The Immortal Mind

The mind is a curious thing. Some people believe it is purely the product of the brain, but in truth, no one really knows where consciousness resides. There are theories, of course, but that’s all they are. This poses a problem for the materialist, as evolution can’t explain why consciousness exists at all. I recently read a book entitled “The Immortal Mind” by neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, and I think it confirms a lot of what I have speculated about the consciousness/mind/soul (whatever you want to call it) and what we as Christians believe. He makes the case that the mind is not a product of the brain and gives many reasons for doing so.

For those who have crippling epileptic seizures, a procedure is done where they actually split the brain in half to stop the seizures. It was initially worried this would result in severe physical disabilities and would split the mind in half. Interestingly enough, it did neither of those things. Patients were able to live completely normal lives afterward. This proved that splitting the brain in half does not split the mind. The mind, having no discernible parts, remained unified. This was also observed to be true of conjoined twins who shared 30% of their frontal lobe brain tissue. They both had distinct, individual minds with their own personalities despite sharing a brain.

When a brain is operated on, it is done with only topical anesthesia because the brain can’t feel pain, and they want the patients to be alert so they don’t cut the wrong thing. Dr. Wilder Penfield, a pioneer in the field of neurosurgery, was instrumental in mapping out the brain. He did this by stimulating the patient’s brain with an electrode. He found he could stimulate the patient’s brain to evoke certain emotions, sensations, memories, and movements, but he couldn’t stimulate the mind. No amount of stimulation altered the patients' thoughts; they were fully aware of what was happening to them. Their will, reason, intellect, etc. all remained unaffected. This showed that the mind can act independently of the brain. 

Other examples are given of people who lost parts of their brain either from surgery or from birth defects. It’s true that there are those with large parts of their brain missing who are handicapped, but it is also true that many function quite well, despite having key parts of their brain missing, including up to half. One example given was a little girl named Katie who was born with only a sliver of frontal lobes, a plate of deep brain tissue, and a spinal cord. The rest of her head was filled with water. Long story short, she grew up normally and even made her high school’s honor roll.

The brain is an important organ, no doubt, but then so are other organs in the body. Certainly, if a brain is severely damaged, it can affect the intellect and will, but that is because brain damage impairs memory or perception areas that are needed for the mind to comprehend things. But if the mind was purely the product of the brain, then any parts missing should always result in impairment, which isn’t necessarily the case.

One theory is that consciousness is a by-product of the processing of neurons in the cerebral cortex. Yet, that’s the part of the brain missing in children born without cerebral hemispheres, called hydranencephaly. Although it produces severe handicaps, they are still very much conscious. The cerebral cortex is considered to be the thinking part of the brain, yet some basic thinking occurs with no cortex at all.

Awareness in even the deepest level of coma is also common. An interesting test was given to a thirty-four-year-old woman in a coma as the result of a severe car accident and diagnosed with persistent vegetative state (PVS). She was fitted with a headset and put into an MRI machine. She was asked to imagine certain things, like playing tennis. When tested and compared with people who had normal brain functions, the woman in a coma had the exact same pattern of brain activation.

At least five other PVS patients were able to respond to requests to think about certain scenarios, and one was even able to answer yes-or-no questions using fMRI imaging. If the mind were completely a product of the brain, those patients should not have been able to respond at all. It demonstrates that even if the brain is altered, the mind is not necessarily altered. The mind may generally depend upon the function of the brain, but it can also function independently at times, as with dementia patients who suddenly become lucid, especially near death, called terminal/paradoxical lucidity.

Then there are Near Death Experiences (NDE). NDEs have been recorded in ancient texts for thousands of years. One very well-documented case is that of a woman named Pam Reynolds. Pam had a bulging aneurysm that required radical surgery. After she was given anesthesia, Dr. Robert Spetzler chilled her body to 60°F/15.6°C, stopped her heart so no blood flowed to the brain, and drained her brain of blood. That gave him a 30-minute window to complete the surgery. Her eyes were lubricated and sealed shut, and her vitals were completely monitored during this time, including her brainwaves. During the operation, she was clinically dead. To further confirm this, they had earplugs in both her ears that emitted a loud 100 dB click every second to stimulate the nerves in her ears so they could record the brain waves. When she stopped responding to the clicks, they knew all brain activity had ceased.

That’s when something extraordinary happened. She recalled feeling being pulled out the top of her head and out of her body. She was able to observe her own surgery, including the operating equipment, the sounds they made, and the conversations in the operating room. This should have been impossible because she wasn’t physically able to see or hear anything, let alone she had no brain activity. She then recalled being pulled through a tunnel of sorts into a place of light. She saw figures, including her deceased grandmother. They communicated to her that if she went any further, she couldn’t return to her body. After the surgery, the doctors warmed up her body, restarted her heart, and brought her back to life. All these events were confirmed by Dr. Spetzler in the BBC documentary The Day I Died.

So, the brain seems to act as an intermediary between the mind and the body. The mind exists independently and transmits instructions to the brain, which then relays those instructions to the body. To use an analogy, the mind is a computer programmer, and the brain is the computer. Something might go wrong with the computer, or it might even stop working, preventing it from receiving instructions. But the computer programmer will still remain unaffected.

The human mind is unique in its ability for abstract thought. It’s one of the things that separate us from animals. That means that the mind has both material and immaterial parts. Material things die, but immaterial, abstract things cannot die. It would like to try to kill numbers, an impossibility. Numbers do not exist as physical objects, yet like the mind, they are real things. According to the first law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be destroyed; it only transforms. Death, then, is merely the transformation from one form to another form.