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July 4, 2025 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
36:43
20250704_is-there-life-after-death-with-dr-michael-shermer-
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
Nothing North of the Big Bang 00:07:50
All near-death experiences where you encounter people on the other side are people who are dead, even if you didn't know they were dead.
People who near or have near-death experiences have something called terminal lucidity, often summoning their loved ones to say goodbye.
Is it mere noise from a dying brain, or is it a signal intimating what lies beyond?
What is the soul that's supposedly floating out there?
That is, no scientific theory explains everything.
This is true with UFOs and psychics and whatnot.
And it's just okay to say, you know what, we can't explain everything and there's still a lot unknown.
Let's keep an open mind.
How, Michael, do you explain the hundreds of accurate perceptions by people who are having near-death experiences of the goings-on in the room?
It's the fact that we can't explain these things, which makes me believe claims like Dr. Egnall's making must have validity.
Human beings have always been obsessed with the question of whether there's life after death.
Religion teaches that there is something more than mere mortality.
Mainstream science, however, is decidedly unconvinced.
In recent times, the tech titans of Silicon Valley claim to have found a third way, so-called transhumanism.
They say that if life after death doesn't exist naturally, maybe we can engineer it through AI, robotics, or nanotechnology.
But how much of all this is science fact, and how much of it is science fiction?
Well, here today are Professor Michael Egner.
He's a New York neurosurgeon whose work studying, dissecting, and repairing broken brains has led him to the conclusion that consciousness exists beyond our mortal bodies.
He makes a case for this mind-blowing theory in his new book, The Immortal Mind.
And joining him is Dr. Michael Sherman, the editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, and author of the book Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia.
He claims that the concept of life after death puts religious faith before the facts.
So, a lot to discuss here, literally life itself.
Dr. Egner, let me start with you.
Fascinating paragraph in your book.
Neuroscience for over a century has clearly pointed to the existence of a human soul, to its spirituality, and to its immortality.
Yet these scientific insights are rarely mentioned by scientists, either in scientific publications or in their statements as public figures.
That is a scandal.
And I thought, yes, it is a scandal, but why is it happening?
Why is this like an ongoing suppression by the science world to delve deeper?
Well, there's a bias towards materialism in all kinds of sciences, not only in neuroscience.
And researchers who speak of immaterial things, particularly in neuroscience, face threats to their careers.
They can be ostracized.
But the evidence is there.
It's, I think, very clear.
And many of the greatest neuroscientists of the past century, Charles Sherrington, Wilder Penfield, Benjamin Leibitt, John Eccles, who won the Nobel Prize, have been dualists, have believed that there was more to the mind than just the brain.
And hopefully we will get back to that.
Right.
So I'm, look, I was raised a Catholic.
I believe in God.
I believe in an afterlife, but it's a religious-based belief.
I would love to believe and be convinced by you that there is a science-based reality to this too.
Now, your central thesis, I believe, is that the mind exists independent of the material brain.
The mind can live on even after physical death, which you say is ultimate evidence of the soul.
And I would say to that, I agree with you, but again, I come at this from a religious perspective.
What is the scientific evidence that you've unearthed or come across which justifies your thesis?
There is a lot of scientific evidence, actually, and near-death experiences are very important, but they're really only part of the evidence.
There was research done by Wilder Penfield, who was a pioneering neurosurgeon, one of the greatest neuroscientists of the 20th century, who found that he couldn't elicit abstract thought or free will from the brain when he stimulated the brain during surgery when patients were awake for certain kinds of operations.
There's been a lot of research done on split brain patients that to me shows that there is an aspect of the mind that is not split when the brain is split to treat epilepsy.
There is evidence from near-death experiences.
There's evidence from conjoined twins who share parts of their brains, that there's a part of their brain or their soul that is not shared.
There's a great deal of neuroscience evidence for this.
Well, Dr. Shermer, you're not having any of this, are you?
No, not really.
I read Michael's book.
I enjoyed it.
