Michael Egnor, Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at Stony Brook University in New York State, told Pat Flynn that there are aspects of the mind that are not generated in the brain.

That sounds like a modest claim but it is actually quite radical. It means that claims that the human mind is simply the physical functions of the brain — which are commonplace in neuroscience — are not correct. That means, in turn, that materialism is not true.

Excerpts from the transcript:

Michael Egnor:… what I found as I began practicing neurosurgery was that there’s a whole lot of stuff out there in the real world that really doesn’t fit the textbooks. The textbooks are written by and large by people who have never seen a living human brain and have never seen or treated a person who has a brain problem where you can actually understand. These are basic scientists, these are people who work with lab animals and they have all kinds of book knowledge, but the real world doesn’t always match up.

He offers an example

A good example was a little girl that I take care of, I’ll call her Cindy, that’s not her real name. But she was born with a twin sister and she was born with very little brain tissue in her head. Probably 80% of her brain was missing, the rest was just water and her twin sister was normal. And I counseled her family that she probably was going to be profoundly developmentally delayed, it was going to be really bad. But she was a newborn. And newborns, you can’t really tell a lot about their brains because they’re kind of simple little creatures anyway.

And as the months and years went by, she grew up just fine. And we had her sister who was normal to compare and she was even more advanced than her sister. And she ended up on the honor roll in high school and I still follow her. She’s in her twenties. She’s a very smart young lady, her mom says she’s too smart for her own good. And probably 80% of what’s inside her head is water. And there’s nothing in any of my textbooks that explained that or even predicted that.

And I’ve got scores of patients with these strange stories. And that doesn’t mean that missing a big part of your brain is good for you. And there are plenty of people who are missing parts of their brain who are pretty disabled because of it, but not everyone. So I began to look first into neuroscience and then into philosophy to try to understand this because it was very clear to me just in my everyday work life that the books didn’t get this right. There was something else going on. And of course, I also, I started out my life as an atheist and a materialist and somewhat at the same time in kind of a similar process became a Christian. So I started to look at human beings differently than I looked at them before.

Remember, materialism is a totalistic claim: The human mind is said to be wholly the outcome of the physical processes of the brain, with no remainder. If there is any remainder, materialism is disproven.

Dr. Egnor and Denyse O’Leary are the authors of The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (Hachette Worthy, June 3, 2025).

The rest of the interview is divided roughly into three parts:

1. There is a general impression that neuroscience is soon going to succeed in completing the materialist project by proving that the mind is nothing but the brain. Why isn’t that happening?
2. How can we relate neuroscience to the traditional concept of the soul?
3. What message does the ancient concept that human nature comes in three parts (not two parts) have for us today. How might it help us understand the human mind better?

Here’s the next segment:

What brain surgery for epilepsy taught us about the human mind. Michael Egnor continues his discussion with Pat Flynn, noting that neither seizures nor Penfield’s brain stimulation provoked abstract thought. The claim that we will find a materialist explanation some day, no date specified, means that we never reckon with failure to do so.