In two previous posts I documented bad misstatements of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. In my 2014 post "Pinker's Fallacious Case Against the Self and Soul" I documented some misstatements Pinker made in a Time magazine article. One of Pinker's bad misstatements in his article was this claim: "Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife." That is the exact opposite of the truth. The surgery in question that severs the two halves of the brain does not produce two minds, but leaves people with a single unified mind, contrary to what is predicted by the dogma that brains make minds.
Pinker here took an experimental result that very strongly argues for the existence of something like a soul and argues against the claim that the mind is the product of the brain, and misstated the experimental result as being the opposite of what it was. His misstatement here was every bit as bad as someone saying that people have taken pictures from outer space that show planet Earth is flat, which is the exact opposite of what happened. Read the appendix of this post for more on this topic.
In a 2018 post I looked at some of the many misstatements and cases of bad logic in Pinker's book "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress." An example of the bad misstatements Pinker made in that book was this statement: "A momentous discovery of 20th-century theoretical neuroscience is that networks of neurons not only can preserve information but can transform it in ways that allow us to explain how brains can be intelligent.” To the contrary, there is no understanding at all of how a brain could possibly be generating intelligence, nor is there the slightest speck of evidence that neurons store learned information. It is now the year 2025, and not a speck of anything a human ever learned has ever been found in a brain by microscopic examination. The failure to discover any trace of learned information in brains by microscopic information is one of the strongest reason for rejecting claims that brains store human memories.
On page 426 of the book Pinker stated, "Nor are the computational and neurological bases of consciousness obstinately befuddling." The truth, quite to the contrary, is that no one understands or can credibly explain any neurological or computational explanation for consciousness or intelligence or human memory. In my post I stated "Pinker again and again claims that he and and colleagues understand deep things that they do not at all understand. " In the past five years it has been widely acknowledged by neuroscientists and psychologists that we do not understand how a brain could produce consciousness, contrary to Pinker's silly boasts on this topic.
Below are some of the scientists who told us the truth on this topic:
- "Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience.” -- Donald D. Hoffman Department of Cognitive Sciences University of California, "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem."
- "Little progress in solving the mystery of human cognition has been made to date." -- 2 neuroscientists, 2021 (link).
- " We don't know how a brain produces a thought." -- Neuroscientist Saskia De Vries (link).
- "You realize that neither the term ‘decision-making’ nor the term ‘attention’ actually corresponds to a thing in the brain." -- neuroscentist Paul Ciskek (link).
- "We know very little about the brain. We know about connections, but we don't know how information is processed." -- Neurobiologist Lu Chen.
- "The neuroscientific study of creativity is stuck and lost." -- Psychologist Arne Dietrich, "Where in the brain is creativity: a brief account of a wild-goose chase."
- "How creative ideas arise in our mind and in our brain is a key unresolved question." -- nine scientists (link).
- "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Were we able even to see and feel the very molecules of the brain, and follow all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges if such there be, and intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem,...The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable." -- Physicist John Tyndall (link).
- "But when it comes to our actual feelings, our thought, our emotions, our consciousness, we really don't have a good answer as to how the brain helps us to have those different experiences." -- Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist, Ancient Aliens, Episode 16 of Season 14, 6:52 mark.
- "Dr Gregory Jefferis, of the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge told BBC News that currently we have no idea how the network of brain cells in each of our heads enables us to interact with each other and the world around us." -- BBC news article (link).
- "The mind-brain problem, i.e., how our conscious experience is related to material brain processes, has been debated by philosophers for centuries and remains one of the deepest unsolved problems in science." -- 12 scientists in the year 2024 (link).
In that 2018 post and my my 2014 post I documented quite a few misstatements of Steven Pinker on the topic of parapsychology and psychic phenomena. Steven Pinker fails to show signs of serious scholarship on these topics, and routinely speaks erroneously when he writes on them.
I find more evidence of Pinker's shallow, lazy scholarship of these topics when I go to his website at www. stevenpinker.com. Doing that on my I-Pad, I got my entire I-Pad screen filled up with a huge image of Steven Pinker's head. I'm not sure why any scholar who wants to be taken seriously would have an image so oversized filling up the first page of his web site. It's the kind of visual you might expect on, say, the home page of some young actress hoping to become a starlet.
