In this thought-provoking episode of Real Science Radio, Dr. Michael Egner shares his ground-breaking work on the brain’s blood flow and its impact on our understanding of the mind. He brings fresh insights into the longstanding debate between material science and spirituality, challenging mainstream perceptions of pseudoscience. Learn how a neurosurgeon’s insights into conditions like epilepsy can profoundly inform our appreciation of the concept of the soul.
Right now, the evidence is that we have a soul. The evidence is overwhelming and very clear. But it’s important to understand what I mean by a soul.
SPEAKER 03 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune in to Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 03 :
Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 04 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams.
SPEAKER 02 :
And I’m Doug McBurney. It’s great to be with you, Fred. Today, we’re going to have a conversation with Dr. Michael Egner. He’s a medical doctor, a professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University, and he is what Wikipedia calls an advocate of the pseudoscientific concept of of Intelligent Design. He’s a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute who’s been a leading voice addressing intelligent design, the mind-brain relationship, and the limits of materialistic explanations for science.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, so whether you’re tuning in as a skeptic or a seeker, you’re in for a fascinating ride. Dr. Egnor, thank you so much for joining us today on Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 05 :
Thank you, Fred, and thank you, Doug. It’s a pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hey, awesome. Dr. Egner, I read a quote that was attributed to you that refers to a time when you were studying cranial physiology, and you are reported to have said the cranial system was, quote, like an ingeniously designed gadget, and that, quote, most of what I needed to know was not in biology textbooks, but in engineering textbooks. Can you elaborate on that?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yes. My main line of research is studying how the blood flow in the brain, which comes from the heart and is pulsatile, is adjusted by the brain to prevent damage to the capillaries of the brain. And I’ve been doing that research for about 25 years. And the medical name for it is the Windkessel effect. And I began studying the Windkessel effect, which has never been studied in detail in the brain before. again about 25 years ago and I looked at everything I could in the medical textbooks and I honestly couldn’t find Anything that really shed light on how the system worked and but I realized that it was kind of a mechanical problem That is that you’ve got this strong pulse from the heart and the brain has to deal with that strong pulse and protect itself from damage from from from that pulse so I went to the engineering literature and I started looking at engineering books on vibration control how to how to machines deal with strong vibrations and And I came to realize that I was learning how the brain process worked by studying the engineering books. So my personal library is full of engineering books. I’ve got a few medical textbooks around, but the engineering told me how this process worked inside the brain. And frankly, if you don’t know engineering, you can’t understand living things at all. All of it’s based on engineering.
SPEAKER 04 :
Wow. Yeah. Well, so true. I mean, we’ve had Sal Cordova on and he’s talked about how many of these firms involved in science and a lot of these companies, they have a molecular biology project or whatever they’re working on. They’ll hire engineers from MIT, Stanford, as much as they’ll hire the molecular biologists because of just of what you just said about, you know, the engineering aspect of all of this.
SPEAKER 05 :
Well, really what biology and medicine is, is reverse engineering. which is a very real field in engineering where you take a device that has been engineered, but you don’t know exactly how it was made, and you study it and figure out how they put it together. And that’s really what we do in medicine, what we do in biology. Even people who don’t believe in intelligent design still use these principles to study the human body.
SPEAKER 02 :
Dr. Edgar, I just wanted to say that whoever attributed the description of you as an advocate of the pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design, I would guess that that person in their daily life recognizes and uses the ideas of intelligent design in things they do every day, yet they call it a pseudoscience, which to me… That’s like a form of insanity to call something that you use every day a pseudoscience just because you’re afraid to admit there’s a creator.
SPEAKER 05 :
Right, right, exactly. It’s a ridiculous term. If you’re, for example, studying the heart, if you don’t begin with the idea that the heart is a pump, you can’t do any science at all. So the inference that the heart is a pump, which is an obviously designed inference, is where you have to start. Now whether you think that design just happened by Darwinian mechanisms or you think that design came from God, that’s a separate question. But you have to infer design. So intelligent design is by no means a pseudoscience. It’s actually the backbone of modern medical science.
