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Does the Soul Exist Outside the Brain? Insights from a Neurosurgeon | Dr. Michael Egnor
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By Jan Jekielek
12/4/2025Updated: 12/4/2025

“Neuroscientists who stand up and say ‘we have souls’ are few and far between,” says pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor.

“But when you look carefully at the neuroscience—the best neuroscience over the past century—it clearly points to the existence of the soul and to the existence of aspects of our mind that don’t come from the brain.”

Egnor himself started off as a materialist and atheist. But 40 years and more than 7,000 brain surgeries later, he concluded that reason and free will do not reside in the brain. In this episode, he reveals what he’s found.

“Neuroscience is just fundamentally wrong in a lot of ways … because of the materialist bias in neuroscience. We can’t get away from this machine analogy, [but] we’re not machines, and we don’t work like machines work. And there’s overwhelming evidence in neuroscience for the existence of a soul,” he says.

Dr. Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at Stony Brook University, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and the co-author of the book “The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders.” Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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