The Soul of the Gaps

Why new claims about Near Death Experiences, terminal lucidity, and other anomalous experiences are not evidence of a brain-independent mind, a soul, or an afterlife.

As the publisher of Skeptic magazine and host of The Michael Shermer Show, which features conversations with authors of new nonfiction books, I have been struck by a sudden surge of works claiming new scientific evidence for the age-old idea of a soul that survives the death of the body and brain, implying an afterlife that continues in some ethereal state.

Here are a few titles on my desk:

• Charles Murray’s Taking Religion Seriously
• Ross Douthat’s Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious
• Michael Egnor’s The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul
• Christopher Beha’s Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer
• Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of an Afterlife
• Michel-Yves Bolloré’s and Olivier Bonnassies’s God, the Science, the Evidence
• Samuel Wilkinson’s Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence
• Jeffrey Kripal’s How to Think Impossibly About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else
• Jesse Bering’s The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson: One Scientist’s Epic Quest for Evidence of Reincarnation, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Other Matters of the Soul

And in 2026, we will be reading Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s account of her conversion experience, which she discussed during our recent debate for The Free Press on “Does the West Need a Religious Revival?” and in her widely read essay “Why I Am Now a Christian.”

What is going on here? Are we in the midst of a 5th Great Awakening? The first four Great Awakenings were:

1. 1730s-1740s led by figures like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield.
2. 1790s-1840s associated with Charles Finney and the rise of camp meetings, hell-fire-and damnation preaching, and involved in the abolition, temperance, and women’s rights movements.
3. 1850s-1900s associated with active missionary work, a social gospel approach to political issues like poverty and homelessness that saw the creation of the YMCA, Freedmen’s Societies, etc.
4. 1960s-1970s Jesus movement, of which I was a part for seven years as a born-again Evangelical Christian, recounted in my 2011 book The Believing Brain. 

The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian fell from 90 percent in 1972 to 64 percent in 2022

I have some ideas on this possible movement, one being a response to the sudden decline in religiosity in the U.S. and the concomitant rise of the Nones (those who check the box on surveys for “no religious affiliation”), which was substantial. As pollsters have documented (including our own Skeptic Research Center and in a special issue of Skeptic) the percentage of Americans who identify as Christian fell from 90 percent in 1972 to 64 percent in 2022, while the religiously unaffiliated—the Nones—rose from 5 percent to 30 percent in the same period (and is probably closer to 40 percent for Millennials and 50 percent for GenZ). All of these trends are carefully documented in Christian Smith’s 2025 book Why Religion Went Obsolete. 

For now, I’ll leave this question to sociologists of religion, who will need time and perspective to determine if this swell in religious books constitutes a genuine Great Awakening or just a hiccup in the continued decline of religiosity. I am more interested in the actual scientific claims made in these books about the verisimilitude of religious notions of the soul and the afterlife.

Gods, Gaps, and Souls

In his 1788 Critique of Practical Reason, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant made this now oft-quoted confession: 

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Many of the authors under consideration here invoke the first object of admiration and awe—the starry heavens above—and as such reflect older theistic arguments for God’s existence, with such cosmological questions as why there is something rather than nothing, the Big Bang beginning of the cosmos that echoes Genesis 1:1, the fine-tuned nature of the universe, and the elegance and beauty of mathematics.

I have chapters on each of these issues in my forthcoming book Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters (January, 2026), so here I want to drill-down on the specific empirical claims made by these authors that new scientific evidence indicates the existence of a mind separate from a brain, and therefore a soul that exists independent of the body, which suggests the existence of an afterlife of some sort (whether the Christian heaven or, if your tastes tend toward the scientific, a quantum field somewhere).

Since most such theistic arguments depend on what is called the “God of the Gaps” style of reasoning—find a gap in scientific understanding and fill it with a deity—let’s call this line of reasoning (pace Steven Pinker’s characterization below) the “Soul of the Gaps,” or cognitive and mental phenomena for which psychologists and neuroscientists purportedly cannot explain, so these lacuna are to be filled with souls.

