Does the Soul Exist Outside the Brain? Insights from a Neurosurgeon | Dr. Michael Egnor
American Thought Leaders
The Epoch Times
4.9 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
“Neuroscientists who stand up and say ‘we have souls’ are few and far between,” says pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor.
“But when you look carefully at the neuroscience—the best neuroscience over the past century—it clearly points to the existence of the soul and to the existence of aspects of our mind that don’t come from the brain.”
Egnor himself started off as a materialist and atheist. But 40 years and more than 7,000 brain surgeries later, he concluded that reason and free will do not reside in the brain. In this episode, he reveals what he’s found.
“Neuroscience is just fundamentally wrong in a lot of ways … because of the materialist bias in neuroscience. We can’t get away from this machine analogy, [but] 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,” he says.
Dr. Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at Stony Brook University, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and the co-author of the book “The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | My textbooks in medical school described the brain as like a computer, it's like the hardware, |
| 0:05.0 | and the mind was like the software. But I had patients who were missing major parts of their brains, |
| 0:10.0 | who were perfectly normal people. It's as if you have a laptop and it works perfectly, |
| 0:16.0 | and then you open it up and you find out that your hard drive is like two-thirds missing. |
| 0:21.6 | Then how does my laptop work? |
| 0:23.6 | It's a perplexing question. |
| 0:25.6 | Dr. Michael Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University, an author of The Immortal Mind. |
| 0:32.6 | I began seeing in my career patients that didn't fit the materialist picture. |
| 0:39.3 | So where do our thoughts come from? What exactly is controlled by the neurons and processes in our brain? |
| 0:45.3 | And what is not? And what do near-death experiences tell us? |
| 0:49.3 | She said, you know, I watched the whole surgery. She described the music they were playing in the operating room while she was brain dead. |
| 0:57.5 | The existence of the human soul is completely consistent with the best modern neuroscience. |
| 1:04.5 | This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick. |
| 1:07.5 | Michael Egnor, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. |
| 1:15.4 | So many of us believe, even those of us who are religious, that our consciousness sits in the brain |
| 1:22.7 | and it's a product of these perhaps electrical impulses, you know, neurological connections that are happening |
| 1:31.3 | in the brain. But you contend that something else is going on. And just, you know, briefly, |
| 1:37.5 | explain to me that argument. We're going to dig into it, of course, a lot further in a moment. |
| 1:41.6 | We're not the first people to ask this question, to delve into this. |
| 1:46.0 | There was a neurosurgeon and a neuroscientist named Wilder Pinfield |
| 1:50.0 | back in the early 20th century, who's really the greatest |
| 1:54.0 | neuroscientists in the neurosurgical profession. |
... |
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