"Cells With Minds" Theory Is As Bad As "Brains Make Minds" Theory

Everywhere there is a massive explanatory failure of the theory that brains make minds. For example:

• There is no place in the brain suitable for storing memories that last for decades, and things like synapses and dendritic spines (alleged to be involved in memory storage) are unstable, "shifting sands" kind of things. An individual synapse and a dendritic spine do not last for years, and consist of proteins that only last for weeks.  A 2019 paper documents a 16-day examination of synapses, finding "the dataset contained n = 320 stable synapses, n = 163 eliminated synapses and n = 134 formed synapses."  That's about a 33% disappearance rate over a course of 16 days. The same paper refers to another paper that "reported rates of [dendritic] spine eliminations in the order of 40% over an observation period of 4 days." 

• The synapses that transmit signals in the brain are very noisy and unreliable,  in contrast to humans who can recall very large amounts of memorized information without error.

• Signal transmission in the brain must mainly be a snail's pace affair, because of very serious slowing factors such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue (wrongly ignored by those who write about the speed of brain signals), meaning brains are too slow to explain instantaneous human memory recall.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for reading memories.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for writing memories, nothing like the read-write heads found in computers.

• The brain has nothing that might explain the instantaneous recall of long-ago-learned information that humans routinely display, and has nothing like the things that allow instant data retrieval in computers.

• Brain tissue has been studied at the most minute resolution, and it shows no sign of storing any encoded information (such as memory information) other than the genetic information that is in almost every cell of the body.

• There is no sign that the brain or the human genome has any of the vast genomic apparatus it would need to have to accomplish the gigantic task of converting learned conceptual knowledge and episodic memories into neural states or synapse states (the task would presumably required hundreds of specialized proteins, and there's no real sign that such memory-encoding proteins exist).

• No neuroscientist has ever given a detailed explanation of how such a gigantic translation task of memory encoding could be accomplished (one that included precise, detailed examples).

• Contrary to the claim that brains store memories and produce our thinking, case histories show that humans can lose half or more of their brains (due to disease or hemispherectomy operations), and suffer little damage to memory or intelligence (as discussed here). 

A wise response to such failures is to suspect or assume that minds must be the product of something beyond the human body, or to suspect or assume that the mind must be the equivalent of something beyond the human body. That would be moving in the right direction. But a recent paper touted some theory that attempts to deal with the failure of "brains make minds" by marching in the wrong direction. The paper ("The CBC theory and it’s entailments: Why current models of the origin of consciousness fail") tries to sell a "CBC theory" that tries to explain minds by assuming something material that is less than a brain: mere cells. The CBC stands for cell-based consciousness. A brain is basically very many cells (neurons) and very many connections between those cells (axons and synapses).  You sure don't make the "brains don't explain minds" problem any better by trying to explain things using only cells. It's kind of like someone writing a long book entitled "My Grand Explanation for Life's Origin," and then responding to a critical review of that book by ripping out all of the pages but one, and then saying, "Now I have an explanation for life's origin." 

The paper misinforms us badly by claiming this: "

Prokaryotes, the simplest unicellular species, display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature including associative learning, stable memory formation, route navigation and decision-making." The paper provides no good evidence to back up this claim, which is not true under the normal definition of "cognitive." Cells do not display behaviors that demonstrate any such things (although using a stripped-down shrunken definition of "navigation" you might be able to claim that cells do some navigation). An individual cell can't learn anything, cannot form a memory, and cannot make a decision. 

As references to back up the claim above, all we get immediately are some self-citations by the authors. One of the self-citations is to this paper, which states:

"We posit that subjective awareness is a fundamental property of cellular life. It emerged as an inherent feature of, and contemporaneously with, the very first life-forms." 

This is the same kind of nonsense which is a pillar of panpsychism, in which mind is spoken of as if it is only the measliest shadow of itself, something that is then called a mere property. Similar nonsense would be going on if you described human beings as mere "noise makers,"  and then offered a "theory of noise occurrence" to try to explain the origin of humans. 

You could probably find some study you could cite to try to support a claim of cell learning, but the study you found would probably show little. Imagine a scientist who has 1000 cells in a beaker, and tries to test learning by the cells. First he gives the cells  some task, and records how well they do. Then he tries the same task again, and records how well the cells do. There will be a 50% chance that on the second try the cells will do better, and that's merely chance at play.  If a scientist files away in his file drawer unsuccessful tests, and writes up for publication a successful test, he might do 100 experiments trying to show cell learning, and a few might get results that would be only expected in one test in 20.  That would be enough to claim "statistical significance," which would be probably be enough to get the paper published.  There is no well-replicated evidence that an individual cell can learn something. 