Here is how Pinker thinks about these purported gaps in our understanding of the brain (in an October 26, 2025 email to myself and Jerry Coyne):

There are two fatal flaws. One is that it is a “soul of the gaps” argument. The brain, an unfathomably complex dynamic system, easily transitions in and out of firing patterns with different levels of order and coherence, as happens in stages of sleep and altered states of consciousness. Contra Murray, these dynamics are nowhere near being understood by neuroscientists, since this may be the most complex problem in science. Yet we can be sure that with 86 billion neurons and a trillion synapses, the brain has enough physical complexity to challenge us with numerous puzzles and surprises, none of them requiring paranormal phenomena. A good graduate student in computational neuroscience with a free afternoon could easily program an artificial neural network that exhibits spontaneous recovery or unpredictable phase transitions from incoherence to coherence. 

But this is assuming that there is a phenomenon to explain in the first place. The claim of “terminal lucidity” is based entirely on subjective impressions of loved ones and caregivers (assuming they were reliable in the first place, and not friend-of-a-friend recollections.) But we know that people are extraordinarily gullible about the cognitive abilities of others, easily overinterpreting simple responses as signs of nonexistent cogitation. 

One example was the first chatbot, Eliza, whose list of canned responses fooled people in the 1960s into thinking they were interacting with a sentient being. Another is Facilitated Communication with profoundly autistic children, in which therapists and patients, oblivious to their own manipulation of keyboard or the children’s hands, were convinced that they were reading out the child’s trapped thoughts. (I’ve seen such sadly deluded parents in real time.) What Murray did not report was any objective indicator of coherence or lucidity, like taking an IQ test or even a standard bedside neurological test.

I’m skeptical that those would show genuine recovery, but even if they did, it would show only that damaged brains can chaotically alter into temporary configurations of coherence. To provide existence of an immaterial soul, it would be necessary to show that the patient could report information that was never accessible via their senses.

Terminal Lucidity

The first time I heard about “terminal lucidity” was at a 2023 debate I did with the British biologist and paranormal researcher Rupert Sheldrake (at the How the Light Gets In conference in Wales), in which he claimed that a number of dying dementia and Alzheimer’s patients, minutes or hours before death, were suddenly able to speak coherently, recognize their loved ones around them, and otherwise seemingly come back fully online before checking out for good.

As I was unfamiliar with the concept (Rupert doesn’t even mention it in our co-authored 2016 book Arguing Science: A Dialogue on the Future of Science and Spirit), I asked for an example. He told me he had witnessed it himself upon the death of a close family member. When I pressed him for more details, it turns out that this was during the Covid-19 pandemic so he was not allowed to be in the room as his loved-one passed away. Then how does he know this person experienced terminal lucidity? Telepathy. O-kay. Sure, for Sheldrake, Psi phenomena like telepathy and ESP are as real as gravity and electromagnetism, but almost no scientists accept Psi as an established fact (to the contrary, in fact).

The neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston made a similar point about the lack of careful documentation of terminal lucidity cases when he noted in his essay “Is Terminal Lucidity Real?”: “No one has actually studied the neuroscience of terminal lucidity while it’s happening—no EEG recordings, no brain imaging, no blood work during episodes. So any explanation is necessarily speculative.” Here are a few plausible explanations offered by the neuroscientist:

Dying patients often develop brain swelling from multiple causes: electrolyte imbalances, low blood protein, kidney or liver failure, inflammation, or damage to the blood-brain barrier. This swelling compresses brain tissue and reduces blood flow, starving neurons of oxygen and glucose. The result is the familiar progression of terminal delirium: confusion, then sleepiness, then coma, then death.

But in their final days, many patients stop eating and drinking entirely. The resulting dehydration could reduce brain swelling, allowing blood flow to increase and temporarily restoring some cognitive function—a brief window of lucidity before the dying process continues. It’s a simple mechanism: lower intracranial pressure means better perfusion, means more oxygen and glucose in the brain, which in turn means more functional neurons.

