Evidence of the Soul From the Brain
- Jason Pluebell
- Nov 16
- 19 min read
As many of us have been told, the mind comes from the brain. The mental experience of humans is simply the result of brain activity from neurons firing and atoms interacting. We are the product of natural forces in our heads. But is this the case? Many people do view the mind in a materialistic way, seeing it as just brain matter and electric charge, but some people hold to a more Christian interpretation of an immaterial substance that is the principle of life. Even non-Christians hold a dualist view of the brain and mind, seeing them as distinct, yet complementary entities that make up a person. Do we have a soul? Is there any evidence for it? If so, do animals and plants have souls? How can we interpret and apply the evidence to our lives?
In the topic of evidence for a soul, there are two main categories we will look at in two articles. The first will be covering discoveries made in neuroscience, and the second will be near-death experiences (NDEs). Today, we will be looking at the discoveries made in neuroscience that suggest there is an immaterial aspect to the mind that is not from the brain. Credit must be given where required, and by no means am I pulling this information out of my own research in medical journals and the history of medical science. Dr. Michael Egnor is the author of "The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon's Case for the Existence of the Soul," where he lays out many discoveries made within neuroscience that suggest there is a soul. Dr. Egnor is a brain surgeon who has performed over 7,000 (and growing daily) successful brain surgeries. He is a professor of Neurosurgery at Stony Brook University, New York, and was named one of New York's best doctors by New York Magazine in 2005.
Today, I will be discussing what he covers in his book. We will begin with some history of some developments made in Neurosurgery over the last 200 or so years of its history. Then we will move on to what the evidence points to, and conclude with what the Bible says about this and what the brain actually is. But before we begin any of this, what is the mainstream materialist explanation for the relationship between the brain and mind?
The Materialist Explanation of the Mind
Most medical textbooks and laymen view the mind as fully encapsulated within the brain. The brain fully explains the mind, and all mental phenomena happen due to the neurons firing within the brain. The mind and the brain are not separate in any sense, but the same thing, equivalent in nature and location. Materialism holds that there is nothing beyond matter and energy and the laws of physics by which they are governed. There is nothing, as C.S. Lewis would say, "above the facts." There is only the interaction of matter and energy; thus, all mental phenomena and experience must be the result of this exact operation.
They view brain tissue as being extremely agile, with the ability to take on the roles of damaged areas (and this will be important shortly). Often, when most of the evidence shown here is brought up, this is the exact explanation they offer. It is equivalent to saying, "I don't know, it's just complex." And it is not explaining anything, only naming, by virtue, a concept in your head with no object to ground. There is no direct evidence that brain tissue is agile with this ability, and it is only under the philosophical a priori commitment to materialism that makes this the only available answer. It is just speculation based on the limitations of an arbitrary worldview. So let's look at the evidence for the soul, from the very thing materialists say refutes its existence.
Wilder Penfield (1920s): The Abstract Mind
We begin with the dawn of the 20th century, when Wilder Penfield sought to understand whether the brain fully explained the existence and experience of the mind. When he began his research in the 1920s, he was a materialist, but through his studies, he found evidence that contradicted this notion. He ended his career a dualist, believing that the brain and mind are separate entities, with the mind being an immaterial one. He began his studies by looking at people who suffered from partial complex seizures.
No Intellectual Seizures (1920s)
They are a type of focal seizure, one that begins in a specific part of the brain due to unusual electrical activity, which affects a person's awareness. They affect one or more of four things in a person's mental experience. Partial complex seizures may make someone move a limb repeatedly, see a bright light or dark spots, recover memories, or feel an intense emotion. Penfield noticed that there was never, over all types of seizures, one that caused an abstract thought to develop, i.e., there were no intellectual seizures. He wondered why people never have seizures where they can't stop performing the Pythagorean theorem, thinking about the law of non-contradiction, or having conversations when nobody is there. The only things affected by seizures are Perception, Emotions, Movement, and Memory (PEMM for short); never reasoning, thinking about concepts, or losing their free will.
Penfield concluded that the simplest explanation is that abstract thought does not come directly from the brain. There has never been a seizure where someone's intellectual thought was affected or stimulated, implying there was no local area in the brain responsible for the abstract mind.
