Are you curious about the mysteries of the mind and brain — where thoughts, feelings and perceptions come from, how consciousness relates to matter, and whether the mind “emerges” from that jelly-like organ inside our heads? Furthermore, what about the soul—does science have anything to say about it?
Well, a new book by neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor tackles these questions and others. In The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, Egnor (and co-author Denyse O’Leary) argues for the immortality of the human soul based on findings from remarkable neuroscience cases, including “split-brain” patients, conjoined twins, “Near-Death Experiences” (NDEs), and more.
While the nature of both the mind and soul are properly the province of philosophy rather than science, science can nevertheless provide indirect evidence for the spiritual aspects of humanity — and the scientific considerations in this book do exactly that.
Take, for example, the case of a medical procedure that involves severing the hemispheres of the brain, which is sometimes done for patients suffering from epileptic seizures. These “split-brain” patients offer a fascinating opportunity to consider the relationship between the mind and brain. As Egnor explains, “for centuries we believed that the brain is the organ of the mind and that consciousness arises wholly from the brain. With the brain cut in half, how would one hemisphere of the brain know what was going on in the other hemisphere? How could a person really act as a unified individual with two halves of the brain disconnected?”
Simply put, if the mind is the brain, if thinking arises from the immensely complex organ in our heads, then cutting the brain ought to fragment the mind. Yet Egnor “found no evidence, either from ordinary clinical examination or events in their lives, that indicates their minds were split, even though their brains were.” Of course, cognitive acts of perception, sensation, imagination and memory often are impacted by this procedure. But the cognitive functions that philosophers have traditionally identified as essential to the mind — acts of thinking and willing — are not. “The distinction between brain-dependent perception and brain-independent abstract reasoning,” writes Egnor, “shows up again and again in modern neuroscience.”
This distinction, in fact, was known by the late neurosurgeon and one-time materialist Wilder Penfield, an early pioneer in brain mapping. His research involved stimulating various regions of the brain to study its functions. He discovered that while he could evoke sensations, memories and imagery in his patients, “there were other thoughts that he could not evoke (such as the patient’s capacity for reason and reflection).” Penfield, therefore, abandoned his early materialism and embraced the idea that the mind is more than the brain, and that it may even survive bodily death: “The mind must be viewed as a basic element in itself,” he remarked. “That is to say, it has a continuing existence.”
Other scientific findings corroborate Penfield’s results. For example, Egnor highlights the phenomenon of twins who are born conjoined but inseparable. Among the cases he considers is the now famous one of Krista and Tatiana Hogan, who were born in 2006 and who are joined at the head, and who share a significant amount of brain tissue. The twins are so deeply connected, in fact, that they “share senses of touch and taste and even control one another’s limbs. Tatiana can see out of both Krista’s eyes, while Krista can only see out of one of Tatiana’s. Tatiana controls three legs and an arm. They can also switch to self-control of their limbs.”
With a connection this tight, one might wonder, could the twins be only one person? More important than what they share, however, is what they do not share. While Krista and Tatiana share sensations, it is instructive that “they do not seem to share abstract reasoning,” comments Egnor. “There is no report that they share concepts… There’s no indication that they can split studying — have Tatiana study geometry and Krista study calculus simultaneously… They also have obviously separate wills — they disagree about quite a bit. That is likely due to the immaterial nature of abstract thought.” Here again, the distinction between the mind and brain emerges, and in this case it gives us good reason to suppose that both Tatiana and Krista have their own minds and that each of them is therefore her own person.
Captivating as this all is, questions remain: What exactly makes thinking different from sensation, imagination, and memory? Why do the latter functions seem to depend on the brain in a way the former does not?
To understand what makes thinking unique, first consider that whenever we sense, imagine, or recall something, we perform a concrete cognitive act: We feel the ocean breeze on our skin; we imagine the chill of the ocean water before jumping in; we recall the sounds of the seagulls, the colors of the palm trees, and the scents of the tropical beach after returning from vacation. In other words, sensation, imagination, and memory all involve concreteness — having a particular location (“on our skin”), a discrete time (“before”) and certain colors, sounds and scents (as in the specific beach we visited).
Thoughts, however, do not. Consider, for instance, the idea of a beach — not the particular image of a beach that we call to mind but the understanding of what a beach is. This idea is not defined by the particularity — the location, sounds, scents, etc. — of any given beach. Rather, it applies to all beaches that exist, making it what philosophers call a “universal.” Here, then, is the rub. Since all thinking involves ideas, all thinking is universal. But because the brain is a concrete organ (it has a certain size, shape, location, etc.), and because universal ideas and conceptions transcend the concrete, the mind must transcend the brain. In other words, the mind must be, as Egnor says, “a function of something other than or beyond the brain.”
Nor is this the only reason to suppose that there is a real distinction between the mind and brain. Indeed, there are several good reasons to suppose it, and Egnor surveys a few of them in the book. Once this distinction is established, however, the obvious next question concerns the relationship between the mind and the soul. Is the soul, for instance, identical to the mind, or is it something more? For millennia, philosophers recognized the soul as that which makes something to be alive. In this sense, all living things have souls — plants, animals, and human beings alike. Of course, the souls of living things differ based on their natural powers and capacities. Plants, for example, have the powers of nutrition and growth. Animals, while also having those powers, have more besides, including sensation and locomotion. Human beings, finally, subsume the powers of both plants and animals and in addition possess the capacity for reason and will.
These last two powers of reason and will define the essence of the human soul, and for reasons examined above (and other reasons expounded on even more more in the book), they explain the distinction that neuroscience continues to discover between the mind and brain. In this way, modern science is catching up to what ancient philosophy already knew. As Egnor puts it, “[ancient philosophers’] description of the powers of our souls are remarkably like what modern neuroscience is revealing to us in the twenty-first century.”
No doubt, the trend in recent decades has assumed that science reveals us to be nothing more than bones, muscles and connective tissue. The truth, however, is that we are much more than that, and The Immortal Mind is a welcome corrective to this profoundly impoverished belief.