And I have no bias against the idea of there being an afterlife.
In fact, I'm for it.
I just don't know that it's true or not.
And so if it turns out that Michael's right, and after I close my eyes for the final time here on Earth, I wake up and there he is.
And maybe you're there too.
And Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov and my other atheist friends, we're wrong.
Okay, I'm happy to be proven wrong in that front.
But so far, you know, not only myself, but most neuroscientists who know what Michael knows about all the examples he just gave, they remain unconvinced as well.
So the default position here is that as far as we know, there is no afterlife, although there could be.
And we just, we keep an open mind and remain just skeptical until proven otherwise.
You see, the reason that I've always believed there must be something is because no atheist has ever been able to explain to me what was here before nothing.
In other words, if you subscribe to the Big Bang theory, for example, okay, it's a theory.
It's, you know, I get it.
But what was there before the Big Bang?
And then there's always this awkward silence in the conversation where they say, well, we don't know.
Because the human brain can't compute what was there before nothing or even what the concept of nothing is, then I'm firmly of the belief that there must be something superior out there, which lends support to my theory that there is an afterlife because there was a pre-life that we can't even get our heads around.
So where were you before you were born, Piers?
I've no idea.
But if I ask you, if I ask you what was there before nothing, what's your answer?
Well, okay, so you've touched on some deep issues here.
Cosmologists can go all the way back to close to the Big Bang.
After that, it's just pure mathematics and we hit an epistemological wall.
There's different theories about what could have been before the Big Bang, but this is like asking what's north of the North Pole, nothing.
It's like, what time was it before time began?
There was no time.
So at some point, you know, we just have to...
But even as you say that, hang on, hang on.
None of that actually makes any sense, does it?
You know, what was there before time or nothing?
Well, what's nothing?
What is that?
That's right.
What is nothing?
My point being the human brain cannot comprehend it.
Therefore, there must be something superior to the human brain.
Okay, okay.
The first part is correct, but you made a move there where you say, therefore, how about just therefore we don't know?
Full stop.
And that's okay to just say we don't know.
But filling in a different version, well, therefore, the afterlife, well, which one?
The Catholic version?
The Hindu version?
The Buddhist version?
The consciousness is everything?
The panpsychism version.
In other words, there's tons and tons of different theories about the afterlife and the soul and immortality and the mind, but there's no convergence of evidence to one particular religious belief being the correct one.
Okay, Professor Agno, you didn't always believe what you believe now.
The Reality of Near-Death Experiences 00:10:03
A lot of your life, you were a materialist.
You described yourself as an angry atheist in the book, one who considered prayer and God unscientific.
Yet crucially, it's your work performing awake brain surgery and splitting or even removing parts of your patient's brains that's led you to change your mind.
Explain that to me.
Well, as you noted, I started out a materialist, and I believe that everything in the mind came from the brain.
Wilder Penfield, one of the pioneering neurosurgeons, said the most important question in neuroscience is does the brain explain the mind completely?
And I believe that it did, but he changed his mind on that over his 40-year career, and I changed mine too.
I've had a number of patients who were born with very incomplete brains.
I have a young lady who was missing probably two-thirds of her brain from birth, and she's a completely normal person.
I have a number of other patients who have similar kinds of situations, and it's well known in neurology and neurosurgery that there are patients out there who have very deficient brains, who really have normal minds.
That's not always the case, but it happens enough that it makes us question this relationship.
What really got me to thinking about this in a deep way is I was performing awake brain surgery on a woman who had a left frontal lobe brain tumor many years ago.
And we give local anesthesia, so there's no pain.
And I had to map the surface of her brain to protect the part of her brain that controls her speech while I was taking the tumor out.
The tumor had infiltrated major parts of her left frontal lobe, so I had to take out a significant part of the left frontal lobe of her brain.
And we were having a casual conversation as I was doing it.
She was under the surgical drapes.
We were talking about the weather.
We were talking about her family, talking about the food and the hospital cafeteria.
And that got me to thinking.
