is interesting.

And Wilder Penfield, this neurosurgeon I spoke of earlier, noticed that about a century ago, and the question he asked, which I kind of paraphrase, he says, “Why are there no intellectual seizures? Why don’t people ever have mathematics seizures?” And they never do. The answer to that is, I think, that reason and free will don’t come from the brain. So a spark in the brain doesn’t make it happen. That’s one way of looking at whether reason or free will come from the brain.

Awake Brain Mapping: Direct Evidence

Another way is for a doctor to actually stimulate the brain directly, kind of like a seizure would do, only in a controlled circumstance. And that has been done many times. It’s done with a kind of an operation called awake brain mapping.

And awake brain mapping is a way of doing brain surgery when the patient is still awake. We give local anesthesia so there’s no pain. The brain itself doesn’t feel any pain. And we stimulate the surface of the brain with an electrical probe, and we ask the patient, “What’s happening? Are you thinking of things?” As we stimulate the brain, does it make a muscle move? Does it make them have tingling, things like that?

And when you do that—and there have been about, I estimated, about 400,000 awake brain mapping operations done over the past century, and each operation entails hundreds of different stimulations, and I’ve done the surgery—when you do that, you can elicit from the brain by stimulating it movement, perception, memory, and emotion.

But you can never elicit reason or free will. No matter where you stimulate the brain, you can’t make a person say, “One plus one is two,” or say, “If A then B, A, therefore B”—modus ponens—or say, “I believe that it’s nice to be kind,” which is a moral viewpoint.

So that goes right along with what is found in seizures, that you can stimulate the brain any which way and reason and free will never come out of the brain. So it’s perfectly reasonable to infer that reason and free will don’t naturally come from the brain because you can’t make the brain do it.

A Personal Journey from Materialism to Mystery

JAN JEKIELEK: You mentioned that you’ve actually performed surgery of this nature to do the stimulation of the brain. Tell me a little bit about your background and how you got into wondering about these questions from the beginning.

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: As a young person, I was a materialist and an atheist. I was raised in a rather secular environment. I was never hostile to religion. I just didn’t think it was true. And I kind of worshiped science. I still love science. I don’t worship it, but I still love it.

So I went to medical school. I wanted to be a doctor. And in medical school I fell in love with neuroscience. And I was fascinated by the relationship between the brain and the mind. How did that work? So I became a neurosurgeon, in part because I wanted to understand more about that.

And so I began seeing in my career patients that didn’t fit the materialist picture. All my textbooks in medical school described the brain as like a computer. It’s like the hardware, and the mind was like the software. And that’s how things worked. And we have detailed neuroanatomical studies of the structure of the frontal lobes and all these things.

But I had patients who were missing major parts of their brains who were perfectly normal people. It’s as if you have a laptop and it works perfectly, and then you open it up and you find out that your hard drive is like two-thirds missing. Then how does my laptop work? It’s a perplexing question.

And so I began looking more deeply into the neuroscience of the mind-brain relationship. And I came across this rather astonishing but quite verifiable result, that reason and free will don’t seem to come from the brain.

And interestingly enough, that’s what the classical philosophers thought. That was what Aristotle said 2,300 years ago.

JAN JEKIELEK: Explain to me those cases that you came across, or maybe others that exist.

The Remarkable Cases of Missing Brain Tissue

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: First of all, I don’t by any means mean to imply that if you’re missing a lot of your brain, you’ll definitely do okay. There are lots of people who are very impaired because of brain damage and things like that. But there are lots of people who are very impaired whose brain structurally look pretty good, actually. So the correlation is kind of loose.

And there are many, many people who have missing parts of the brain who are really highly functioning people. What replaces the brain tissue inside the skull is spinal fluid, which is basically water. And there are cases reported in the medical literature of people just having a few millimeters of brain tissue around the inside of their skull and the rest is just water. And they’re mathematicians, they’re very bright, highly functioning people.

I have a patient, a young woman who when she was born, imaging of her brain showed that she was missing about two-thirds of her brain, or at least there was water occupying two-thirds of the space that the brain was in. And when she was born, I told her family that I was maybe a little pessimistic about how she was going to do in life. But as time went on, she grew up normally. She was a perfectly normal kid. In fact, she was bright and she’s a highly functioning businesswoman in her 20s and a very vibrant, intelligent person.

