When Dr. Michael Egnor, professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at SUNY Stony Brook, joined host Robert J. Marks on the Mind Matters News podcast, the discussion centered on one of medicine’s most provocative frontiers: near-death experiences (NDEs). Egnor — an  award-winning brain surgeon and co-author with Denyse O’Leary of The Immortal Mind — argues that NDE research delivers compelling evidence that consciousness can exist apart from the brain. The interview charts the strongest clinical cases, counters materialist objections, and asks what these glimpses of the “other side” imply about human destiny.

What counts as a near-death experience?

Egnor defines an NDE as a lucid mental episode occurring during clinical death —typically after cardiac arrest when brain activity flat-lines. Survivors report leaving their bodies, observing the operating room, entering a tunnel of light, and meeting deceased relatives or luminous beings. Far from isolated anecdotes, NDEs number in the tens of millions across history; specialized journals now document and analyze them scientifically. Roughly one in five modern reports contains a veridical element — a detail later verified by witnesses, medical records, or physical evidence.

The Pam Reynolds surgery: medicine’s best-documented case

Egnor singles out the 1991 operation on Pam Reynolds as the gold standard for verification. Neurosurgeon Robert Spetzler needed thirty motionless minutes to repair a giant brain-stem aneurysm. To gain that window, his team cooled Reynolds to 50°F, stopped her heart, drained the blood from her brain, and placed EEG leads plus brain-stem auditory monitors to confirm total cerebral silence. When revived, Reynolds described:

• The exact shape of a special bone-saw, not something a non-surgeon might know.
• Conversations between staff while her ears were equipeed with a device that emitted loud clicks (intended to demonstrate brain-stem inactivity).
• A popular song playing in the piped-in music in the background.

Only after that detailed observational phase did she recount the classic tunnel experience and reunion with deceased relatives — an experience so beautiful that she resisted returning to her body. Reynolds went on to live another two decades, insisting to the end that her account was literal truth.

Two broad patterns—and an unsettling subset

Marks and Egnor note that NDEs tend to follow two overlapping tracks:

1. Out-of-body observation — verifiable, earthly perceptions while the brain shows no function.
2. Transcendent encounter — entry into a hyper-real realm, often populated by loved ones or figures matching the experiencer’s spiritual expectations.

Less publicized are the hellish narratives. Professor and artist Howard Storm, once an atheist, reported being lured by malicious entities, torn apart, and rescued only after praying. Deeply shaken, he became a Christian minister and wrote My Descent into Death:  A Second Chance at Life (2005). In his book After (2021), psychiatrist Bruce Greyson has documented patients who awoke mid-surgery begging doctors not to let them die, later remembering nothing — suggesting some painful experiences may be repressed.

Why skeptics’ explanations fall short

Materialist critics propose hypoxia, carbon-dioxide spikes, endorphins, temporal-lobe seizures, ketamine, or psychedelic chemistry as the causes of NDEs. Egnor counters that such states produce confusion, panic, or hazy imagery in patients — the opposite of the clarity, coherence, and life-long recall typical of NDEs. Moreover, none of those mechanisms explains accurate perception of remote events or the fact that people blind from birth describe seeing for the first time during an NDE, with details later confirmed.

Celebrated skeptic Carl Sagan (1934‒1996) offered a theory for the tunnel motif, that it was reall a lingering memory of the birth canal. Egnor dismisses this suggestion as biologically and psychologically implausible. Such proposals, the surgeon says, “attempt to explain away, not explain.”

Memory, culture, and the limits of language

Not everyone who is resuscitated reports an NDE — a point skeptics seize upon. Egnor responds that memory consolidation requires a minimally functioning brain; some experiences may simply be lost. Those that survive are inevitably filtered through cultural vocabulary. Scholar Carol Zaleski calls NDEs “other-world journeys” whose core is ineffable; witnesses therefore borrow the imagery most familiar to them — Jesus, a radiant ancestor, even fictional figures like Gandalf from Lord of the Rings  — to approximate what words cannot capture.

A neurosurgeon’s theological resonance

Egnor sees striking parallels between NDEs and the “dark night of the soul” described by mystics such as St. John of the Cross: when ordinary thought is silenced, a deeper reality breaks through. In clinical death, the brain’s chatter ceases involuntarily, granting a similar opening. From this perspective, NDEs corroborate the long-standing claim of the great faiths — that the self outlives bodily demise.

Implications for science and for living

If consciousness persists when the brain is offline, the prevailing neuroscience model — mind equals brain — requires revision toward dualism or something beyond current materialist frameworks. Practically, the experiences transform those who have them: fear of death vanishes, priorities reorder, and ethical focus sharpens. This life, Egnor concludes, “is a preparation for life that goes on and I think is eternal.”

Marks closes with the apostle Paul’s taunt to mortality — “O death, where is thy sting?”—remarking that NDE research grants empirical heft to that ancient hope.

In sum…

The interview sets out a cumulative case:

• Robust data: thousands of medically serious NDE accounts, a significant fraction of which are independently verified.
• Clinical anomalies: perception without brain activity, accurate observations, sensory experience in the congenitally blind.
• Transformative aftermath: durable psychological change, diminished death anxiety.

No single laboratory test will settle the question of immortality. Yet, as Dr. Michael Egnor contends, near-death experiences offer modern, experiential evidence that the human mind is not confined to the skull — and that death may be less an end than an entrance.