“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.”
Tag: consciousness
Top Neuroscientist Demonstrates What’s Behind Reality
He was called “The Einstein of Brain Science.” A neuroscientist whose ideas quietly reshaped how we understand the mind, perception, and reality itself. In this talk, he doesn’t speculate. He demonstrates. What he shows challenges one of our deepest assumptions: that reality is simply out there, waiting to be perceived. Decades ahead of his time, Karl Pribram proposed a model of the brain so radical that it forced science to reconsider what perception actually is, and where reality truly comes from.
Megahertz Brain Waves, Microtubule Time Crystals, and the Physics of Consciousness | Stuart Hameroff
“Consciousness may not emerge from neurons firing — it may be the quantum music playing inside them.” At Deep Tech Week San Francisco 2025, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist, professor, and co-creator of the Orch-OR theory of consciousness with Sir Roger Penrose, delivers a mind-bending exploration into the quantum physics of the brain — and why megahertz brain waves and microtubule time crystals could be the hidden heartbeat of awareness itself. In this talk, Hameroff reveals over 40 years of research connecting neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and anesthesia — from the origins of life and cognition to the possibility of consciousness before biology itself. Drawing on experimental data from nanotechnology labs in India, EEG studies, and ultrasound brain stimulation, Hameroff shows that consciousness might operate across a hierarchy of frequencies — from hertz-level cortical oscillations to megahertz and terahertz vibrations deep inside neurons.
Emergent Complexity
Here is Emergent Garden’s thoughts on emergent complexity. I go through a tour of simple systems that produce unexpected complexity, and try to break down emergence into more general and useful ideas. We talk about snowflakes and ant colonies, cellular automata and universe simulations, and the many weird ideas of Stephen Wolfram. I also offer some advice for creating and encouraging emergent behavior. This video is important to me. Emergence is the most interesting thing in the universe.
The Highest Levels of Thinking | Why Society is Stuck at the bottom
Human civilization is built on pyramids. Not just the stone ones baked under the Egyptian sun, but invisible structures, hierarchies of thought, layers of meaning, and levels of thinking that range from the most basic impulses to the heights of true revelation. And yet, despite the astonishing tools, knowledge, and information available to us today, most people never climb past the very first steps. In school, in politics, in culture, and especially online, the majority of society still operates at the lowest layers of thinking: remembering , or more accurately, simply regurgitating everything they’ve been told.
You’re Out of Tune (And It’s Making You Miserable)
What’s the difference between changing yourself and changing the world? Only one of them actually works. In this wide-ranging conversation, Keith Martin-Smith and David Arrell diagnose the core pathology of contemporary life: we’re living in an attainment culture that measures worth through accumulation—more status, more recognition, more stuff—while starving the qualities that actually make life worth living. The result? Epidemic levels of anxiety, polarization, narcissism, and a quiet desperation that no amount of productivity hacks or self-optimization can touch. The alternative isn’t another framework to add to your collection. It’s a fundamental reorientation toward attunement culture—a shift from quantity to quality, from getting to becoming, from conquest to meaning. David lays out the architecture of this shift across three temporal dimensions: HEALTH (The Past): Most of us are operating from developmental anchors—unconscious wounds and reactive patterns that keep us stuck at earlier stages of maturity. When you criticize, control, or comply automatically, you’re not responding to what’s in front of you; you’re responding from an old script. The work is to turn toward these patterns with curiosity, reclaim the energy locked there, and stop letting the past hijack your present. DEPTH (The Present): Your attention is under siege. Billions of dollars have been spent engineering super-normal stimuli to keep you distracted, metabolically aroused, and scrolling. But presence—the capacity to remain grounded when life gets turbulent—is the foundation of wisdom. Character and virtue aren’t abstractions; they’re your ability to tolerate weather without capsizing. The fruits of the spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control) emerge spontaneously when you create the conditions, like apples from a healthy tree. GROWTH (The Future): Beyond your current capacities are your leading edges—the places where you’re stretching into new territory. Growth means tolerating the unknown, throwing aspirational grappling hooks into territory you can’t yet see clearly, and expanding your container of authenticity. It’s not about becoming someone else; it’s about becoming more fully who you already are. Throughout the conversation, Keith and David return to a revolutionary foundation: dignity culture. Unlike respect (which must be earned), dignity simply is—every human being has equal claim to worth by virtue of being human. This creates common ground from which we can build toward higher ground. It dissolves the false choice between dominator hierarchies and victim narratives, between attainment Olympics and oppression Olympics. The examples are visceral: Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t change America by attacking his enemies—he changed it by cultivating such depth of character that he could march from Selma without taking opposition personally. Lama Tsering Everest changed a room simply by walking into it. The power of alignment—when your intrapersonal, interpersonal, and cultural dimensions move in the same direction—is magnetic. The conversation offers practical wisdom for the current moment of cultural chaos: shift from grievance to gratitude, from entertainment to enrichment, from tribe of the chosen to tribe of the chosen ones you intentionally create. Track your attention. Practice humor. Grant dignity to yourself and others. Get your butterflies in formation. This isn’t self-help. It’s a blueprint for becoming the kind of person who can actually create change—not by trying to fix everyone else, but by doing the work that makes your very presence a form of influence.