Awake Craniotomy (1930s)
Not only did he look at just the symptoms of seizures, but he also cracked open the skull to look deeper into this. He performed awake brain surgery, or awake craniotomy, where open brain surgery is performed while a patient is under local anesthesia. He would do this, as is done today, to map the brain's surface to determine where the seizures were coming from, and then to remove that part to cure the seizures. When he would map the brain, we would tap different parts with electrodes to stimulate them. In his career, Penfield would go on to perform about one million stimulations on 1,100 different patients over some 45 years.
He discovered the same thing here as with the symptoms. He was never able to stimulate abstract thought. He never poked an area and had a patient recall word definitions or philosophical concepts. He could only stimulate Perception, Emotion, Movement, and Memory. He concluded that, since no part of the material brain can affect abstract thought, or the mind, abstract thinking does not come from the brain. The brain may be necessary for the elaboration of abstract thought because, without information about the world around the body, no thoughts about it can be made. The brain seems more like a sensory control panel for the soul to access the body and information about its world. Penfield concluded that what comprises the soul, what sets man apart from animals and plants, is this capacity for abstract thought. An immaterial mind apart from the brain, a spirit.
Penfield & Benjamin Libet (1950s - 1980s): Free Will
Throughout the 1930s to the 1950s, Penfield would continue his research and eventually come to a conclusion on free will as well. While performing the craniotomies, he would often ask a patient to lift one of their arms. He would then stimulate the part of the brain to raise that arm himself. He would ask the patient if they raised their arm themselves, and no patient ever answered incorrectly. Out of the 1,100 patients and thousands of times he has done this, everybody was able to tell when they were not the ones raising their arms.
This implies that no part of the brain is responsible for free will, and the notion that all our behaviour is the result of brain activity is simply wrong. Free will is not a brain function. There is still another person who would work in the 70s and 80s to expand upon this research.
Libet and Free Will (1980s)
Benjamin Libet would come along in the 80s and make some groundbreaking discoveries in relation to free will. He would scan the electrical impulses of a patient's brain to look at the brain activity when they performed certain tasks. He found that about half a second before you decide to do a simple task, there is a short and intense spike in brain activity. This was initially seen as confirming the notion that there is no free will, only brain activity. But Libet was extremely clever, and to test this further, he asked the patients to deny their decision, to say, flip on a light switch, or press a big red button. The denial of the decision had zero brain activity, suggesting there was no material cause for the rejection of a simple task. He showed a type of "free won't" where we can deny a temptation our brain brings up.
This is very similar to what the Bible's concept of temptation from the flesh is about. Our material, fleshy brains hit us with temptations, but we have the free will to deny those temptations, which is not from the brain. This implies that there are natural temptations that an immaterial mind can observe and reason whether it is right ot wrong. Neuroscience agrees with Scripture.
Roger Sperry (1959 - 1968): Corpus Callosotomy and the Unification of Conscious Experience
Roger Sperry was an American neurophysiologist and neurobiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1981 for his developments in the individual functions of the brain hemispheres. He was studying a method called Corpus Callosotomy, or split-brain surgery. It was originally developed to cure or lessen the intensity of seizures that started in one hemisphere of the brain and then spread to the other, or a Focal to Bilateral Seizure. They would cut the brain in half, so that one hemisphere would have no material causal connection to the other. This prevented the seizure from spreading across the entire brain and lessened the intensity of the seizures.
Because the brain was split in half, Sperry was able to study what each side did independently. He noticed that even though the brain was physically split in half, people who underwent these operations were still normal. They could walk, talk, cry, laugh, think, and had fewer seizures. It was like cutting an Xbox 360 in half and still being able to wreck noobs in Halo 3 multiplayer. It stunned the materialist view of the mind, as cutting computers in half never results in them still functioning. It implied that there was something immaterial that was able to recognize sensory input from each disconnected side, a mind apart from the brain.
Sergent & Pinto: The Split Perception, but Unified Conception
Justine Sergent (1987): Split Brains and the Mind
Sergent was a researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. About two decades after Sperry, she would also study split-brain patients, but with an even better method. She found a way to show each patient's hemispheres of their brain different pictures. So that while the left side sees one picture, the other sees a different one. She would show one side an arrow facing one direction, and the other another arrow facing a different direction. She would then ask the patient if the arrows were facing the same direction, and every single patient answered correctly. How could they compare arrows and have no physical connection between the brain hemispheres? There is something about the mind, not in the brain, that can recognize both sides' inputs.