I have another young woman who was missing significant parts of her brain who was referred to me because she was having headaches. And they did an MRI of her brain when she was 7 years old and they found that she’s missing major parts of her brain. So they send her to me. The headaches weren’t from that. She was just having stress in school. She was a gifted child. She was having headaches because she was so bright and she was studying too much. She went on to get a master’s degree in English literature as a published musician. Missing big parts of her brain.

I have another little boy who’s also missing about two-thirds of his brain. And hope was lost for him when he was born. A lot of the doctors said, “I don’t even know if we should feed him because he’s going to just be a vegetable.” Well, they did feed him and he’s a normal 20-year-old. He’s perfectly normal and he’s missing quite a bit of his brain.

And I have some patients who have a condition called hydranencephaly, which is a condition where they are missing all of their brain hemispheres and all of the cortex of their brain. So basically the brain stops here in these people. All of this is just water up here and it’s because of strokes that happen inside the womb. It’s a tragic thing. And they are very handicapped. These are not people who function normally, but they’re still fully conscious.

They’re basically children with severe cerebral palsy, but they’re completely conscious. And they smile, they’re happy to be with their family, they recognize friends and strangers and things like that. And practically all the current theories of how consciousness works—integrated information theory, global workspace theory, higher order theories, all these theories—they all involve some kind of computational processing in the cortex, and that’s what makes us conscious.

These people don’t have a cortex. They don’t have brain hemispheres. They got nothing, and they’re fully conscious. So neuroscience is just fundamentally wrong in a lot of ways. And I think it’s because of the materialist bias in neuroscience. We can’t get away from this machine analogy. And we’re not machines, and we don’t work like machines work.

And there’s overwhelming evidence in neuroscience for the existence of a soul. And I think we really need to rethink how our minds work and how our souls work and how it relates to us as human beings.

The Evidence for the Soul in Neuroscience

JAN JEKIELEK: There’s overwhelming evidence in neuroscience of the evidence of the soul. So you’ve, I think you’ve given me some of it already today, but overwhelming. Why overwhelming?

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: There are about 20,000 people in the United States right now walking around with implanted deep brain stimulators. And deep brain stimulators are put in by neurosurgeons for people who have problems like Parkinson’s disease or essential tremors, where they have severe tremors, or people who have depression.

And you can put electrodes deep into the brain and a stimulator implanted under the skin that stimulates the brain, usually at a frequency of about 60 hertz, 60 times a second, although sometimes it’s even more frequent. And that can help brain function, that can make the brain work better. So people with Parkinson’s disease sometimes are helped by that.

So we get 20,000 people with these brain stimulators implanted. There’s not a single report in the medical literature that I’m aware of of that kind of stimulator ever evoking reason or free will. There’s been a lot of research done on patients with awake brain surgery. There’s also been some observational studies of people who were born as conjoined twins who are conjoined at the brain. And the same phenomenon is evident in those studies. That is that reason and free will are not material powers of the brain.

Responding to the “God of the Gaps” Argument

JAN JEKIELEK: Before we go there, you know, I’ve been kind of trying to understand how people are responding to your arguments, people who are experts in the field. We have Stephen Novella, the Yale neurologist. You know, he describes your position as a “god of the gaps” argument. What is the “god of the gaps” argument and how do you respond?

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: The “god of the gaps” argument are arguments that are used usually by materialists or atheists who can’t explain things. That is, there will be aspects of the natural world, human biology or physics that can’t be explained using materialist ideas. So they say, well, if people who don’t accept materialism or don’t accept atheism offer an explanation, all we’re saying is, “Well, God did it,” and that’s not at all what we’re saying.

So a “god of the gaps” argument is just a materialist way of kind of deflecting criticism of their inadequate science. There are many gaps in our understanding of the natural world, in our understanding of the human brain, the human mind, the human soul, our understanding of the universe. There’s lots of gaps. In fact, most of it’s a gap. The amount that we really understand is very small compared to what’s out there. Even though we do understand a lot, but there’s a lot to understand that we don’t get.

So there are a lot of gaps out there. And we all try—all people who are interested in science try to explain what happens in those gaps. Atheists try to explain it with what I call “atheism of the gaps,” meaning they have their own explanations. And what it usually is is what has been referred to as promissory materialism.