A recent article cited the paper "Associative Conditioning Is a Robust Systemic Behavior in Unicellular Organisms: An Interspecies Comparison" as evidence that cells can learn. I don't think the paper is robust evidence of any such thing. We have some scientists claiming that after some cells were prodded to move in a particular direction by an electrical stimulus, that they will be more likely to move in that direction without the stimulus.  But the paper is not a pre-registered study, and it failed to follow any blinding protocol. A blinding protocol is an essential for a study like this to be taken seriously. The effect reported is one that could very easily have occurred by chance. By chance a group of cells may have some kind of herding effect, and may tend to move in any of four directions with a probability of about 25%.  The authors seem to have made the dubious assumption that each cell in a rather dense group of cells would move randomly in any direction, an assumption that ignores various factors that might tend to create a herding effect by which a rather dense group of cells will tend to move in the same direction. 

Cells do often act in a purposeful manner, as if guided by some higher agency interested in achieving grand end results such as the construction of a human body. But that does not entitle us to claim that cells themselves have minds. The authors are just spouting unjustified and implausible speculations when they make these claims: 

"All cells are sentient, exhibit self-referential awareness, and are fully capable of decision-making and problem-solving....each cell is a conscious 'self', combining three essential elements necessary for cogently explaining multicellularity. In order to collaborate in their trillions, each self-referential cell must 'know that it knows', 'knows that others know', and be aware that other cells 'know in self-similar patterns'. These aspects of consciousness are essential to the collaboration, cooperation, and co-dependencies that cells demonstrate for multicellular decision-making and united contingent problem-solving."

Note all the uses of words in quotation marks. For example, we don't get a claim that cells have a self, but a claim that they have a "self," and we don't get a claim that a cell knows that it knows, but that it "knows that it knows."  Always suspect you are being fooled and word-tricked when you read statements like this using words in quotation marks. Similarly, be very suspicious if someone says, "I have a nice 'computer' I'd like to sell you" rather than "I have a nice computer I'd like to sell you."

What is going on in the paper is largely some equivocation sleight-of-hand. The very slippery word "consciousness" (which can mean a hundred different things) is being used in different ways: on one hand to mean some hypothesized tiny little shadow of a thing that isn't anything like a human mind, and on the other hand to refer to the vast mental reality of a human mind.  So the authors try to make a jump from some claimed "consciousness with a microscopic small c" (claimed to exist in a cell) to consciousness with a giant capital C (human minds), not telling us how the use of the word "consciousness" is vastly changing from one part of the paper to another. Similarly, all kinds of verbal tricks are being employed in which the words "intelligent," "self," "know," "conscious," "sentient" and "cognition" are being used in strange ways outside of their normal definitions. This all smells like a type of equivocation and language misuse similar to what goes on when Darwinists refer to "natural selection" that is not actually selection (not being a choice made by conscious agent), and when they talk about evolution with a microscopic "e," some mere tiny variation in a gene pool, and try to use that as a justification for claims of evolution with a giant sky-high capital E, such as claims of macroevolution or common descent a trillion times harder to prove  than such a tiny gene variation. Similar equivocation trickery is used by theorists of panpsychism, as I discuss in my post here. 

The idea of a conscious cell might at first glance seem to be a promising one to someone who considers the vast unsolved problem of morphogenesis, the problem of how there occurs the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body.  The progression cannot be explained by the idea of cells reading a body blueprint stored in DNA, because no such blueprint exists in DNA, contrary to the many lies that have been told on this topic. Now, a person might think that you could make progress on this problem by assuming that each cell is conscious, and that a cell has a goal of moving things towards greater order.  

But deeper reflection should lead you to conclude that this idea leads nowhere in helping to explain the origin of human bodies. An individual cell could never understand the grand purpose served by the construction of the human body: the end result of having large, mobile, tool-manipulating, seeing and food-gathering (or food-catching or food-growing) organisms such as adult humans that can survive well on the surface of planets like our planet. The construction of a human body and the purpose of such a result are ideas that would be 1000 miles over the heads of some little barely conscious cell floating about in the body.  Such a cell could never have any idea such as "Aha, let me try to reach exactly the right place in one of the chambers of the heart, where I might serve some purpose in helping this large mobile organism pump its blood so that it will be able to live for years on the surface of its planet."  So we wouldn't actually help to explain the origin of human bodies by imagining conscious cells. 

If human bodies were merely a heap-like blob of cells, then we might be able to help explain how we got such bodies by some idea that cells are conscious, and like to stick together, like lonely people seeking crowds on a Saturday night. But human bodies are no such blobs. Human bodies are fantastically organized systems consisting of a suitable arrangement of organs, muscles and bones that allow humans to live, reproduce and walk around on the surface of a planet while breathing, pumping blood, and finding, eating and digesting plants and animals. No cell would ever understand what was needed for a human body to fill such role, nor would such a cell understand how it could position itself in the right way to serve such a role.  