Yair Pinto (2017)
Pinto expanded upon Sergent's work, but with different pictures. He would show the brain two pictures that together make a story. For example, one picture would be something like a baseball or a rock, and the other a broken window. Each hemisphere is only seeing one picture, so if the mind is in the brain, it shouldn't be able to compare the pictures to form the narrative. He would ask them what happened, and every patient said a baseball or a rock broke someone's window, but no part of the brain saw both pictures. He showed, in a research paper published in PubMed in 2017 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Pinto+Y&cauthor_id=28122878), that while physical perception seems divided between hemispheres, the conscious conception of what was seen was united.
Which means there is no physical interaction happening between hemispheres while the united experience is still emerging, something not in the divided hemispheres, but something separate to them that was able to observe both perceptions to conclude.
Adrian Owen (2006): Consciousness in Persistent Vegetative State (PVS)
Owen published a paper in the Journal Science in 2006 titled "Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State," where he studied people in the deepest state of coma (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16959998/). People in PVS are considered brain dead, with no brain activity and thus no conscious experience or awareness, but Owen's work has shed light on how this is only true for some patients. He would put people in PVS in an MRI machine to get images of their brain activity when asked questions or to think about something. The scans would show patterns of brain activity when asked, despite the brain damage sustained. He then compared the brain scans to those of normal people, and they were identical, implying that the PVS patients understood him.
He then asked the same questions, but shuffled the words so they made no sense. The MRI scans showed no brain activity, further confirming that they were able to understand what he was saying. Dr. Egnor tells us that there is other work where patients are able to perform math, where they are asked something like one plus four, and then the questioner counts up from one, and brain activity begins when they count up to the correct answer, five. But this is not for all PVS cases, and only about 40% experience conscious awareness while in this state, meaning they were misdiagnosed with PVS, and were not mindless people.
Dr. Egnor's Experience: Evidence From the Brain
In his book, "The Immortal Mind," and in interviews, Dr. Egnor lays out his personal experience of evidence for the soul from the phenomena with his patients as a brain surgeon. He mentions that he has had patients with massive physical brain issues who exhibited normal human behaviour and ability. He keeps their names anonymous.
One patient was a young lady who was missing her entire brain due to fluid buildup (seen above). This was known before her birth from her prenatal ultrasounds. There was little hope for the child not to be disabled, but she grew up completely normal and was not affected by the missing physical structure of her brain.
He had another patient who was missing her entire cerebellum and cerebral regions of her brain. Doctors suggested that she not be fed after birth due to the expected misery, but they went back on that and decided to give her a chance. She was a straight-A student, is a published musician, and has a master's degree in English. One young boy was missing half of his entire brain, but in recent years graduated high school as a perfectly normal athletic boy, who played sports with aptitude. Some are even missing their entire outer brain cortex, but still exhibit normal behaviour.
Others have what is called hydranencephaly, when someone has multiple strokes within the womb, destroying both sides of their brains, replacing them with fluid. All these people have left are small sections of their brain stem, and most are handicapped, but still fully conscious people: they smile, laugh, sleep, and react to conversation. This is not expected under the materialist explanation of the brain and mind, as these people are missing both hemispheres of their brains and still retain conscious experience.
Could the Mind Have Evolved?
Could the mind be the product of biological evolution? Does it hold that the evolution of the complexity of the arrangement of molecules in the brain would eventually give rise to consciousness? If natural selection is a real force that can create irreducibly complex, implausible, and goal-oriented structures and information, then it can only act on matter. Natural selection acts on random mutation within a genome (change can also be the result of preprogrammed changes within a genome), so how would it be able to produce an immaterial mind? What we have seen thus far is that there is an aspect of the mind that can recognize the brain's activity and organize it into abstract thought. It exists above and beyond the mere facts of the brain matter and its activity, because if it were not, then all aspects of consciousness must be affectable in all cases, but this is obviously not the case.
Therefore, the mind cannot evolve as it is not material; the brain structure may, but the vast complexity of the molecular structure, and further, the genetic information that drives its construction, casts vast doubt on faith in a blind natural process. If it is the case that a blind, random, natural process evolved your mind, why do you trust any thought you have about anything? There is zero reason to expect that natural processes produce minds that can make reliable observations and conclusions about nature. You'd need much more faith than a theist does to believe in that (1 part in 1030,000 for a simple cell to form from random chance).
Is the Mind a Computer?