Not Pinker, just a guy like Pinker
A year 2022 article on Pinker's website shows Pinker's failure to seriously research the topics of psi, ESP and telepathy. He gives us this very untrue statement: "Also, the classic claims for ESP in controlled experiments cited by Horowitz, such as those of J. B. Rhine and his intellectual descendants, have been exposed as artifacts of investigator bias, leakage of information, selective reporting, overinterpretation of coincidence, questionable research practices (such as post hoc data exclusion), and outright fraud." No such thing ever happened. The experiments of Duke University professor Joseph Rhine have never been successfully debunked, and stand up very well as very strong evidence for ESP and telepathy. The separate-buildings experiment of Riess was about as strong as a result in favor of telepathy as anyone could ask for. In a test requiring 1850 card guesses, an unnamed woman in a different building guessed an overall average of 18.24 cards correctly per 25 cards, rather than the expected average of only about 5 cards correctly per 25 cards, with the number of correct guesses being 979 more than expected by chance.
The Ganzfeld experiments in recent decades have been laboratory experiments that very well-replicated the phenomenon of ESP shown by Rhine's experiments, with results consistently showing an average hit rate of 30% or more, much higher than the expected by-chance hit rate of only 25%. Far from being debunked, results like those of Rhine have been well-replicated in recent decades. By claiming that Rhine's results were overturned, Pinker has told us the opposite of the truth. The latest result of an ESP test is the result reported on page 62 of the year 2025 document here. It is a test of 240 participants conducted at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland's largest university), by two professors. The researchers used the long-successful Ganzfeld protocol, which for many years has produced results of around 30% to 32%, well above the result expected by chance (only 25%). The tests were done in a "ganzfeld laboratory" in a "quiet and secure basement room of a university building," in the years 2023 and 2024. We read that "Seventy-two hits were obtained out of 240 sessions, a 30% hit-rate," a success well above the result expected by chance, only 25%.
At the end of his statement I quoted above claiming that Rhine's research was discredited, Pinker gives four references, numbered 11, 12, 13 and 14. Reference number 11 is to a Skeptical Inquirer article by Blackmore that does not mention any research by Rhine. Reference 11 is to a paper by Hyman that has no detailed discussion of the research of Rhine, but merely the very false claim that "Rhine's data are no longer used to argue the case for psi." Reference 13 is to a paper that does not mention Rhine or his research. Reference 14 is to a paper that does not refer to Rhine or his research. So none of the papers or articles that Pinker has cited back up his claim that Rhine's research was debunked. Rhine's research was enormously convincing evidence for ESP, and Pinker has done nothing to discredit such research, while providing only bad citations to try to back up his claim that such research was discredited.
We have two hundred years of extremely convincing written evidence in favor of clairvoyance, a large fraction of it written by reliable and distinguished sources such as scientists and doctors. Some of that evidence is discussed in the 18 posts you can read here. A relevant quote from a 19th-century authority is below:
"The distinguished Parisian Professor of Medicine, Rostan, gave at the time his corroborative testimony to the existence of this power in the article ' Magnetisme,' in the ' Dictionnaire de Medecine,' wherein he remarked : 'There are few facts better demonstrated than clairvoyance' ....Innumerable instances are recorded of the possession of the faculty of clairvoyance by persons in the normal state, in sleep [hypnotism], and in some abnormal conditions of the system, " -- Edwin Lee, MD, "Animal Magnetism and Magnetic Lucid Somnambulism" page 103 and page 133.
The scientist Joseph-Philippe-François Deleuze stated on pages 129 to 130 of an 1817 book that more than two thousand somnambulists (hypnotized people) had been observed since 1784, and also that the majority of them were observed to see with their eyes closed (which is clairvoyance), while also stating that in France more than 50,000 people had witnessed such phenomena. In subsequent decades extremely strong evidence for clairvoyance would continue to appear -- for example, the cases discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here,
The denial of this century's professors of the reality of clairvoyance is a case of denialism as bad as what would be going on if professors claimed that meteorites have never fallen to the earth. Pinker is the kind of thinker who apparently cannot be bothered to seriously read up on two hundred years of evidence for clairvoyance and telepathy, and who resorts to dumb armchair circular-reasoning arguments against their existence. He says, "If ESP really existed, not only would the laws of physics have to be overturned, but life would be unrecognizable." Nonsense. Whether ESP or telepathy exists has very little or nothing to do with physics, a topic Pinker does not appreciably write about. And there is no reason why our understanding of physics or life has to stay unmodified.
At no point in the article does Pinker show any signs of being a serious scholar on the topic of telepathy research or research into paranormal phenomena. I defy anyone to produce a single article or paper or book Steven Pinker wrote in which he sounds like a deep and diligent scholar of the anomalous, the paranormal, parapsychology or psychical research. Deep scholars of these topics bury their noses in old books, and quote abundantly from original source materials. We don't get that when Steven Pinker lazily pontificates on these topics, sounding like a dabbling dilettante making the tiniest of efforts while just "phoning it in." None of Pinker's generalizations about these topics can be trusted, because he shows no signs of diligence in studying these topics. Psi denialists such as Pinker seem to senselessly follow a rule of "discard or ignore all clues that offend me," like the people I describe in my post here.
