Episode 239
DR. MICHAEL EGNOR - The Brain, the Mind, and the Soul: A Neurosurgeon's Journey from Atheism to Faith
Dr. Michael Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University who has performed over 7,000 brain operations throughout his 40+ year career. In this conversation, he shares groundbreaking evidence from neuroscience that challenges materialist assumptions about consciousness and provides scientific support for the existence of the human soul. The episode explores split-brain surgery, near-death experiences, and how his own conversion from atheism to Christianity was informed by what he observed in the operating room.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Brain surgery can remove major portions without affecting abstract thought or consciousness
- Split-brain patients remain unified persons despite severed hemispheres
- Children missing two-thirds of their brain can develop completely normally
- Near-death experiences show consciousness operating independently of brain function
- Materialism fails to explain how perfect concepts emerge from imperfect brains
- Artificial intelligence cannot achieve true consciousness because machines lack souls
CONNECT WITH DR. EGNOR
- Buy "The Immortal Mind" on Amazon
- https://mindmatters.ai/
- https://evolutionnews.org/
- https://www.discovery.org/p/egnor/
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Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker B:Hello and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.
Speaker B:This is a weekly interview show where I sit down and talk with authors, thought leaders, and influencers who help us understand our changing world.
Speaker B:New episodes release every week.
Speaker B:My guest this week is Dr. Michael Egnor.
Speaker B:Dr. Michael Egner is the professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics and neurosurgery residency director at Renaissance School of Medicine in Stony Brook, New York.
Speaker B:He attended medical school at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed residency training in neurosurgery at the University of Miami.
Speaker B: Stony brook University since: Speaker B:He is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute center for Natural and Artificial and is co author, with Denise o', Leary, of the new book, the Immortal A Neurosurgeon's Case for the Existence of the Soul, published by worthy books.
Speaker B:Dr. Egnor, thanks so much for joining me on the Will Spencer Podcast.
Speaker A:Thank you, Will.
Speaker A:It's a privilege to be here.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker B:So I have your book here, the Immortal Mind, and I have to say I greatly enjoyed this book.
Speaker B:I found it to be a moving overview of a very important subject, a personal story as well, and also very informative and accessible.
Speaker B:You and Ms. O' Leary did a wonderful job with this.
Speaker A:Oh, thank you.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker B:So from the beginning, let's just start.
Speaker B:What inspired the book?
Speaker B:What inspired you to start putting it together?
Speaker A:Well, I had started out my life as an atheist, and I grew up in a family that didn't particularly value religion.
Speaker A:And I was never an angry atheist.
Speaker A:I always kind of I thought Christians were really nice people and that Christianity was a lovely idea, thought it was a myth.
Speaker A:I thought it just wasn't true.
Speaker A:And I fell in love with science.
Speaker A:I wanted to understand the world.
Speaker A:And so I majored in biochemistry in college.
Speaker A:And then in medical school, I fell in love with neuroscience and wanted to be a neurosurgeon.
Speaker A:So I studied all the textbooks and learned as much as I could.
Speaker A:And when I actually got to practicing neurosurgery, I found out that there were the relationship between the brain and the mind was different from what had been in my textbooks, which had been sort of materialistic persp.
Speaker A:And I also went through a religious conversion during that time.
Speaker A:And I really came to see the brain, the mind, and the human soul in a very different way.
Speaker A:And what really struck me was that the neuroscience behind the relationship between the brain and the mind pointed to a very different understanding of the soul than I had had when I was a Materialist.
Speaker B:So you've conducted thousands of neurosurgery oper many.
Speaker B:Is it 7,000, something like that?
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, about 7,000.
Speaker A:Which is.
Speaker A:Which is sort of an average number for.
Speaker A:I mean, I've been doing this for about 40, 45 years, depending on how you define it.
Speaker A:So it's about an average number for a surgeon who has worked that many years.
Speaker B:What's a high number just for a range?
Speaker A:That's a good question.
Speaker A:I would imagine pushing 10,000 would be pretty.
Speaker A:Pretty high, but.
Speaker A:So 7,000 is a pretty average number, I think.
Speaker B:So the audience knows this is something that you know quite a lot about, not just, you know, from textbooks, not just from theory, but from actual.
Speaker B:In the field, surgery.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And that's a large part of what motivated me to work with Denise o' Leary on this book was that I really felt that what I was learning from my own practice, from my own experiences with patients, didn't fit the materialist paradigm.
Speaker A:And I went and looked at the neuroscience at a lot of the great research experiments that have been done over the past century, and I saw that other people were really getting the same results that I was.
Speaker A:They were seeing the same things, although they weren't always so willing to talk about them that way.
Speaker B:What were some of the things that you were seeing?
Speaker A:Well, a good example is when you study neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, you learn about all the different connections and pathways inside the brain and how critical the cortex of the brain is to consciousness and things like that.
Speaker A:But I began seeing patients who really had deficiencies in the way their brains were structured.
Speaker A:But they were okay.
Speaker A:They were perfectly conscious.
Speaker A:Many of them were perfectly normal.
Speaker A:One example, there's a little girl who was born with about two thirds of her brain missing and the rest of her head was filled with spinal fluid.
Speaker A:And I, yeah, I counseled her family that, well, I couldn't be sure.
Speaker A:I mean, I didn't think she'd do very well.
Speaker A:I thought she would be very developmentally delayed.
Speaker A:And as she grew up, she grew up perfectly normally.
Speaker A:She's now a young lady in her 20s, and she's bright and perfectly normal.
Speaker A:Person can converse just like you and I can.
Speaker A:And she's missing most of her brain.
Speaker A:I have other patients who have major problems.
Speaker A:I have a young lady who is also missing important parts of her brain, brain from birth, as a birth defect, who was a gifted student in school and now has a master's degree in English literature and is a published musician.
Speaker A:And perfectly normal person.
Speaker A:But I also.
Speaker A:I have some patients who are very handicapped.
Speaker A:For example, I have a little boy who's missing both of his brain hemispheres.
Speaker A:The only thing he has is a brain stem.
Speaker A:And the condition is called hydrancephaly.
Speaker A:It's a rare condition where children have strokes inside the womb and most of their brain is gone.
Speaker A:And he's got rather severe cerebral palsy.
Speaker A:He has a lot of handicaps, but he's fully conscious, totally conscious kid.
Speaker A:And all the textbooks say that consciousness comes from the cortex, the surface of the brain.
Speaker A:But he doesn't have a surface of the brain, and he's still completely conscious.
Speaker A:The point really struck home when a number of years ago, I was doing awake brain surgery.
Speaker A:Awake brain surgery is when we operate on patients while they're awake.
Speaker A:We give them local anesthesia so they don't feel any pain, but we do it when they're awake if we have to map the surface of their brain.
Speaker A:So we go in and use an electrical probe to stimulate gently, the surface of the brain to find out where the critical areas are located.
Speaker A:If we have to remove a tumor or remove an area that's causing seizures, we can be sure that we're not going to damage something really important.
Speaker A:And in this young woman, I was removing part of her left front frontal lobe because it was infiltrated by a tumor, and it was near the area that controlled her speech.
Speaker A:So I had to be able to listen to her talking as I was doing the surgery so I could know that I was protecting her ability to speak.
Speaker A:And we had a conversation as I was removing a major part of her left frontal lobe.
Speaker A:And we were talking about the weather, we were talking about her family, talking about the food in the cafeteria.
Speaker A:And this went on for several hours during the surgery.
Speaker A:And when I was finished the operation, I just thought, my goodness, none of that is in any of the textbooks.
Speaker A:There's no neuroscience textbook that says you can take out most of the left frontal lobe with a person who's talking to you as you're taking it out.
Speaker A:So I began to ask the question, what is the relationship between the brain and the mind?
Speaker A:And I found that a neurosurgeon before me named Wilder Penfield, who lived back in the mid 20th century, had asked that question also.
Speaker A:And his question, he said it in a very elegant, eloquent, eloquent way.
Speaker A:He said, and I paraphrase, the fundamental question in neuroscience is, does the brain explain the mind completely?
Speaker A:Now, everybody knows that the brain, to some extent, explains the mind.
Speaker A:I mean, if you get hit on the head with a baseball bat, your mind isn't going to be quite the same as before.
Speaker A:Or if you drink too much and you get intoxicated, your brain's different and your mind is different.
Speaker A:But is the brain the whole story?
Speaker A:Is there anything else there?
Speaker A:And Penfield, who, just like me, had started out as a materialist, and he was one of the greatest neuroscientists of the 20th century.
Speaker A: After mapping the brains of: Speaker A:And I was finding exactly the same thing.
Speaker A:And there are many other experiments that also support that view.
Speaker B:That was one of the things that I enjoyed most about the book, was the way that you laid out the difference between brain, mind and consciousness and soul.
Speaker B:That there are aspects of us that are controlled by the material aspects of our brain.
Speaker B:But there's something that exists completely independent of the brain that can't be split or separated, but that.
Speaker B:That can't be localized in the brain itself.
Speaker B:Maybe that was what you referred earlier.
Speaker B:You referred to the materialist perspective.
Speaker B:Maybe you can share a little bit about what that means.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker A:That's a very good synopsis of what we write about.
Speaker A:The brain is an organ just like any other organ in the body.
Speaker A:For example, the eye is an organ, and what it does is it helps us see.
Speaker A:So vision is its job.
Speaker A:The ear is the organ of hearing.
Speaker A:The heart is the organ of pumping blood.
Speaker A:So you can reasonably ask, well, what is the brain?
Speaker A:The organ of what does the brain do?
Speaker A:And it does really important things.
Speaker A:And you can say it does really five things that are fundamentally important.
Speaker A:The first thing is that it kind of controls the basic functions of our body, like our blood pressure, our heart rate, all of our hormones, things like that.
Speaker A:The second thing the brain does is it controls our movement.