Michael Egnor brings up the fact that many people see the mind as a type of computation. A computation matches one physical pattern according to rules and will be blind to meaning. Everything in your mind, all your thoughts are about something. They are all directed towards an object. Nothing about a computation system has any meaning or aboutness to it; it just follows a program and computation code. A spelling system does not care about the topic of your high school essay. Chat GPT has no regard for your opinion or who you are; it simply follows the complex speech pattern, text data processing, and probability calculations code that was programmed by a human with a mind that can think critically and apply meaning to it.
The mind is the opposite of this. One can attempt to explain the brain in a computational framework, but the mind cannot. It is more like the brain is a material tool for the mind to receive information.
Is the Brain the Mind?
Some will cite the case of Phineas Gage to argue that people's entire conscious experience can change with brain damage, even aspects of the mind. Some have overhyped and exagerated the story of Gage, as he was not a completely different person after his incident. Some say he was like an animal's mind in a human, or that he was a complete jerk after his accident.
Gage was a construction worker in 1848. On September 13 of that year, some explosives would detonate, sending a four-foot-long iron rod right through his skull. It entered his face, just below his left eye, and traveled up, where it exited the top of his head near his frontal lobe. He was still conscious after the incident and was rushed to Dr. Harlow, who noted how impressive Gage's case was, as seeing anyone still awake with an iron rod in their head would be impressive. A funny aspect of this is that Gage kept the rod after it was removed, and would often take it with him to tell the story to people. He would be discharged from the hospital in just two months and was said to be a changed man afterwards.
Dr. Egnor tells us that most reports on him exaggerate the effects of his injury. He had no real personality changes in toto, and was merely "looser in his morals," as Egnor says. Gage's total emotional state was changed, with no proof that his abstract, intellectual abilities were altered, and emotion is a material state of the brain, as we have seen from Penfield. Emotions may be affected if the brain is affected, but this does not mean the mind originates in the brain. That is a bit of a jump and ignores the mountain of evidence against this. So, is the brain the mind, or is it another thing entirely?
We have different organs, all designed for specific biological functions. The heart supplies blood throughout the body, the stomach is for digesting food, and a special place to expel waste. The eyes are for sensing light to see, and the kidneys filter waste, regulate blood pressure, and maintain the body's water level. But is the brain the organ of the mind? Harkening back to Penfield's work, he offered hard evidence that the abstract mind does not come from the material interaction of brain matter. His almost one million brain stimulations and the seizures he was studying would have to result in abstract thinking being affected if the materialist explanation were true, but they didn't. We also saw from Libet that there is no location of the brain responsible for the act of free will decision making, and from Sergent to Pinto that dividing the brain does not divide a person.
"The Brain may be necessary for the full, normal function of the intellect, and may be affected by injury or drugs, but with all the evidence of no direct material connection between the brain and the mind, which is more likely. That the mind comes from the brain, or that the brain is a material tool for the mind, and cutting my brake lines will not allow me to brake, even if I am slamming the pedal."
The brain is the physical stuff in the skull, responsible for only four things previously mentioned: perception, emotions, movement, and memory. Anything beyond these necessities of function seems not to come from the brain, as no amount of physical alteration of it can offer 100% confidence that the mind comes from the brain. It is more like the mind is using the brain to access information about the material world. Our ability for abstract thought, self-reflection, and free will cannot be evoked or changed from the brain itself, yet we exhibit these capacities. Thus, as Dr. Egnor says, the mind must be the organ of perception, emotion, movement, and memory. There is no such organ in the human body responsible for free will and abstract thought. The brain may be necessary for the normal function of the intellect and will, and may be affected by injury or drugs, but with all the evidence of no direct material connection between the brain and the mind, it is more likely that the mind comes from the brain. Or that the brain is a tool for the mind, and cutting my brake lines will not allow me to brake even if I am slamming the pedal. A driver may want to slam the brakes, but the material function of the car has been altered to not allow that input; likewise, if the brain is damaged, it may not allow the mind to do certain things.
Is the Soul Real?
So, is the soul real? Have we seen evidence of it? From neuroscience, it seems that we have seen evidence of the immaterial aspect of our conscious experience. But what is the soul? The soul is everything that makes us alive. Parts of the brain activate for moving, sensing, emoting, and remembering, but part of this soul is the abstract and immaterial. Egnor says that plants and animals have souls, but they are fully material. You never see animals and plants thinking about God, morality, metaphysics, or attempting to describe nature in the language of mathematics. The human soul seems to have this immaterial aspect to it, a type of hybrid of brain activity and the mind. The soul knows, loves, and animates us, as we all know from our personal experience. The soul has no physical parts, as we have seen from the work of Sperry, Sergent, and Pinto: when the brain is cut into parts, the soul does not split with it. Then, from Penfield, we see that there is no spatial location inside the brain for which the soul occupies; in other words, there was never a location in or on the brain where the entire mental consciousness was affected.