This could be tested, with a prediction that terminal lucidity would be correlated with dehydration. But there’s more plausible causal mechanisms at work:

Normal consciousness requires precise neurochemical balance. Too much excitation causes seizures. Too much inhibition causes unconsciousness. Wakefulness depends on brainstem neurons continuously releasing neuromodulators like acetylcholine, noradrenaline, and histamine into the cortex. When this system breaks down in a damaged or dying brain, people typically become progressively less responsive.

But sometimes, perturbing a broken system can temporarily fix it. If you’ve ever gotten a glitchy electronic device to work by hitting it, you’ve seen how pushing a malfunctioning system into an unusual state can accidentally restore function.

Maybe something similar happens in dying brains, where under extreme or unusual conditions, damaged neural networks can sometimes spontaneously reorganize in ways that temporarily restore function. One research paper speculates that dying brains might generate “spontaneous network integration manifesting as lucid behavior” through “rapid and nonlinear synchronisation.” Translated from Academic into English, this means “we think weird things might happen in a dying brain that briefly improve function, but we don’t really know what.”

To move the concept of terminal lucidity from the anecdotal to the scientific, Zeleznikow-Johnston suggests some plausible studies:

With informed consent from patients and families, video record supposed lucid episodes in people with advanced dementia or other terminal conditions. Have researchers who are blinded to each patient’s medical status and proximity to death score the recordings for evidence of lucidity. Compare these to baseline videos of the same patients, and to control recordings from other dementia patients who don’t experience supposed lucid episodes.

If independent, blinded raters confirmed that genuine improvements in cognition were occurring, follow-up studies could investigate what’s actually happening physiologically: neuroimaging to measure brain activity patterns, blood work to check for electrolyte changes, continuous monitoring to track the lead-up to episodes. If we could identify reliable precursors or correlates, we might be able to induce similar states safely in living patients.

Yes, this requires asking grieving families for permission to record and monitor their loved one’s final days. That’s difficult. But patients routinely consent to organ donation and whole-body donation to science—procedures far more invasive than video cameras and EEG caps. If anything, families motivated by the possibility of helping future dementia patients might welcome the chance to contribute to research.

Similar such tests have been proposed for studying near-death experiences.

Near-Death Experiences 

In Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying, the award-winning war reporter recounts his closest brush with death in the summer of 2020 when he suffered extreme abdominal pain caused by a ruptured aneurysm that left him hospitalized and his life slipping away. Astonishingly for this life-long atheist, as blackness encroached he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to let go: “It’s okay. There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day. “He was not so much a vision as a mass of energy configured in a deeply familiar way as my father,” Junger recalled. “I hesitate to even describe him as ‘energy’ because it was a word he hated unless used in its proper scientific sense: subatomic work potential.” What was it he experienced, and can it be tested?

To move the NDE experience from the anecdotal to the scientific, in 2019 the renowned psychologist David Myers attended a day-long research consultation by the NDE researcher Sam Parnia to outline more rigorous research methodologies. Here is Myers account of what they have found so far: 

In the first study, just published, a cardiac arrest at one of 21 participating hospitals alerted a trained researcher to rush to the patient with a small equipment bag. Without interfering with the resuscitation, the researcher attached an EEG recording cap and headphones, then activated a tablet computer.

Across 567 cardiac arrests—defined as no heartbeat or respiration—53 patients (9.3 percent) survived. Twenty-eight did so with sufficient health to be available for volunteer interviews, yielding three take-home findings.

First, most of the 53 survivors initially flat-lined on the EEG, but, with continued CPR, recovered brain activity up to 60 minutes later. This result not only encourages first responders to persist, it also suggests the possibility of to-be-recalled cognitive activity in comatose patients.