Part of the reason why "cells with the slightest shadow of a mind" cannot explain the origin of a human body is the vast amount of component interdependence in the human body, very often requiring that things mutually dependent on each other be constructed simultaneously rather than sequentially. 

It is true that cells combine in magnificent ways, just as if some mysterious higher agency was driving them towards purposeful goals. From such a reality you have no warrant for suspecting that individual cells are conscious, and that the vast amount of organization that occurs when a body forms is a result of a billion tiny little decisions made by conscious cells.  Similarly, if you see some miracle of organization at a beach in which a swirling whirlwind of sand forms itself into a giant beautiful well-arranged sandcastle, you have a reason for suspecting that some mysterious unseen causal agency is at work; but you have no warrant for suspecting that such an effect occurs because individual grains of sand are conscious. 

The idea of conscious cells is also worthless in explaining the human mind. You would not get anything like the experience of what it is like to be a human mind by adding up tiny little experiences of what it is like to be a cell. This type of problem is one of the main reasons for rejecting panpsychism.  Panpsychists claim that individual atoms or subatomic particles are conscious. But trillions of little experiences of being an electron or an atom would never add up to being the experience of being a human with a single self. In a book dealing with the philosophy of mind, J. P. Moreland discusses an objection to panpsychism just like that I just stated, which he describes like this:

"Combination Problem—Sub-minds, such as those of atoms, cannot be conceived to combine or sum into complex, unified minds such as humans have. Hence, panpsychism is not an adequate account of mind."

A few pages later he says this about this Combination Problem: "I take this to be the Achilles heel of panpsychism." He discusses some attempts to evade the problem, none of which are credible. The same Combination Problem that rules out panpsychism as an explanation for human minds also rules out individually conscious cells as an explanation for human minds. 

If there were trillions of bodily cells (none having the slightest knowledge of history, politics, science, art or human culture, and none having the slightest ability to produce speech, thoughts, novel ideas, abstract generalizations, literature, art, philosophy, culture and science), and they had some kind of shadow consciousness, no combination of such cells would ever add up to make the minds of humans who do understand facts and subtle truths of history, politics, science, art and human culture, and do have the ability to produce speech, thoughts, novel ideas, abstract generalizations, literature, art, philosophy, culture and science.  And if trillions of tiny cells each had a tiny bit of awareness of their cell surrounding,  that total body of knowledge would be a body of biology internals knowledge not matching the knowledge of humans, 99% of whom have no appreciable knowledge of biology internals, but instead have an entirely different body of knowledge: knowledge of topics such as friends, family, school subjects, history, politics, local geography, sports and celebrities. 

Contrary to the claims quoted above, cells do not have selves; cells do not know; cells do not know that they know; and cells do not know that other cells know. There are not 37 trillion selves in my body, but a single self. The unified self of a human mind could never arise from some combination of 37 trillion cell selves. 

The paper I have criticized does at least give a good quote that I have added to my long list of revealing quotes by scientists in which they make confessions that undermine confidence in the achievement legends so commonly stated by scientists. The quote is this:

"There is a growing sense of unease among biologists that there are serious shortcomings in the Neo-Darwinian framework, in particular that several of its central assumptions are wrong and that, as a result, it lacks explanatory power. The problems are many and likely fatal. For one, epigenetic effects are not only real, they are critical for the evolution of cells. Epigenesis had been largely excluded from the Darwinian paradigm due to Lamarckian theory having been deemed in error. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that the central assumption of Neo-Darwinism, that mutations occur randomly and that natural selection operates to fix the most adaptive variations, is simply wrong (Miller et al, 2023)." 

The authors imagine a replacement for the Neo-Darwinian framework:  

"We anticipate a shift from a gene-centric Neo-Darwinism and SMC to a cognition-centric CBC framework (Miller et al, 2023). The result will be an evolutionary biology based on systematic, natural learning carried out by intelligent and sentient cells—not on random genetic errors."

But that would just be replacing one mythology with a different mythology, because claims of intelligent cells are as mythical as the "DNA is a body specification" myth that is a pillar of Neo-Darwinism.  And you could never credibly explain how you got the fantastically organized structures of large multicellular organisms such as mammals by imagining that it happened by cells learning something, which would be an idea almost as silly as claiming that skyscrapers get constructed because parts such as steel beams, pipes and windows learn things.

MIT Magazine Misses Mark on Epilepsy and a GABA Gamble

The world of science and technology journalism sometimes seem to operate under a rule of: "Hype first, and think later."

The MIT Technology Review magazine recently had an article that was a bad example of reporting about a risky new treatment.  The article had the title "Brain-cell transplants are the newest experimental epilepsy treatment," and sounds as if it was written by someone trying to raise the stock price of a company called Neurona Therapeutics.  We hear about some new technique tried on only five  people, in which an attempt is made to treat epilepsy by inserting brain cells into one of the most sensitive parts of the brain. 

