ID the Future host Andrew McDiarmid has been talking to psychologist Alexander Batthyány and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor about a deep mystery of the human mind: the way people deep in dementia can suddenly become lucid just before dying. Their minds break free from the years-long limitations of the brain. But how?

Some sources offer “explanations” that wallpaper over the gap in our understanding. Shortage of oxygen, as discussed in the second video, is one:

McDiarmid: Now, Mike, some have suggested that things like low oxygen or high carbon dioxide might explain episodes of clarity near death. As a neurosurgeon who’s treated those conditions, how convincing is that? [00:48]

Egnor: It’s not convincing at all. I mean, I’ve seen thousands of patients who had cerebral hypoxia, low oxygen in the brain, and hypercarbia, which is high CO₂ in the blood. And these can all happen as one’s heart and lungs and brain begin to fail. And there can be a variety of effects of these.

But what they never do is, they never make you more clear. They never make you more coherent. They never make you better. If you cut off a person’s oxygen, they don’t get better. And so they cause confusion, they can cause panic, they can cause somnolence, all kinds of effects. But people are not made better by having their oxygen cut off. If you’re studying for your math exam the next day, you won’t think more clearly if you get hypoxic.

In short, the familiar mantra, “The mind is simply what the brain does” is clearly no help.

Deep mysteries raise deep questions and this conversation doesn’t shy away from them. So I want to unpack the issues Batthyány and Egnor raise in three parts, beginning with the question Egnor tackles next: Do we misunderstand what our brain actually does?

The pop science image is that the brain is a computer. But in Egnor’s view, that image sheds no light on what we are trying to understand.

What if the brain merely focuses the mind?

Egnor: There’s a theory about the relationship between the mind and the brain that goes back a long ways. It was particularly popular in the 19th century and was advocated by William James, who’s a psychologist and really is the father of modern psychology.

And James hypothesized that the relationship between the mind and the brain was not that the brain generated the mind, but rather that the brain focused the mind. That is that the mind was something that’s much larger than brain function.

There’s much more out there, which frankly, in near death experiences is what people consistently report. That is, that in the near death experience, many of the cognitive experiences people have are of hyperacute perception and then deep conceptual insights. Your mind works better under those circumstances.

And religious people, monks and nuns and people who do contemplative prayer have to suppress the activity of their brain to expand the activity of their mind. [04:48]

Egnor is quite interested in near-death experiences just now because he is working on a new book (2027) focusing on them. Like The Immortal Mind (2025), it is co-written with me.

He went on to unpack the “magnifying glass” analogy offered by James (1842–1910):

So one of the analogies that James used was that the brain is like a magnifying glass. And the actual mind, our soul really, is like the sun. And the mind that we use in everyday life is like a spot that the magnifying glass focuses down like on the sidewalk.

On a sunny day, you can focus a little spot of light. And we need that focus by our brain because we are biological creatures and we have to live. And we would have difficulty getting food and getting rest and taking care of the normal chores of being a living human being each day if we were constantly in this expansive spiritual world. So we have to focus in the mundane world, and that’s what the brain helps us do.

But the brain focuses the mind. It doesn’t generate the mind. And I think terminal lucidity and near-death experiences are very clear examples of the wisdom in that understanding of the mind–brain relationship.

It’s at the boundaries of life that things get fuzzy

Batthyány, who wrote a book on terminal lucidity, Threshold (2023), has been thinking a lot about this too:

Batthyány: But the important point is, when we come to boundary conditions, suddenly what was set in stone no longer is valid. We need new rules. And now, when we say that in everyday life, there’s a clear and strong dependency of mind on brain, then we come to death and dying, and we see this no longer seems to apply. And what else is death and dying than the strongest boundary condition of living?

So we observe something which is not that rare actually. And in nature, you see this very often, that there are certain areas in which it is valid. And so in a funny way, materialism is not wrong. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s not wrong in a very limited area as a phenomenological finding. [10:48]

And when it comes to terminal lucidity…

Okay. I mean, of course, if you have a phenomenon, you want to find a cause. That’s normal and very rational thinking. So we asked our participants [in the study on which his book is based].

By the way, many of our cases testified more than one witness. So there might be the daughters and granddaughters, plus a nurse or medical doctor, who was called.

And we invited them and told, “Please tell us, what do you speculate and you’re utterly free. What do you think might have triggered the lucid episode?” And we believe, perhaps it’s relatives being present.

And then we found out that maybe it’s the other way around. Of course, if somebody’s dying and the hospice says, “Come, say goodbye,” people are there. And you need bystanders if you want to have witnesses.

And TL is a third person phenomenon, in a sense. “We know it not because we have to believe the NDEer, what he or she believed as the only eyewitness, but in our cases, we even have videos.

Yes. It is both well-attested and hard to account for in a materialist framework.

Next: The thin spaces of our lives where strange things do happen

Also: Andrew’s own takes on the two interviews are here and here.