A Neurosurgeon's Case for the Soul Is Good, But Could Have Been Much Better

The year 2025 book The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon's Case for the Existence of the Soul by Michael Egnor and Denyse O' Leary is a book that covers many cases that have been discussed on this site since the year 2018. On page 10 Egnor says this:

"As a busy neurosurgeon who has performed over seven thousand brain operations, a medical school professor who has taught young medical school students and aspiring neurosurgeons for forty years, and as a researcher who has applied the rigorous methods of science to discoveries about how the brain works, I have come to see that the human soul is real and that human beings are not mere machines made of meat."

On pages 5-6 Egnor says this:

"I saw many patients with brain damage, whether from birth, bullets, blood clots or tumors. And yet their minds -- their ability to think and reason and believe and desire -- didn't seem as damaged as their brains."

On page 6 he describes a woman who had a brain tumor in her left frontal lobe. He says this:

"During the surgery, I spoke with her continuously as I was quietly removing most of her left frontal lobe. She maintained a perfectly normal conversation throughout the surgery."

On pages 16 to 17 Egnor recalls performing his first split-brain operation. This is an operation in which surgeons sever the corpus callosum, a bundle of fibers that connect the left half of the brain with the right half of the brain. The radical operation is sometimes done to stop very bad seizures resistant to drug treatment. Egnor recalls that his patient named Sam seemed normal after the operation:

"His vision was normal, and so was his speech. In fact, the only thing different about Sam....was that he was no longer having major seizures. And he certainly seemed like a single, unified person....He told me repeatedly that his inner experiences were just the same as before the surgery."

On page 17 Egnor says this:

"Since I operated on Sam, I've cared for a number of patients who had split-brain surgery. Like other neurosurgeons, I found no evidence, either from ordinary clinical examination or events in their lives, that indicates their minds were split, even though their brains were."  

On pages 36-37 Egnor recalls his surgery on a boy named Charles who had a severe head injury. Egnor removed half of the boy's cerebellum, a part of the brain involved in muscular activity. Egnor says that four weeks after the operation "I could find no neurological defect at all." He says, "His cognition, speech and motor skills were like that of any other four-year-old, even though he was missing half of his cerebellum." Many years later Egnor learned that Charles was in the NCAA "playing basketball at a high level." Egnor says on page 37, "Neurosurgeons routinely remove large parts of the cerebellum to treat strokes and tumors, and most patients retain normal coordination."

On pages 46-47 Egnor tells of a patient named Katie. We see a brain scan picture showing most of the child's brain missing. In an article Egnor  says Katie "had a third of the brain that her sister had," her fraternal twin. In the article Egnor tells us that Katie "sat and talked and walked earlier than her sister," "made the honor roll," and "will soon graduate high school."

On page 48 mentions a patient named Maria who had only two-thirds of her brain, but who "finished her Master's Degree in English literature." On the same page he mentions a Jesse who had a brain that was half full of water. He says Jesse "became a normal happy middle schooler." On the same page he mentions that 25 percent of those born with no corpus callosum (the nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain) show no symptoms. He references the paper "Structural neuroplastic responses preserve functional connectivity and neurobehavioural outcomes in children born without corpus callosum" which you can read here. That paper tells us that one child born without a corpus callosum had an IQ of 126, far above average. 

On pages 49-50 Egnor tells us that a Chinese woman who had lived a normal life was found by a brain scan to have no cerebellum. We read that a paper making a search of the medical literature found nine cases of people born without a cerebellum, one of which was completely normal, and two of which were mentally normal. 

Later Egnor begins to discuss near-death experiences. On page 100 he cites a case of a nine-year-old boy named Eddie who had a near-death experience, and reported seeing his sister Teresa in heaven. The boy was told that Teresa was actually at college. But it was then discovered that Teresa had died in a car accident shortly before Eddie's experience. 

Whenever discussing accounts such as these, it is important to track down the original account. Egnor quoted a paper by Bruce Greyson (a very interesting paper discussed at length in my 2014 post here entitled They Seemed to Know of Deaths They Should Not Have Known Of"). But Greyson is not the original source of this account. The original source is pages 44 to 45 of the 1995 book "Children of the Light: The startling and inspiring truth about children's near-death experiences and how they illumine the beyond" by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger.  Below are those pages:

The source of the account is identified two pages earlier as "Doctor K. M. Dale, who practiced medicine for many years in the Pittsburgh area." The boy is identified as Eddie Cuomo. 

Egnor and O'Leary make a good case for the soul, and a good case against the claim that the brain is the source of the human mind. But their case could have been much stronger. Oddly, they have almost completely failed to discuss the topic of human memory. A deep dive into that topic could have led to very many other strong reasons for believing in a human soul, such as the failure of neuroscientists to ever discover by microscopic examination any evidence of learned information in the brain, the failure of neuroscientists to advance any credible theory of how a brain could store memories, a failure of neuroscientists to present any credible theory explaining the wonder of instant human learning, the failure of neuroscientists to explain the lifelong preservation of memories, and the failure of neuroscientists to present any credible theory explaining the wonder of instant human recall of correct detailed answers when someone is asked a question. Egnor and O'Leary also fail to discuss the very important topic of brain physical shortfalls: all the physical limitations of human brains (such as unreliable synaptic transmission and the short lifetimes of synapses and synaptic proteins) that rule out claims that brains are the source of human minds and the storage place of human memories.  Egnor and O'Leary also fail to discuss many things that today's scientists generally fail to study, but which provide strong additional evidence for a human soul: things such as apparition sightings, deathbed visions, and the strong evidence for clairvoyance and ESP.  So while Egnor and O'Leary's case for a human soul is good, it is much less strong than it could have been.