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Does the Soul Really Exist? This Neurosurgeon Says Yes

November 20, 2025

Andrew McDiarmid’s recent interview with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor dropped at Discovery Science. Dr. Egnor is the author, along with , of The Immortal Mind: A neurosurgeon’s case for the existence of the soul (2025):

Here’s an excerpt from midway through the podcast [12:38 and following]:

Michael Egnor: Near-death experiences are surprisingly common. There’s no question there. There’s been probably tens of millions of people over over human history who have had things like this.

And there tends to be patterns to them that occur across cultures. People often feel that they’re leaving their body. They often see see their body and they will hover in the vicinity of where they have died. They often describe a kind of a tunnel experience where they go down a passageway and they come into a different world. The world they come into is often very beautiful, although there are some negative experiences there. There are people who have hellish death experiences though probably the most common ones are the pleasant ones. And people go to the other side of the tunnel and they see a beautiful world. They often will have some interaction with the divine figure, and they generally will meet dead friends and relatives.

As Egnor and O’Leary discuss in Chapter 6 of The Immortal Mind, some researchers see these experiences as the hallucinations of a dying brain. The difficulty is that the experiences don’t fit the weird, random pattern of hallucinations; they fit an orderly pattern.

Michael Egnor: A fascinating aspect of near-death experiences is that, to my knowledge, there’s never been a report of someone having a near-death experience where they met anyone on the other side who wasn’t dead. That is, the only people they meet are dead people. There have been a number of recorded instances where people with near-death experiences have met a dead person on the other side of the tunnel who they didn’t know was dead.

From The Immortal Mind:

In After (2021), Greyson identifies another type of information that can result from NDEs: seeing a person who has died but is not known to have died. He offers an example from one of his papers:

“A young nine-year-old boy named Eddie was seriously ill in a hospital. Recovering from a thirty-six-hour fever, Eddie immediately told those in the hospital room that he had been to heaven, recounting seeing his grandfather, an aunt, and an uncle there. But then his startled and agitated father heard Eddie report that his nineteen-year-old sister Teresa, away at college, was in heaven too, and she told Eddie that he had to return. But the father had just spoken to Teresa two days prior. Checking with the college, the father found out that his daughter had been killed in a car accident the previous day.³⁶ The college had not been able to reach Eddie’s parents immediately, probably because they were away with Eddie.” (p. 100)

³⁶ Bruce Greyson, “Seeing Dead People Not Known to Have Died: ‘Peak in Darien’ Experiences,” Anthropology and Humanism 35 (2010): 159– 71. 10.1111/j.1548 – 1409.2010.01064.x. Accessed May 7, 2024.

The Pam Reynolds Challenge

Egnor: And there’s a very famous near-death experience. A woman named Pam Reynolds was a patient who had an aneurysm at the base of her brain, a blood vessel that was about to burst. And she needed a very radical kind of surgery to fix the aneurysm. And it was done in Phoenix at the Barrow Institute by a neurosurgeon named Robert Spetzler. And what she had to have done was, she had to have her body cooled down to about 60° Fahrenheit, put on a heart-lung machine and then her heartbeat was stopped. And Dr. Spetzler went into her brain, drained the blood out of her brain, fixed the aneurysm in minutes, and then restarted her heart, resuffused her brain, and she came back to life. And this was done in the early 1990s.

And she made an excellent recovery. And she reports that when this happened, she felt as soon as her heart stopped, it felt as though she popped out of her body, went up to the ceiling of the operating room, watched the whole operation. And she said she wasn’t frightened. She said it was beautiful and fascinating. She heard the conversations the doctors had which could be checked. She heard the music that was playing in the operating room. She saw the instruments. She then went down a tunnel. She saw her grandmother and her uncle who said she had to come back. She came back, went back into her body and she said it felt like diving into a pool of ice water. It’s kind of interesting because her body temperature was 60°. So it really was a pool of ice water. Um, and so this is probably the best documented case of near-death experiences, in that she was documented by all kinds of machines in the operating room as being completely dead while she had these experiences.

Her descriptions of events during the time she was clinically dead checked out. For example, she heard the OR background music, “Hotel California,” when she was clinically dead by all known measures (p. 91). Dr. Egnor calls her story, the Pam Reynolds challenge, for those who think that NDEs can easily be explained away.

Stay tuned for another episode of Discovery Science where McDiarmid and Egnor will continue to unpack the ways in which near-death experiences are challenging — not science — but the materialist presumption that has dominated for many decades in science.

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