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AI 整理 : Michael Egnor（脳外科医、医学者） の講演: 人間の魂の実在を示す科学的証拠

· 55 min read

前置き​

私の見解とは真逆だが、具体的なデータが多く登場しているゆえ、取り上げる。7000件の脳手術をした人物の講演。

AI(NotebookLM plus) による整理・要約。講演で提示している静止画は後日含めたいところ。

音声対話(by AI) 11:06​

https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/15ee2ec8-3336-4800-bfbf-7af9fa1e4dd0/audio

AI 概要

魂の科学的証拠

講演者は、神経科学の観点から人間の魂と不死について探求しています。彼は自身の神経外科医としての経験や、脳の損傷を抱えながらも正常な機能を維持する患者の例、

また脳機能に関する古典的な研究（ペンフィールド、スパーリー、リベット、オーウェンらによる）を紹介し、魂が脳とは独立して存在する証拠を提示しています。さらに、臨死体験の報告や抽象的な概念の性質を引き合いに出し、精神的な魂は物質とは異なり、崩壊しないため不死であると結論付けています。

メモ​

"The Scientific Evidence of the Human Soul"

Benjamin Libet の実験で、あまり注目されていない事柄

動画(29:55)​

Is The Soul Real？ A Neurosurgeon Explores The Evidence (2025 Dallas Conference on Science & Faith)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=41bIJ7hYbLs

要旨

要約ブリーフィング資料：「科学から見た人間の魂と不死」

この資料は、医学者Michael Egnor氏による講演「人間の魂の科学的証拠」の抜粋に基づき、人間の魂と不死に関する主要なテーマと重要なアイデア、事実をレビューすることを目的とします。

Egnor氏は、神経科学の観点からこれらの問いにアプローチし、自身の臨床経験や著名な神経科学者たちの研究成果を根拠に、唯物論的な脳機能説に疑問を呈し、脳とは独立した魂、すなわち精神の存在とその不死性について論じています。

主要なテーマ​

  • 魂の存在と脳からの独立性: 脳は心全体を構成するのではなく、魂は脳とは独立した何かとして存在するのか、という問い。
  • 魂の性質: 魂はどのような性質を持つのか。精神的実体として、物質的な性質（部分、場所、時間性）を持つのか。
  • 魂の不死性: 魂は死後も存在し続けるのか。もしそうであれば、それはどのような意味での不死なのか。

重要なアイデアと事実​

脳の損傷と機能の維持:​

講演者は、自身の外科医としての経験から、脳の大部分を失ったにも関わらず、完全に正常な、あるいは意識や感情を維持している患者の例を複数挙げ、脳が心全体を説明できるという唯物論的見解に疑問を呈しています。

  • 「彼女は脳の約3分の2を失っています。それは彼女が生まれたときからの状態です。（中略）彼女は完全に普通の人間として育ちました。」(0:02:17)
  • 「彼は、脳幹だけを残して、脳の両半球を失っています。（中略）彼は意識があり、面白く、笑い、泣き、感情的には普通の人間です。」(0:03:34)

抽象的思考と脳の刺激:​

著名な脳外科医ワイルダー・ペンフィールドの研究を紹介し、脳の特定の部位を刺激することで運動、感覚、感情、記憶などを誘発できるが、抽象的な思考や推論を誘発することはできないことを指摘しています。これは、抽象的な思考能力が脳とは別の場所にあることを示唆しています。

  • 「誰一人として、微積分発作を起こす人はいません。… ペンフィールドは言いました、『これは本当に奇妙だ。』」(0:05:23)
  • 「脳には抽象的に考える中心がないのです。理性のある中心がないのです。」(0:06:19)

脳梁離断術と心の統合性:​

ノーベル賞受賞者ロジャー・スペリーとその共同研究者ジャスティン・サージェントの研究に基づき、脳梁離断術（左右の脳半球を繋ぐ神経線維を切断する手術）を受けた患者が、それぞれの半球に別々に提示された情報を統合して理解できることを示しています。これは、脳の物理的な分離にも関わらず、心が統一性を保っていることを示唆しており、「脳の中にない、心の中に何かがある」ことを強く示唆しています。

  • 「彼女は、脳のどの部分も両方の矢印を見ていないにもかかわらず、矢印を比較できた方法を見つけました。（中略）それで彼女は結論づけました、脳の中にない、心の中に何かがある、と。」(0:08:25)
  • 「しかし、脳のどの部分も野球と窓の両方を見ていませんでした。ですから、脳の中にはない、心の中に何かがあるのです。」(0:09:18)

自由意志と脳活動:​

ペンフィールドとベンジャミン・リベットの研究を引用し、自由意志が脳機能ではない可能性を示唆しています。ペンフィールドは脳刺激によって意図的な動きを誘発できるが、患者は自身の意志による動きと刺激による動きを常に区別できたことを発見しました。リベットは、簡単な決定を行う際に脳活動が意識的な決定の前に起こることを示したが、決定を「拒否する（veto）」際には新たな脳活動は見られないことを発見しました。これは、脳が誘惑を与えるが、それを選択するか否かの自由は脳から独立していることを示唆しています。