Second, 6 of the 28 interviewed survivors (21 percent) had a “transcendent recalled experience of death.” This roughly accords with prior studies’ finding that 10 to 15 percent of cardiac arrest survivors report a memorable transcendent conscious experience (which Parnia labels a “recalled experience of death” rather than a “near-death experience”). The 6 survivors reported experiences such as:

Separation from the body: “I found myself above my body.” “I knew that I had died.” “I felt so light and free.” “I was high up in the ceiling of the ward looking down upon the bed.” “I could see the doctors and nurses working over me.” “I perceived and saw everything around me, like in 360 degrees.”

Perception of heading toward a destination: “I experienced going down a tunnel towards a huge bright shining light.”

Reviewing and reevaluating life: “I saw my entire life in great detail.” “I felt so warm, safe, protected and deeply loved.” “My body was dead for two minutes; for me, the time passed as if it were many years.”

Third, the study enabled an unprecedented objective test of survivors’ recall accuracy. Many have wondered: Have those who recall death experiences—even of happenings during the resuscitation—experienced hallucinations, such as commonly reported with oxygen deprivation or psychedelic drugs? Or are their out-of-body reports of cardiac arrest events factual and verifiable?

Parnia and his three dozen collaborators creatively devised and implemented a plan to put claims of death-experience recollections to the test. As patients underwent CPR, a tablet computer displayed one of ten visual images, such as an animal, a person, or a monument. When later interviewed, could the 28 survivors report the image displayed during their death experience? If not, could they, when shown the ten possible images, guess which image had been displayed? The result: “Nobody identified the visual image.”

QED. Null results.

So, what exactly is going on in the NDE? In my 2018 book Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, I noted that any explanation for the NDE must begin with the fact that there’s a reason why the N modifies the D: the people who experience them are not actually dead. They’re only near death, a state in which the brain may undergo stress, be deprived of oxygen, release neurochemicals that can mimic the hallucinatory trips of drug users, or experience any one of the dozens of anomalous neurological anomalies, abnormalities, or disorders that have been documented by neurologists and neuroscientists. The fact that each NDE is unique does not mean that some of them are real trips to heaven (or hell) while the rest are merely byproducts of a hallucinating brain. It just means that the brain is capable of a wide variety of experiences depending on the immediate conditions and one’s personal life trajectory, all of which are necessarily unique but no less caused by internal brain states.

Experiencers will often emphasize that they were “dead” or “absolutely dead” or “clinically dead”

In their NDE accounts, experiencers will often emphasize that they were “dead” or “absolutely dead” or “clinically dead” in order to bias the interpretation toward the miraculous or supernatural. A Portland, Oregon Emergency Room doctor named Mark Crislip, however, reviewed the original EEG readings of a number of patients claimed by scientists as being flat-lined or “dead” and discovered that they weren’t dead at all. “What they showed was slowing, attenuation, and other changes, but only a minority of patients had a flat line, and it took longer than 10 seconds. The curious thing was that even a little blood flow in some patients was enough to keep EEG’s normal.”

Crislip also analyzed the NDE study by Pim von Lommel and his colleagues published in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet, in which the authors “defined clinical death as a period of unconsciousness caused by insufficient blood supply to the brain because of inadequate blood circulation, breathing, or both. If, in this situation, CPR is not started within 5-10 min, irreparable damage is done to the brain and the patient will die.”

As Crislip notes, however, most of these cardiac patients were given CPR, which by definition delivers oxygenated blood to the brain (that’s the whole point of doing it). “By the definitions presented in the Lancet paper, nobody experienced clinical death,” Dr. Crislip concluded, adding that as a physician who has conducted CPR many times, “No doctor would ever declare a patient in the middle of a code 99 dead, much less brain dead. Having your heart stop for 2 to 10 minutes and being promptly resuscitated doesn’t make you ‘clinically dead’. It only means your heart isn’t beating and you may not be conscious.”

They never actually died

So proponents’ claim that in NDEs people die and then travel to the other side is gainsaid by the fact that they never actually died. 

Arguably the most famous NDE is that of the neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, recounted in his 2011 book Proof of Heaven. During a meningitis-induced coma, Alexander met a young woman with high cheekbones, deep-blue eyes and “golden brown tresses” framing her face. Together they traveled on the wing of a butterfly, “in fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again. It was a river of life and color, moving through the air.” The woman’s outfit “was simple, like a peasant’s, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had.”