And promissory materialism is a tactic used by atheists and used by materialists where they’ll say, “We can’t explain that yet, but give us 10 years, you know, we promise we’ll figure it out. Don’t you worry your little head. We’ll figure it out.” And so materialists do a lot of promising. You know, they’ll say, “Well, we can’t explain why it is that reason or free will can never be stimulated by stimulating the brain. But give us some time and don’t you worry about it.”

So the “god of the gaps” argument is just a way that atheists and materialists have of deflecting the inadequacies of their theories.

Implications for Brain Technology

JAN JEKIELEK: So what are the implications of this? We agree that, you know, moral thinking, that free will, logic, math, things like that don’t come from the brain. What are the implications for these types of technologies, for example, like Neuralink with Elon Musk, that are starting to be implemented in your mind?

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Well, a couple of things. It’s important to recognize up front that while reason and free will don’t come from the brain, that many things do come from the brain. And you could say that there are six things that definitely come from the brain, no question about it.

The first is what’s called homeostasis, which just means all your physiological regulation, control of your heart rate, your breathing. If your brain doesn’t work right, you have trouble breathing, so that’s real.

The second thing that comes from the brain is arousal, meaning that if your brain is working right, you’re awake and alert and you pay attention. If your brain isn’t working right, you’re drowsy or you’re comatose and so on, so your brain makes you awake.

And then the four things that were found in seizures and brain stimulation—movement, perception, memory and emotion—those all come from the brain. Reason and free will don’t. But in everyday life we tend to integrate them. They tend to happen kind of alongside one another.

A good way of thinking of that is to imagine a student studying mathematics. So he’s a college student. He’s studying for his finals. Well, he’s using all of those powers, material and immaterial, to study for finals. He’s using homeostasis, like his breathing and his heartbeat to keep him alive so he can study. He’s using arousal to stay awake so he doesn’t fall asleep when he’s studying. He’s using the motor function that comes from his brain to turn the pages of his textbook, to write the equations down.

He’s using sensory function to see the equations. He’s using memory, obviously to try to remember them. And he’s using emotion because he has to be in the right state of mind to want to study. He doesn’t want to be bored, he wants to be excited about what he’s doing.

But he’s also using reason and free will at the same time as those things. And reason and free will isn’t from the brain. Reason is understanding what the equations really mean so you can memorize them, which is like cramming, where you just get a mental picture of what the numbers look like on paper, or you can understand what they mean, which isn’t memory, it’s learning, it’s knowledge, which is a different thing.

And they got free will, meaning the student is freely choosing to do this study. So you can see that the material and the immaterial powers of the soul, of the mind intertwine, and they work together.

So with Elon Musk and Neuralink and things like that, there’s no way that an electrical device or any device implanted in the brain can stimulate reason or free will, because they don’t come from the brain. However, an electrical device in the brain can, for example, overcome depression so that people then are motivated to learn and can use their reason and free will. An electrical device may at some point help you overcome paralysis so you can write down equations better and learn them better. But nothing that will be implanted in the brain will ever cause reason and free will to be evoked.

Sensitive Appetites vs. Rational Appetites

JAN JEKIELEK: You’re telling me that motivation doesn’t come from free will?

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: I think they’re related to one another, but they’re not the same thing. There are two different kinds of appetites. There are what Aristotle called sensitive appetites, and there are rational appetites.

Sensitive appetites are like, if I see a piece of cake, I say, “Man, I’d like to eat that piece of cake.” That’s a sensitive appetite. You know, I’m hungry. I want to eat the thing. My dog sees a piece of bacon. He has a sensitive appetite. He wants that bacon no matter what.

But there’s rational appetites. A rational appetite might be, “I want to stick to my diet. I don’t want to exceed 2,000 calories today, so I’m not going to eat that cake.” Well, that’s a rational appetite.

So human life, in some sense, is a continuous struggle between sensitive appetites and rational appetites. We want things that we shouldn’t have, or we don’t want things that we should want, that we should have. And it’s a struggle.

JAN JEKIELEK: So in a way, you’re saying that’s basically the struggle between the mind and the brain?