Speaker A:It allows us to move our limbs to do things like that.
Speaker A:Third thing is it controls our.
Speaker A:Our sensations.
Speaker A:So it controls our vision and our hearing and things like that.
Speaker A:It allows us to have memories.
Speaker A:So when we remember our grandmother's face or something, that comes from the brain.
Speaker A:And it allows us to have emotions.
Speaker A:We can feel happy or sad, and you can tell if you can take a medication that changes the way your emotions work.
Speaker A:So the brain is an organ that does those things, and they're very important.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker A:But what I found and what many other neuroscientists have found is that the brain doesn't generate abstract thought like reason and intellect and the ability to think things through logically.
Speaker A:And it doesn't seem to generate the free will either.
Speaker A:The free will seems to come from an immaterial source.
Speaker A:So what I think is the clearest or most, is the truest way to explain the way the brain relates to the mind is that the brain does basic physiological functions.
Speaker A:It does movement, it does sensation, it does memory, and it does emotion.
Speaker A:But intellect and will don't come from the brain, and they're part of the soul.
Speaker A:And we have immaterial souls.
Speaker A:And you can identify the immaterial soul in ordinary neuroscientific research and in ordinary neurosurgical practice.
Speaker B:You can identify the soul in ordinary practice.
Speaker B:Say more about that.
Speaker A:That.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Well, in the same way that I was having this conversation with this lady when she was awake, removing a major part of the left frontal lobe of her brain, and even though I was cutting out a big part of the frontal lobe, it didn't have any effect on our conversation at all.
Speaker A:She was perfectly fine because I wasn't cutting out her soul.
Speaker B:Praise God for that.
Speaker A:Yeah, right, right.
Speaker A:So there's a part of us that isn't made of me.
Speaker A:You might say, you know, we are, in some sense made of meat.
Speaker A:We're animals, we're living creatures, but there's a part of us that isn't meat.
Speaker A:And the materialist mythology, and it really is a mythology, is that we're just robots made of meat.
Speaker A:You know, we just were.
Speaker A:The brain's the central processing unit that makes our body work like robots.
Speaker A:And the reality is that in ordinary neurosurgical practice and in some of the best neuroscience of the past century, the evidence is very clear that we're not robots made of meat, that we have a soul, and that part of that soul has spiritual powers, which are not material powers.
Speaker B:So maybe you can illustrate this.
Speaker B:And by the way, this was one of my favorite things, if not the favorite thing about the book, was the way that you separated mind from soul or the material aspects that root themselves in the brain to this thing called the soul that does exist beyond the brain.
Speaker B:What is that?
Speaker B:How does that work?
Speaker B:How is that a unified, singular thing in a way that can't be divided?
Speaker B:That was kind of the journey that I went on while reading the book was something that seemed kind of nebulous, but I had a sense of.
Speaker B:An intuitive sense of.
Speaker B:Came into sharper focus during the course of your book.
Speaker B:And so that was one of the gifts that I got from reading this.
Speaker A:Well, thank you.
Speaker A:And that actually was a very specific intention of ours, was to.
Speaker A:Was to make the case that there's nothing particularly spooky about this.
Speaker A:This is not magic, it's not a seance, it's not any kind of weird thing.
Speaker A:This is very straightforward logic, very straightforward philosophy, and a very straightforward science.
Speaker A:And one of the things that really struck me about what I was learning was that it fit beautifully the.
Speaker A:The way that Thomas Aquinas, who's a Saint from the 13th century, understood the way the soul worked and actually is very close to the way Aristotle felt that the soul worked.
Speaker A:So this is ancient wisdom that I think we need to bring back, because the materialist view that again, everything comes from the brain and that we are just meat robots doesn't fit the science, it doesn't fit reality, and it doesn't even make any sense.
Speaker B:So were these observations that you had been carrying for a long time about the way the brain and the mind and consciousness work, and then when you encountered Aristotle and Aquinas, suddenly they offered explanations like, oh, these fit with my experience, or had you encountered them first and they help you re.
Speaker B:Understand what you'd seen?
Speaker A:I encountered.
Speaker A:Well, I encountered the science first and the experience first, and I found all these strange things.
Speaker A:Again, this not notion that there were two different aspects to the mind.
Speaker A:One aspect of the mind, like our ability to see and to hear and so on, was clearly linked very closely to the brain.
Speaker A:I mean, that's a major part of brain surgery is protecting those things.
Speaker A:But then the other aspect of the mind, the capacity for abstract thought, for having concepts, for having reason for free will, they weren't linked so closely to the brain.
Speaker A:And so I. I began reading philosophy of mind.
Speaker A:I was saying, well, I wonder if anyone else has seen this before.
Speaker A:And I realized that, well, Aristotle saw it back 2,300 years ago, and St. Thomas Aquinas saw it back about 800 years ago.
Speaker A:I'm not the first person to see this.
Speaker A:And what I really wanted to convey in the book is that these classical ways of understanding the soul, which is really largely the Christian way of understanding the soul, is the truth that there's a.
Speaker A:It's the scientific truth as well as the theological truth.
Speaker B:How did you feel when you saw that?
Speaker B:Was it a relief?
Speaker B:Was it like, what was?
Speaker B:I imagine there was some emotional experience to have observed all these things scientifically and then to go back thousands of years and find like, oh, yeah, no, we knew this stuff once upon a time.
Speaker A:Well, I felt two things.
Speaker A:One was, you know, kind of some fascination certainly made me take St. Thomas Aquinas a lot more seriously.
Speaker A:And I figured, well, if he got this right, he probably got a lot of stu right.
Speaker A:So I actually read.
Speaker A:I read as much as I could about God and about faith and about all sorts of things from Thomas Aquinas because he certainly nailed it on this.
Speaker A:The other thing I felt honestly was some.
Speaker A:Well, I wouldn't call it anger, but some distaste for the materialist way of looking at things, because I think it's a very, very shallow mistake that materialists make.
Speaker A:And I also felt a little bit of anger because it leads people, especially young people, to believe things about themselves and about humanity that simply aren't true.
Speaker A:That is that if you're told by the scientific community, which is a very impressive, imposing community, if you're told by the scientific community that, well, everything in your mind comes from your brain, you don't really have a soul.
Speaker A:Many scientists now claim that you don't have free will, which is total nonsense.
Speaker A:Of course we have free will.
Speaker A:And when all these very destructive messages are sent out by highly credentialed people, and when you look behind it, it's nonsense.
Speaker A:It's scientific nonsense, it's philosophical nonsense, and it's basically a lie.
Speaker B:And especially the way that science is set up as sort of the high priesthood of the modern e. Scientists have been suddenly imbued with the answers to everything probably since going back to Darwin.
Speaker B:And so you're set up to believe.
Speaker B:Many people are set up to believe that the soul doesn't exist.
Speaker B:We're just, you know, meat puppets, as you said.
Speaker B:And people believe that about themselves.
Speaker B:What are the consequences of that versus what would the consequences be if they believe that they did have an immortal soul or knew that they were something beyond a piece of meat.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:And it's liberating in a lot of ways to understand that we are spiritual creatures.
Speaker A:We are a composite of physical creatures, but also spiritual creatures.
Speaker A:And it's all blended in us.
Speaker A:And one of the beautiful things that Thomas Aquinas pointed out was that in a sense, we are all of creation put together.
Speaker A:That is, we're made of mineral, we're made of animal, we're made of spirit.
Speaker A:We have everything together in us.
Speaker A:And we are created in God's image in the sense that we are spiritual creatures and we have spirits that are very tiny reflections of God's infinite spirit.
Speaker A:And it's not all that difficult to see, when you look at the neuroscience and when you look at the philosophy that makes sense of it, the whole thing makes pretty good sense, actually.
Speaker B:So one of the ways that you illustrate this throughout the book is through many anonymized case reports of individuals that you work with.
Speaker B:And I think you spent a good bit of time talking about the corpus callosum.
Speaker B:And so maybe we can illustrate some of the things that you're talking about by discussing when the corpus collo.
Speaker B:What is the corpus callosum?
Speaker B:What happens when it gets severed?
Speaker B:What doesn't happen when it gets severed in patients?
Speaker A:Yeah, that's a fascinating aspect to it.
Speaker A:And I found all the stuff that we talk about in the book fascinating.
Speaker A:The corpus callosum issue, which is with split brain surgery, I found to be just.
Speaker A:It still gives me chills because it's.
Speaker A:Well, I'll explain.
Speaker A: Back in the: Speaker A:There was an operation that could be done that could free them from having these seizures.
Speaker A:And the operation is called a corpus callosotomy.
Speaker A:And what that means is that we go in and there's a huge bundle of fibers about the size of the palm of your hand that connect the two hemispheres of the brain, and we cut those fibers.
Speaker A:So the hemispheres are basically disconnected.
Speaker A:There are a few tiny connections that still remain that we can't cut.
Speaker A: .: Speaker A:When you cut the corpus callosum and the things that we can cut.
Speaker A:And when you do that, it stops the seizures.
Speaker A:The seizures don't happen anymore.
Speaker A:What's remarkable is that when you meet people who've had this operation, and I've met many of them and I've done the surgery, they're perfectly normal.
Speaker A:I mean, their hemispheres are cut apart, but they're fine.
Speaker A:They feel fine.
Speaker A:They don't feel like two people.
Speaker A:They feel like one person.
Speaker A:They feel like they always felt, except they don't have seizures anymore.
Speaker A: is has been noticed since the: Speaker A:And there was a neuroscientist named Roger Sperry back in the 50s and 60s who realized that this was an amazing opportunity to study what the hemispheres of the brain do.
Speaker A:Because when they're separated, you can study them individually.
Speaker A:And by putting objects in a person's visual field, you can send information to one hemisphere, but not to the other hemisphere if they've been split apart.
Speaker A:So, for example, if I put something in my right visual field that sends information to my left hemisphere and vice versa.