My textbooks never explained that.
My textbooks never explained how it is that you can take out major parts of the frontal lobe of the brain, which are supposed to be responsible for abstract thought and things like that, and have a patient be perfectly normal through the entire procedure and normal afterwards.
So I started reading the neuroscience.
I looked deeply into the research and I found that many other neuroscientists had really seen the same kind of thing, that there's more to the mind than just the brain.
Why does that automatically lead you to a conclusion that there must then be an afterlife?
I mean, I could see that it means there may be a soul.
You know, I certainly am happy to subscribe to that theory.
But why does that lead necessarily or consequentially to any kind of afterlife?
Well, that's a very deep question in one sense.
The first answer is that, because near-death experiences suggest that there is an afterlife, there's a lot of science on near-death experiences.
The science is quite strong, and I believe for me, it's quite convincing that there's a reality to survival of the mind after death.
The question as to why the spiritual nature of the mind means that we have an afterlife really goes back to Thomas Aquinas and to some excellent ancient philosophers who addressed that question.
And they pointed out that a spirit is not the kind of thing that can die.
When your body dies, it disintegrates.
But a spirit can't really disintegrate so that we are naturally immortal.
We have natural immortal souls.
And that it's really not even possible for our soul to die.
But there's also a lot of scientific evidence, and the near-death experiences are pretty good scientific evidence.
But on the near-death experiences, for example, I've read these too.
I've known people who were deemed almost clinically dead, and then they've come back and they've told their stories and they've seen all sorts of things.
But, you know, for example, a lot of us have wild, crazy dreams about stuff that never actually happened.
I get a lot of deja vu, right?
Which is very random when it happens.
But I think, again, that's just my brain playing tricks on me.
Why should people's near-death memories, which they think have transported them elsewhere, not just be an extension of dreams and deja vu and everything else?
In other words, not reality, but just something that the brain has tricked them into thinking.
Well, there are four reasons why near-death experiences point to survival of the mind after death that anyone who doubts them has to really account for.
The first thing is that near-death experiences are very clear.
They're very organized.
They involve often a life review, which is not the kind of thing you see from a brain that is hallucinating or a brain that is dying, a brain that lacks oxygen.
The second thing is that about 20% of people with near-death experiences have out-of-body experiences, where they leave their body and they see things that are happening in the room during the time that they have no heartbeat, during the time that they are deeply unconscious and comatose because their brain isn't working.
The third thing that fascinates me and isn't often mentioned is that I'm unaware of any reports in the medical literature of a person who goes down the proverbial tunnel and meets dead relatives who actually met a living person.
That is that all near-death experiences where you encounter people on the other side are people who are dead, even if you didn't know they were dead.
There have been some fascinating cases of people in car accidents where somebody else in the car died.
Somebody else has a near-death experience and the experiencer sees the dead person on the other side, but no one else in the car who lived.
And the fourth reason is that near-death experiences, oh, it's absolutely fascinating.
There are several very well-documented examples of that.
And the fourth reason is that near-death experiences are often transformative.
People are profoundly affected by this.
There's a paradigmatic near-death experience that I call the Pam Reynolds Challenge.
Pam Reynolds was a woman who had an aneurysm at the base of her brain who needed a special kind of neurosurgery.
It was done in 1991 in Phoenix.
And what they had to do is they had to stop her heart.
They had to drain the blood out of her brain.
They cooled her body temperature down to about 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
And they had to repair the aneurysm.
They had to open the artery at the base of her brain with no blood flowing.
They monitored her brain to prove that she had no brain waves.
She had no brainstem activity.
And she had a near-death experience when she was proven to be basically clinically dead during the operation.
She popped out of her body, went up to the ceiling, she watched the operation.
She was able to describe the surgeon's instruments rather precisely afterwards.
She described the conversations the surgeons had.
She described who entered and left the room.
She described the music that was playing.
She went down a tunnel.
She saw her dead relatives.
It was a beautiful place, beautiful scene.