  • 「彼は結論づけました、脳の中に自由意志をシミュレートする場所を見つけることができなかったと。自由意志は脳の中にありませんでした。」(0:10:19)
  • 「そして拒否には、脳の中にスパイクはありませんでした。だから彼は言いました、それは彼が自由意志を示したというよりは、彼が自由な『しない』を示したということだ、と。」(0:12:09)

持続的植物状態の患者における意識:​

エイドリアン・オーウェンの研究は、重度の脳損傷による持続的植物状態にある患者の一部が、機能的MRIによって示される脳活動パターンを通じて、指示を理解し、思考し、コミュニケーション能力さえ持っている可能性を示唆しています。これは、深刻な脳損傷の後でも、意識や思考能力が失われない可能性があることを示しており、心と脳の分離を支持する証拠とされています。

  • 「これらの人々は、彼らの脳が事実上破壊されていたにもかかわらず、彼が尋ねている質問を理解していました。」(0:14:19)
  • 「ですから、多くの場合、最も深い昏睡状態にある人々ともコミュニケーションをとることができます。」(0:15:07)

臨死体験 (NDE):​

臨死体験は、魂または心が脳から分離する典型的な例として挙げられています。講演者は、特に「真実性の高い（veridical）」臨死体験、つまり、体験者が身体から離れている間に起こったことを正確に知っている体験は、脳活動が停止している間に意識が存在し得る証拠であると主張しています。パム・レイノルズの体験が具体例として挙げられています。また、臨死体験で亡くなった親族のみが現れることも、その体験が単なる脳の機能不全による幻覚ではない証拠として挙げられています。

  • 「ですから、臨死体験の一部が非常に現実的であることに疑問はありません。」(0:17:11)
  • 「臨死体験をした医学文献の誰一人として、トンネルの反対側に生きている人を見たことはありませんでした。」(0:17:11)

フィニアス・ゲージの事例:​

脳損傷と人格の変化の事例として有名なフィニアス・ゲージについて、講演者は、彼の感情状態は変化したが、理性や数学などの抽象的思考能力に変化があった証拠はないと述べ、この事例が心全体が脳から来ることを証明するものではないと主張しています。

  • 「ゲージの感情状態は変化しましたが、彼の数学や理性などに変化があったという証拠はありません。」(0:17:58)

心は計算ではない:​

心は計算の一種ではないと主張されています。その理由は、心が常に「〜について考える（aboutness）」という指向性を持つ一方、計算には本質的に指向性がないからです。計算は人間が意味を付与することでのみ意味を持ちます。

  • 「心は計算の一種ではありません。非常に単純な理由からです。あなたの心の中のすべては、何かを指しています。」(0:18:36)
  • 「ですから、計算には意味がありません。唯一の意味は、私たちがそれに帰属させる意味です。」(0:19:30)
  • 「ですから、心は計算の一種ではないだけでなく、計算の反対です。」(0:19:30)

心の進化:​

自然淘汰は物質的なものにのみ作用するため、魂の非物質的な側面は進化によって説明できないと主張されています。

  • 「そして少なくとも心の部分は、繰り返し見てきたように、物理的ではありません。ですから、物質に固有のものではないものを進化させることはできません。」(0:20:24)

脳は心の一部（運動、知覚、記憶、感情）の器官である:​

講演者は、脳が運動、知覚、記憶、感情の器官であることは間違いないとしつつ、理性と意志には器官がないと結論づけています。脳はこれらの機能の正常な働きに必要であるが、それらが脳から生じるわけではないと区別しています。

  • 「ですから、最も合理的な科学的結論は、脳は運動、知覚、記憶、感情の器官であるということです。これらは間違いなく脳から来ています。」(0:20:59)
  • 「しかし、知性と意志の器官はありません。」(0:21:08)
  • 「脳に依存しているという事実は、脳から来ることを意味しません。」(0:21:29)

魂の定義と性質:​

魂は人間を活性化するものであり、人間の生きた存在そのものです。それは脳活動（運動、感覚、感情、記憶）と抽象的な能力（知性、意志）のハイブリッドであり、霊的な性質を持つと定義されています。魂は物質的な性質（部分、場所、時間）を持たず、統合性を保ちます。

  • 「魂とは、人間を活性化させるものです。私たちの魂は、私たちを生きている人間たらしめるすべてです。」(0:21:48)
  • 「ですから、魂は精神です。」(0:23:04)
  • 「魂には部分がありません。（中略）場所がありません。（中略）魂は時間の中にありません。」(0:22:24)

人間は霊魂を持つ唯一の生物:​

動物や植物にも魂はあるが、それらは完全に物質的であり、運動、知覚、記憶などの機能に限定されると説明されています。人間だけが、抽象的な思考、理性、自由意志といった霊的な魂を持っています。

  • 「私たちだけが、霊的な魂を持つ唯一の生き物です。」(0:23:21)

