Yesterday, Michael Egnor, first author of The Immortal Mind: (Worthy 2025), did a podcast with a fellow neurosurgeon, Dr. Lee Warren, whose program is heard in over 70 countries.

“The Immortal Mind, with Dr. Michael Egnor” (54:14 min, with selectable segments)

Warren is himself the author of Hope is the first dose (Waterbrook 2023), offering help in recovering from trauma, tragedy, and “other massive things.” In addition, he is an inventor who “holds two U.S. patents for minimally invasive surgical equipment and is the inventor of numerous high-impact medical devices.”

Despite the fact that both participants in the discussion are brain surgeons, it remained a lively and accessible chat about how the human mind is not simply the brain and can even survive death:

A normal conversation with a patient while removing part of her brain [23:13]

Egnor: I have quite a few patients — and I’m sure you’ve seen the same thing, I think neurosurgeons encounter this — with missing parts of their brains who are really in pretty good shape. You know, obviously there are parts of your brain that you can’t do without … there are parts that are very intolerant of injury but there are other parts that really you can do just fine without. That always struck me as bizarre and that wasn’t in my neuroscience textbooks.

What really kind of brought it to a head was I was doing an awake brain operation many years ago. I don’t do a lot of them; it’s not my specialty within neurosurgery but I was doing it on a woman who had a left frontal lobe astrocytoma [tumor] which was lowgrade but it was infiltrating a lot of her left frontal lobe.

I wanted to make sure I protected her speech area so I did an awake procedure (you can do [24:02] brain surgery awake, of course, with local anesthesia so people don’t feel pain. I’m mapping her frontal lobe by stimulating her brain and finding out where her speech area is so I can protect it.

As I remove the tumor — and I’m taking out a substantial portion of the frontal lobe to get the tumor out — I’m talking to her. I’m having a conversation with her and it’s a perfectly normal conversation. We’re talking about the weather, her family, the cafeteria food in the hospital, and it goes on for several hours as we’re taking out the tumor.

And at the end of the case, she did very well. she did nicely, made a good recovery.

I was flabbergasted. I’m thinking, here I am, taking out a major part of this lady’s brain. I might as well have been cutting her hair! I mean, she showed no response but my none of my textbooks explained that you could do that… So clearly, there was something different about the mind–brain relationship than what was in the textbooks. So I began looking at the neuroscience of it.

This experience led Egnor to study, among other things, the work of pioneer neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield (1891–1976). Over many years of observations from neurosurgery, Penfield reached a similar conclusion to Egnor’s. He had started by understanding the mind as a mere product of the brain but came to see it as distinct from the brain.

That journey resulted in Mystery of the Mind, (Princeton 1975), in which he concluded, “The brain has not explained the mind fully.” Many neuroscience discoveries and achievements later, Egnor finds the same thing.

The mind’s hope of eternity [37:41]

The two neurosurgeons got into some really deep emotional stuff at this point:

Warren: For the person who’s listening out there somewhere that’s, say, going through something hard in their life — they’ve lost somebody — or a lot of our listeners will be like me, somebody who lost a child or somebody’s going through something.

Egnor: I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I – I lost a child too…

Warren: I’m so sorry, yeah, But a lot of the listeners that find my work do so because they’ve read my books where I’ve talked about that. So there may be somebody out there who’s listening and saying “Why does this stuff matter?” Like, why does it, how does it help me find hope to know that my mind and my brain aren’t the same thing?

Egnor: That’s a great question a great question and it’s a question that I think is really at the heart of what I’m doing. It’s at the heart of what you’re doing.

Pointing out that the scientific truth that we see is something that is not just an academic exercise. This is not something to just do in the musty halls of universities. This matters in people’s lives. It matters enormously and it’s given me enormous comfort.

As you mentioned, the loss of a loved one can really be a devastating event. And what helps me is the understanding — and I think this is absolutely true — that we have immortal souls, that when we die, our souls don’t cease to exist. I believe that the Christian way of understanding eternity, of understanding our future, is true. So I know that my son, who passed away a few years ago, is in heaven and we will meet again. We will spend eternity together and it is unbelievably reassuring. It doesn’t take all the pain away; there’s still pain there but I know that death is not permanent. Death is a transition from this earthly life to a to a life with God, to a life where you go back to the source of love to the source of beauty and holiness.

Note: Chapter 5 of The Immortal Mind talks about veridical near-death experiences, where people report seeing things during NDEs that can later be verified. Chapter 6 addresses objections from skeptics. These experiences add to the evidence that the mind can act independently of the brain. Arguments for the immortality of the soul beyond that are addressed in Chapter 7.