Speaker A:So you can basically talk to sort of, or inform each hemisphere separately and study how the hemispheres work separately.
Speaker A:So Sperry did this research and he won the Nobel Prize in medicine for it because it was fascinating research.
Speaker A:But I think, and even Sperry himself commented that one of the most fascinating things is not that there is a separation and there is a perceptual separation.
Speaker A:Simple example.
Speaker A:The left hemisphere usually is the hemisphere that controls speech in most people.
Speaker A:So if you show a picture of an object to the right hemisphere in a split brain patient, then that information about what's in that picture gets to the right hemisphere, but the right hemisphere is not connected to the left hemisphere.
Speaker A:So the person knows what the object is, but he can't say what the object is because he can't speak.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:However, if you like, the classic example is an apple.
Speaker A:If you show a picture of an apple that goes to the right hemisphere in a split brain patient, the right hemisphere sees the apple or the person sees the apple using his right hemisphere.
Speaker A:But the right hemisphere doesn't have the power of causing speech.
Speaker A:Only the left hemisphere can do that.
Speaker A:So if you ask the person, what are you seeing?
Speaker A:The person says, I don't know.
Speaker A:But if you ask the person, so they can't say the word meaning.
Speaker B:Go ahead, please.
Speaker A:That they see it, but they can't name it.
Speaker A:That they see it, but they can't say, that's an apple.
Speaker B:However, they recognize it on some level, though they recognize.
Speaker A:Oh, yes, yes.
Speaker B:They can't conjure the word.
Speaker B:Okay, got it.
Speaker A:Precisely.
Speaker A:But if you put a basket of fruit in front of them, they'll hold up an apple and say, this is what I'm saying.
Speaker A:Seeing.
Speaker B:Got it.
Speaker A:But they can't say the word.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:So Sperry found things like that very, very, very interesting stuff.
Speaker A:But he found, and subsequent researchers have found, a fascinating phenomenon in which there are many things in the mind that are not split when you split the hemispheres.
Speaker A:So the really fascinating thing is that some things are split and some things are not split.
Speaker A:Split, even though the whole brain is split.
Speaker A:And as an example of the fascinating work and just the brilliance of this research, there is a researcher named Alice Cronin at Massachusetts at mit who has done work with split brain patients.
Speaker A:And the work she's done is that this is not about speech.
Speaker A:This is About.
Speaker A:About matching pictures.
Speaker A:She'll put one picture that will project to one hemisphere and simultaneously three pictures that project to the other hemisphere.
Speaker A:And she will ask the person, tell me, for the one picture, which of the three pictures conceptually matches the first one?
Speaker A:An example would be, imagine that.
Speaker A:And this is an example that she actually used is to one hemisphere, she gives a picture of an artist's palette, like a painter's palette, to the other hemisphere, she shows three pictures.
Speaker A:One is of a violin, the other is of a toilet plunger, and the third is of an electric light bulb.
Speaker A:And she said, for the one picture, tell me which one of the three pictures conceptually matches that.
Speaker A:And people with split brain stuff will match the picture of the palette, the artist's palette, to the vinyl violin, because they're both kinds of art.
Speaker A:However, keep in mind that no part of the patient's brain has seen both sets of pictures.
Speaker A:One hemisphere sees the palate, the other hemisphere sees the violin.
Speaker A:There's no part of the patient's brain that sees both the palate and the violin because the hemispheres are split, but the person can match them easily.
Speaker A:So what's doing the matching?
Speaker A:And she's done hundreds of these different kinds of matches and what she's found, which other people have found.
Speaker A:Justine Surgent, a researcher at McGill.
Speaker A:Jair Pinto, who's a researcher in the Netherlands.
Speaker A:I found the same thing that people with split brains have split perceptions in many ways.
Speaker A:Meaning, again, you show a picture to the hemisphere that doesn't do speech, they can't speak that thing, and so on, but they can match pictures, concepts easily across, even if no part of their brain has seen both pictures.
Speaker A:So what that implies is that there's a part of the mind that's not in the brain.
Speaker A:And that's very much what I find surgically.
Speaker A:That's what Dr. Penfield found.
Speaker A:And if you want to, we can talk about Penfield's work, which was fascinating also, please.
Speaker A: e, he was the surgeon who did: Speaker A:And he found, when he was mapping the brain, that he could stimulate four different things in various patients.
Speaker A:He could stimulate movement, he could make them move their limbs.
Speaker A:He could stimulate sensations like vision or things like that.
Speaker A:He could stimulate memories and he could stimulate emotions, but he found that he could never stimulate the formation of concepts.
Speaker A:He could never stimulate reason.
Speaker A:He could never stimulate mathematics or logic.
Speaker A:He said that's strange because most of what we do in our everyday life involves concepts, but you can't get it out of the brain.
Speaker A:The brain won't produce them.
Speaker A:When you stimulate it, it'll produce movement, it'll produce sensations, memories, emotions, just fine.
Speaker A:Why is there a whole class of thoughts, thoughts that can't be elicited from the brain?
Speaker A:And he said, well, the obvious answer, the simple, clear answer, is those thoughts don't come from the brain.
Speaker A:And now there's no question, no one doubts that the brain is permissive of those thoughts.
Speaker A:Meaning if you get hit on the head, you're not going to be able to do a lot of reasoning for a while.
Speaker A:But what Penfield was arguing is that the capacity for reason doesn't come from the brain.
Speaker A:The brain is necessary for the normal exercises of it, but it's not the origin of it.
Speaker A:It's not sufficient for it.
Speaker A:And if you think about it, those things that Penfield couldn't get out of the brain were abstract thought, the formation of concepts, et cetera, are the same things that the split brain research shows is not in the brain.
Speaker A:That is, this whole notion of thinking abstractly, of thinking conceptually, doesn't seem to come from the brain, at least not in the same way that our movement and our sensations and memories and emotions come from.
Speaker A:From the brain.
Speaker B:Yeah, I just.
Speaker A:Please, go ahead, please.
Speaker A:Penfield also found that he couldn't stimulate free will.
Speaker A:That is that he.
Speaker A:When he would stimulate the brain, he could never make a person think that what the person would do in response to the stimulation, like raise their arm, was he could never make them think that they had chosen it.
Speaker A:That is that they always knew, independently of what he did to their brain, whether they chose it or not.
Speaker A:Or not.
Speaker A:Which implies that free will isn't from the brain.
Speaker A:There's no question the brain can influence our decisions.
Speaker A:You know, if you're really hungry and that's a chemical thing that goes on in your body and your brain makes you want to eat, but the final decision as to what you eat is your free will.
Speaker A:It's not the brain itself.
Speaker B:I found that to be so interesting that of course, through getting hit on the head, you can negatively impact these things, but you can't generate them from nothing.
Speaker B:You can't stimulate the brain and generate someone to have the perception that their will is causing them to do something that was a big light bulb moment like, whoa.
Speaker B:And then also that you can literally cut the brain in half, you know, through the corpus callosum, and you don't end up with Two people, you don't end up with two separate wills, two separate perceptions.
Speaker B:But the materialist aspect would say, when you cut the brain in half, if consciousness is in the brain, brain, you should get two separate sets of memories, two separate sets of wills and intentions.
Speaker B:And that's not what happens.
Speaker B:And I was like a big light bulb went off when I read that.
Speaker A:And even before I thought really deeply about this stuff, 30, 40 years ago, when we would do split brain surgery, I was just amazed, I mean, after the surgery, that these people are just fine.
Speaker A:And again, if you do very detailed, detailed research, you can find perceptual splits, but it's very fine.
Speaker A:The patient doesn't notice it.
Speaker A:You don't notice it in everyday life.
Speaker A:If we had a person who had had that surgery on the podcast with us now, you couldn't tell the difference.
Speaker A:They're perfectly normal people.
Speaker A:And sometimes in science, the most important thing is to explain negative results.
Speaker A:That is, in some sense, if you think of it as an experiment, you cut it in half and certain things don't change.
Speaker A:And that's remarkable.
Speaker A:It's almost as if you took a chainsaw and cut your computer right down the center into two pieces, and it still works just fine, like what's going on.
Speaker A:And the materialist paradigm for this can't explain it.
Speaker A:There's nothing the materialists offer that is a really satisfactory explanation for how this happens.
Speaker A:I should say materialists have noticed that this is a problem.
Speaker A:And the typical explanation that they offer for it is what's called subcortical pathways.
Speaker A:And subcortical pathways are tiny pathways that do allow a little bit of communication between the hemispheres, even after a corpus callosotomy.
Speaker A:But the amount of communication that that offers is minuscule.
Speaker A:For example, in Alice Cronin's experiments at mit, those patients had what's technically called a commissurotomy, which is an especially complete cutting of the connections.
Speaker A:The corpus callosum has about 2 million axons in it.
Speaker A:So those 2 million axons were cut, the only remaining axons numbered.
Speaker A:People have estimated about 1,500 axons that allow other pathways.
Speaker A:And that's again, a tiny fraction of 1% of the pathways.
Speaker A:But people can just instantaneously make these conceptual comparisons.
Speaker A:So there's obviously something going on aside from these little tiny pathways.
Speaker A:People have even estimated how much information content can get across these other pathways.
Speaker A:And the recent estimates that I've read is about 1 bit per second, which, if you think about it, is practically nothing.
Speaker A:It's not so Much.
Speaker A:It's not much.
Speaker A:So the materialist explanation is, in my view, just junk science, makes no sense at all.
Speaker A:And when you think about those experiments, you're just looking at the soul.
Speaker A:The soul is right there.
Speaker A:It's obvious.
Speaker A:Anybody with any common sense can see it that, yeah, there's a part of you that's not split.
Speaker A:That part of you that's not split is the immaterial part of your soul.
Speaker B:And we also talked about your young patient that was missing two thirds of her brain, that it was just spinal fluid inside her skull.