We got a more recent example of Pinker's lazy, shoddy scholarship about spooky phenomena in his year 2025 article on the topic of terminal lucidity. Terminal lucidity is a phenomenon in which some very sick person believed to be very close to death or with a very damaged brain or demented mind suddenly shows a brief period of intellectual clarity before dying from his disease. This often can occur after a long period of stupor or mental incapacity.
Pinker's article shows zero signs that Pinker has studied any of the cases of terminal lucidity. All he gives us is some armchair reasoning and gaslighting, and a bunch of rhetorical questions. It's just the kind of "can't be bothered to make a few Google searches" affair that we might expect when Pinker is writing about unexplained phenomena. He mentions not a single specific case in which terminal lucidity was claimed.
Here are some terminal lucidity cases that help discredit the false claims about the human mind that Pinker likes to make. On page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the journal Light, which you can read here, we read this:
"In one of his lectures last year to the L.S.A., the Rev. Cruwys Sharland related how a one-time pupil of his, after suffering for many years from disintegration of the brain, when approaching his death, suddenly recovered complete mental control and gave those present a long circumstantial account of a walking tour he had undertaken when quite a boy, in company with Mr. Sharland, then his tutor. Every detail was correct, every fact rightly placed, as Mr. Sharland himself testified.
Psychica quotes several analogous cases from the German Wahres Leben. A young girl, imbecile for eight years, one morning informed the doctor of the asylum in which she lived that she would die the following night—which she did—and discussed various points with him with full mental awareness. M. Martensen Larsen has recorded the case of an Army doctor confined for homicidal mania, who, just prior to his passing, recovered his sanity and wrote several letters asking the forgiveness of those he had attempted to injure. M. G. W. Surya writes of a friend of his who was summoned to the asylum in which his brother had for years been confined with complete softening of the brain. He found his brother perfectly normal and anxious to make certain suggestions to him. He died the same day, and autopsy revealed that the brain had entirely disintegrated.
How can we account for his complete lucidity before death ?
Similarly, the well-known Berlin anatomist, Benecke, assured his students that Schinkel, the architect, died in possession of all his faculties, in spite of the fact that his cranium was subsequently proved to have been, ' so to speak, empty.' ”
We have here not just one but three different cases in which it is stated that someone with the most severe brain damage seemed to gain or have normal mental function shortly before dying. In two cases it is reported that the person acting normally or with normal cognition just before death had the most extreme disintegration or wasting of the brain, leaving basically no brain left.
Recently there was published the paper "Terminal Lucidity in a Pediatric Oncology Clinic," which reported some similar cases of terminal lucidity. You can read the full paper here. One or more of the authors interviewed the physicians involved in the cases. Before discussing its fascinating account of terminal lucidity in a patient identified as Patient One, I should mention that the term "encephalopathic" typically refers to a severe brain pathology, most often involving a brain infection or a failure of the immune system to protect the brain from infection. In the paper we read this:
"The patient was a three-year-old Hispanic female with prolonged medical treatment history for her diagnosis of hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), a complex and often life-threatening medical condition resulting from an uncontrolled and ineffective immune response, leading to extreme inflammation in many organs/tissues. After over a year of intense treatments, she underwent an umbilical cord blood transplant, which is the only known cure for this condition. Unfortunately, the transplant was rejected, and while attempts were made to find another option for a second transplant, she had a re-emergence of her HLH and was admitted to the hospital for chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Despite some initial improvements, she developed progressive organ damage and deterioration over the next several weeks, prompting transfer to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), with worsening liver and pulmonary failure. She became severely jaundiced and encephalopathic, and was no longer speaking, eating, or responding to parents/providers. The ICU physicians were worried that she was an aspiration risk, prompting intensification of Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate (DNR/DNI) conversations with her parents. As all the known treatments available were exhausted and her condition worsened, the focus shifted to providing palliative care. Although initially resistant, after nearly two weeks of intense conversations with parents (including family members and a Catholic priest) and further deterioration in their daughter’s condition, a DNI and modified DNR status change was agreed. That evening, the patient awoke and asked for her usual comfort items (i.e., Lion King movie, parents, toys) and food. She showed no indication of mental impairment and regained the ability to sit up in bed and participate in coloring and other simple age-appropriate tasks. She spoke using logical, organized full sentences, and had multiple conversations with her parents that evening, which they and the bedside nurse described as 'like a miracle.' During the conversations with her parents, she reviewed all the important people in her life and prayed for them. She indicated awareness of transitioning to death and reassured loved ones of the need not to be concerned about her. She also seemed to be communicating with people who were not visible to others. After several hours, she asked to 'go to bed' and returned to her comatose state. During the next 24-48 hours, she never awoke again, and she ultimately died peacefully of cardiac arrest in her parents’ arms."