魂の不死性:​

物質的な死は物質の分解であるが、霊的な魂は物質的な性質を持たないため、分解したり死んだりすることはできないと論じられています。概念としての「数字の8」が物質的な表現（紙に書かれた8）とは異なり、分解されないことになぞらえ、霊魂は自然に不死であると結論づけています。

  • 「物質は分解されます、精神は分解されません。」(0:26:52)
  • 「そして、この不死は自然なものであることに注意してください。（中略）それは私たちの性質であり、私たちの精神は分解したり死んだりすることができません。」(0:27:26)

死後の視覚と神の光:​

臨死体験で報告される視覚や色彩の体験について、霊的な魂は物質的な目を持たないため、どのように見ているのかという問いに対し、講演者はトマス・アクィナスの比喩を引用し、死後の視覚は「神の光」によるものである可能性を示唆しています。

  • 「ですから、人々が臨死体験で見ていると思う光は、神の光です。」(0:29:23)

まとめ​

Egnor氏の講演は、自身の神経外科医としての長年の経験と、ワイルダー・ペンフィールド、ロジャー・スペリー、ベンジャミン・リベット、エイドリアン・オーウェンといった著名な研究者たちの成果を根拠に、脳が心全体を説明するという唯物論的な見方に対する強力な反論を展開しています。特に、脳損傷後の機能維持、抽象的思考の脳からの独立性、脳梁離断術患者の統合性、自由意志の非脳機能性、持続的植物状態患者の意識、そして臨死体験といった事例は、脳とは独立した「魂」、すなわち精神の存在を強く示唆する科学的証拠として提示されています。

さらに講演は、人間の魂が単なる物質的な存在ではなく、理性、意志といった霊的な側面を持つこと、そしてその霊的な性質ゆえに物質のように分解されず、自然に不死であるという結論に達しています。これは、人間の存在が物質と精神のハイブリッドであり、「存在の大いなる連鎖」の中で特別な位置を占めるという神学的・哲学的な視点とも一致すると述べられています。全体として、本講演は神経科学の知見が、人間の霊的な魂の存在とその不死性という伝統的な考え方を支持しうることを示唆する内容となっています。

timeline と 主要関係者

年表​

  • 19世紀:フィニアス・ゲージが作業中の事故で脳を鉄のスパイクで貫通される。彼の性格が変化する。

  • 20世紀半ば:ワイルダー・ペンフィールドがモントリオールで脳外科医として働く。彼はてんかん手術のパイオニアであり、覚醒下脳手術を行い、脳の表面を刺激してマッピングする研究を行う。彼は知的てんかん発作がないことに注目し、抽象的な思考や理性が脳に由来しない可能性を示唆する。

    • ロジャー・スペリーと彼の同僚が、てんかん発作を抑えるための脳梁離断術（脳を機能的に半分に切断する手術）を受けた患者に関する研究を行う。スペリーは半球間の機能分化に関する研究でノーベル賞を受賞するが、脳が半分に切断されても患者の精神が正常であることを発見する。

    • 脳梁離断術が開発される（スペリーによるものではない）。

  • 約20年前 (講演時):テリー・スキアボが持続的植物状態にある。

  • 1991年:マイケル・エグナーがストーニーブルック大学の教員となる。

    • パム・レイノルズが脳動脈瘤の手術を受ける。手術中に心停止状態となるが、この間に臨死体験をする。

  • 約20年前 (スペリーの研究の後):マギル大学のジャスティン・サージェントがスプリットブレイン患者の研究を進める。彼女は両半球に異なる情報を同時に提示し、脳のどの部分も両方の情報を見ていないにもかかわらず、患者がそれらを比較できることを発見する。

  • 現代 (講演時):マイケル・エグナーが自身の脳外科医としてのキャリアの中で、脳の働きと精神の関係について疑問を抱く経験をする。彼は脳の大部分を失った患者たちが正常な認知機能を持っている例を複数提示する。

    • ジェレ・ピントがスプリットブレイン患者へのストーリー提示による研究をさらに進める。彼は、ストーリーを理解するためには両半球に提示された情報が必要であることを示し、精神が脳にはないことを示唆する。
    • ベンジャミン・リベットが自由意志に関する実験を行う。彼は、簡単な行動を決定する前に脳活動のスパイクが見られることを発見するが、その決定を「拒否」することには脳活動のスパイクがないことを発見し、「自由不作為 (free won't)」が存在することを示唆する。
    • エイドリアン・オーウェンが持続的植物状態の患者に関するfMRI研究を行う。彼は、これらの患者が外からの質問を理解し、脳活動パターンを示すことができることを発見する。一部の患者は数学や家族史に関する質問に答えることができることも判明する。
    • 臨死体験に関する研究が行われ、検証可能な（真実である）臨死体験が約20%存在することが示唆される。
    • 人間の魂と精神が科学、神学、哲学の観点から議論される。魂は肉体とは分離した非物質的な存在であり、理性、自由意志、抽象的な思考を可能にするものとされる。魂は不死であり、肉体の死によって消滅しないと主張される。
    • 人間の魂は精神的（intellect and will）と物質的（movement, perception, memory, and emotion）の側面を持つと説明される。精神的な側面は脳に由来しないとされる。
    • 人間の魂は精神であり、他の生物の魂（完全に物質的）とは異なると主張される。人間は物質と精神の混合体であり、神の似姿であると説明される。