SPEAKER 04 :
Like you said, it’s reverse engineering. So many times, so many examples we see in the scientific literature of reverse engineering some creature that God created. So Dr. Eggner, you have a new book out this summer. Early this summer, it’s The Immortal Mind, A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. So we wanted to dive into that. I have a kind of a personal connection to some degree, someone very close to me. has epilepsy. And I, you know, we did a show, I don’t know, several years ago, and we mentioned your work in this particular case. And I don’t know if you get into this in your book. It’s a new book and I haven’t had a chance to read it. It’s one I definitely recommend just knowing the work that you’ve done. But, you know, to kind of let the cat out of the bag, from what I understand, you cut a person’s brain essentially in two. I mean, one hemisphere from the other. Somehow you disconnected the two. And this was the case of severe epilepsy. Could you tell us about that?
SPEAKER 05 :
Sure. There are some kinds of seizures that aren’t controlled well with medication. There are people who have 20 or 30 seizures a day, even in the presence of medication. And there’s an operation that was developed in the 1940s that’s been used thousands of times called a corpus callosotomy. And a corpus callosotomy is where you go in and there’s a huge bundle of fibers about the size of the palm of your hand that connect the right and left hemisphere. And if you cut that bundle of fibers, that connects the two hemispheres. A seizure that begins on one side of the brain can’t travel to the other side. And that makes the seizures much, much more mild or in some cases makes them go away entirely. So it’s not a common operation, but I’ve done it, it’s still done. And it works very well. Back in the 1950s and 60s, there was a researcher named Roger Sperry, who was a neuroscientist, who realized that with this disconnection of the two hemispheres of the brain, you could study what each hemisphere was doing separately, because they, in fact, were working separately. And it was a fascinating way to study the brain. So he studied people who had had this operation, and he won the Nobel Prize for that. So we learned a lot from that. The first thing that I noticed about patients who’ve had this operation is that after the operation, they’re perfectly normal people. You would think that cutting the brain in half would cause a radical change in the way a person’s mind worked and so on, because the hemispheres really are disconnected. But it’s not. The person is still totally unified. They feel like one person. In no meaningful way do they have two centers of consciousness or anything. They do have some very subtle perceptual issues. For example, the left hemisphere of the brain controls the ability to speak in most people. And if you present a picture to the right hemisphere of the brain of a split brain patient, and you can do that by putting it in the proper place in the person’s visual field, the person knows what it is, but they can’t say it because that information can’t get from the right hemisphere over to the left hemisphere. So there are subtle issues, but they still feel like one person and they’re perfectly functional. And Dr. Sperry noted that himself and many other researchers have studied it much more carefully. And if you’d like to, I can go into more detail. But it’s a fascinating observation that cutting your brain in half doesn’t actually change your mind nearly as much as you think it would.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, it’s amazing. And by the way, anyone who’s scheduled for surgery tomorrow at Stony Brook, you should know that doctor does have some medical books lying around. You did mention that at the beginning. I do have them. But just to a layman, the idea of a surgeon… Well, maybe I could just ask you, who was the first surgeon who had the courage and the chutzpah to cut that bundle of fibers to try to help someone? And wow, that’s just astonishing that that happened.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, I actually kind of contemplated that as well. The backstory to it is that there are people who are born without a corpus callosum. There are people who have a birth defect where the corpus callosum isn’t present. It’s actually surprisingly common. And these people very often are perfectly normal people. They’re certainly not two people. So it was kind of known that the corpus callosum wasn’t as critical as it first seemed. And in the 1940s, they performed the operation on a number of animals. and found that the animals behaved entirely normally afterwards. There seemed to be no problem with it. So they felt that it was safe to try. And these patients had seizures that was really making it impossible to live. So they had to do something, and it worked out very well.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. Okay, so we’ve talked about the brain, the physical side of things. Let’s take this to the soul, because Genesis 2-7 informs us that the Lord God formed man… of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” So how does such a declaration stand up against the practice of medicine, brain surgery, neurosurgery, and the understanding of modern neuroscience?
