Speaker

Theodore Schwartz

Theodore Schwartz

Neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery at Weill Cornell Medicine / New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he runs a research laboratory devoted to epilepsy. Schwartz has published more than 500 articles and pioneered minimally invasive approaches to brain surgery — operating through the nostril with endoscopes, or through small incisions in the eyelid, rather than opening the skull. He is the author of Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery (2024), a history and anatomy of the profession written for a general reader. He trained for sixteen years before practising independently, and plays jazz and funk bass.

Schwartz writes and speaks from the seam between the operating theatre and the philosophy seminar — he took degrees in philosophy and English before medicine, and grew up in the household of a Freudian psychoanalyst. What recurs in his account of the brain is a thoroughgoing materialism tempered by candour about its limits: he treats the self, free will, personality, and even religious experience as products of brain circuitry that surgery and stimulation can demonstrably alter, while insisting that consciousness itself — why there is something it is like to be a particular person — remains genuinely unexplained.

Core positions

The unified self is an illusion: split-brain and hemispherectomy patients show that the brain is hundreds of parallel modules, with selfhood and free will narrated after the fact by a ‘storyteller’ module. Personality is brain circuitry, and altering the circuitry — with a deep-brain-stimulation electrode, a tumour, or focused ultrasound — alters who a person is; the same logic explains how treating epilepsy can dissolve a patient’s religious experiences. Surgical skill varies enormously yet is almost entirely unmeasured, because hospitals track only what governments reimburse (infections, readmissions), not whether a tumour was fully removed; reimbursement is flat regardless of a surgeon’s experience or outcomes. Brain-computer interfaces are near-term for paralysed patients and, once genuinely safe, should be no more regulated than a mobile phone. On Freud he is sympathetic: discard penis envy and the Oedipal complex, and the structural insight — that the unconscious governs most of what we do and the ego is a small rationalising layer — has been vindicated by neuroscience.

In the wiki