No such thing as terminal lucidity should occur if your brain was producing your mind. Once a mind-producing brain had deteriorated, such a deterioration would be irreversible. A brain producing a mind would no more suddenly restore itself in the hours before death than a book missing many of its pages would suddenly restore such pages. Terminal lucidity is one of endless examples of paranormal phenomena that collectively show the irrationality of the materialist dogmas that Pinker cherishes the most, with brain physical shortfalls and accidentally unachievable biological organization doing even more show to show the irrationality of such dogmas.
Pinker's very frequent "holier than thou" lectures about the virtue of rationality (in which he sells thinkers like himself as Men of Reason) should not prevent us from getting insight as to how irrational his materialist belief system is. A small fraction of the aspects of such irrationality are discussed in my 2018 post and my 2014 post about Pinker's writings. A major reason why people fail to perceive the irrationality of the materialist belief system of thinkers like Pinker is that those selling such a belief system have typically hidden their irrationality by using a thick layer of misstatements, like some bald, very wrinkled old man who hides his old age by using a toupee and a thick layer of makeup. Once we study, list and strip away such misstatements, the mask of rationality is pulled away, and we can see the underlying irrationality. There is nothing rational about claims such as the claim that a human body so supremely systemic and having so very many just-right interdependent components arose because of a mere accumulation of copying errors.
In his career Pinker got very absorbed in studying history, which may have been a case of getting sidetracked from the studies he should have done before making the kind of statements about minds, souls, brains and biological origins that he has made. While Pinker frequently appeals to dogmas about brains and biology, I doubt that he is a very deep and very broad scholar of brains and biology and the full spectrum of human mental capabilities, human mental experiences and human mental performances; and none of the 50 or so articles on his website seem to suggest that he is such a scholar.
When Pinker makes erroneous biology statements like "the most selfish thing a gene can do is build a selfless brain" and "the organization of our mental modules comes from our genetic program," or when he refers most erroneously to "the genetic recipes that build the mind" (as he does on page 20 of the book here), he sounds like someone who has fallen "hook, line and sinker" for the worst "old wives' tale" myths about DNA and its genes (which do not have any such thing as a program or specification of how to make a brain or any of its cells or any of the organelles of such cells, and do not have any specification of anything like a mental module or a mind, or a recipe or program for making any such thing). A sufficiently deep study of the human brain and the sky-high information-rich fine-tuning and hierarchical organization of human bodies not specified by DNA or its genes, and a sufficiently deep critical study of neuroscience research (combined with a sufficiently deep study of medical case histories and the full spectrum of human mental experiences and the full spectrum of human mental performances) will very much undermine and discredit the type of dogmas that Pinker likes to preach.
Sounding a note similar to one of my criticisms above, a Harvard authority states, "Pinker has strong opinions on how religious people think, yet he seems not to have done the work of actually reading religious thinkers."
Pinker is one of the key figures in evolutionary psychology, one of the worst junkyards of unscientific and unfounded speculation in academia. Sitting on their armchairs, evolutionary psychologists spend endless hours making cheesy impossible-to-test speculations such as "you have such and such a mental trait because cavemen needed such and such a trait for such and such a reason," or "people still act in such and such a way because evolution made cavemen act in such and such a way for such and such a reason." It is ironic Pinker has criticized Rhine, who was much more of an experimental scientist than Pinker. Rhine spent the prime of his career gathering valuable hard laboratory data, something very different from Pinker's "just-so story" evolutionary psychology tall tales that are the opposite of hard data. The article "Why Jeremy Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology" explains some aspects of evolutionary psychology that are morally troubling.
But it seems some people do think Pinker wrote a good book promoting optimism about mankind's progress and a good book on language; and a visit to his site will allow you to find out about such works if you are interested.
Appendix
This appendix will support my claim that Pinker made a false claim when he claimed in his Time article that "Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.)"
See this scientific paper "The Myth of Dual Consciousness in the Split Brain." The actual facts about split-brain surgery are related here by a surgeon who has performed such an operation. He states this about split-brain patients:
"After the surgery they are unaffected in everyday life, except for the diminished seizures. They are one person after the surgery, as they were before."The surgeon states: "In a rational scientific community in which evidence and reason held sway, split-brain surgery would be hailed as compelling evidence for dualism and the immateriality of the intellect and will."