SPEAKER 05 :
Sure. Well, the story is kind of interesting. It played a major role in my conversion to Christianity and a major role in my understanding of the human person and my understanding of science. When I realized that the way the mind and brain interact is really described quite accurately by just traditional Christian theology and Christian philosophy. What’s been found in the science is that, for example, there’s a neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield, who is one of the pioneers in neurosurgery. He worked in the early and mid-20th century. And he studied epilepsy a lot. That was one of his major things. He operated on like 1,100 patients with awake brain surgery, where the patient remains awake during the surgery. You can give local anesthesia so there’s no pain, and you can map the brain and find out what parts of the brain do what. So he did some amazing work. And Penfield asked a question in the beginning of his research that is, I think, the most important question in neuroscience. And he asked, does the brain explain the mind completely? That is that if you understand the brain and how it works, do you completely understand how the mind works and what the mind is? And over a period of 40 years of practicing and research, he came to the conclusion that it doesn’t, that there are parts of the mind that are not explained by the brain. And he came to this for a variety of reasons. He came to this conclusion for a variety of reasons. The first reason was that he began his career by studying everything that was known about epilepsy. And he wanted to know exactly what happens when people have seizures. The seizure we tend to think of is a generalized seizure where people go unconscious and shake and things like that. That happens a lot. But there are many kinds of epileptic seizures where people don’t go unconscious, where people remain conscious but they have movements or sensations that happen. And Penfield studied this in great detail and he found that when people remain conscious, there are four things that can happen during a seizure. One is that you can have an uncontrollable movement. You can have an arm that shakes. The second thing is you can have a sensation, like you can see flashes of light or feel tingling on your skin or smell a funny odor. The third thing is that you can have memories. That is, seizures can present as a memory, like a recurrent memory of something that happened in childhood. The fourth thing is that seizures can cause powerful emotions. You can have an emotion of fear. There’s a rare kind of seizure called a gelastic seizure that causes laughter, that people think everything is funny. But what Penfield noticed was that there were no intellectual seizures. No one ever has a seizure that makes them do mathematics. No one ever has a seizure that makes them do logic or philosophy. What we’re doing here, talking about the mind and the brain, never comes from a seizure. No one ever does that. And that has remained true. I’ve studied seizures also. So Penfield asked the question, why aren’t there any intellectual seizures? Why does it never happen? And he said, well, a seizure is electrical activity in the brain that gets out of control. And we know that it can make you move or have sensations or have memories or have emotions. But if it doesn’t make you have abstract thought, then maybe that’s because abstract thought isn’t coming from the brain. Maybe the mind… is where abstract thought comes from, but that’s not in the brain. So, essentially, maybe we have a soul, and certain things come from the soul, like the ability to reason, to form concepts, to have free will, but they don’t come from the brain itself. What he then did is he did research on mapping the brains of 1,100 people. And he stimulated the brains like a thousand times during each operation, which lasted six or eight hours. He would stimulate the brain and see what the person thought and did, etc. And he found the same thing, that when he stimulated the brain, he could stimulate a movement, he could stimulate a sensation, he could stimulate a memory, or he could stimulate an emotion. But he never could stimulate calculus. He could never stimulate logic or reasoning. He said, again, maybe reasoning doesn’t come from the brain. Maybe it comes from what one might call the soul. So he felt that the brain did not explain the mind completely and that the capacity for abstract thought and the capacity for free will were not from the brain.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s incredible. So I wanted to ask you a question related to this, and I don’t know if there’s an answer, but this, I’ll say family member that has epilepsy, they’re well controlled with medication. But there was one time in my life where they totally went blank for like a minute and just staring straight. We’re driving. And I’m ready to go to the hospital. And then next thing I know, they’re back and they’ve resumed their conversation from before. Have you ever had that as an example?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah. Those are sometimes called absent seizures or petty mal seizures. And they’re relatively common. And sometimes people will have little stereotype movements. They’ll stare. Sometimes they smack their lips, but they’re really kind of out of it for a few seconds. It can be a minute or two. It’s a well-recognized kind of seizure. Fortunately, many people outgrow it. It’s a rather common seizure in childhood, and frequently they outgrow it by the time they become adults. Gotcha.
SPEAKER 02 :
And so, Doctor, the observations of Penfield… It sounds like they drove you to look deeper into where exactly does all this come from? Where does the math and the calculus and the intellectual capacity and thought, where does that all come from? are you prepared to say with confidence that it has convinced you that there is a soul, or are you still open to the idea that there’s some other seat of this intellect and these observed behaviors?