登場人物​

  • マイケル・エグナー (Michael Egnor):本講演の語り手であり、脳外科医。かつては唯物論者で無神論者であったが、脳外科医としての経験から脳の唯物論的な理解に疑問を抱くようになる。魂と精神が脳とは分離した存在であるという考えを科学的な証拠に基づいて支持する。ストーニーブルック大学の教員。
  • ワイルダー・ペンフィールド (Wilder Penfield):20世紀半ばにモントリオールで活躍した著名な脳外科医。てんかん手術のパイオニアであり、覚醒下脳手術中に脳をマッピングする研究を行った。知的てんかん発作が存在しないことから、抽象的な思考や理性が脳に由来しない可能性を示唆した。
  • ロジャー・スペリー (Roger Sperry):20世紀半ばの神経科学者。脳梁離断術を受けた患者の研究でノーベル賞を受賞した。半球間の機能分化を明らかにした一方で、脳が半分に切断されても患者の精神が正常であることに注目した。
  • ジャスティン・サージェント (Justine Surgent):マギル大学の研究者。スペリーの研究から約20年後にスプリットブレイン患者に関する研究を行った。両半球に異なる情報を提示しても、脳のどの部分も両方の情報を見ていないにもかかわらず、患者がそれらを比較できることを発見し、精神が脳にはないことを示唆した。
  • ジェレ・ピント (Jere Pinto):スプリットブレイン患者へのストーリー提示による研究をさらに進めた研究者。ストーリーを理解するためには両半球に提示された情報が必要であることを示し、精神が脳にはないことを示唆した。
  • ベンジャミン・リベット (Benjamin Libet):自由意志に関する著名な研究者。簡単な行動を決定する前に脳活動のスパイクが見られることを発見したが、その決定を「拒否」することには脳活動のスパイクがないことを発見し、「自由不作為 (free won't)」が存在することを示唆した。
  • エイドリアン・オーウェン (Adrian Owen):持続的植物状態の患者に関するfMRI研究を行った研究者。これらの患者が外からの質問を理解し、脳活動パターンを示すことができることを発見し、意識の存在を示唆した。
  • パム・レイノルズ (Pam Reynolds):1991年に脳動脈瘤の手術中に心停止状態となり、検証可能な臨死体験をした女性。手術中に自分の体が離れて手術の様子を観察し、部屋の出来事や会話を正確に報告したとされる。
  • フィニアス・ゲージ (Phineas Gage):19世紀に作業中の事故で脳を鉄のスパイクで貫通された男性。彼の性格が変化した事例として、脳が精神に影響を与える例として議論されるが、エグナーはこれがすべての精神的側面が脳に由来することを証明するものではないと主張する。
  • テリー・スキアボ (Terry Schiavo):約20年前に持続的植物状態として広く知られた女性。オーウェンの研究が示唆するような、重度の脳損傷患者における意識の存在に関する議論に関連して言及される。
  • トマス・アクィナス (Thomas Aquinas):約1000年前に活躍した哲学者、神学者。講演者が臨死体験における「視覚」を説明する際に、彼の光に関するアナロジーを引用している。

注記: この年表と登場人物リストは、提供されたソース内の情報にのみ基づいています。年号や出来事の正確な時期は、ソース内で直接言及されているか、文脈から推測できる範囲で記載しています。

文字起こし

（医学者 Michael Egnor の講演 "The Scientific Evidence of the Human Soul" の文字起こし）

What is the soul? And is the soul immortal? I very strongly believe that this is a question for neuroscience. That is, obviously there are theological answers to this, and there are philosophical answers to this. But neuroscience also addresses these issues. There are three questions that I want to ask today about the human soul. First of all, does the soul exist as something separate from the brain? (0:00:30)

The current materialist way of looking at things is that all of our mind is just from the brain. And if it does so, then what is the soul? And is the soul immortal? I very strongly believe that this is a question for neuroscience. That is, obviously there are theological answers to this, and there are philosophical answers to this. But neuroscience also addresses these issues. (0:00:53)

And it does so, I think, in a fascinating way. The first question, does the soul exist as something separate from the brain? And I'd like to start with my own story. I started out as a materialist and an atheist as a young man. And in medical school, I fell in love with neuroanatomy and neurophysiology because I thought that learning about the brain, learning all the detailed, beautiful neuroanatomy, would really help me understand who I was and understand what it was to be a human being. (0:01:22)

I trained in neurosurgery at the University of Miami and have been at Stony Brook on faculty there since 1991, and I've done about 7,000 brain operations. And I've learned a fair amount, not only academically, but just in personal experience, as to how the brain works and how the mind relates to the brain. I saw a number of things over my career that made me question the traditional materialist way of understanding how the brain works. (0:01:54)

