Indirect Evidence for Gandhabba from Neurosurgery

Just listened to the first podcast; it’s really quite good!

Here’s an interesting quote from the podcast, at 9:02, regarding Penfield’s first line of reasoning for dualism:

… but Penfield noted that in probably hundreds of thousands of different individual stimulations, he never once stimulated the power of reason, he never stimulated the intellect, he never stimulated a person to do calculus or to think of an abstract concept, like justice or mercy. All the stimulations were concrete things—move your arm or feel a tingling or even a concrete memory like you remember your grandmother’s face or something—but there was never any abstract thought stimulated. And Penfield said: “Hey, if the brain is the source of abstract thought, then once in a while, when I’m putting electrical current on some part of the cortex, I ought to get an abstract thought.” And he never, ever did. So he said: “Well, the obvious explanation for that was that an abstract thought doesn’t come from the brain.”

Note that despite Penfield’s perspective that this was evidence for dualism, it also supports a Buddhist perspective involving gandhabba.