The central point that science journalist Denyse O’Leary and I make in our new book The Immortal Mind: a Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (June 3, 2025), is that the mind is more than just the brain. We have spiritual souls, and we have mental abilities that transcend brain activity.

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Of course, theologians and philosophers have made this case for thousands of years. But now we have solid neuroscience to show that the theologians and philosophers were and are right. We have immortal spiritual souls that transcend our brain. Our book is a deep dive into the scientific evidence for the existence of the soul and for the fact that we survive death.

A recent neuroscience research paper provides a fascinating insight into the disconnect between the mind and the brain. In Robustness of the Mind-Body Interface: case studies of unconventional information flow in the multiscale living architecture (preprint), scientists  Karina Kofman and Michael Levin lay out the remarkable evidence for the observation that the mind is more than just the brain. They observe:

Neuroscience, and behavioral science more broadly, seek to characterize the relationship between functional cognition and the underlying processes operating in living tissue. The current paradigm focuses heavily on the brain, and specific mechanisms thought to underlie mental content and capabilities. One of the most interesting approaches to any field, which often leads to progress, is to highlight data which do not comfortably fit a specific dominant framework.

Kofman and Levin emphasize that scientific progress often comes from challenging established beliefs. In neuroscience, the most entrenched belief is that the mind is entirely produced by the brain. And some data challenge that belief, for example,

Reduced brain mass or absent brain tissue without the expected loss of function (e.g. hydrocephalus, hemihydranencephaly), discrepancies between   cognitive   state   and   brain   function   (e.g.   accidental   awareness   during anesthesia, terminal lucidity), and cases of cognitive abilities exceeding the apparent skill of the individual, all highlight interesting features of the immense plasticity of the mapping between cognition and its living substrate. These cases suggest new avenues for research…

What kinds of situations are we talking about?

The paper goes on to describe a number of brain syndromes. They include situations in which people are missing parts of their brains or are supposedly under general anesthesia but are aware of what’s happening. (Yes this happens, but patients rarely feel pain as a result).

They also talk about people with debilitating dementia who have periods of lucidity and normal mental function. Such periods defy the dogma that the brain is wholly responsible for the mind.

In my 40 years of experience as a neurosurgeon, I have seen some of the situations they write about. I have patients with major parts of their brains missing, who have surprisingly normal minds. For example, one of my patients is a woman in her twenties who is missing about half her brain because of a birth defect. But she is a completely normal person, bright and successful in life. If you met her, you would not notice anything wrong. You would not know that half of her skull is filled with spinal fluid — basically water!

I have quite a few patients like this and, as a result, like the authors of this paper, I began to question the neuroscience dogma that the mind (i.e., consciousness) is completely the product of the brain.

Consciousness without a brain?

Perhaps the most dramatic example of the independence of consciousness from the brain itself is a condition called hydranencephaly, which the authors describe in their paper and we describe in our book. It is a rare condition — about 1 in 10,000 births —where babies are born completely lacking brain hemispheres. They have only a brainstem, thalamus and cerebellum, and even these parts of the brain may not function well. They often die in the first year of life but some live into later childhood.

Nearly all theories of consciousness in neuroscience claim that consciousness arises from some sort of processing in the brain hemispheres. That is, they assert that we are conscious because the neurons in the cortex of our brain hemispheres interact in complex ways that cause us to be conscious.

Yet children with hydranencephaly have no brain cortex and no brain hemispheres. But despite their disabilities (they cannot walk or talk), they are quite conscious. They wake up and sleep, laugh and cry, and are otherwise obviously conscious.  

My oldest surviving patient was Charlie. He lived until age 7. He was a sweet little boy, quite conscious, with a broad range of emotions including joy, sadness, fear and affection. By nearly any of the neuroscientific theories widely today, Charlie should have utterly lacked consciousness — he had much less brain tissue than most people in deep comas. It’s ironic that the most sophisticated theories held by brilliant neuroscientists are disproven by Charlie and by each handicapped child with hydranencephaly. There is more to the mind than just neuronal processing in the brain hemispheres if thousands of people without brain hemispheres are conscious.

What the brain actually does

This is not, of course, to deny that the brain is related to the mind. But as we point out in our book, the brain does four and only four mental things: movement, perception, emotion and memory. Consciousness itself, and the capacity for abstract thought and free will, are ordinarily dependent on the brain for normal function. But they don’t come from the brain. The neuroscience evidence is becoming clearer all the time: the brain is necessary, but not sufficient, for normal abstract thought and for free will.

Scientists need to be the most thoughtful critics of their own ideas — they need to constantly question their own assumptions. This is how scientific progress happens. Thus, the neuroscience community needs to question its most fundamental assumption — the dogma that consciousness comes entirely from the brain and that we don’t have spiritual souls. There is massive evidence for the existence of the soul, for its spiritual nature, and for its immortality. Neuroscience needs to come to grips with the significance of the evidence that Kofman and Levin lay out in their research article, and that Denyse O’Leary and I set forth in our book.