The patients I'm going to show you here are real people. I've changed their names, but they're very real people. The picture on... I guess it would be which side? On your left is an MRI of the brain of a young lady, and the black there is spinal fluid. The brain is the gray stuff there. She's missing about two-thirds of her brain. That's the way she was born. (0:02:17)

The image alongside of it is a normal brain for comparison. When she was a young baby, we scanned her and found this, and we were rather pessimistic with her family about her chances of having a normal life. She grew up a completely normal person. She was on the honor roll in high school. If you met her today, you'd say, ah, she's a bright, bright young lady. (0:02:36)

She's perfectly fine. Missing two-thirds of her brain. This is a little boy named Joshua. He was born missing also about two-thirds of his brain. And he... again, that black space there is just water. He was evaluated by the ethics committee at my hospital, and they recommended that he not be fed when he was born because he was in such terrible shape that it'd be better if he passed away. (0:03:02)

We rescinded that order and fed him, and he's now graduating from high school. (0:03:09)

Perfectly normal young man. Plays sports. He's a great kid. Maggie is a young lady who was in a gifted program when she was young. She's a brilliant young woman. Missing most of her cerebellum and part of the central regions of her brain. She has had to have some surgery to take care of fluid pressure there, but she's done very well. She has a master's degree in English literature, and she's a published musician. (0:03:34)

Nicholas is a little boy who's quite handicapped. He has cerebral palsy, and he's missing both hemispheres of his brain. The only part of his brain he has is his brain stem. He is handicapped. He can't speak, he can't walk, but he's fully conscious. He's kind of funny. He laughs, he cries. He's emotionally a normal person, even though he is handicapped, even though he's missing his entire brain hemispheres. (0:04:03)

So it raises the question, it sounds like a really strange question, but as you'll see, it's not so strange. Is the brain the organ of the mind? You know, the heart's the organ of circulation, the kidneys are the organ of making urine, but is the brain completely the organ of the mind? Clearly in some ways it is, but in other ways it may not be. (0:04:25)

This question was first addressed by Wilder Penfield, who's a neurosurgeon, worked in Montreal in the mid-20th century. Probably the greatest scientist in the neurosurgical profession. And he was the pioneer in epilepsy surgery. And he would do awake brain surgery, meaning that patients during the brain surgery would be fully awake with local anesthesia, so they felt no pain. And he would stimulate their brain to map the surface of their brain to remove foci of epilepsy. (0:04:54)

And he's devoted his career to studying epilepsy. And he asked a fascinating question. He said, why are there no intellectual seizures? When people have seizures, if they remain conscious during the seizures, they do one of four things. They'll have uncontrollable movements. Their arm will shake. They can have sensations like tingling on their skin. They can have emotions, powerful fear or laughter or joy. (0:05:23)

And they can have memories. You can have a seizure where you get this recurrent memory. But nobody ever has a calculus seizure. Nobody ever has a mathematics seizure where you can't stop doing long division. And Penfield said, that's really odd. If you can evoke all these other things, why can't you evoke abstract thought? Reasoning, theology, philosophy, thinking about God. It doesn't happen from seizures. (0:05:53)

And he said, the most reasonable explanation is that that aspect of the mind isn't from the brain. He tested this further by intraoperatively with awake patients, stimulating the surface of their brain to map the brain, just like you would map a city, and to find out where different things were located on the brain. Again, so he could protect them in removing epileptic foci. (0:06:19)

But he couldn't find any kind of abstract thought centers in the brain. (0:06:24)

There's a movement center. There's a sensation center. There's a visual center. There's a hearing center. There are emotional centers. There are memory centers. But there's no center for thinking abstractly. There's no center for reason. And he said, that's odd. That's the same thing that he found with looking at the kinds of seizures that happen. Some of the most interesting work along this line has been done by Roger Sperry and his colleagues. (0:06:50)

Sperry won the Nobel Prize for this work. Back in the mid-20th century, an operation was developed for people who would have a seizure in one hemisphere of the brain that would spread to the other hemisphere. And these were catastrophic seizures that were very difficult to control. So what Sperry... So an operation that was developed, not by Sperry, but by others, was to cut the brain in half, essentially. (0:07:16)

So that if a seizure started in one half of the brain, it couldn't spread to the other half. And that made the seizures much easier to control and much milder. And it was called a corpus callosotomy. And we still do that surgery today. So the hemispheres of the brain are functionally disconnected. And Sperry, who was a neuroscientist, realized that you could study what each hemisphere does because they're disconnected. (0:07:39)

So he did a lot of wonderful work in the left hemisphere controls speech, the right hemisphere controls spatial orientation. And he got the Nobel Prize for that. But one thing that he noticed, and I've noticed too, is that people who've had their brains cut in half are pretty normal people. As you meet these people, their brains are cut in half and they're walking and talking, they feel normal. (0:08:00)