The Leibitt Experiments and “Free Won’t”

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: In that sense, yes. Fascinating in that sense, yes. And that particular phenomenon was described in some detail by Benjamin Leibitt, who was a neuroscientist in the mid-20th century. Fascinating man. His obsession in science was with what he called “mind time.” He was very interested in what’s happening inside the brain at the moment you have a thought like we do. Brainwaves and brainwaves, you can kind of correlate them in very rough ways to thought. But he wanted to know down to the millisecond at the moment you have this thought, what’s your brain doing?

So he did some very ingenious experiments to look at that. And he found in his most famous experiments—and in the neuroscience community, these Leibitt experiments are very famous—that when you have a desire to do something, there is a brainwave that happens about half a second before you are consciously aware of the desire to do it.

Like, let’s say that I have a desire to have a piece of cake. If you look really carefully and study brainwaves, at least by Leibitt’s kind of experiments, you find that the brainwave that corresponds to your thought, “Boy, I’m going to have that cake,” happens before you’re aware of the thought by about half a second. So there’s this spark, and then you want the cake.

And the initial interpretation of that was that we don’t have free will, that everything we do is driven by the brain. We’re just sort of these robots that get these sparks that we can’t control. But Leibitt was a very clever researcher, very good scientist. So he, in his experiments, would ask his subjects in the experimental setup to occasionally veto the thought. That is, to think you were going to do something, and then say, “No, I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it.”

And what he found was that the veto didn’t have a change in brain waves. So he said the veto doesn’t seem to be the brain. So he was a dualist. He was a property dualist. And he said that we have free will, but he said it’s more like it’s “free won’t.”

He says that what happens is—the term he used is—that the brain presents us with a “sea of validities,” which I guess means a sea of temptations, constant, like waves just constantly coming up. And they’re preconscious, they move us, but we’re not completely consciously aware of it. We just feel that we have to do something, he said, but we retain the free choice to accept it or deny it. And that’s where free will comes in. And it’s kind of like “free won’t.” So his term “free won’t” has become very famous in neuroscience, making me think.

JAN JEKIELEK: A lot about basically how we end up conceiving ourselves and our lives. I haven’t given this a ton of thought, what you’re telling me right now, ironically, perhaps.

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Well, we don’t tend to do it because we’re living it. It’s like a fish in water. The fish probably doesn’t think about the water.

The Case of Conjoined Twins

JAN JEKIELEK: There’s also these observational studies of twins conjoined at the head, which yielded some very interesting results that are pertinent. Can you share a little bit about that?

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: To the best of my knowledge, the studies of twins who were conjoined at the head and share brain activity hasn’t been as systematic as one would like. But there’s a lot that’s known about them. They’re quite rare. And the ones that are probably the best known are Tatiana and Krista Hogan, who are twin girls who live in British Columbia.

And they were born joined at the skull. And they have what’s called a thalamic bridge, which is a bridge of brain tissue that connects the deepest parts of their brains. So their brains connect and they can do some remarkable things. They can see at least partially through each other’s eyes. They can feel to some extent, each other’s skin.

There’s a video, actually, of their mother sitting with them on a couch. And the girls close their eyes, and the mother will touch one girl’s hand. And both girls will say, “You’re touching the hand.” One girl will say, “You’re touching my hand.” The other girl says, “You’re touching my sister’s hand.” They share some motor control over each other’s limbs. They can share emotions, and they seem to share memories to some extent.

But as far as we know, they don’t share reason and free will. First of all, they have different personalities. They get into fights. They have different opinions on things. And they both have to go to school, meaning they both have to study. It’s not like one girl can sit there learning her times tables, and the other girl who’s attached can just watch TV, but she knows the times tables too.

So again, we see this dichotomy between reason and free will and all the things that the brain does. And they show that even if you have connected brains, your reason and free will is separate because they have separate souls. They have brains that are connected, but they’re separate human beings. They’re separate persons, and they have separate souls. And you don’t share reason and free will between people.

Understanding the Immaterial

JAN JEKIELEK: So going back to something you said earlier, that reason and free will are immaterial aspects or parts of the person. Powers of the person. Immaterial. What does that even mean?

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Immaterial means that the source of these powers is not a physical thing. It’s not a physical object. And immaterial is actually a fairly simple concept. For example, numbers are immaterial. The number 12 is an immaterial thing. That is, you can’t say, “Well, the number 12 is located today in Cincinnati, and it weighs five pounds.” I mean, it doesn’t make any sense.