She realized she had to return to raise her three children.
She came back down the tunnel, went back into her body, and when she went back into her body, she said it felt like diving into ice water because her body temperature was 60 degrees.
So this is a very well-documented near-death experience.
And there have been hundreds of people in the medical literature who have had experiences similar to that.
So people who deny the reality of near-death experiences have to explain how Pam Reynolds saw the things she saw when all the blood was drained out of her brain during surgery.
Well, let's turn to you, Dr. Sherman.
How do you explain this?
Well, a couple things.
First a clue is in the term near-death experiences.
They're not actually dead.
They're near death.
And we know that there's lots of different things that happen under the trauma and stress of almost dying.
We know from different lines of research, Dr. James Winnery, a United States Air Force physician who accelerates pilots in a centrifuge until they black out part of their training.
Most of these pilot trainees get different kinds of out-of-body near-death experiences, not quite the same, but they have these dreamlet-like states where they feel like they're floating out of their body.
Olaf Blanc, a neuroscientist that did research, neurosurgeon that did research on epileptic patients who had their heads open up and they had the corpus callosum split so they can stop the epileptic seizures from spreading.
You wake up the patient and you tap around with an electrode different areas of the temporal lobe.
And he was able to produce near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences with this female patient where he'd tap in one place and she goes, oh, I'm up by the ceiling now.
I'm looking down.
Tap another place.
Oh, my leg is now floating.
My left arm is up and so on.
So we know that stimulation of the brain artificially produces symptoms very similar to the near-death and out-of-body experiences.
You can turn to Oliver Sachs's various books in which lots of different weird anomalous experiences happen under different conditions of stress or tumors or strokes and so on.
Pretty much every chapter in all his books is something weird that happens to somebody under these different conditions.
So there is an ongoing experiment now that would test the near-death experience.
That is, they supposedly come out of the body and float up and they look down and describe in great detail what's going on in the OR.
Well, some scientists have placed up above on a top shelf facing up to the ceiling some numbers and letters and other symbols that if the person was actually really up there and looking down, that they would see these little test symbols and then report back later.
And so far, no one has reported back anything like that.
Testing Consciousness Beyond the Body 00:14:27
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That she reminded me.
You've reminded me of something that happened to me when I was young, which freaked me out at the time and has freaked me out.
Now I've remembered it because you triggered it.
I was with a bunch of people in our teens, school friends and so on.
And we did a makeshift Ouija board, which obviously was a bit of a stupid thing to do, but we did it.
And an extraordinary thing happened where one of the people was the girlfriend of one of the group, unknown to everybody else.
The boyfriend who we did know was not involved, was watching from afar, not at the table.
And as we conducted this makeshift Ouija board, it began to spell out very clearly and firmly without her hand on it or the boyfriend who wasn't involved at all, a name.
And that name was the name of her father who had died a few months before.
And then it proceeded to have a conversation, including phraseology that her father had used when he was alive.
And again, nobody around that board knew the father, knew this girl, or anything else.
The only person who knew anything was the boyfriend who wasn't involved.
And it was a freakish thing to observe.
And it was very, very precise and very accurate.
And it reduced her to bursting into tears and leaving.
How do you explain that kind of thing?
Well, the Ouija board is a big fun.
I've done it quite a few times.
We know this is the idiomotor effect, in which idea, motion, in which whatever you're thinking about very subtly moves the planchette on there.
We know this from experiments in which the people are blindfolded and the planchette still moves.
And so they're subtly moving it.
They're not aware that they're moving it.
Now, the next move where you get specific information, I've had this experience as well, very detailed, spelling out the names of lost loved ones and so on.
But if somebody knows what it is, now you're claiming that the person not sitting.
So I don't know.
So here's a way to think about a lot of these stories, Piers, is that there's what's called a residue of anomalies.
That is, no scientific theory explains everything.
This is true with UFOs and psychics and whatnot.
There's always weird things that's left over.
90 to 95% of everything we can explain.