They have less seizures than they used to have. It would be the same thing as if someone just took a chainsaw and cut the laptop in half, and it still worked just fine. Like, there's something odd about this. The follow-up research on that is something that still gives me chills. And I learned about this decades ago. And I think it's among the most fascinating results in cognitive neuroscience. (0:08:25)

Justine Surgent was a researcher at McGill in Montreal, worked about 20 years after Sperry. And she studied people with split-brain surgery. And what she did was she found a way to present pictures of things, like pictures of arrows, to each hemisphere separately at the same time. So she put arrows up that the right hemisphere would see one arrow, the left hemisphere would see the other arrow, but no part of the brain saw both arrows. (0:08:54)

One half saw one arrow, the other half saw the other arrow. And she asked the people, are the arrows pointing in the same direction or not? And they always got it right. But how could they compare arrows when no part of the brain saw both arrows? So she concluded that there was something in the mind that wasn't in the brain. (0:09:18)

Now, Jere Pinto has furthered that research in which he tells stories to split-brain patients, where the first half of the story is presented to one hemisphere. The second half of the story is presented to the other hemisphere. But you don't understand the story unless you see both. A good example would be if the left hemisphere can see a baseball, and the right hemisphere can see a broken window. (0:09:47)

So Pinto would ask the patient, what happened? And the patient always answered, the baseball broke the window. But no part of the brain saw both the baseball and the window. So there's something in the mind that's not in the brain. Wilder Penfield also studied free will. And he did a very interesting study. During these awake brain operations, he would stimulate the surface of the patient's brain. (0:10:19)

And if you stimulate the right place, you can make them do things, like make them raise their arm. He would ask them, during the surgery, to occasionally raise their arm themselves, without him stimulating them. And you can't feel your brain. Your brain has no sensory things, and the patients are under surgical drapes, so they can't see what he's doing. And he would ask them, when your arm goes up, I want you to tell me whether you did it or whether I did it. (0:10:43)

And they always got it right. Hundreds of thousands of trials of this in 1,100 patients. No one ever missed it. No one ever got it wrong. And he concluded, then, that he couldn't find any place in the brain that simulated free will. That free will wasn't in the brain. That you could always tell, this is my will. This is not someone doing it to me. (0:11:08)

So free will is not a brain function. Benjamin Libet did probably the most famous research on free will. And what Libet found, and it would take a while to go into details about how he did his experiments, they were quite ingenious, but he would record electrical signals from the scalp, and these are people who haven't had any surgery, they're just normal volunteers, and what he found was that when you decide to do something simple, there tends to be a spike in brain activity that happens about a half second before you decide. (0:11:46)

Like, if you're going to turn on a light switch. About a half second before you turn on the light switch, your brain spikes. And that's before you're aware that you're going to turn it on. So what... and that seems, at first glance, that everything is driven by your brain. Your brain makes you do it, and you don't really have any free will. It's all just chemicals driving you to do things. (0:12:09)

But he was a very clever researcher, and what he did is he asked people to veto your decision. That is that when you're about to flip the switch, say, no, I'm not going to do it. I've changed my mind. (0:12:21)

And the veto didn't have a spike in the brain. So he said, it's not so much that he showed there was free will, but they showed there was free won't. That is that your brain... and he commented, he was a religious man, and he said, this is the traditional religious way of understanding human motivation. That we're hit with temptations from our brain, but we have the free choice to do it or not. (0:12:53)

Because the free choice to do it or not did not have any new brain activity at all. It was independent of the brain. So the brain keeps hitting you with these things. Have that extra piece of cake. But you can say yes or no, and you can't blame your brain. Adrian Owen is a researcher. I think he's currently in Indiana. He was at Cambridge in England. He did a fascinating study in patients in persistent vegetative state. (0:13:24)

Persistent vegetative state is the deepest level of coma. It's just a step above brain death. And it happens when people have had very severe brain injuries from lack of oxygen or from motor vehicle accidents. And it's called vegetative because it's been assumed that these people are basically vegetables, meaning that they have no mind. They're just a body, and there's no mind left. Some of you may recall the Terry Schiavo stuff that went on about 20 years ago. (0:13:54)

She was in persistent vegetative state. What Owen did is he put patients in MRI machines and did functional MRI imaging that shows brain activity. And he would ask them to think about things with a headset. He'd say, think about walking across the room or think about your family or think about playing tennis. And they would show patterns of brain activation in their very damaged brain. (0:14:19)

And he then did that with normal volunteers and found the patterns were identical. Implying that they were understanding what he was talking about. And then what he did, and he was very clever, he asked the same questions but he mixed up the words so they didn't make any sense. Instead of, think about walking across the room, he'd say, room across walking about think. (0:14:41)

Doesn't make any sense. And the brain was silent. So these people were understanding the questions he was asking, even though their brains were practically destroyed. And he actually found, he and others, other people have replicated his work, that about 40% of people in persistent vegetative state show clear evidence of being able to communicate. There are people who can do mathematics in persistent vegetative state. (0:15:07)