Speaker B:Skull.
Speaker B:And yet she had a fully functioning intact consciousness, memories, emotions, and no apparent function.
Speaker B:So wouldn't it also stand to reason, if the materialist perspective were true, that such a physically diminished brain would result in not just a physically diminished person in terms of their cognitive abilities, but like something of a smaller soul?
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker B:That doesn't seem to be the case.
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:And even to the point of this condition called hydroencephaly, where they don't even have brain hemispheres, there is no brain.
Speaker A:From here up is gone.
Speaker A:And these people do have handicaps.
Speaker A:There's no question about it.
Speaker B:Of course, of course.
Speaker A:But they're fully conscious.
Speaker A:Fully conscious.
Speaker A:And when I raise these issues with colleagues and people who are neuroscientists, the people who stick to the materialist explanations, they're stuck with all this hand waving like, well, we can't explain it now, but give us some time, we'll figure it out.
Speaker A:It's bound to be a connection somewhere.
Speaker A:Some people call that promissory materialism, where you kind of promise it.
Speaker A:And I always tell them, well, maybe you're right.
Speaker A:So here's my phone number.
Speaker A:And call me when you get the evidence.
Speaker A:But you don't have any evidence right now.
Speaker B:I promise, I promise we'll figure it out.
Speaker A:Give me a call.
Speaker A:Give me a call.
Speaker A:But until you have the evidence and they don't have the evidence to explain how this works materialistically, in my view, the only reason, reasonable, plausible, scientific explanation for the results of experiments like this is that we have spiritual souls.
Speaker A:And it shows up in the research.
Speaker B:It also shows up.
Speaker B:You talk a lot about work with conjoined twins.
Speaker B:So we've talked about all different kind of physical conditions.
Speaker B:And here's another one that you use to illustrate the unity of soul even in, even the most extreme circumstances.
Speaker A:Yes, a fascinating, fascinating thing.
Speaker A:Of course, we all know about that.
Speaker A:Some people can be joined as.
Speaker A:Or born joined as twins.
Speaker A:And there are rare instances where the twins are joined at the head.
Speaker A:And when they're joined at the head, sometimes they share brain tissue.
Speaker A:And the two of the most remarkable ones are Tatiana and Krista Hogan, two young ladies in British Columbia who are joined at the head.
Speaker A:And they share what's called a thalamic bridge, which is a large part of brain tissue that connects the deepest parts of their brains.
Speaker A:So they basically share brains in some sense.
Speaker A:And they can do remarkable things.
Speaker A:These girls can see through each other's eyes.
Speaker A:They share control of limbs where they can move limbs together.
Speaker A:If their mother touches the hand of one of them, both of them feel it.
Speaker A:So there's a lot of remarkable things.
Speaker A:However, they are completely different people.
Speaker A:That is, they have different personalities, they have different likes and dislikes, they have different opinions about things.
Speaker A:They have fights where they'll disagree with one another.
Speaker A:So they share vision.
Speaker B:Go away.
Speaker B:Leave me alone.
Speaker A:Yeah, right, exactly, exactly.
Speaker A:So they share vision, they share cessation, but they don't share opinions, they don't share reason.
Speaker A:They, they, they can't.
Speaker A:For, for example, if one kid studies, studies the times tables, both kids don't know the times tables, they both got to study the times tables.
Speaker A:So that, well, at least that's, that's an extrapolation.
Speaker A:That is, they, they don't share a. Abstract concepts, they don't share the.
Speaker A:And if you think about it, that goes along very much with what Penfield found when he stimulated the brain with what we find in split brain patients.
Speaker A:That there's a part of, part of our being, of our soul that is material and that is related to the brain, but there's also a part that's not related to the brain.
Speaker A:And these girls show that the part that's related to the brain is their vision, their sensation, things like that, just what Penfield found.
Speaker A:But their opinions, their concepts, their abstract thoughts are their own.
Speaker A:They don't cross.
Speaker A:So the evidence is all around us if we look for it and if we recognize what it means.
Speaker B:What an astounding thought.
Speaker B:The idea that you can share, you can see through someone else's eyes, you can feel the things that they're touching with their hands.
Speaker B:But when someone learns a fact, fact, you don't also learn it.
Speaker B:Like that's just, that's just, that's mind, I mean literally mind blowing stuff.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's fascinating stuff and it's.
Speaker A:But it's exactly what St. Thomas Aquinas would have said in the 13th century.
Speaker A:You know, I said, well, what would he have said first?
Speaker A:I would have said it in Latin.
Speaker A:So I wouldn't have understood it.
Speaker B:Minor difference.
Speaker A:But the translation would be that if, if people's brains were connected and they could share that, what they would share would be the ability to move things, the ability to have sensations like vision, memories.
Speaker A:And these girls do share memories to some extent, and emotions.
Speaker A:But he'd say, but they wouldn't share the spiritual part of themselves.
Speaker A:They wouldn't share their ability to reason, their ability to have concepts, their free will.
Speaker A:That would not be shared.
Speaker A:Because that's not the way the soul works.
Speaker A:The soul basically has aspects that can be cut with a knife or that can be shared and aspects that cannot be cut with a knife and cannot be shared.
Speaker B:And that can't be identified to any specific location in the brain.
Speaker B:Maybe that's what you mean by can't be cut with a knife.
Speaker B:We don't know where that lives.
Speaker B:If there's nothing to me beyond what's in the egg up here, we should be able to find where free will lives.
Speaker B:We should be able to find where abstract concepts live.
Speaker B:And we should not just be able to impact them negatively as in to remove it.
Speaker B:We should be able to put something in.
Speaker B:I should be able to stimulate your free will to do something.
Speaker B:I should be able to give you an abstract concept without you having to learn it.
Speaker B:But we can't do that.
Speaker B:We can remove physical parts of the brain and diminish your capacity, but we can't add anything to your capacity.
Speaker B:Capacity.
Speaker A:Yes, yes.
Speaker A:And the brain is organized in such a way that the areas of the brain that control movement and sensation and memory and emotion are very precisely placed in the brain.
Speaker A:I mean, literally within submillimeter precision.
Speaker A:For example, movement, I mean, moving your finger can be precisely placed in the brain on a spot, on the cortex.
Speaker A:But you can't precisely place your ability to do some training, subtraction or your ability to think logically.
Speaker A:There's no subtraction area in the brain.
Speaker A:So there's a tremendous difference in our capacity for abstract thought, for reason on the one hand, and our capacity for material things like movement and sensation on the other hand.
Speaker A:And the Aristotelian or the Thomistic understanding of the soul predicts the.
Speaker A:Predicted that.
Speaker A:They predicted that that's what we'd find and that's what we do find.
Speaker B:Incredible firsthand from a neurosurgeon.
Speaker A:Yes, yes.
Speaker B:And you also spent a bit of time talking about near death experiences.
Speaker B:And this is something that I know many people are fascinated by.
Speaker B:I've never personally had an interest in it.
Speaker B:Nothing wrong with it.
Speaker B:But to read the book and to read some of the experiences that people have had in, in a post death experience in many ways really opened my eyes to the breadth of that field.
Speaker B:And now I can understand why people are so fascinated by it.
Speaker B:So maybe you can talk a little bit about those to show like this goes way further.
Speaker A:Yeah, near death experiences are quite fascinating.
Speaker A:I understand where you're coming from when you say it, because weren't too into it.
Speaker A:I actually wasn't either.
Speaker A:It just struck me as kind of mystical stuff that's not very scientific.
Speaker A:But actually there is science behind it.
Speaker A:It's quite remarkable.
Speaker A:Probably the most fascinating near death experience, at least in modern times, was of a woman named Pam Reynolds.
Speaker A:And she was a 31 year old woman who had an aneurysm at the base of her brain.
Speaker A:An aneurysm is a ballooning out of a blood vessel and it was about to burst.
Speaker A:She was getting headaches, she was having neurological problems.
Speaker A:And the aneurysm was basically by ordinary methods at the time, considered inoperable.
Speaker A:There's nothing that could be done for it.
Speaker A:And she was going to die from it.
Speaker A:It was going to burst.
Speaker A:The only way that it could be fixed was to open up the main blood vessel at the base of her brain and rebuild the blood vessel.
Speaker A:But you can't do that while the blood's flowing.
Speaker A:You can't.
Speaker A:I mean, that's not possible.
Speaker A:There's a neurosurgeon in Phoenix named Robert Spetzler who is the world's expert on this kind of surger.
Speaker A:And he actually developed a technique for doing it.
Speaker A: And he operated on her in: Speaker A:And what he did was called a standstill procedure.
Speaker A:And it's a procedure where he would take her to the operating room, place her under general anesthesia, monitor her brainwaves, did all the fancy stuff.
Speaker A:He would cool her body down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit from 98.6.
Speaker A:And that would be cold.
Speaker A:Oh yeah.
Speaker A:And what it would do is slow down the metabolism in her body so that that any damage to her brain would be minimized because there was minimal energy requirements at that temperature.
Speaker A:Then what he would do is he put her on a heart lung machine and he stopped her heart so there was no longer any blood flowing.
Speaker A:And he raised the head of the operating table to drain blood out of her brain so he could see what he was doing inside the artery because there wasn't any blood in the artery.
Speaker A:And then he fixed The.
Speaker A:The artery.
Speaker A:It took him about 30 minutes.
Speaker A:He fixed the artery, and then he started her heart again and then warmed her back up again and brought her back to life, basically.
Speaker A:But she was as dead as it gets, meaning she was.
Speaker A:You know, her heart was stopped.
Speaker A:They monitor her brain waves.
Speaker A:Her brain waves were completely gone.
Speaker A:Everything was gone.
Speaker A:And so after the surgery, he.
Speaker A:He was seeing her and.
Speaker A:And asking her how she was feeling and how she was doing.
Speaker A:And she said, well, I. I feel.
