“The human brain is incredible, mysterious, and powerful. But it’s not what makes us who we are. The soul does that.”
Those words were spoken not from a synagogue pulpit or a church lectern, but inside one of America’s most prestigious secular universities. On January 28, Dr. Michael Egnor, a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at Stony Brook University’s Renaissance School of Medicine — an award-winning brain surgeon named one of New York’s best doctors by New York Magazine — stood before an audience at Cornell University and made the case that the soul is not a matter of faith alone. It is, he argued, a matter of evidence.
Egnor began his talk, titled “The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul,” by telling the audience something that surprised them: he started his career as a materialist and an atheist. He grew up in a secular environment, he said, and “worshipped science.” It was science itself — the practice of cutting open human skulls and watching what happened — that changed his mind.
The textbooks he trained on, Egnor explained, were built on a straightforward materialist assumption: the mind is what the brain does. But what he witnessed in the operating room didn’t fit that framework. He described a woman born with two-thirds of her brain missing who grew up completely normal, made the honor roll in junior high, and is today a businesswoman in Manhattan. He described another woman born without cerebral hemispheres or a cerebral cortex — the structures textbooks identify as the seat of consciousness — who is fully conscious. He operated on a woman with a left frontal lobe tumor while she was awake, holding a conversation with her for hours as he removed part of her frontal lobe. By every textbook standard, that conversation should not have been possible.
These cases led Egnor to examine the work of Wilder Penfield, one of the most prominent neurosurgeons of the 20th century, who had asked the same question decades earlier: does the brain completely explain the mind? Penfield concluded it did not. Egnor went back and fact-checked Penfield’s findings against the current medical literature. What he found was unambiguous. Over 400,000 brain mapping operations have been performed in the United States over the past century. In that entire body of medical literature, there is not a single documented case of a seizure or direct brain stimulation ever evoking reason or free will. Not one. Seizures produce movement, perception, memory, and emotion. That is all. Reason and free will — the things that make us who we are — cannot be triggered, cannot be cut out, cannot be located anywhere in the brain.
“There’s not a single report in the medical literature of any seizure ever evoking reason or free will,” Egnor told his Cornell audience flatly.
This is precisely where the Hebrew Bible enters the conversation with its own clarity. The Book of Bereishit (Genesis) describes the creation of man in terms that sharply distinguish the physical from the spiritual: “Vayipach b’apav nishmat chayyim vayehi ha’adam l’nefesh chayyah” — “And He blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). The text does not say God engineered a sophisticated brain. It says God breathed a neshama (soul) into man. What Egnor found in the operating room is exactly what the Bible has described for three millennia.
But Judaism does not treat the soul as a single, undifferentiated thing. The Sages identified five distinct dimensions of the human soul, each representing a deeper level of connection between the human being and God. Understanding these layers makes Egnor’s findings even more striking — because what neuroscience cannot locate in the brain maps precisely onto what Jewish tradition describes as the soul’s higher faculties.
The most basic level is the nefesh (life-force), the animating principle tied most closely to the physical body and the blood. It is the dimension of soul shared, in a basic sense, with all living creatures. Above that is the ruach (spirit), associated with emotional life, moral character, and the force of personality. These two lower aspects of the soul correspond most closely to what brain science can at least partially trace — mood, temperament, instinct, and emotional response.
The third level, the neshama (breath/higher soul), is where the divide between brain and mind becomes scientifically visible. The neshama is the seat of sekhel (intellect) and moral reasoning — the capacity to think abstractly, to contemplate God, to engage with ethical questions. The Sages taught that the neshama is the dimension of the soul most directly “blown” into man by God Himself, as the verse in Genesis 2:7 makes explicit. This is the faculty that Egnor’s research shows is entirely absent from any seizure record or brain stimulation result in 400,000 documented operations. Reason cannot be switched on by electrical stimulation of the brain. That is not a gap in neuroscience’s knowledge — it is a finding.
Above the neshama are two levels that the Kabbalistic tradition, particularly as systematized in the Zohar and later by the Arizal, Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, identifies as transcendent and largely beyond ordinary human experience. The chayah (living essence) represents the divine life-force, the dimension of soul that perceives unity with God rather than separation from Him. Most human beings touch this level only in rare moments of spiritual clarity. The yechidah (singular one) is the deepest and most rarified level — the point of the soul that is, in the language of the Sages, literally one with God. It is not a faculty that does anything in the ordinary sense. It simply is. It is the divine stamp on each individual human being that makes every person irreplaceable and infinite in worth.
What neuroscience studies — what it can study — touches only the lower rungs of this structure. The nefesh and ruach leave traces in biology. The neshama, chayah, and yechidah do not, because they are not generated by the body. They are invested in it from above. Egnor’s central finding — that reason and free will cannot be located, stimulated, or surgically removed — is, in Jewish terms, exactly what one would expect. You cannot find the neshama with a scalpel because the neshama does not originate in matter.
Egnor put it in his own terms: “If you want to find out how we’re connected to God in an intimate way, in a breathtakingly beautiful way, that science shows us, realize that reason and free will are God’s fingerprints in us. What neuroscience shows us are those fingerprints that you can’t evoke, you can’t stimulate, you can’t cut — that’s reason and free will, and that’s God in us.”
The Cornell lecture was part of a broader speaker series sponsored by the Heterodox Academy Campus Community at Cornell titled “Does God Exist?” — a series that has also featured biochemist Michael Behe on intelligent design, Rice University’s Dr. James Tour on the scientific community’s inability to explain the origins of life, and authors Spencer and Andrew Klavan on the meaning of belief. Associate Professor Randy Wayne, who helped organize the series, told The College Fix that universities dominated by materialist orthodoxy routinely overlook “clues of the immaterial necessary for understanding the nature of the natural world.”
That is a generous way of describing what has happened in mainstream academia. The materialist assumption — that the mind is nothing more than brain chemistry — has not been proven. It has simply been assumed, institutionalized, and taught as a settled fact. Egnor spent a career in one of the most technically demanding fields in medicine, watching that assumption fail.
Judaism mapped the architecture of the soul thousands of years before the first neurosurgery was performed. Five layers, each more transcendent than the last, each corresponding to a deeper level of divine connection — and the two highest layers entirely beyond the reach of any instrument, electrode, or surgical blade. When a brain surgeon at an Ivy League university stands up and tells his colleagues that reason and free will cannot be found in brain tissue, he is not discovering something new. He is confirming something very old. His book, The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, co-authored with Denyse O’Leary and published by Worthy Books, extends these arguments in full. The science is catching up. And it is catching up loudly.
