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Some Thoughts on Mind and Brain (and Spirit?)

Some Thoughts on Mind and Brain (and Spirit?)

Last updated on: October 26, 2025 at 6:01 pm by Dan Peterson

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Some Thoughts on Mind and Brain (and Spirit?) 2025-10-26T18:01:54-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The cover of Sharon Eubank’s thoughtful book

Last night, my wife and I met with friends for dinner and for discussion of a book by Sharon Eubank titled Doing Small Things with Great Love: How Everyday Humanitarians Are Changing the World. I like the book very, very much. It’s inspiring but, at the same time, practical and realistic and self-critical, and it powerfully makes the point that, while we can’t do everything or solve all problems, we can and should be doing something. I commend it to your notice.

At one point, Sharon cites a statement from President Ezra Taft Benson that I’ve always liked:

The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ would take the slums out of people, and then they would take themselves out of the slums.
The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape human behavior, but Christ can change human nature.

The cover of the second book that I’ve now encountered on the topic of “terminal lucidity”

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading about a remarkable phenomenon known as “terminal lucidity.” Here’s an article about it from the 23 February 2021 issue of The Guardian: “‘The clouds cleared’: what terminal lucidity teaches us about life, death and dementia: Just before Alex Godfrey’s grandmother died from dementia, she snapped back to lucidity and regaled him with stories of her youth. Could moments like this teach us more about the workings of the brain?”

I’m currently reading Michael Nahm, Marjorie Woollacott, and Natasha Tassell-Matamua, eds, On the Banks of the River Styx: New Perspectives on Terminal Lucidity and other Near-Death Phenomena (AAPS Press, 2025). Here is a passage from an essay in On the Banks of the River Styx that was written by Marjorie Woollacott. Dr. Woollacott is a neuroscientist and an emeritus professor of human physiology at the University of Oregon:

A model of consciousness positing that conscious awareness is fundamental to human existence, and that brains only filter this more fundamental conscious awareness, is supported by the data. Evidence suggests that at the end stages of life, activity in brain filters such as the default-mode network and left-brain language centers, which normally limit awareness to mundane levels of processing, diminish so much that individuals gain momentary access to vaster consciousness, and return to mental clarity.

This phenomenon can be as simple as a wife who had been unable to move or speak due to dementia or coma, opening her eyes and saying her deceased husband’s name with a smile on her face, just before she dies. The phenomena can also include more animated and extended interactions with family, during which an individual eats a last meal and converses lovingly and with gratitude, before the person lapses back into coma and passes away.

This research does not support the commonly held hypothesis that consciousness solely emerges from neural activity. This is because in instances of terminal lucidity, despite the absence of normal neural function in key brain cortical areas in for example advanced dementia, severe stroke or coma, clear consciousness is present. (49-50)

As a neuroscientist, and a professor in the Institute of Neuroscience and the Department of Human Physiology at the University of Oregon, I trained in the materialist theory of consciousness in which activities in specific areas of the brain are considered the sole producer of awareness. Because of this training, I struggled for years to accept the validity of the data on terminal lucidity. (50)

Here are the data that are challenging from the materialist lens. Individuals with Alzheimer’s disease at the end of life have been documented to have severe damage to or loss of nerve cells, and those cells’ connections in the brain. This is associated with loss of memory, confusion and the inability to recognize family members. Forms of dementia such as Alzheimer’s, Lewy Body Dementia, and Fronto-parietal dementia, are considered irreversible (Schneider, 2022). (50)

As this brain degeneration is defined as irreversibly damaging the function of the brain, lucidity returning at the end of life should be impossible, according to the materialist hypothesis in which lucid awareness is solely produced by the brain. Thus, the data presented in numerous scientific studies and in the previous chapters are fascinating, but puzzling and controversial. The data imply that mind or consciousness can continue in some way that is uncoupled from the brain. (51)

With data accumulating on the phenomenon of terminal lucidity, and increasing acceptance of the validity of research on the phenomenon, are there other models than the current materialist/ physicalist model of consciousness, which could better explain terminal lucidity’s existence? In fact, there is an alternative view known as “idealism” in philosophical traditions. It posits that consciousness is fundamental to human beings and everything that exists. It is therefore also the basis of our awareness (Farris & Göcke, 2022; Planck, 1931). In this context, many philosophers and scientists posit that the brain functions as a filter to this more fundamental and non-materialist aspect of reality (Grosso, 2015; James, 1903).

Described as the filter theory, this model proposes that the brain serves a permissive or transmissive function, controlling access to expanded awareness or consciousness. William James and others proposed that the brain is not the generator of conscious awareness, but is instead the organ that adapts or channels wider awareness into the needs of everyday living. The brain is then normally seen as functioning as an interface, which selects, focuses, and constrains the processes of a wider mind and consciousness (Woollacott & Weiler, 2025).

These theories that postulate the fundamental nature of consciousness (Hoffman, 2014; Kastrup, 2017, Kelly et al., 2015) are often described as theories of non-local consciousness (Nahm, 2023). These researchers question the view that conscious awareness can be completely understood as based on neuronal activity, within what they consider a causally closed system of solely physical processes. (52)

This Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph was taken in October 2012 — thirteen years ago this month — from the Provo, Utah, campus of Brigham Young University. The view from Bdelights and often astonishes me still today.

Finally, I was just a bit surprised to find this in the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™. However, on reflection, I guess that it really did belong there: “BYU is the only school in the country ranked in the top 10 in both football and men’s basketball”

Please note that, like the large majority of my biog entries — and like everything else that I write and publish — this entry contains absolutely no political content. Ideologically hypersensitive personalities can now relax and enjoy the remainder of their day, free (here, at least) from any possible encounter with differing ideas that might trigger them or threaten their safe space.

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