SPEAKER 05 :
Oh, I’d say with as much certainty as one can have in science, of course there’s a soul. And the evidence is overwhelming. If you look at The number of seizures that people have had, say, over the past 200 years, if you look back at that, which is really the era of modern neuroscience began maybe in the early 19th century. I did a back of the envelope calculation based on the incidence of seizures and it’s about 250 million seizures people have had across the world. There’s not a single report in the medical literature of anybody having a seizure that involves abstract thought. And so that’s a huge database. Penfield himself found that in these 1100 patients and what was probably the better part of a million brain stimulations that he did on these people together Not once could he evoke an abstract thought. So the evidence that the soul exists and that the capacity for reasoning, for abstract thought, as well as the capacity for free will, are immaterial spiritual powers and not powers of the brain itself is overwhelming. There are very few things in science, I think, that are that clearly proven.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, so is there a response to that position from those who dub you as pseudoscientific? Have you heard a response?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, the two responses that I get is, number one, they sometimes just ignore it because they’re neuroscientists and they just don’t pay any attention to this perspective. The other response, which is the more common response, is what one might call promissory materialism. That is that they’ll say, well, we haven’t found the spot in the brain where the intellect comes from yet. Or maybe it’s too complex and it’s not really a spot. It’s kind of an integration of information. But we’ll figure it out eventually. And what I tell them is, well, we have to deal with the evidence that we have right now. And I give them my phone number and I tell them, if you figure it out, call me. Because right now the evidence is that we have a soul. The evidence is overwhelming and very clear. But it’s important to understand what I mean by a soul. Because there are different ways of understanding what the soul is. There are two main Christian ways of understanding the soul. And both of them are perfectly credible ways of understanding. I have a preference for one of them. The first way was what you might call the Platonic way of understanding the soul, that the soul is like a separate substance and it’s kind of like a ghost that lives in your body and it’s separable from your body. It was derisively referred to by a philosopher named Gilbert Ryle back last century as the ghost in the machine, but that’s not quite what Christians mean by this and it doesn’t really accurately represent what that is. And that perspective is called substance dualism or sometimes Cartesian dualism. And there’s a lot to say for it. And I have friends and colleagues who take that perspective. It’s not quite my perspective. The way I see the soul was the way that Aristotle saw it and the way that Thomas Aquinas saw it. And the way that they saw it, I think, matches neuroscience beautifully. What Thomas Aquinas said was that the soul is, first of all, it’s not something spooky. The soul is not like, it’s not like a translucent image of you that can kind of come out of your body and you can kind of see through it and stuff like that. Like that movie Ghost, Patrick Swayze. That’s not what the soul is. What Thomas Aquinas said with following on Aristotle is that the soul is simply all of the activities that make us alive. For example, my capacity right now to speak with you is a part of my soul. My heartbeat is a part of my soul. My capacity to digest food is a part of my soul. My capacity to see is a part of my soul. When you take everything that makes a person alive and subtract from that everything that’s true of them when they’re dead, the difference is the soul. So it’s not mysterious. It’s not spooky. It’s just what makes us alive. But if you look at the soul that way, you realize that the mind is a set of powers. It’s a set of abilities that we have. The ability to see, the ability to perceive, the ability to speak. the ability to remember, the ability to understand, the ability to act freely, all these abilities. And what both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas realized is that some of the abilities come from the body itself. There’s no question. I mean, your ability to see. comes from your eyes, from your optic nerves, from your brain. If you have an injury to that part of your brain or your eyes, you can’t see. That’s very obvious. But there are other abilities that don’t seem to come from the brain. And Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle knew this 2,000 years ago. They said that the ability to have abstract thought to think about things like mathematics, can’t come from the brain because it’s the kind of an ability that a piece of flesh cannot create. It goes beyond flesh. And what amazed me is that when you look at neuroscience, that’s exactly what we find today. So we find that the Thomistic understanding of the soul from St. Thomas, which really is the dominant classical Christian understanding of the soul, is also the best understanding of neuroscience.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. So I’m curious about, with the work that you’ve done, so what happens in things like dementia and Alzheimer’s? I’m curious because, you know, obviously the brain itself isn’t working as well. And I’m curious how that connects.