The Geometry of Consciousness: Understanding the Divine Pattern
This podcast explores a bold new theory proposing that every feeling, thought, or dream may have an actual shape. The Phenomenal Manifold Hypothesis by Éric Reis suggests that consciousness can be mapped as a geometric structure—a “phenomenal manifold” (Ψ). Instead of asking why experience exists, it focuses on describing its structure, much like thermodynamics described heat before molecular theory. According to the model, each conscious experience corresponds to a point in a vast multidimensional landscape, and the distance between points reflects how similar two experiences are. The geometry of Ψ is determined by three measurable properties of brain dynamics: Integration (I), representing how unified and irreducible a conscious moment is; Coherence (Γ), measuring how synchronized neural regions are; and Differentiation (Δ), capturing the richness and variety of possible brain states. These three forces define the curvature, dimensionality, and shape of your inner world at each moment. The theory predicts that different states of consciousness correspond to distinct geometries. Wakefulness forms a high-dimensional space with moderate curvature. Deep sleep or anesthesia collapses the manifold into a low-dimensional, nearly flat structure. Psychedelic states expand the geometry dramatically into a highly complex, high-dimensional manifold with high Differentiation but often lower Coherence. Certain meditative states contract the manifold into a unified, low-volume geometry that may shrink to less than 20% of its waking size. Crucially, the model is testable and falsifiable. It must accurately reconstruct known phenomenological structures—such as color relationships—or it fails. It also predicts that the intrinsic dimension of consciousness should remain relatively stable across healthy individuals; large variations would falsify the theory. The hypothesis also offers a framework for evaluating machine consciousness. By analyzing an AI system’s informational dynamics, researchers could compute Integration, Coherence, and Differentiation. The theory proposes minimal thresholds—such as Imin ≈ 0.15 bits and dimensionality n ≥ 3—for a system to be considered a potential candidate for consciousness. If an AI meets these criteria, the precautionary principle suggests treating it as potentially phenomenal. Ultimately, this podcast discusses how the Phenomenal Manifold Hypothesis proposes that consciousness may have a discoverable geometry. By translating neural information dynamics into geometric structure, it offers a scientific bridge between objective brain activity and subjective experience, opening new ways to map the hidden landscapes of the mind.
Scientists Reveal a Theory Suggesting Another Reality Has Been Intersecting Ours
Right now, while you watch this, another version of you made a different choice. In a lab in California, a particle just passed through two separate slits at the exact same time. Scientists have discovered that reality itself might be splitting into countless copies every single second. We are talking about the Many-Worlds Interpretation, a theory suggesting that infinite parallel universes exist right here, overlapping with ours. If you enjoy exploring these mind-bending ideas, subscribe and hit that like button. Prepare yourselves. We begin.
What Is Life?
What does it truly mean to be alive? Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Paul Nurse answers biology’s most fundamental (and elusive) question in his full interview with Big Think. Drawing from decades of research, Nurse explores how five core ideas redefine life, from the hidden power of the cell to the bizarre machinery inside us all.
This Forgotten Code Shows EXACTLY How Language Controls Reality
Everything is energy – and language is the code that collapses reality. You were never taught this, but every word you speak is a quantum measurement. You are not describing your life – you are fixing it into place. In this 1 hour 19 minute master-class, we expose the hidden mechanism behind manifestation, language, and reality creation through the work of John Archibald Wheeler, quantum physics, and ancient esoteric traditions that understood this thousands of years ago. This video reveals why: • Your subconscious treats words as commands • Observation doesn’t reveal reality — it creates it • Speech collapses probability into lived experience • Silence preserves infinite potential • Repetition stabilizes destiny You’ll learn: • The Participatory Universe explained simply • Why “I am” statements lock identities permanently • How language entangles you with money, health, and relationships • Neville Goddard’s revision method explained through quantum mechanics • The 7 exact protocols to reprogram your reality starting tonight This is not motivation. This is instruction. Once you see this, you can never speak unconsciously again.