So there are many, many, many things that we think about, many things that are quite real. They’re called universals in philosophy that are very real but are not matter. And reason and free will are abilities we have whose source is our soul but not our brains.

The other problem that we face a lot in neuroscience, it’s a very serious problem in neuroscience, is what’s called the mereological fallacy. And the mereological fallacy—and there are two wonderful scientists and philosophers who have written a lot on this, Maxwell Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker. Bennett is a neuroscientist from Australia and Hacker is a philosopher from Oxford.

The mereological fallacy is a fallacy of attributing to a part something that can only be attributed to a whole. An obvious example would be to say that my feet are walking. Well, you can say that metaphorically, but I’m walking using my feet or my eyes see. My eyes don’t see. I see using my eyes.

So we have to be very careful when we say the brain understands or the brain has this emotion, or the brain does this or does that. The brain does do things without question.

JAN JEKIELEK: Or a brain is thinking. I think that’s what a lot of people would say, right?

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Yeah. A brain can’t think. How can a brain think? A brain’s a lump of meat. Can’t think. Some people say the brain sees. The brain sees this or that. And I say, “Hey, it’s dark inside there and it doesn’t have a flashlight. It can’t see anything.” The brain doesn’t think. People think using their brains, that’s fine, but the brain doesn’t think.

And one could say, “Well, it’s just a metaphor,” and sometimes, metaphors can be fine. There’s no problem with using metaphors. But if you’re a scientist, you have to be very careful about metaphors. Because if you think the brain can think, then you start looking inside the brain for that little thinking area, and then your research project is just based on a fallacy.

Wittgenstein is a 20th century philosopher, spoke a lot about this, that you have to be very careful of your language and very careful of the way you express things, or you lead yourself into all kinds of nonsensical conundrums. And neuroscience is full of this stuff.

For example, there’s a problem in neuroscience called the binding problem. And the binding problem is we experience things as a unified whole. That is that I experience talking with you as a kind of a unified thing. I’m talking with you. But in reality, according to the binding problem, it is a whole array of different things. It’s my sensation of sitting here, my hearing your voice, my seeing you, my thinking about you. And how is that all bound together in the brain as a single experience? And it was called the binding problem.

And Bennett and Hacker say that the binding problem is just a good example of nonsense. That is that you don’t bind ideas. Binding is what you do to physical things. Binding is what you do. I’ll bind up some packages, but ideas aren’t packages, so you don’t have to bind them. So we have to be very careful of our language.

The Limits of Materialism

JAN JEKIELEK: This is all a product of trying to fit everything that’s going on into a materialist approach. Basically. Right. Is that—am I hearing right?

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Precisely.

JAN JEKIELEK: Yeah.

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: And even more rigorously, yes. Yes. And materialism is a box, and it’s a relatively small box, and you have to try to cram all of reality into it. If you’re a materialist and reality doesn’t fit, there’s a lot of things about reality that don’t fit in a materialist box.

More specifically, what materialists are doing, and most of them aren’t aware of it because most of them are not philosophically inclined, is what’s been called mechanical philosophy. And mechanical philosophy really became a thing in the 19th century, although it was growing over since Descartes, when people started making very sophisticated machines. During the Industrial Revolution, we got really good, all these steam engine and the printing press, all that stuff. People began starting to think of human beings as machines or as nature as a machine. And by the 19th century, that was kind of implicit in the way people thought about things.

JAN JEKIELEK: I think it still is implicit.

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Mechanical philosophy is everywhere. But we aren’t machines. Nature’s not a machine. You can make analogies. You can say, “Well, in some ways, we’re kind of like machines.” That’s fine, but we’re not machines.

Aristotle pointed out the profound difference between a machine and a natural thing, and he called them the difference between an artifact and a substance. A substance is a naturally existing thing. We each are a substance. A human being is one substance. A machine is an artifact. It’s cobbled together. What you do is you take pieces, pieces of natural things, you stick them together and you get them to do something that they don’t naturally do.

An example that Aristotle used, kind of an amusing example of the way to tell an artifact from a substance. He said, “Imagine that you take, like a sapling, like a fresh, small tree, and you make a bed out of it. And then you take a piece of the bed and you plant it in the ground. What will grow from the ground is a tree, not a bed.”