You ask them, what's 9 plus 6? You count, when you hit 15, the brain lights up. People can tell their family histories. Is your brother's name George? Brain will light up. So you can communicate with people in the deepest level of coma in many cases. Near-death experiences are sort of the paradigmatic example of a separation between the soul or the mind and the brain. (0:15:35)

And while some near-death experiences may be not genuine, they may be hallucinations or whatever, there's no doubt that there is a real core of real experiences. (0:15:46)

There are probably about 20% of near-death experiences are veridical, meaning they can be checked. The person knows things that occurred when they were dead, things that went on inside the room, etc. The probably most famous near-death experience was Pam Reynolds, who was an aneurysm patient, operated on in 1991. And in order to safely operate on the aneurysm, her surgeon had to stop her heart after cooling her body down to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And that gave him about 30 minutes to fix the aneurysm. (0:16:21)

He drained all the blood out of her brain, fixed the aneurysm, and then re-warmed her and started her heart again. And she survived and did very well, actually. She said, in the recovery room, she said, you know, I watched the operation. I said, what? You know, you were brain-dead. You couldn't possibly watch the operation. So she said that as soon as her brain went dead, she popped out of her body, floated up to the ceiling, watched the surgery. (0:16:50)

She said her vision was amazingly accurate. It was a beautiful scene. And then she told him what he talked about during the surgery. She told him what the instruments looked like and what music was playing in the room during the surgery. And things like this have happened a number of times. So in my view, there's no question that some near-death experiences are very real. (0:17:11)

The other thing that, for me, is very convincing is that people have surveyed the literature, and there are thousands of examples of this in the literature, where people go down a tunnel, and they see loved ones and relatives at the other end of the tunnel. Nobody in the medical literature who's had a near-death experience has ever seen a living person at the other end of the tunnel. (0:17:32)

It's not like you kind of watch your mother, and your mother's still alive, and you see her at the other end of the tunnel. Only dead people are at the other end of the tunnel, including people that you didn't know were dead. There are a number of examples of people who were in car accidents, where someone in the car died, and they didn't know the person died, because they were critically injured also, and they saw that person on the other side of the tunnel, but not people in the car who didn't die. (0:17:58)

Everybody asks about Phineas Gage. Phineas Gage was a gentleman who, in a work accident in the 19th century, had an iron spike that was driven through his brain. And his personality changed. He was a religious, upstanding man before this, and after this, he wasn't too bad a guy, but he kind of lived the high life a little bit. And people say, well, doesn't that prove that the brain completely controls the mind? (0:18:26)

And it doesn't. Gage's emotional state changed, but there's no evidence that there was any change in his mathematics or reason or things like that. (0:18:36)

So obviously, if you have a brain injury, you can have changes in the way you behave, but that doesn't mean that every aspect of the mind comes from the brain. A question that is being asked, particularly nowadays with AI, is the mind a kind of computation? And no, it's not. It's not a kind of computation for a very simple reason. Everything in your mind is pointed at something. (0:19:02)

It has a meaning to it. When you think, you always think about something. You can think about Dallas. You can think about a laptop. Think about your family. But nothing in computation has any aboutness to it. That is, a word processor, a word processing program, doesn't care about your opinion in the essay you're writing. You can write a pro essay and a con essay. (0:19:30)

It doesn't matter. Computation has no aboutness. A camera doesn't care whether you're taking a picture of a sunset or a picture of a snow scene. It couldn't care less. So computation has no meaning in it. The only meaning is what we ascribe to it. So not only is the mind not a kind of computation, it's the opposite of computation. Now, you can study the brain as if it were a computer, but that's just an artificial framework you're imposing on the brain. (0:20:02)

But the mind is not a kind of computation. It's the opposite. Then you can ask the question, did the mind evolve? I don't really think that anything evolved, but I certainly don't think that the mind evolved. And the reason is very simple. If natural selection is a real force that can actually create biological novelty, which I don't believe for the most part that it can, it can only work on physical things. (0:20:30)

And at least part of the mind, as we've seen repeatedly, is not physical. So you can't evolve something that isn't inherent to matter. So is the brain the organ of the mind? Seems like a crazy question. But it's not crazy at all. Because our capacity for reason, our capacity for free will, can't be evoked from the brain. But we certainly have this capacity. (0:20:59)

So I think the most reasonable scientific conclusion is that the brain is the organ of movement, perception, memory, and emotion. Those definitely come from the brain. There's no question about that. But there is no organ of intellect and will. Now, the brain in some sense is necessary for normal functioning of the intellect and will. That is, you're not going to be able to think too clearly about calculus if you've just been hit over the head with a baseball bat. (0:21:29)

And your will can be affected by alcohol, which affects the brain. But that doesn't mean that your intellect and your will come from the brain. Because there's a ton of scientific evidence that they don't come from the brain. So the first question we ask is, does the soul exist? And the answer is, yes, the soul exists. (0:21:48)

The soul is what animates a human being. Our soul is everything that makes us alive. So part of the soul is brain activity. Moving, sensing, emoting, and remembering. But part of the soul is this abstract capacity that we have. So what really then is the soul? It's like a hybrid. Well, the soul can do a variety of things. It knows. It loves. We know things. We love things. (0:22:24)