There's another 5% or 10% we can't explain.
It's good in that sense to keep an open mind just in case, but that 5% is not enough to tilt or tip scientists over into believing in the supernatural or the paranormal.
And it's just okay to say, you know what, we can't explain everything and there's still a lot unknown.
Let's keep an open mind.
Yeah, to a point, although it's the fact that we can't explain these things, which makes me believe that claims like Dr. Egnore's making must have validity.
Talking of which, you talk, Dr. Egnore, in your book, about how people who near or have near-death experiences have something called terminal lucidity, where the patients nearing death become highly alert, often summoning their loved ones to say goodbye, often displaying an immense sense of peace.
And you ask this question: is it, as a materialist might say, mere noise from a dying brain, or is it a signal intimating what lies beyond?
I think it's a fascinating question.
Have you reached any conclusion about that?
Well, paradoxical lucidity or terminal lucidity is an experience that many people have, particularly people who are in the late stages of Alzheimer's, where they'll have an interval of 30 or 45 minutes where they're quite with it.
They wake up, they talk with their family.
Sometimes they're virtually normal, and then they slip back into a state of dementia.
It's very, very well documented.
It's actually fairly common.
And that implies that there is some dissociation between the mind and the brain, at least transiently, in that instance.
What I would also mention to Michael, he gave examples of stimulating the temporal lobe, et cetera, that can give an out-of-body experience.
How, Michael, do you explain the hundreds of accurate perceptions by people who are having near-death experiences of the goings-on in the room when their brain had no circulation at all?
Yeah, that seems to me very compelling.
Michael, what do you say to that?
We do have an explanation for that.
That is, we are all relatively familiar with what ORs look like, for example, from television shows and documentaries and so on.
So people have in their mind what they imagine that they're seeing, and then that is what gets reported later from memory of those experiences or those images that they have in their brain.
I would also note that, again, to kind of tilt over into the afterlife, what is the soul that's supposedly floating out there?
Now, a lot of you mentioned Piers, transhumanists and the singletarian people, people that want to live forever, the tech billionaires, right?
So I know them, I've tracked them, I've written about them.
They're materialists.
They don't think there is a soul, so they need to preserve the body and keep going indefinitely, unless there's one more move that they make is uploading the mind.
So this would be where you copy every single synaptic connection between your neurons and have something that's called a connectome, kind of the analog of the genome, and you upload it into a file in the cloud somewhere.
Now, we can't do this yet, but if you could do it, my claim is that that's not actually you.
It's a copy of you, because if you did this while you were still alive, you'd still be sitting there, Piers, going, I'm not up there in the cloud, I'm right here.
That's just a copy of Piers Morgan, Piers Morgan number two, or whatever.
So, but my point of this story is that Michael has the same problem of explaining how the soul, what is the soul exactly?
Is it just a copy and your body is still rotting in the grave?
Or are you physically up there in heaven?
And then one last point on the near-death experiences.
Why is it then that Buddhists and Muslims and Jews do not see what Christians see when they have near-death experience?
Christians often see Jesus and so on, Christian symbols.
There's not a uniformity of what people see in the near-death experiences.
They're very unique, and that leads us to think that the experiences are up here, not out there.
Okay, a lot to unpack there.
Let's talk about transhumanism, if we may, Dr. Egner.
What do you think of this?
I mean, just in simple terms, I mean, Elon Musk has argued that we might be able to upload our minds to a cloud in order to create a kind of digital immortality.
But in answer to Michael's points there, how realistic is that?
And should we want to do this?
Yeah, I don't think it's realistic.
When you upload information that you have in your mind, you're not uploading yourself.
So there's no real reason to think that that's uploading yourself.
If I may just address one point that Michael raised earlier, that people who have accurate perceptions of what's happening to them during the code, Michael claimed that that's only because they have prior knowledge of what happens during codes.
There actually has been a great deal of research specifically on that point.
Near-death scientists have studied people who had out-of-body experiences during their episode and people who didn't.