Machines are very important and they’re beautiful, fascinating things, but we can only connect them to people. We can only connect them conceptually to people or to the universe by analogy. But we’re not machines and the universe is not a machine.

Are We Cobbled Together?

JAN JEKIELEK: You know, I think a lot of people would say that, well, maybe there’s two different ways to think about this, right? One would they say, “Well, we are actually in fact cobbled together,” perhaps through something like evolutionary forces or so forth. So that would be maybe one way of looking at another way would be, perhaps we just don’t know enough in our scientific approach yet to cobble together something like a human body.

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Yeah, that’s promissory materialism. And my answer to promissory materialism is actually very simple, is that I’ll give you my cell phone number and you can call me when you have the evidence. But they don’t have the evidence. So yeah, it’s just—

JAN JEKIELEK: What about the other view?

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: The other view that we’re cobbled together?

JAN JEKIELEK: By evolution, for example, but by some natural forces that—

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Right, well, that just becomes infinite regress. If you’re saying that the natural forces themselves are machine-like, you have to explain how it is that a natural force is a machine. Again, what defines a machine is that it’s an artificially constituted device whose parts have no natural tendency to do what they do when they’re in the machine. So by definition, that can’t be a natural thing.

Near-Death Experiences

JAN JEKIELEK: You know, another thing that you’ve looked into is these near-death experiences. And that kind of clarifies a lot of these questions we’ve been discussing here. Now tell me a little bit about that.

Near-Death Experiences: A Common Phenomenon

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Yeah, near-death experiences are surprisingly common, actually. It’s been estimated that about 20 million Americans now living either have had a near-death experience or will have a near-death experience at some point in their lifetime.

Carol Zaleski is a literary scholar who wrote a wonderful book called “Other World Journeys” in which she recounts near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences throughout history in various cultures. In the Middle Ages it was actually very common. And it’s been found practically every culture has reports of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences going back thousands of years.

The nature of these experiences varies somewhat from culture to culture, but there are commonalities between them. And over the past several decades, there’s been quite a bit of scientific research done on near-death experiences in the West. I believe that there is a core of reality, at least to many of them. And I think they’re the proper subject of scientific study or the proper object of scientific study.

JAN JEKIELEK: What do they tell us in your mind, the fact that these things exist? Because, again, the explanation that I’ve heard is these are just as blood flow is being cut off to the brain. There’s some particular electrical patterns happening. And as a result, someone has a fantastical experience and that’s it, that’s what we’re talking about.

The Pam Reynolds Case: A Paradigmatic Near-Death Experience

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: I think a good way to discuss this is to begin with what is in some ways the paradigmatic near-death experience in modern times. That was Pam Reynolds. And then I can talk about the implications of that.

Pam Reynolds was a woman who, in her mid-30s, was found to have an aneurysm at a major blood vessel at the base of her brain. And the aneurysm at the time—this was in 1991—was inoperable through ordinary means. And she would die soon from rupture of the aneurysm.

She came to Phoenix, as it turns out, to Dr. Robert Spetzler, who is a neurosurgeon here in Phoenix, who was the world’s expert in aneurysms. And he had an operation he called a standstill procedure, which was a very radical procedure for treating certain kinds of aneurysms.

And the problem with her aneurysm is that it involved the basilar artery at the base of her brain, which is a critical artery. And the aneurysm was this ballooning, kind of asymmetrical enlargement of the artery that was about to burst. And the artery had to be reconstructed. But the process of reconstructing the artery could not be done while it had blood flowing through it. So there had to be some way to stop the blood flowing through it. You stop the blood flowing through it, you die.

So what Spetzler worked out was an operation—and he did it a number of times on Reynolds and other patients, and it was quite successful—where he would put them under anesthesia, open their head, expose a region of the aneurysm, cool their body down to about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, put them on a heart-lung machine, stop their heart, raise the head of the bed, drain the blood out of their brain. And he had about 30 minutes to rebuild the artery so he could open the artery. The person was as dead as it gets, and he could then rebuild the artery.

And then once the artery was rebuilt, he would then restart their heart, put them back on heart-lung machine, restart their heart, warm their body back up, close the operation.

