Thinking out loud - is there a way to find empirical evidence to support dualism?

I've been frustrated with the scientific research in consciousness.  If you've read some of my other blog posts, you'll know that I am interested in the idea that the brain and mind are separate entities.  If you subscribe to dualism, which I sometimes do, then physical / neuronal evidence of dualism can be tricky.  The brain is involved in our thoughts in many ways.  This is clear when we have physical effects on the brain such as the effects of alcohol, a bump on the head, or dementia.  So to find evidence that the brain doesn't generate consciousness is difficult to tease out from all the noise in the brain.  The mind and brain are so tightly coupled that its near impossible.  I've thought about this a bit, and I was wondering if there could be some signs that might hint that the brain doesn't originate every thought.  If you can prove this, you can weaken the stance that mind = brain.

To take this on, I go with the assumption that all thoughts can be in theory, seen as a chain of events.  The brain has one thought, which leads to another, and to another.  Such a chain of neuronal activity such as a set of neurons firing, leading to a cascade of other neurons firing, and those firing another set and so on would support the brain fully in control of our thoughts.  However then its reasonable to say that if we see a break in this chain, a spontaneous firing of neurons for which no prior set of connected neurons initiated it, then its possible that some outside event could have initiated the cascading events.  I'd suspect this is what happens to some degree with our sensory system.  For example, say you're sleeping and a large noise wakes you up.  The noise is external to the brain, but it initiated a chain of events - your ear senses the noise, you become startled and awaken.  Following this analogy, If the brain (or perhaps some component or portion of the brain) is seen as a sensory organ, then it may "sense" the mind and you may see similar activity.  This would be especially interesting if this initiation of neuronal activity comes from a part of the brain that seems un-connected to specific hardware, such as the amygdala, hippocampus, etc.  This might suggest that some how a configuration of neurons act as a sensory system to the mind, like a fly landing on a random part of the spiders web.  

I know that this is probably a too simplistic an idea.  Perhaps there's no way to even test this.  I suspect we don't have the technology to even perform such experiments.  Perhaps the chain of neuronal activity would be difficult to really map out given the complexity of each neuronal connection.  

Just thinking out loud.