Speaker A:I feel good.
Speaker A:And I watched the whole operation.
Speaker A:Operation.
Speaker A:And he said, you did what?
Speaker A:What?
Speaker A:And so she said, yeah, that when.
Speaker A:As soon as my heart stopped, I heard.
Speaker A:And she said it sounded like a natural d. She was a musician, so she.
Speaker A:She knew about musical notes, and it was like a humming sound.
Speaker A:And then she said she felt like she popped out of.
Speaker A:Out of her body and then floated up to the ceiling and then floated over his shoulder and watched him operate on her.
Speaker A:And so he.
Speaker A:It was a little skeptical, and.
Speaker A:But then she started des in detail his surgical instruments.
Speaker A:Something that a person who wasn't a neurosurgeon wouldn't know anything about.
Speaker A:And she then described the conversations he had in the room by quoting him what he said during the time that she was brain dead.
Speaker A:Then she described what the other doctors said and did when she was brain dead.
Speaker A:And she told their names.
Speaker A:I think there were 18 different doctors who were in and out of the room.
Speaker A:And she was describing grabbing them all.
Speaker A:And she said that her vision was beautifully clear.
Speaker A:She could see.
Speaker A:It was a vision.
Speaker A:It was more than you could ever see in ordinary life.
Speaker A:And then she said she saw a tunnel, and she felt that she was being pulled down the tunnel, but she wanted to go down the tunnel.
Speaker A:It was like a beautiful feeling.
Speaker A:And there was a little light at the end of the tunnel, as they say.
Speaker A:And she reached the end of the tunnel, and she was in this beautiful world, and she saw, I think, her grandparents who had passed away.
Speaker A:And she had conversations with people there, and she wanted.
Speaker A:Wanted to stay there.
Speaker A:But she was told that she had children to raise.
Speaker A:She had three kids, and she had to go back into.
Speaker A:Into her body, and it wasn't her time yet.
Speaker A:So she went back down the tunnel.
Speaker A:And she said that when she went back into her body, it was like diving into a pool of ice water, which it actually was because her body temperature was 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
Speaker A:And the remarkable thing about this experience was that, again, she was as dead as it gets, meaning that she didn't have any blood in her brain, her heart was gone and her brain was completely monitored, meaning they had electrodes being sure that her brain had no function when this was happening.
Speaker A:So it was like, it's almost like a scientific experiment, although it wasn't designed that way.
Speaker A:So that kind of experience many people have had.
Speaker A:About 9 million people in this country, at least 9 million people have had some kind of.
Speaker A:Have had some kind of near death or out of body experience.
Speaker A:It's been studied.
Speaker A:And so people have these experiences fairly commonly.
Speaker A:And I've debated this with materialists who try to say, well, it's just hallucinations, it's having a seizure, it's having.
Speaker A:Who knows?
Speaker A:But anyone who denies the reality of these experiences has to explain four characteristics of the experiences that many people have that are difficult to explain except that we have a soul that leaves the body.
Speaker A:The first characteristic is that when people have these experiences, as Pam Reynolds had, everything is beautifully clear.
Speaker A:That is that your vision is better than ever.
Speaker A:The colors are brilliant and beautiful.
Speaker A:You can think in very deep ways and very organized ways.
Speaker A:And if this is all just a hallucination or from lack of oxygen, your mind gets goofy.
Speaker A:You can't explain how you can see so clearly and have such clear thoughts.
Speaker A:The second characteristic, which is very important is that about 20% of people who have near death experiences have accurate out of body experiences.
Speaker A:That is they go out of the body and they see things while their brain is dead that are accurate.
Speaker A:They can see name tags on people in the room.
Speaker A:If they're having a cardiac arrest, they can read the dialogue on machines that are in the room.
Speaker A:They have things that are proven.
Speaker A:You can actually check and see that they're telling the truth that they couldn't have seen in a regular living body.
Speaker A:There had to be some other way.
Speaker A:The third characteristic, which absolutely fascinates me, I think, and to me this is very powerful evidence, is that when you go down the tunnel, you see all the dead people at the other end and you talk with them.
Speaker A:There has never been a report that I'm aware of in the medical literature and there have been thousands of people of reports.
Speaker A:There's never been a report of a living person being seen at the other end of the tunnel.
Speaker A:Everybody you see is somebody who's dead, which is kind of interesting if it's just wishful thinking.
Speaker A:If the tunnel is just, well, gee, you know, I was going through this near death experience and I kind of wanted to be comforted by my mom who's still alive, or by my spouse who's still alive, you'd see a living person there.
Speaker A:But you never see living people, only dead people, even if you don't know they're dead.
Speaker A:There have been several instances where people have been involved in car accidents where there are many people in the car and patients are taken to different hospitals.
Speaker A:Sometimes ambulances will split the patients up because one hospital can't take this whole bunch of new patients.
Speaker A:And a person will have a near death experience in one hospital and meet a person in the car who died at a knock another hospital, but not meet the people who didn't die.
Speaker A:What the most famous example of this was.
Speaker A:Katherine Kubler Ross, who's a psychiatrist who has written extensively on death and dying, reported the story of a little girl who had a near death experience after a car accident.
Speaker A:Her family was in a car accident, was hit by a one way driver who caused a terrible accident.
Speaker A:She was taken to a hospital.
Speaker A:She had a near death experience herself and members of her family were taken to other hospitals.
Speaker A:She described her near death experience to Dr. Kubler Ross as I saw my brother and I think my brother and my mother at the other end of the tunnel.
Speaker A:And Ross found out that her brother and mother had died at another hospital.
Speaker A:But her father didn't die and she didn't see her father at the other end of the tunnel because he wasn't dead.
Speaker A:So there's another famous example of a little boy named Eddie who he was nine years old, he had a ruptured appendix and had a near death experience, nearly died from it.
Speaker A:And when he came around he told his family that he had seen a tunnel, that an angel took him down the tunnel.
Speaker A:And he met his sister at the other end of the tunnel, his 19 year old sister who was in college.
Speaker A:And his father said but your sister's not dead.
Speaker A:And then he got a call from the college that she had been killed in a car accident the previous day and they hadn't been able to reach the family.
Speaker A:So the boy knew she was dead, but the family didn't know she was dead.
Speaker A:So how do you explain that?
Speaker A:Materialistically there's no way.
Speaker A:And the fourth characteristic of near death experiences that materialists can't really account for is that these experiences are transformative.
Speaker A:That is that people who have them, they're really doing different people after this happens, they become much more spiritual.
Speaker A:What people tend to say after a near death experience is that they realize that the things that really matter in life are more interpersonal, more to do with compassion, with ethics, that things that you're proud of the money you make, the accomplishments you have don't really matter as much as how you treat other people, as how you relate to God, as how compassionate you are.
Speaker A:Those are the things that really count in life.
Speaker B:And so that was one of the most striking things about that section of the book, was that people walk away from those experiences with a much stronger sense of moral convictions, that there is a moral component to these natural or supernatural experiences.
Speaker B:That you go through the tunnel and what you experience there convicts you morally and you return with a very changed sense of what matters on earth.
Speaker B:That was that in the context of everything else that we've been talking about, about the unity of will, about the, about the unity of conceptual thinking, you know, the brain not containing the mind or consciousness, that element of that, that, okay, we can even say that there are these near death experiences where something exists beyond what's going on in the physical body.
Speaker B:And when that thing is just allowed some time to free reign, it goes and encounters in some next, in some next realm, moral conviction.
Speaker B:And that, that was, that was.
Speaker B:I can still feel that in my body.
Speaker B:Like how it felt to read that.
Speaker B:Like what a, what a, what a testimony, I guess we'd say.
Speaker A:Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker A:And of course there, there are many, many theological questions that arise from near death experiences because the near death experiences don't always match what we learn from theology.
Speaker A:So, and those are fascinating questions in themselves.
Speaker A:My own personal view on this is that what people are experiencing is not heaven.
Speaker A:That is, you're not there yet, you're on the outskirts.
Speaker A:And also in order to report what you see, of course you report in your body, you come back to life and tell people what happened.
Speaker A:And we tend to filter things through our mortal bodies in ways that what many people say with near death experiences is that what they're telling us about what they experience is the best they can do.
Speaker A:But it's ineffable.
Speaker A:It is that what they experience is something that you can't put in words.
Speaker A:And there's a book called Otherworld Journeys and I'm blocking on the author's name, but it's a wonderful book and I, if I don't try too hard, I'll think of her name.
Speaker A:But it's a wonderful book and Otherworld Journeys is the title.
Speaker A:And it's a book that looks back at out of body experiences that people have had throughout history in various cultures.
Speaker A:And these experiences, which are spiritual experiences, particularly near death experiences, are culturally conditioned to some extent.
Speaker A:That is that people, it's not so much probable that they are different experiences, but people try to report them to other people according to what they're familiar with culturally, so that you see a being of love and light.
Speaker A:And a Christian may interpret that being as Jesus, a Buddhist may interpret it as Buddha, depending on how you interpret it.
Speaker A:So it's a deep, profound experience that's difficult to put it into words.
Speaker B:And the reports we get are from the people who come back.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So maybe you're in some sort of, I don't know, we could call it perhaps a waiting room.
Speaker B:And so.
Speaker A:Yeah, sure, sure.
Speaker A:It's, it's like the green room.
Speaker A:Right, right, right.
Speaker B:Exactly, exactly, exactly.
Speaker B:Well, you, you brought up your personal perspective on this, and maybe now would be a good time to talk a little bit about your own conversion story.
Speaker B:I, I, I listened to you tell it on another show and I was very moved by it.
Speaker B:That was a very brave thing to go into.
Speaker B:And, and how to the book and to where you are today.
Speaker A:Sure.
Speaker A:Well, at around the same time that I was seeing in my professional life that the typical materialist and also atheist way of looking at the human person, the human brain, the human mind and soul, didn't add up that there was more to us than that.