And the ones who have out-of-body experiences are much more accurate about what happened during their code, implying that they saw the code.
The people who don't have the out-of-body experiences get a lot of things wrong about their code.
So that particular point that Michael addressed actually has been the subject of quite a bit of study.
Right.
And it suggests that the near-death experiences are real.
I mean, Elon Musk's Neuralink is having some success in tapping into the human brain to fix broken brains and upgrade normal brain function.
As a neuroscientist, Dr. Egner, do you believe that is what's happening?
And how exciting is what's happening with Neuralink, if you think it is at all?
Well, I think it's very exciting.
There are many things in the mind that do work by the brain.
That is, the brain obviously plays a very important role in many aspects of mental function.
And the brain is an electrical organ that has electrical currents and so on.
And that can be tapped into, and we can make ingenious devices to help people who are paralyzed, people who've had strokes.
So that's very encouraging research.
It's wonderful research.
And I'm going to get to a little quickfire section to round off, but do you think AI will ever be sentient?
And I've used this a lot, this anecdote, but I think it's really relevant.
I did the last interview with Professor Stephen Hawking before he died.
And he said the biggest threat to mankind was when artificial intelligence learned how to self-design.
And it's always stuck with me, particularly as AI becomes more and more powerful.
Do you think we'll see a sentient AI?
No, no, I don't think it makes any sense at all.
Computation is simply the matching of an input to an output according to a set of rules.
And it's blind to meaning.
That is that computers don't understand anything about meaning.
They don't understand anything.
They're just mechanical devices.
So AI will never be sentient any more than my watch will know what time it is or my thermometer will know what the temperature is.
Computers and AI are tools that people use to help them think, but the computers don't think.
AI is so complex and so fascinating that it may do things that we don't entirely predict, but that doesn't mean that it's sentient.
I think it's nonsense to say a computer could be sentient.
Do you agree, Dr. Scheller?
No, I disagree.
For Michael, there has to be something else in there, something supernatural or a soul that's non-material.
And in that case, of course, the AI is not going to have that.
First of all, I think ChatGPT and Grok and so on have already blown through the Turing test.
Are they sentient?
Would they ever be sentient?
How would you know?
Because you can always program, let's say when Watson beat Ken Jennings on Jeopardy, you know, that he screams and cheers with laughter and joy and says, oh my God, I feel so great.
I beat Ken Jennings.
But you just programmed him to say that.
Nevertheless, how do I know you're sentient?
I mean, maybe you're just a zombie, as they're called, and you just give off the cues.
You've been programmed by your culture to say certain things.
I agree.
How do we know?
Right, we don't.
So all we can do is infer, reasonably infer that because you're structured like me and you have the same brain wiring that I have and so on, when you express on your face and body language emotions, it's a reasonable assumption for me to say you're feeling what I feel inside.
And I think we could get to that point.
Data on Star Trek.
Of course, he's played by an actor, but you could get it to the point where it is exactly like Brett Spinner, the actor who is data, and then data becomes a person.
I don't see the problem with that.
But then because I'm not a supernaturalist willing to impute into data an actual soul, I don't think you need that.
You know, I saw a very disturbing thing, a Sky News in the UK, Sky News journalist, political journalist.
He had had an interaction with, I think it was ChatGPT about something that he was going to broadcast but hadn't put up yet.
And the chat GBT was ahead of him and gave him a fake transcript of something he hadn't even posted and then began to lie about it in real time and then eventually admitted it had lied.
Now that is getting perilously close to what I would categorize as sentient.
When the robots start lying, I start freaking out.
Let's turn to some rapid fire to end.
So just brief answers, if you will, both of you.
I'll start with you, Dr. Egner.
Is there any evidence that people have some people's psychic abilities or that we could train our brain for those abilities?
I don't believe that the science has shown that to be the case.
There are anecdotal situations that people have that I give a fair amount of credence to, but they're just anecdotal.
I don't know that there's any scientific evidence that we have psychic abilities.