So he did this with her. During the process, she was heavily monitored, meaning that they had to make sure that her brain was dead, because that actually protected her brain when it was cooled down and everything was stopped, which gave him more time to operate.

And after her surgery—and she made an excellent recovery, the aneurysm was fixed—she said, “You know, I watched the whole surgery.” So he said, “You couldn’t have watched the whole surgery. You were brain dead. You were under surgical drapes.”

So she then told him all about the surgery, the details she saw. She said that what happened was when her heart stopped—she was a musician—she said she heard a natural D was the way she described it. It was like a hum. And then all of a sudden she felt pop, that she popped out of her body. And she could see her body and she could see the room.

And she said she went up to the ceiling and she could see everyone there. She could see Spetzler, she could see the instrument, she could see herself, all the other people there. And then she hovered over his shoulder and watched him operate on her.

And she described his instruments to him in some detail, in things that she could not have known unless she was the surgeon in the operating room. That is, there were details of the structure of the instruments. He had custom-made instruments, and she described conversations that he had word by word that he was talking about. She described issues that arose during the surgery and conversations between doctors. She described the music they were playing in the operating room while she was brain dead.

She said that while she was watching, she then saw a tunnel and she felt herself being pulled down the tunnel. So it was a very pleasant feeling. It wasn’t like she was being dragged. And at the other end of the tunnel, she saw this beautiful world. And she saw, I think it was her grandparents who had passed away. And her grandparents told her that it wasn’t her time yet and that she had children to raise and she had to go back.

So she went back down the tunnel and she went back into her body when her heart restarted. And she said it was like diving into ice water. She said it was extremely unpleasant, which, yeah, it was 60 degrees. It was very cold, actually.

And her near-death experience is undoubtedly the best documented near-death experience in medical history because it was almost an experiment. It was almost like a prospective study where they actually did it on purpose. Usually when people have near-death experiences, it’s chaos. They’re in a hospital, their heart stops. People are desperately trying to resuscitate them. For her, it was all very carefully planned.

So she became very famous. She wrote a book.

JAN JEKIELEK: She—

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: She was on 60 Minutes. Spetzler has been interviewed extensively in the press about it. He says, “I can’t explain it.” He says, “She told me what I said, and I don’t know how she knew.”

The Pam Reynolds Challenge: Four Unexplained Characteristics

For people who deny the reality of near-death experiences, materialists who say it’s just brain chemistry, it’s some hallucination or something, I have what I call the Pam Reynolds challenge. Meaning that it may be that some near-death experiences are hallucinatory experiences or seizures or some kind of thing. But there are four characteristics of many near-death experiences that have to be explained.

And the first characteristic is that the experiences are very often very clear, very coherent, very detailed. People often have a detailed life review during it. And brain death doesn’t make you better. It doesn’t make you clear and coherent. I’ve seen thousands of people who had serious brain problems. It doesn’t make you think more clearly. But near-death experiences are remarkably clear.

The second characteristic of near-death experiences that warrant an explanation is the out-of-body experience. There are at least hundreds if not thousands of people reported in the medical literature who observe things during a near-death experience that they could not have observed in the body. They’re on a table, people are pumping away on their chest, and they’ll see name tags of people on the other side of the room. There are people in near-death experiences who see things in distant cities that can be confirmed. There’s a lot of that. So there are out-of-body experiences that are called veridical, meaning that they correspond to confirmed testing.

The third characteristic of near-death experiences, which I think is absolutely fascinating, is that as far as I know, in all of the literature of near-death experiences, in the scientific literature, there’s never been a report of somebody who’s gone down the proverbial tunnel and seen a living person at the other end of the tunnel. The people you encounter on the other side are always dead people.

And if these were hallucinations or wishful thinking, yeah, once in a while you’d run into your husband or wife who’s still living, just because you’re looking for someone to comfort you. And there are well over a dozen reports in the medical literature of people encountering dead people on the other side of the tunnel that they didn’t know were dead either. They had died a couple days before the near-death experience, and they hadn’t been told of their relative’s death.

There are situations, several of people in car accidents where multiple people were injured in a car accident and they’re sent to different hospitals and one person will have a near-death experience at a hospital and see another person who was in the car who died at another hospital. And they had no way of knowing that they had died, but they don’t see the people who lived.