Speaker A:I also had experiences I'm sure many people have had I will call hauntings.
Speaker A:And I would be going about my daily activities with my family, my work, my recreation, whatever, and I'd all of a sudden start to think, like, how did I get here?
Speaker A:What is this all about?
Speaker A:You're in this amazing world.
Speaker A:I don't know where I came from, I don't know where I'm going.
Speaker A:I don't know why I'm here.
Speaker A:And we take so much for granted.
Speaker A:But goodness gracious, this is a fascinating place.
Speaker A:And for the most part, we don't think about how to explain it.
Speaker A:And that would, it would kind of creep me out, you know, I'd say, goodness gracious, it's like, it's like I'm missing the story here.
Speaker A:And then I'd get back to work and go on and do my other distracting chores.
Speaker A:And when my youngest child was born, I have four kids, and my youngest child, my son, we noticed when he was very small that he wasn't making eye contact with us and he wasn't smiling.
Speaker A:And I became concerned that he had a severe kind of autism, which was kind of terrifying, you know, that he wouldn't be able to connect to me.
Speaker A:And my wife had the same concerns.
Speaker A:And so we took him to a Specialist who said he was a few months old at this point.
Speaker A:And the specialist said, you really can't tell when they're this young.
Speaker A:You can't be sure.
Speaker A:So it was really bothering me.
Speaker A:I was terrified of that, of having a child who wouldn't know me.
Speaker A:And so I one night was seeing a consult, a patient at a Catholic hospital.
Speaker A:There was a.
Speaker A:Was near my main hospital.
Speaker A:And after I saw the patient, I was leaving the building and there's a chapel there they kept open 24 hours.
Speaker A:And so I decided to go in the chapel and pray because I had no other choice.
Speaker A:I was just.
Speaker A:So I went in the chapel, knelt down in front of the altar and said, lord, I don't know if you exist.
Speaker A:I have my doubts, but I. I'm pulling out all the stops now.
Speaker A:I need some help on this.
Speaker A:I can't emotionally deal with having my child be someone who doesn't know me, that I can't form a bond with.
Speaker A:And I heard a voice.
Speaker A:Only time in my life I've ever heard a voice.
Speaker A:And the voice was very clear, it was inside my head, but it was not me.
Speaker A:And the voice said, but that's what you're doing to me.
Speaker A:And I collapsed, said, well, all right, I'm very sorry, I didn't mean to do it to you.
Speaker A:I realized that in a way I've been autistic to you and that's painful to the Lord when we're not connecting to him.
Speaker A:And so I promised him I wouldn't do it anymore.
Speaker A:And I asked him to heal my son.
Speaker A:And so I called the church the next day, said, hey, how can I get baptized?
Speaker A:I was never baptized and my family too, and everybody got involved.
Speaker A:And a couple days later, my son's six month birthday and at his little birthday gathering, he started to smile and look at us and made eye contact and was a normal child.
Speaker A:So I believe that it's painful to God when we don't have a relationship with him.
Speaker A:And he gave me the grace of sharing, showing me what that felt like, and then healed my son.
Speaker B:Can you talk about what a powerful story, by the way.
Speaker B:Can you talk about some of the changes that happened in you and in your life?
Speaker B:And may I ask how old you were at the time?
Speaker A:Let's see.
Speaker A:Well, this happened 25 years ago and I'm almost 70 now, so 45.
Speaker B:Yeah, mid-40s.
Speaker B:So you had spent 45 years as an unbeliever, maybe.
Speaker B:Can you talk a little bit about the things that changed for you personally and in Your family in the months, years that followed, sure.
Speaker A:Well, again, I'd come from a perspective that I wasn't an angry atheist.
Speaker A:I thought Christians were really nice people, and I thought Christianity was a beautiful story and Christ was a very admirable man.
Speaker A:But I came to realize through this experience and through just contemplating all this that it's not just a beautiful story, it's the truth.
Speaker A:And the truth, it's even more beautiful as the truth.
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And with my own family, there are some members of my family have become Christians with me, and some members are not yet.
Speaker A:They're in many ways better people than I am, but they still haven't come to the Lord.
Speaker A:I hope and pray that they will, but one of the things it made me very resolute about doing was to try to help other people who were kind of in the same boat.
Speaker A:I was brought up in a secular environment, brought up in an atheist environment where faith in God wasn't really a big part of their lives.
Speaker A:To understand that faith in God is not only good for us in sense of, it's reassuring and so on, because it's not entirely reassuring, that is that knowing that you have to answer to the Big Guy is not, you know, you take things a lot more seriously in a lot of ways, but that it's right.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:I mean, the idea that Christians live in this happy little bubble where, you know, Jesus takes care of everything and we got nothing to worry about.
Speaker A:If you're a Christian, you got a lot to worry about.
Speaker A:You got a lot.
Speaker A:You have to do right by God and you have to do his will.
Speaker A:But I want people to understand that the science, that this logic, reason, philosophy is all on the side of Christianity, that atheism and materialism are.
Speaker A:Are lies.
Speaker A:They're just wrong.
Speaker A:And they're junk science.
Speaker A:They're junk philosophy and junk logic.
Speaker A:And so part of what I've done for the past 25 years has been to devote myself to debating atheists, to writing about this.
Speaker A:I blog a lot for evolution news and views and mind matters news at the Discovery Institute, which is a think tank that tries to advance the theory of intelligent the idea that there is design in nature.
Speaker A:There are many different religious perspectives in the institute.
Speaker A:Some people in the Discovery Institute are not religious.
Speaker A:Some people do not believe in God.
Speaker A:Most people there are Christians, but not all.
Speaker A:There are people who are Jews.
Speaker A:There are people who come from different perspectives.
Speaker A:But everybody there believes, as I do, that there is evidence for intelligent agency, intelligent design in the nation, natural world, for evidence of intelligent Design in life, in biology and physics, in neuroscience, that there's evidence for God's action, I think.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I spoke with Dr. John west last week.
Speaker A:Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Speaker A:John is wonderful.
Speaker B:He is.
Speaker B:So just a quick question.
Speaker B:So your beliefs started shifting, your whole perception of reality started shifting, shifting.
Speaker B:And as you began confronting or encountering your colleagues in the field of neurosurgery, many of whom were materialists, what was that like and what has that been like over the course of the past 25 years?
Speaker A:Well, it's kind of interesting that neurosurgeons aren't particularly materialists.
Speaker A:I mean, there certainly are.
Speaker A:There are some that are for sure.
Speaker A:But I mean, there are many very, very devout Christians and Jews and people who are very serious about and Muslims or people who are very serious about their faith who are neurosurgeons.
Speaker A:I think of neurosurgeons very much, at least in this sense, almost like engineers, in a sense that it's an applied science.
Speaker A:You have to take the scientific ideas and make them work in the real world.
Speaker A:You can't just live in this abstract world of theories.
Speaker A:And because if you get the science wrong in neurosurgery, you kill people.
Speaker A:So you've got to get the science right.
Speaker A:So neurosurgeons are a little less tolerant of crazy theories.
Speaker A:And materialism is quite honestly a crazy theory.
Speaker A:And so there are a lot of neurosurgeons who agree with me.
Speaker A:I mean, I'm not the only neurosurgeon who thinks this.
Speaker A:Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon, wrote a book about his own near death experience.
Speaker A:I'm blocking on the title of it.
Speaker A:I think Heaven is Real, I think actually is the name of the book.
Speaker A:And there are many neurosurgeons who are very devout people.
Speaker A:Ben Carson is a very devout Christian who is a neurosurgeon.
Speaker A:Where you really find most of the materialists and the atheists is in the neurosciences, is in the basic sciences.
Speaker A:And part of that maybe it just attracts people who tend to think along those lines.
Speaker A:Part of it is that if you're a basic scientist and your career depends on getting grants and getting papers published, you're going to have a tough time professionally if you express Christian views, if you express a belief in the soul, materialists can be awfully nasty people.
Speaker A:And you can professionally solve, suffer quite a bit by sort of coming out.
Speaker A:And as someone who believes in the spiritual soul, who believes in God, who believes in Christ, is not good for your career in some of the basic sciences.
Speaker B:It's incredible what a lack of transcendent morality will allow people's consciences to do when they don't believe.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:And what's really funny is that, and I've noticed this repeatedly with materialists and atheists on this issue, is that they will engage debate a little bit, but ultimately they just want to censor you.
Speaker A:That is, they just want to shut you up.
Speaker A:And I have never seen anybody on the intelligent Design or Christian side of things of this debate that we're having now want to censor the other side.
Speaker A:That is that I want the materialists free range.
Speaker A:I want to hear what they have to say.
Speaker A:I want to hear, hear their arguments.
Speaker A:I just want to be able to respond to their arguments.
Speaker A:So the people in the Discovery Institute want intellectual freedom.
Speaker A:They want the people to have the ability to tell the truth as they see it and to discuss these issues in the scientific realm and the philosophical realm openly, without fear of censure and without fear of cancellation.
Speaker B:Yeah, that seems to be the thing.
Speaker B:From the Christian side we can have an open debate, but on, on the materialist side, the Christian perspective cannot be allowed.
Speaker A:Yeah, we welcome debate.
Speaker A:There's nothing I love more than talking about this with people who disagree with me because actually those are very interesting conversations.
Speaker A:The problem that we encounter so much in the Intelligent design discussions and in discussions of the immateriality of the human soul is that our opponents often try to shut us up rather than engage us.
Speaker A:Well, that's not always the case.
Speaker A:There are many materialists and atheists who are willing to talk, and that's to their credit.
Speaker A:But there are many who just try to censor us.
Speaker B:Maybe you can talk a little bit about why materialism is a crazy theory.
Speaker B:I happen to agree with you, but I'd love to hear more about that.
Speaker A:Well, it's a crazy theory in a variety of ways.