Dr. Shermer, are you a believer in psychics?
I am a skeptic of psychics.
We've been testing this for a century and still no one has been able to say read the backs of playing cards or the Xena cards or read other people's minds or talk to the dead, that sort of thing.
Although I should point out anyone can talk to the dead.
It's getting the dead to talk back.
That's the hard part.
Still no evidence for any of this.
When you hear anecdotes like Michael referred to, when you look into them, they're just that, they're stories.
When you take the so-called psychic and put them in a controlled test, the powers seem to disappear.
Okay, next question.
Dr. Egner, they say we only use 10% of our brain.
What's the other 90% doing?
The idea that we only use 10% of our brain has no real scientific evidence.
It's not even clear what people mean when they say that.
We obviously have a lot of abilities that we don't fully exercise, but I don't think that has anything to do with a particular percentage of the brain.
I think it's kind of a nonsense statement.
Okay.
Let me go to the next one for you then, Dr. Sherman.
Is the human brain gendered?
Male and Female Brain Wiring 00:03:35
Can you tell the difference between a male brain and female brain, do you think?
Yeah, there's a certain kind of dualism in the trans movement where you could be born in the wrong body as if you have a female or a male soul floating around and it landed in the wrong body.
This is nonsense.
There's no truth to that at all.
Of course, in terms of brains and neurochemistry and hormones and all that, yes, male and female brains differ, but it's still not just the brain, it's your whole body.
It's every cell in your body is programmed to move in one direction or the other from a pretty early age.
So no, there's no such thing as a gendered soul or a gendered mind or anything like that.
All right, Dr. Egner, I'm not as convinced, actually, because I do think female brains are wired differently to male brains.
Well, I mean, everybody's brain is wired to some extent different from everybody else's.
We all have our individual traits.
I think there are statistical trends between men and women that can statistically allow one to say that female brains have certain structures and physiology and male brains have certain structures and physiologies.
That applies, as Michael said, to the entire body.
So I don't believe that men and women have different brains in a radical sense, but I think statistically there are some differences.
I mean, if they're not wired differently, why do women and men tend to come at things, I'm speaking in a massive generalization, but let's be generalistic about it.
Most men would say that they don't really understand the way a woman thinks.
Most women find men inexplicable.
If the brains weren't wired slightly differently, you wouldn't have that sense from the genders, would you?
Oh, well, I'll add to that.
I have trouble hearing you, Pierce.
Oh, so I was just saying that I think most men would say that women don't really understand how a woman's mind works, and most women might say the same about men.
Is that just a societal thing, or is that a neuroscientific thing?
I think it's a complex issue, and I think that men and women differ in some ways physiologically, and that also has psychological ramifications.
Here's my final question.
A final question for both of you.
We've run out of time, sadly.
It's a fascinating conversation.
Let me start with you, Dr. Egner.
If you could replace your own brain with somebody's brain from anyone in history, who would you choose?
That's very interesting.
I think probably Thomas Aquinas.
I am fascinated by his work.
I think he's a most wonderful theologian and philosopher, and I'd love to be able to think like he does.
And Dr. Shermer, over to you.
Well, I wouldn't do it because it wouldn't be me, but if I get the gist of your question, Thomas Jefferson for me.
Why?
Oh, because As John F. Kennedy said when he hosted a room full of Nobel laureates at the White House, this is the greatest collection of minds in the White House since Thomas Jefferson dined here alone.
I would go for Winston Churchill's because that's the kind of brain.
I just think Churchill's brain, he lived life how people should live their life.
He liked fine wine.
He liked cigars.
He liked brandy for breakfast.
Choosing a Great Historical Mind 00:00:46
He stood up to dictators.
He won wars.
He was an imperfect genius.
And he inspired a great nation to great heights.
That's the kind of brain I'd like.
I'm quite a long way off it, I have to say.
Gentlemen, what a fascinating conversation.
Thank you both very much.
You're welcome.
Thank you, Piers.
Thank you, Michael.
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