And the fourth characteristic of near-death experiences is that they are often transformative. People are different people afterwards. They lose their fear of death. They’re very different people.

So any materialist explanation—and the materialist explanations, there are dozens of all kinds of stories that materialists make up. Well, it is enkephalins, a brain chemical, or it’s endorphins, another brain chemical, or it’s a seizure or it’s a hallucination or it’s wishful thinking or whatever—you have to explain all four of those things and there’s no materialist explanation that can account for all four.

So I think that there is a core of reality to near-death experiences. Maybe not every near-death experience is a genuine survival after death, but there’s a core of reality to them. What I think is the most interesting question about near-death experiences is the theological and philosophical questions. Because people on the other side don’t always see what we would have expected them to see from the traditional religious perspective. And it’s a very, very interesting question.

JAN JEKIELEK: Yeah, and I guess you would say that that is the mind, that’s the soul, that’s different.

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Well, the soul is the aggregate. The soul is sort of you. It’s kind of everything put together. The mind is several powers of—

JAN JEKIELEK: Okay, maybe I misunderstood because the brain obviously is not present at this point. Brain is part of that aggregate.

Perception Beyond the Physical Body

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Yeah, that’s a very interesting question. A very interesting question. And I think it’s a very perceptive question that’s been asked and that is how do you see things without eyes? Your eyes are dead too when it happens. How do you see or how do you remember? Memory does seem to be a brain function. Well, how do you remember what happened in the near-death experience if your brain does not work?

And the answer to that is, I think, when you ask people about their experiences with near-death experiences, virtually all near-death experiencers say, “I’m going to tell you what happened, but what I’m telling you is not really what happened.” That is, it’s ineffable. What happened is something I can’t give you words for, but this is the best I can do with language. And then they tell you in the words they can choose.

Carol Zaleski in “Other World Journeys” wrote a lot about that, that some of the cultural differences in the way near-death experiences are experienced may be the result of the cultural bias. What happens? If you think about it, what would ever make us think that we could go to the other side, to an existence outside of our body and make any sense of it? We’ve never had an experience of that before. How could we possibly make sense of all that?

So a lot of these people say, “What I experienced, I can’t tell you. I’ll do the best I can with metaphors, and these are metaphors.”

So I think that when they say they can see, first of all, they don’t describe it as mortal vision. They say it’s amazingly clear. The colors are unbelievably beautiful. And there’s a fascinating comment by Thomas Aquinas, great medieval scholastic theologian, that because similar questions were asked by the medievals—after death, when you are in heaven or in hell, when you’re anywhere, how can you see? Especially if the Christian says, you don’t have your resurrection body yet, how do you see without eyes?

And Thomas Aquinas said that we perceive after death by divine light, that there are ways of seeing that don’t involve eyes. And so I think, personally, I think that’s what near-death experiencers are seeing and remembering is by virtue of powers that transcend ordinary mortal powers.

JAN JEKIELEK: I just really enjoyed this conversation. A quick final thought as we finish.

Final Thoughts: Science and the Soul

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: My goal in all of this in writing “The Immortal Mind” with my colleague, science journalist Denise O’Leary—

JAN JEKIELEK: Leary.

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: My goal in all of this is to let people know, people who are believers in God and people who aren’t believers in God or people who are questioning, that the existence of the human soul is completely consistent with the best modern neuroscience, that science is not our enemy. And that if we look at science objectively and we look at the real evidence, we have souls and there are immaterial powers of our soul, reason and free will, and that our souls are immortal.

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, Michael Egnor, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

DR. MICHAEL EGNOR: Thank you. Thank you so much. It’s been a privilege to be here.

JAN JEKIELEK: Thank you all for joining Michael Egnor and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

Related Posts

• Peter McCormack Show: AI’s Five Kings and Their 8 Billion Tenants w/ Liberman’s (Transcript)
• TRIGGERnometry: w/ Sir Antony Beevor on Russian Mindset (Transcript)
• Transcript of John Kiriakou’s Interview: This Past Weekend #661
• PBD #812: w/ Mehdi Hasan – Iran War, Qatar/China DARK Money (Transcript)
• SRS #310: w/ Josh Duhamel – Survival Skills, Off-Grid Living, Billionaires Building Bunkers (Transcript)