"Not so fast. There are several reasons to question the conclusions Sperry, Gazzaniga, and others sought to draw. First, both split-brain patients and people closest to them report that no major changes in the person have occurred after the surgery. When you communicate with the patient, you never get the sense that the there are now different people living in the patient's head.
This would be very puzzling if the mind was really split. Currently, you are the only conscious person in your neocortex. You consciously perceive your entire visual field, and you control your whole body. However, if your mind splits, this would dramatically change. You would become two people: 'lefty' and 'righty.' 'Lefty' would only see what is in the right visual field and control the right side of the body while 'righty' would see what’s in the left visual field and control the left side of the body. Both 'lefty' and 'righty' would be half-blind and half-paralyzed. It would seem to each of them that another person is in charge of half of the body.
Yet, patients never indicate that it feels as though someone else is controlling half of the body. The patients’ loved ones don’t report noticing a dramatic change in the person after the surgery either. Could we all — patients themselves, their family members, and neutral observers — miss the signs that a single person has been replaced by two people? If you suddenly lost control of half of your body, could you fail to notice? Could you fail to notice if the two halves of your spouse’s or child’s body are controlled by two different minds?"
A 2020 paper states this about split-brain patients: " Apart from a number of anecdotal incidents in the subacute phase following the surgery, these patients seem to behave in a socially ordinary manner and they report feeling unchanged after the operation (Bogen, Fisher, & Vogel, 1965; Pinto et al., 2017a; R. W. Sperry, 1968; R. Sperry, 1984)."
A very relevant case reported is that of an 88-year old man (identified as H.W.) who tested very well on a test of mental functioning, getting the maximum possible score of 30. But it was found that the man had no corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is the main part of the brain that links the two brain hemispheres. A man who has no corpus callosum is equivalent to a split-brain patient. As an article reports:
"Given the importance of the callosum for connecting the bicameral brain, you’d think this would have had profound neuropsychological consequences for H.W. In fact, a detailed clinical interview revealed that he’d led a normal, independent life – first in the military and later as a flower delivery man. Until recently, if H.W.’s testimony is to be believed, he appeared to have suffered no significant psychological or neurological effects of his unusual brain...Brescian and her colleagues conducted comprehensive neuropsych tests on H.W. and on most he excelled or performed normally. This included IQ tests, abstract reasoning, naming tests, visual scanning, motor planning, visual attention and auditory perception."
The article has a very clear title telling us the truth about this matter:
This Elderly Man Was Born With His Brain Hemispheres Disconnected. Did It Affect His Life? Hardly.
But the corresponding scientific paper sounds as if was written to try and make this case as unlikely as possible to be noticed. We have this title: "Case study: A patient with agenesis of the corpus callosum with minimal associated neuropsychological impairment." Agenesis is a word meaning "absence," one that would only be used by someone trying to get as few people as possible to notice an absence.
Making a generalization about people born without a corpus callosum connecting the two sides of the brain, a scientific paper states this:
"The major anatomic feature of Primary AgCC is the absence of the corpus callosum....Primary AgCC has surprisingly limited impact on general cognitive ability. Although the full-scale IQ may be lower than expected based on family history, scores frequently remain within the average range."
We hear no mention of any "two minds in one body" effect. Another paper states this, using the term "agenesis of the corpus callosum" which means a failure of someone's body to ever have the corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the brain:
"In the 37 adult cases of agenesis of the corpus callosum, 19 (51%) had some degree of intellectual impairment, with the remainder being judged to have a normal IQ. Of those with learning difficulties, two thirds had a mild impairment, and one third had a moderate or severe problem."
You can find papers on the condition of being born with no corpus callosum by searching on Google Scholar for papers having the phrase "agenesis of the corpus callosum." You will not find any discussion of "two minds in one body" in such papers about split-brain equivalent patients, which helps show that the claim of such an effect is groundless.
The paper "Outcomes Associated With Isolated Agenesis of the Corpus Callosum: A Meta-analysis" tells us that for those with complete agenesis of the corpus callosum (complete failure of the corpus callosum to appear) "abnormal cognitive status occurred in 15.16% (95% CI, 6.9–25.9) of cases," which is fewer than 1 case in 6. The same paper tells us that for those with partial agenesis of the corpus callosum (partial failure of the corpus callosum to appear) "cognitive status was affected in 17.25% (95% CI, 3.0–39.7) of cases," fewer than 1 in 5. This suggests the great majority of people born with split brains and no corpus callosum have normal minds, and nothing like split minds or two minds in one body.
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