Alexander was then overwhelmed with a feeling of love, not friendship or romantic but “somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.” Her message to him was simple: “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

I have appeared on a number of television shows with Eben Alexander and have spent a fair amount of time with him in green rooms before and after, discussing what he thinks happened to him. I enjoyed our conversations and found him to be an amiable man, but he is a neurosurgeon who knows the literature about hallucinations and the many tricks the mind can play under a wide variety of conditions. Why doesn’t Alexander recognize his own experience as something similar to what so many others have undergone who don’t claim to have tripped off to celestial empyreans? Because it happened to him, and personal subjective experiences are orders of magnitude more powerful than anything you can read in a book.

There are additional problems with Alexander’s claims. During his NDE he says that his “cortex was completely shut down.” He concludes from this that “there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma,” and therefore “my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe.” According to Dr. Laura Potter, the attending physician the night Alexander was wheeled into the ER, however, Alexander’s coma was induced by her in order to keep him alive while he was heavily medicated, and that whenever they tried to wake him he thrashed about pulling at his tubes and trying to scream, so his brain was not completely shut down. When Potter later challenged him on this point, Alexander told her his account was “artistic license” and “dramatized, so it may not be exactly how it went, but it’s supposed to be “interesting for readers.” In other words, Alexander mashed fact and fiction, meaning that there is really nothing to be explained.

We now know of a number of factors that produce such fantastical hallucinations, also masterfully explicated by Oliver Sacks in his book Hallucinations. For example, Sacks recounts an experiment by the Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and his colleagues, who produced a “shadow-person” in a patient by electrically stimulating the left temporoparietal junction in her brain. “When the woman was lying down a mild stimulation of this area gave her the impression that someone was behind her; a stronger stimulation allowed her to define the ‘someone’ as young but of indeterminate sex.”

Sacks also recounts his experience treating 80 deeply parkinsonian postencephalitic patients (as featured in the film Awakenings starring Robin Williams as Sacks), noting “I found that perhaps a third of them had experienced visual hallucinations for years before L-dopa was introduced—hallucinations of a predominantly benign and sociable sort,” speculating that “it might be related to their isolation and social deprivation, their longing for the world—an attempt to provide a virtual reality, a hallucinatory substitute for the real world which had been taken from them.”

In a December 2012 article in The Atlantic analyzing Alexander’s claims, Sacks explained that the reason hallucinations seem so real “is that they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do. When one hallucinates voices, the auditory pathways are activated; when one hallucinates a face, the fusiform face area, normally used to perceive and identify faces in the environment, is stimulated.” From these facts the neurologist concluded: “The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr. Alexander’s case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. It is curious that he does not allow this obvious and natural explanation, but instead insists on a supernatural one.”

Perhaps belief in them is a way of dealing with the difficulties of life…and old age, dying, and death. 

The reason people turn to supernatural explanations is that the mind abhors a vacuum of explanation. Because we do not yet have a fully natural explanation for mind and consciousness, people turn to supernatural explanations to fill the void. But what’s more likely? That Alexander’s NDE was a real trip to heaven and all these other hallucinations are the product of neural activity only? Or that all such experiences are mediated by the brain, but to each experiencer they seem real? To me, this is proof of hallucination, not heaven.

Cramming for the Final?

A scientific understanding of terminal lucidity and Near-Death Experiences as I have offered here—situating them in natural explanations sufficient enough to forestall any need for invoking the paranormal or the supernatural—is not meant to take away from the power of the experience as seemingly real, as emotionally salient, or as transforming and life-changing. Perhaps belief in them is a way of dealing with the difficulties of life…and old age, dying, and death.

As I told Charles Murray in our podcast conversation about his book, when I first saw that the 82-year old social scientist and life-long nonbeliever had found God, I wondered “Cramming for the final?”

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the recent wave of God-themed books….