Mind over matter

Interview | A new book on neuroscience challenges the prevailing materialist worldview | Daniel James Devine

Your mind doesn't get the credit it deserves. Not according to The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul (HarperOne), a new book aiming to show that the mind—as distinct from the brain—is a real entity with nonphysical qualities. That's opposite the current dogma in the field of neuroscience, where materialism—the philosophy that physical matter is all that exists—has held sway, promoting drug treatments for most psychiatric disorders and fueling atheists who argue spirituality is a delusion created by the brain.

Spiritual Brain authors Mario Beauregard, a neuroscientist from the University of Montreal, and Denyse O'Leary, a science journalist who often writes about the Intelligent Design movement, offer a "nonmaterialist" approach to brain science. Drawing on evidence as wide as the placebo effect, near-death experiences, and Beauregard's own research into "religious, spiritual, and/or mystical experiences" (RSMEs), Beauregard and O'Leary make a researched case for the nonmaterial—and ultimately spiritual—nature of man.