There is more evidence to be discussed about NDEs, but that will be covered in the second article. We may conclude that: If the soul is everything that makes us alive, then animals and plants have souls too, but their “everything" is entirely material. They can move, sense, emote, and remember, but they never aim to describe nature in language; they never engage in philosophical concepts or think about God; they do not have free will, only appetites and emotions, but no strict moral law imposed upon them. Humans have this immaterial, abstract aspect that is unaffected by matter, the mind. Our minds are immaterial spirits, and what sets us apart from plants and animals, from what we have seen, is the fact that our souls have an immaterial aspect to their existence and nature. The capacity to reason, self-reflect, feel moral guilt, and communicate with God, which follows exactly what the Bible tells us.
The Bible and the Evidence
What we have concluded is that the brain and mind are not the same thing. There is something above the brain that can recognize information from it and can organize that into abstract thought. We saw how the soul, being all that makes us alive, has an immaterial aspect that sets us apart from plants and animals, the mind. The Bible is not silent about this same reality, and speaks of it thousands of years before modern science would open the cranium. We were created with the Imago Dei.
"Then God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." (Genesis 1:26)
God created all the plants and animals with material souls, but he created man uniquely in His image or likeness.
"And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit." (2 Corinthians 3:18)
We are patterned after Him, mirroring a family resemblance of Him pertaining to our spiritual and moral nature, as God has no physical body or parts. Human beings were created in God's likeness in order to:
"With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness." (James 3:9)
Communicate with each other, that we may bless each other, lest we curse.
"She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands. She is like the merchant ships, bringing her food from afar. She gets up while it is still night; she provides food for her family and portions for her female servants. She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard. She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks. She sees that her trading is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night. In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers. She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy. When it snows, she has no fear for her household; for all of them are clothed in scarlet. She makes coverings for her bed; she is clothed in fine linen and purple." (Proverbs 31: 13-22)
Be creative, with the capacity to make things anew.
"You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand." (Psalm 16:11)
Experience and interpret emotions and feelings to develop longings for relationships and fellowship.
“Woe to me! I cried. I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” (Isaiah 6:5)
Be put under a moral law that we may discern right and wrong according to God's good nature.
"Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son." (John 3:18)
Act and be responsible for our use of free will in accordance with righteousness.
“Martha, Martha, the Lord answered, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.” (Luke 10:41-42)
Fill the infinitely large hole that can only be filled with knowledge and love of God through faith in Jesus Christ.
We were created with an eternal spirit that is capable of communion and fellowship with the Creator of the universe. He created our souls to reflect different parts of His nature, male and female He made them. Both exhibiting different imagotypes (Koch and Myers, Raising Gender-Confident Kids, pg 61). We all reflect God's good nature in different ways, and we should glorify Him and His design for each of us, both biologically and spiritually. We are equipped with this immaterial and abstract capacity for reasoning, self-awareness, other-awareness, self-reflection, observation, communication, information processing, and moral reasoning imposed by a moral legislator to guide us to reflect that good image in its full designed purpose, to love thy God with all your heart and soul, and to love your enemy as your neighbor.
I will return to discuss near-death experiences (NDEs), where we will see the full palette of evidence for the soul and afterlife. Until then, keep on praying, and keep asking questions. God bless.
Michael Egnor's Presentation: https://youtu.be/41bIJ7hYbLs?si=hJaIUY1ZKmw44fXS
The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon's Case for the Existence of the Soul: https://www.christianbook.com/immortal-mind-neurosurgeons-case-existence-soul/9781546006350/pd/164002?en=google&event=SHOP&kw=academic-0-20%7C164002&p=1179710&utm_source=google&p=1229913&dv=c&cb_src=google&cb_typ=shopping&cb_cmp=23253333512&cb_adg=191394761951&cb_kyw=&utm_medium=shopping&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=23253333512&gbraid=0AAAAAD_dTHZL9V1AJqFwNE51MnBR5qVAZ&gclid=Cj0KCQiAiebIBhDmARIsAE8PGNKjCus7_bdawabGDUCEACym8co4iMAo-gnx8_zElk_JRnXL85eoyYwaAhCAEALw_wcB
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