What Damaged Brains Tell Us About the Mind

What Damaged Brains Tell Us About the Mind

Michael Egnor

The central point that science journalist Denyse O’Leary and I make in our new book The Immortal Mind: a Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul (June 3, 2025), is that the mind is more than just the brain. We have spiritual souls, and we have mental abilities that transcend brain activity.

In Robustness of the Mind-Body Interface: case studies of unconventional information flow in the multiscale living architecture (preprint), scientists  Karina Kofman and Michael Levin lay out the remarkable evidence for the observation that the mind is more than just the brain....Kofman and Levin emphasize that scientific progress often comes from challenging established beliefs. In neuroscience, the most entrenched belief is that the mind is entirely produced by the brain. And some data challenge that belief, for example,

Reduced brain mass or absent brain tissue without the expected loss of function (e.g. hydrocephalus, hemihydranencephaly), discrepancies between   cognitive   state   and   brain   function   (e.g.   accidental   awareness   during anesthesia, terminal lucidity), and cases of cognitive abilities exceeding the apparent skill of the individual, all highlight interesting features of the immense plasticity of the mapping between cognition and its living substrate. These cases suggest new avenues for research…

The paper goes on to describe a number of brain syndromes. They include situations in which people are missing parts of their brains or are supposedly under general anesthesia but are aware of what’s happening. (Yes this happens, but patients rarely feel pain as a result).

They also talk about people with debilitating dementia who have periods of lucidity and normal mental function. Such periods defy the dogma that the brain is wholly responsible for the mind.

In my 40 years of experience as a neurosurgeon, I have seen some of the situations they write about...

Here's the paper linked to by Egnor, posting it separately for clarity:

Robustness of the Mind-Body Interface: Case studies of unconventional information flow in the multiscale living architecture (preprint)

Karina Kofman & Michael Levin

Neuroscience, and behavioral science more broadly, seek to characterize the relationship between functional cognition and the underlying processes operating in living tissue. The current paradigm focuses heavily on the brain, and specific mechanisms thought to underlie mental content and capabilities. One of the most interesting approaches to any field, which often leads to progress, is to highlight data which do not comfortably fit a specific dominant framework. Here, we review clinical and laboratory data in several unconventional systems which are not predicted by the current models in the field. Reduced brain mass or absent brain tissue without the expected loss of function (e.g. hydrocephalus, hemihydranencephaly), discrepancies between cognitive state and brain function (e.g. accidental awareness during anesthesia, terminal lucidity), and cases of cognitive abilities exceeding the apparent skill of the individual, all highlight interesting features of the immense plasticity of the mapping between cognition and its living substrate. These cases suggest new avenues for research that at the very least stretch existing frameworks, and parallels to discoveries being made in the emergent form and behavior of synthetic constructs. We speculate on a roadmap for the study of interesting and still poorly-understood features of embodied minds that could be impactful for biomedicine and engineering, as well as foundational philosophical issues.

More on Levin's ideas can be found here, AFAICTell he's advocating for a kind of Platonic Dualism.