Speaker A:One is the, that there are so many things in reality that are obviously not material.
Speaker A:A very good example is we have the capacity to think of infinite numbers.
Speaker A:That is that there is no number that is too high for me to think of it.
Speaker A:For example, if you name a number a quadrillion billion zillion quadrillion, I'll just say quadrillion.
Speaker A:I'll just say that number plus one.
Speaker A:So there's no finite limit.
Speaker A:How can the capacity to think of an infinite number of numbers come from a finite brain?
Speaker A:I mean, they're simply logical problems.
Speaker A:Another very interesting example that has been used classically and it was used classically by philosophers a thousand years ago is the human capacity to think of perf concepts.
Speaker A:For example, if you are thinking about what a triangle is, you think that a triangle is a three sided closed plane figure whose internal angles sum to 180 degrees.
Speaker A:That's the geometrical definition of a triangle.
Speaker A:However, there is no physical triangle anywhere that is exactly, exactly that.
Speaker A:That is that if you draw a triangle on a piece of paper, it's never perfect.
Speaker A:180 degree angles, the lines are never perfect, even on the quantum level.
Speaker A:Because of quantum uncertainty, nothing is ever perfect.
Speaker A:But our ideas can be perfect.
Speaker A:So how do you get perfect ideas out of an imperfect brain?
Speaker A:So there's a lot of logical reasons.
Speaker A:Materialists, for example, obviously believe in the ability of mathematics to describe the world.
Speaker A:But mathematics itself is not material, that is that the whole range of numbers and of all the mathematical operations that go on are not things that have location and substance.
Speaker A:You don't say like well how much does the number 8 weigh?
Speaker A:Or where is the number 8 located?
Speaker A:It's not material.
Speaker A:So the belief that the only thing that exists is material, it's just nonsense, it's stupid.
Speaker A:We all know that's not the case.
Speaker A:The other problem with materialism, and many materialists try to get away with this by fudging on the definition of materialism.
Speaker A:Many materialists identify themselves as physicalists.
Speaker A:And physicalism is the materialist belief that the only thing that's real is things that can be described by the law laws of physics.
Speaker A:So they'll kind of say, okay, so numbers are real because they're part of the laws of physics.
Speaker A:But that's it, no further than that.
Speaker A:And the problem with that is a problem that's been long noted and was pointed out by C.S.
Speaker A:lewis, is that the ability to make an argument, to use reason to make logical points, depends upon the logical laws of logic.
Speaker A:If A, then B, A, therefore B laws of non contradiction, all these logical laws.
Speaker A:However, if the only thing that exists are the laws of physics, and if all of our ability to use logic comes from our brain, and our brain is driven purely by the laws of electromagnetism, by the laws of chemistry, etc.
Speaker A:There's no logic in the laws of, of physics.
Speaker A:The laws of physics involve Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations and equations of chemistry, but it doesn't involve the laws of logic.
Speaker A:So how do you get logic out of physics?
Speaker A:They're two different things.
Speaker A:So if you say the only thing that exists is physics, then you're admitting that you're not using logic.
Speaker A:And if you're not using logic, why would we listen to what you, you have to say?
Speaker A:So the whole materialist enterprise, whether you call it materialism or physicalism or whatever name you want to make up, is self contradictory.
Speaker A:It's self refuting.
Speaker A:If you're arguing that, hey, I'm just a piece of meat, that's all I am is a piece of meat driven by physical laws, okay?
Speaker A:I mean, if I accept that, then I'd stop listening to you because you're just a piece of meat who listens to, to a piece of meat.
Speaker A:It's nonsense.
Speaker A:So materialism or physicalism or whatever name these guys want to conjure up for their misunderstanding is self refuting.
Speaker A:It's silly and it really deserves mockery.
Speaker A:And I believe that the metaphysical perspective of Thomistic dualism, which is the way of looking at the mind that St. Thomas used, or hylomorphism, which is Aristotle's way of understanding, understanding the world, or of idealism, which is Plato's way of understanding the world, those are all genuine, profound, important philosophical perspectives.
Speaker A:Which one is exactly right is open to reasonable debate.
Speaker A:Materialism is just a mistake.
Speaker A:It's not a perspective.
Speaker A:It's like saying one plus one equals five is mathematics.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:Well, it's not mathematics.
Speaker A:It's just a mistake.
Speaker A:So materialism is just a mistake.
Speaker A:There are honest debates between people who follow Plato, people who follow Aristotle, people who follow Plotinus.
Speaker A:There are various different philosophers that we can have nice discussions about.
Speaker A:Materialism is just a stupid error and it doesn't deserve much respect.
Speaker B:Especially when it's confronted with some of the things that we've discussed tonight.
Speaker B:For example, where the consciousness, where the soul.
Speaker B:Soul lives, missing brain, severed brain, shared brain, right near death experiences, these are things that strict materialism simply cannot explain, that are scientifically documented.
Speaker B:Meaning if these two things cannot both be true at the same time, plus you have the logical arguments, plus like where are the laws of physics written?
Speaker B:Where are they written down?
Speaker B:Like is.
Speaker B:Is it just a habit?
Speaker B:Does matter.
Speaker B:Just have these, these habits that it can break at any time.
Speaker A:Precisely.
Speaker B:Materialism, physicalism is, it's, it's pernicious, it's sticky, it sticks to people and they're very reluctant to let it go.
Speaker B:And you actually document in the book some of the arguments that people make trying they, trying to, trying to find, slice things like it must be this.
Speaker B:They're, they're proceeding from a foreordained conclusion, their own minds.
Speaker B:And so they try to figure out like you talked about some of the, the one bit brain connections.
Speaker B:Like it must be that because it can't be this other thing.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:It always boils down eventually to what people have called promissory materialism.
Speaker A:That is that if you pin people who take materialistic or physicalist understandings of science, if you pin them, eventually they just run out of explanations.
Speaker A:They say, okay, I can't explain that, but hey, science is going to be able to explain it in 10 years.
Speaker A:You just wait and it's like you're.
Speaker A:But that's not science, right?
Speaker A:Saying that we have no idea based on our metaphysical framework how this works, but trust us, we'll let you know one of these days.
Speaker A:Well, that's not science.
Speaker A:You know, again, I give them my phone number.
Speaker A:Call me when you have the evidence.
Speaker A:Until I see the evidence, I don't accept materialism.
Speaker A:And yeah, materialism is a very pernicious thing and as I said, is real junk science.
Speaker B:I also want to talk about how this relates to this.
Speaker B:And this was a supply surprising chapter later in the book about artificial intelligence.
Speaker B:And I, I found, obviously it's a big subject, you know, artificial general intelligence.
Speaker B:I saw another, another video just today, like ChatGPT 5.0 artificial general intelligence, like some YouTube thumbnail.
Speaker B:And you actually provide a pretty, a pretty astounding refutation based on the premises of your book.
Speaker A:Yeah, the, the, the idea that a machine of any sort, a computer or a network can be conscious is just nonsense.
Speaker A:The way I think of it as a simple kind of illustration.
Speaker A:If I use a sundial to tell me what time it is.
Speaker A:So I have a little, maybe if I have a little sundial out in my garden, I look out there and oh, it's around 2 o' clock in the afternoon.
Speaker A:Well, that's nice, but I wouldn't begin to think that my sundial itself knew what time it was.
Speaker A:It's just a tool that I use so I can know what time it is.
Speaker A:It's a tool, it's an instrument.
Speaker A:If I look at my cheap Casio watch and I say, oh my, well this is not a sundial.
Speaker A:You know, this watch is much more accurate than a sundial, but it still doesn't know what time it is.
Speaker A:It just tells me what time it is.
Speaker A:You know, it's a tool.
Speaker A:And I can buy a robot Rolex watch and I can say, wow, now this, this is a fancy watch, this is a very sophisticated watch.
Speaker A:But my Rolex watch doesn't know what time it is either.
Speaker A:It's not any smarter than my sundial or my Casio.
Speaker A:And then if I ask Chat GPT what time it is, Chat GPT will give me the time.
Speaker A:But it doesn't know what time it is either.
Speaker A:It doesn't know it any more than a sundial knows it, or my Casio watch knows, or the Rolex watches it, or the the Rolex knows it.
Speaker A:Machines don't know things.
Speaker A:Machines are instruments.
Speaker A:They're chunks of silicon and metal and they do amazing things, but thinking is not one of them.
Speaker A:And in fact, if you think about it, when you have a concept in your mind, the concept is always about something, which is a rather remarkable characteristic of thoughts.
Speaker A:When you think of like I think about Washington D.C. or I think about my pen, or I think about, about my family, it's always directed at something.
Speaker A:And so thoughts always have a meaning to them, a direction to them.
Speaker A:But computation never has an inherent meaning.
Speaker A:That is, computation is simply the matching of an input, like a pattern of electrons to an output, another pattern of electrons according to a set of rules, which is the algorithm.
Speaker A:And that's how computers work.
Speaker A:They match pattern, algorithm, pattern.
Speaker A:But those patterns don't have meanings of their own.
Speaker A:The only meanings are what we ascribe to them.
Speaker A:And an example of what that means is, let's say that I'm typing an essay that I believe materialism is true.
Speaker A:So I'm typing away and then I decide halfway through the essay that no, no, I'm going to change my opinion.
Speaker A:I'm going to type the essay that materialism isn't true.
Speaker A:My word processor will handle the materialism is true essay exactly the same way it handles the materialism isn't true essay.
Speaker A:It doesn't care about the meaning of the essay.
Speaker A:When you use Microsoft Word, the meaning of what you type into it is irrelevant to it.
Speaker A:It doesn't care because it's not thinking.
Speaker A:If it were thinking, it might not accept what you write.
Speaker A:It might say, no, I disagree with that.
Speaker A:I'm not going to let you type that.
Speaker A:But it never does that.