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s a question that people often raise, that if you point out that certain abilities of the mind don’t come from the brain, they’ll say, well, yeah, but what happens when your brain is badly damaged when you have something like Alzheimer’s? Obviously, your mind doesn’t work very well. Alzheimer’s is a disease of memory. That is, you lose the capacity to form new memories and to retrieve old memories. And memory comes from the brain. There’s no question about that, that memory is tightly linked to brain function. There are memory pathways inside the brain that when you’re doing brain surgery, you have to be very careful not to damage because you can destroy a person’s ability to remember things. So no one doubts that memory comes from the brain. The best way to understand this relationship between the brain and the mind with things like memory and intellect and so on is the concept of necessity and sufficiency. There’s no question that a good functioning brain is necessary under ordinary circumstances for all aspects of the mind. If my brain isn’t working well, I’m not going to be able to do mathematics very well. If I drink a lot of alcohol and get drunk, I’m not going to be able to calculate numbers nearly as well as I do if I’m sober. If I have Alzheimer’s disease and there’s brain damage, I’m not going to be able to remember things as well or even get to the point where I can’t speak or I can’t do things purposefully. So the brain is necessary for the mind and for the expression of the soul. But there are certain parts of the soul that the brain is not sufficient for. And what it’s not sufficient for is intellect and will. So the brain is not sufficient for expressing rational thought. It’s not sufficient for free will. So people with Alzheimer’s have severe impairments of their brain. And because the brain is necessary to express oneself, to have memories and so on, it causes major deficits. That doesn’t mean, though, that abstract thought comes from the brain. It just means the brain is necessary for the expression of it. It’s kind of analogous to if you’re looking at your cell phone and you’re talking to your wife on the cell phone and the cell phone battery runs out. And you can’t talk to your wife anymore on the cell phone. That doesn’t mean that your wife lives in the cell phone and she went away when the battery died. It just means that the cell phone is necessary if you’re at a distance to talk to your wife. But it doesn’t mean your wife lives there. Your intellect and your will don’t live in your brain. They don’t live anywhere. They don’t have a location. But you can’t express intellect and will properly if your brain is damaged.
SPEAKER 04 :
So I have a follow-on question to that. That’s really fascinating. So kind of on the other end of the spectrum, we did a show, I don’t know, a couple, it’s been, I don’t know, maybe five years with the late Bob Enyart on savants. And so you’ve got this other spectrum. Bob came up with what I thought was a really good definition of what a savant is. And I wanted to run this by you and then maybe get your comment on a savant. So he said, a savant is a person who can access some of the originally created extraordinary capabilities of the mind and the brain, which because of sin are now mostly latent. And a person with a physiological break in the barrier that formed after man’s fall is That break, opening partial access through the barricade designed to block access to our greatest intellectual potential. And Bob’s position was that at the fall, God blocked access to even more greater intellectual potential just because of the sinful nature of man, just how much worse we’d be if we were… that much more capable and intelligent. And I wanted to get your thoughts on this. For those interested, the show’s at rsr.org slash savant. So, Dr. Agnor, do you have any thoughts on, you know, this other side of the spectrum on savants?
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, I think he’s exactly right. I think that actually nails it in a very nice way. Another way of looking at the relationship between the mind and the brain was proposed by William James, who is one of the founders of modern psychology. back in the late 19th century, and a lot of other philosophers have looked at it this way. I think James is right. He said that we think of the brain as the organ that generates the mind. He said that maybe it’s better to think of the brain as the organ that focuses the mind. that the mind is much larger and much more powerful than the brain lets it be. The brain limits the mind. And the analogy he used was if you take on a sunny day a magnifying glass and you hold the magnifying glass against the sidewalk or near the sidewalk, you can focus some of the sunlight on a spot on the sidewalk. And that focus spot is basically analogous to our mind and the brain is like the magnifying glass.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape, stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That’s Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 03 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune in to Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real. That’s what I’m talking about.
In this thought-provoking episode of Real Science Radio, Dr. Michael Egner shares his ground-breaking work on the brain’s blood flow and its impact on our understanding of the mind. He brings fresh insights into the longstanding debate between material science and spirituality, challenging mainstream perceptions of pseudoscience. Learn how a neurosurgeon’s insights into conditions like epilepsy can profoundly inform our appreciation of the concept of the soul.