And it animates us. It makes us living human beings. It has no parts, as Sperry and Surgent and Pinto found. If you cut the brain in half, you don't cut the soul in half. It has no location, meaning near-death experiences. Don't happen in a place, at least in this world, that we can put our finger on. You know, you can't find the tunnel anywhere that people go down. (0:22:52)

A soul is not in time. Near-death experiences are timeless, in a sense. And the soul abides, meaning it exists even after death. And it can even exist with severe brain injury. So the soul is a spirit. And our spirit is our soul. We are the only living creatures whose souls are spirits. Animals have souls. Even plants have souls. But their souls are entirely material. (0:23:21)

Their souls, like an animal's soul, lets the animal remember and move and perceive and do things like that. Very important stuff. But animals don't do calculus. Animals don't think about God. Animals don't even have free will. They can have appetites, but they don't think morally about things. So we are the only living creature that has a spiritual soul. And again, while one can make a very strong theological argument about the truth of this, and even a philosophical argument, you can make an equally strong neuroscientific argument. (0:23:55)

And since truth is unitary, the arguments, if they're true, all have to line up. And in fact, they do line up. We are a paradigm of all creation, meaning we're a mixture of spirit and matter. We have one foot in matter, our body, our movement, sensation, memory, and emotion, and one foot in spirit, intellect, and free will. And that's been referred to by theologians as the great chain of being. (0:24:24)

We are made in God's image, in this sense, that God is infinite spirit. He's knowledge, love, and power. And the human soul knows, loves, and acts, and we are created in His image. The spiritual aspect of our soul is God's image. Is the soul immortal? One could at least think that, okay, well, all right, so we have souls, so it's a spirit, but when our body dies, the spirit blinks out, goes away. (0:24:54)

The question then is, can a spirit die? What does it mean for a spirit to die? Which we can get at by asking, what does it mean to die? What does death really mean? So if you think of a chair, a tree, and a dog, say, how do those things die? (0:25:18)

Well, a chair, at least metaphorically, could be said to die. And what happens if a chair dies is that it's reduced to wood chips, just a pile of dust. You say, well, there's no longer any chairs, just a pile of dust. The matter in the chair never goes away, but it's just dust now instead of a chair. The tree is the same thing. When the tree dies, it rots and just goes back into soil. (0:25:42)

The dog is the same thing. So life is an integration of matter to make a living thing, and death is a disintegration of matter. When we die, our bodies don't go away, they disintegrate. But every atom inside our body will end up somewhere else. So the physical body can disintegrate, but can a soul, a spiritual soul, disintegrate? And to get a feeling for the answer to that question, think about the number 8. There are two ways that the number 8 can be represented. (0:26:22)

One is written down on a piece of paper, and the other is, conceptually, thinking about the number 8. Well, certainly, the number 8 written on a piece of paper can disintegrate if you put the paper on fire and burn it. It just becomes a pile of ash. So in that sense, the number 8 can die, can disintegrate, if it's material. But the number 8, conceptually, one might say the spiritual number 8, can't die. (0:26:52)

You're not going to hear from a mathematics department at a local university that the number 8 passed away yesterday. And so now we have to count from 6, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10. So numbers don't die, abstract things don't die, and spirits don't die. Matter disintegrates, spirits can't disintegrate. And note that this immortality is natural. Of course, it comes from God, but we are naturally immortal. (0:27:26)

That is, it's in our nature that our spirit cannot disintegrate and cannot die. Your spiritual soul has no off switch. Your body has an off switch, but not your soul. And the soul is mortal. One question that has utterly fascinated me for many years, and I've thought about it philosophically, theologically, etc., and it's bothered me a little bit. When people have near-death experiences, they report beautiful scenes. (0:28:02)

They say the colors are just breathtaking. And their vision is like nothing they've ever experienced on Earth. And, you know, I'm a scientist of sorts, and I say, well, how can you see without eyes? You know, we're talking about a spiritual soul. Spiritual souls are neat things, but they don't have eyes. You know, in the resurrection they'll have eyes, but you're in that intermediate state. (0:28:27)

So how do you see anything? And Thomas Aquinas addressed this question almost a thousand years ago, and he gave kind of an analogy. He said, imagine that life on Earth is like being inside a church with stained glass windows at night. And the church is lit from indoors with candles. (0:28:54)

So it's kind of dim in there. You can see things. You can see the, you know, the windows at night, but it's dark outside. And you just see this dim inside of the church. And imagine you're getting towards daylight, but it's still dark. And then the candles go out. And that's when you die. But as the sun rises, suddenly you see incredibly beautiful things. (0:29:23)

You see by God's light from outside. So the light that people are seeing, I think, in near-death experiences is divine light. And that's how we see. It's a different kind of light. So thank you. And we discuss these issues in much more detail and other issues in The Immortal Mind. And thank you for listening.

(0:29:50)

(2025-06-13)