Speaker A:In fact, that's what makes computation so useful, is that it has no meaning of its own.
Speaker A:And by having no meaning of its own, is a blank slate that we can put meaning onto.
Speaker A:So computation, you know, AGI, none of that stuff involves any, any consciousness on the part of the machine.
Speaker A:Machines are never conscious.
Speaker A:They can never be conscious.
Speaker A:It's not inherent.
Speaker A:They don't have souls.
Speaker A:And because they don't have souls, they don't have experiences.
Speaker A:And so they're they're never conscious.
Speaker A:We use them to help us or to hurt us, as the case may be.
Speaker A:But the machines themselves have.
Speaker A:Have no consciousness and can never have consciousness.
Speaker B:I experienced some of this when I tried to use AI for some image generation and realized for very quickly that AI can't actually see anything.
Speaker B:Like, you know, you look at the images where it's got the horror hands, you know, where people's fingers are all distorted.
Speaker B:And a person would look at that immediately and know like, well, that's obviously wrong, but the AI can't actually see it.
Speaker B:It's just using numbers to produce something that we can see and we can understand, but that it can't actually understand innately to itself because it's working on algorithms.
Speaker A:Yes, precisely.
Speaker A:And I think the watch analogy is kind of a nice one that, that I'll believe that AI can think when someone can show me how a sundial knows what time it is.
Speaker A:It's nonsensical.
Speaker A:It's childish thinking.
Speaker A:It's magical thinking.
Speaker A:And there's no magic in AI, no matter how spooky it may seem.
Speaker A:It's not magic, it's computation.
Speaker A:And I think it's very important that we learn how it works, that we use it, we use it properly.
Speaker A:It has enormous potential benefits and enormous potential risks.
Speaker A:But none of that has anything to do with consciousness of the machine itself, because machines can never be conscious.
Speaker B:That's right.
Speaker B:And don't ascribe living characteristics to a computer, to an algorithm, to raw computation.
Speaker B:They're not the same as we are.
Speaker A:And you could even see that being used in a way to manipulate people, that is that programmers could make AI where people think that when they're interacting with the AI, that they're interacting with a conscious entity.
Speaker A:And that has a lot of hazards and so on.
Speaker A:But the only consciousness one might say in that is the consciousness of people who program it and use it.
Speaker A:The machine itself has no consciousness and never can.
Speaker B:All this is why I so greatly appreciated your book.
Speaker B:Here it is again, the Immortal Mind.
Speaker B:Because everything that we've been talking about today is actually in this book.
Speaker B:And so hopefully you can get a sense of how impacted I was to read this and the shift that it created in my thinking and the different ways it got me thinking about problems that I hadn't really considered seriously before.
Speaker A:Well, thank you.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker A:And that's our dream come true, is to have people see the truth more clearly.
Speaker A:And what's in the book is the truth.
Speaker B:Wonderful.
Speaker B:Just.
Speaker B:May I ask you just a Couple questions about your career and we close on that.
Speaker B:So one of the things that fascinates me is the experiences of men who do very significant and high stakes things.
Speaker B:So here you are, you're a young man, you've been fascinated by the brain for your whole life.
Speaker B:You tell some of that story in the book, and then you've gone through medical school and training and you're getting ready to do your first opinion open brain operation, like on a, on a real living patient.
Speaker B:How, how old were you at the time?
Speaker A:Let's see, first off, first operation, probably I was probably like 28 or so.
Speaker A:28 years old?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So can you, can you take, take me into that moment?
Speaker B:Take us into that moment?
Speaker B:Like, yeah, well, that's something that I couldn't, I don't think I could do that.
Speaker A:Well, it's, it's, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not an easy thing.
Speaker A:I, I'm the director of, the director of the residency program at Stony Brook, meaning that I train the young neurosurgeons.
Speaker A:So and this is something we talk about a lot is how do you make this transition from being a medical student who does interesting things and so on, but not at that level of responsibility, into being a neurosurgical attending where you are the guy in charge doing it.
Speaker A:And neurosurgery residency is about seven years long.
Speaker A:In fact, it's exactly seven years long.
Speaker A:And we have a very specific way we train people through those seven years.
Speaker A:And residents start out as assistants, so they don't take the primary responsibility for operating and taking care of patients.
Speaker A:And they learn from people who have the experience.
Speaker A:And they're gradually given opportunities to take more responsibility through their training.
Speaker A:And their final year of training is where they take responsibility that's commensurate with what they would have as an independently practicing neurosurgeon.
Speaker A:And at the end of their training, I, as the residency director have to sign a paper that says that they are competent to safely practice on the public, that they can go out and do operations on people without supervision, without somebody standing there.
Speaker A:So the way you get through that process, from being a medical student, never having done any surgery, to being somebody who goes out in real life and does it on your own, is you go through a seven year period of continuous observation.
Speaker A:These guys, guys work the better part of 80 hours a week.
Speaker A:And we watch them very carefully.
Speaker A:They start out with small responsibilities.
Speaker A:And as they show us that they can do A good job with that, we give them more responsibilities.
Speaker A:That's not to say that when you reach the other end of the training, that it's easy.
Speaker A:Meaning that I think the hardest thing that a doctor faces, especially a neurosurgeon, is that sense of responsibility.
Speaker A:The major complication rate for neurosurgery in the best of hands is maybe a couple percent.
Speaker A:That is that 98% of your operations go great.
Speaker A:But if you're doing 200 operations a year, which is fairly common for a neurosurgeon, that means that there are four operations per year that have major complications, and that's on your conscience.
Speaker A:And if you've been doing this for 40 years, that means that there's 100 patients who've had major complications related to your work.
Speaker A:And that's if you're really good, that's like the low number.
Speaker A:And you have to deal with that psychologically.
Speaker A:And different people deal with it different ways.
Speaker A:And I talk with the residents in training about how will you feel if a patient doesn't do well and you blame yourself for it.
Speaker A:And that's the price you pay.
Speaker A:As.
Speaker B:As a neurosurgeon, I'd never even considered that before.
Speaker B:That inevitably some percentage of patients may not do well due to circumstances beyond your control.
Speaker B:And yet the way that we as humans tend to think is there are no circumstances beyond our control.
Speaker B:You can still have the best day ever or something.
Speaker B:God forbid, a mistake could be made.
Speaker B:These are real things that happen to real people because we don't live in a perfect world even when we're at our best.
Speaker A:Yes, neurosurgeons tend to.
Speaker A:I tell the residents they live with faces in their minds, and they rehash operations they've done and decisions they've made.
Speaker A:You go back years, say, gee, I wish I could have done that differently.
Speaker A:I wish that it turned out a different way.
Speaker A:And you live with that.
Speaker A:And some people just can't take it psychologically.
Speaker A:There are neurosurgeons who just quit.
Speaker A:They just find some other way to make a living.
Speaker A:Some neurosurgeons develop personalities that aren't very nice.
Speaker A:They blame other people.
Speaker A:Things don't work out right.
Speaker A:It was the nurse's fault.
Speaker A:It was the other guy's fault.
Speaker A:It's not my fault.
Speaker A:There's a neurosurgeon named Henry Marsh who wrote a wonderful book, and I'm blocking on the name of the book.
Speaker A:It's so hard.
Speaker A:Getting older is not easy, but it's a great book.
Speaker A:Look up Henry Marsh.
Speaker A:And again, if I don't think too hard, I'll think of it.
Speaker A:But it's a book about bad neurosurgical outcomes.
Speaker A:He's a neurosurgeon from England, an excellent neurosurgeon.
Speaker A:And the book is about cases that didn't go well and how he felt about it.
Speaker A:And every neurosurgeon experiences that.
Speaker A:So it's a big part of the profession.
Speaker A:And I try when we train the young neurosurgeons to kind of get them ready for facing that when they go out to and practice on their own.
Speaker B:Yeah, this is a very human thing.
Speaker B:Have you found that your faith has helped you in that regard?
Speaker A:It certainly has.
Speaker A:It certainly has.
Speaker A:Neurosurgeons sort of the joke that neurosurgeons think they're God.
Speaker A:And if you have faith, you realize that you aren't God.
Speaker A:And so it does help you to know that things are out of your hands in many ways.
Speaker A:On the other hand, I'm responsible, responsible to God, and he expects me to do the best I can.
Speaker A:So as I'm sure you've had the same experience in your Christian life that faith in God doesn't.
Speaker A:It's not a ticket to just do anything you want to do.
Speaker A:It's not like, well, hey, God will take care of it.
Speaker A:No, it comes with a lot of responsibility.
Speaker A:Comes with a cross.
Speaker A:It comes with a cross.
Speaker B:Amen.
Speaker B:Amen.
Speaker B:Well, thank you so much for that, the brilliant insights in your book and in this conversation, and they're going to stick with me.
Speaker B:I can feel them.
Speaker B:I'm going to be thinking about this for the rest of the day.
Speaker B:So I really appreciate how much you've had to share and how much that you give of your wisdom and experience in sharing these topics that are far outside of the realm of people.
Speaker B:But really, we live with them every day.
Speaker A:All right, well, thank you so much, and it's been a privilege to meet you and to speak with you.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker B:Thank you.
Speaker B:Where would you like to send people to find out more about you and what you do?
Speaker A:Well, the Immortal Mind is available on Amazon, so you can find it there.
Speaker A:Mike Egner and Denise o' Leary are the two authors.
Speaker A:Also, I blog a lot at Mind Matters News, which is part of the Discovery Institute, and also at Evolution News and Views, also part of the Discovery Institute.
Speaker A:The Discovery Institute has been a leader in this effort to get to the truth about science, the truth about the natural world.
Speaker A:And I've learned a lot from them.
Speaker A:And I think readers and listeners will also.
Speaker B:Thank you, sir.
Speaker B:Those will be linked in the show notes.
Speaker A:Thank you.
Speaker A:Thank you, Sa.