The approach mentioned is one that takes the exact opposite path that physicians have been using for decades in treating epilepsy. Epilepsy is a mysterious brain disease that causes seizures, which are like electrical storms in the brain.  The exact cause of epilepsy is unknown. Nowadays most epilepsy is successfully treated by prescribing medications.  A minority of patients have what is called drug-resistant epilepsy. The standard treatment for very bad drug-resistant epilepsy is surgical removal of part of the brain. 

In the most severe cases of epilepsy, doctors can perform a hemispherectomy that may involve removal of half of the brain.  But most of the times a much less drastic operation is performed.  Since most epilepsy is what is called temporal lobe epilepsy (in which seizures come from the part of the brain called the temporal lobe),  drug-resistant epilepsy can usually be treated by an operation called a temporal lobectomy. Such an operation involves removing much of one of the temporal lobes of the brain. Several thousands of such operations occur every year in the US.  Most of the the time the operation works very well, without serious side effects. 

Since doctors have a good surgical treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy, why would the MIT Technology Review be promoting some scantily-tested experimental treatment taking a "Johnny-come-lately" approach that is the exact opposite of the standard medical technique, a treatment involving adding brain cells rather than removing them?  The author article tells us this about mainstream surgery for epilepsy:

"While this kind of surgery can stop seizures permanently, it comes with the risk of 'major cognitive consequences.' People can lose memories, or even their vision."

The article gives us no references or quotes backing up this statement, which seems to be very misleading in regard to the claim about losing memories.  Removal of one of the brain's temporal lobes to treat epilepsy was done thousands of times a year in the decades before the year 2003, and also in the past two decades. Reports of severe memory problems following removal of the temporal lobe are actually rare.  A 2003 scientific paper tells us how rare how such cases are:

"Davies and Weeks (1993) did report one case of postoperative amnesia in a series of 58 cases of unilateral temporal lobectomy, whereas Walczak et al. (1990) found one case of marked deterioration in memory from a preoperative normal state in their series of 100 patients who underwent such surgery. Rausch and Langfitt (1992) estimated that, on the basis of their series, 'the prevalence of patients at risk for postoperative amnesia who otherwise met criteria for surgery fell between one and four out of 218’ (p. 508), and Jones‐Gotman et al. (1993) noted that 'the base‐rate of post‐resection amnesia, were all patients operated on without prior screening with the amobarbital procedure, may be less than 1%, (p. 447).' "

The authors of the 2003 paper state, "We were able to locate nine definite cases of amnesia following unilateral temporal lobe surgery in the English‐language literature." This is not very worrying, given that (1) many thousands of operations of this type were done before the year 2003; (2) doctors or scientists often loosely use the term "amnesia" for any of a large variety of memory performance problems, and typically use such a term for cases that are something other than a severe loss of learned or episodic memories; (3) there are many reasons why a person may have memory problems, and a few people having memory problem after a particular operation does not show the operation caused such a memory problem. 

In fact, in Table 3 of the paper we are given the details of the impairments of these nine cases of claimed amnesia; and none of them sound like a case of loss of knowledge or episodic memories (with the possible exception of case 5, which is not well-described). We hear about what seem like rather minor memory performance shortfalls.  A 2009 study carefully testing "before and after" memory results for 82 patients who had surgery for temporal lobe epilepsy tells us this: "The main finding of this study is that, at variance from the picture emerging from short-term follow-up studies, longer-term memory outcome after TLE [temporal lobe epilepsy] surgery seems to be good, as after 2 years memory performance was equal to or better than baseline [before surgery] in most patients." A review of 911 surgical operations for epilepsy (looking for bad effects) mentions no case of amnesia or memory loss or memory deterioration. 

There is no robust evidence that surgical treatment for temporal lobe epilepsy causes loss of memories. Trying to justify some radical surgical treatment that is the opposite of the approach doctors have long taken for treating epilepsy (an experimental technique involving adding brain cells rather than removing them), our MIT article seems to have missed the mark. The facts about how taking out large chunks of the brain are even more shocking than those discussed above. It seems that contrary to the dogma that your brain stores your memories, you can remove not just the temporal lobe, but even an entire half of the brain without causing people to lose their memories.  See my post here for a justification of that claim. 

We get some hype in the MIT article, not justified by any published research results of the study mentioned. We read this:

"The treatment, developed by Neurona Therapeutics, is shaping up as a breakthrough for stem-cell technology. That's the idea of using embryonic human cells, or cells converted to an embryonic-like state, to manufacture young, healthy tissue." 

Ironically, to the left of this claim we have to a link to an article entitled, "After 25 years of hype, embryonic stem cells are still waiting for their moment."  The MIT article is part of that 25 years of hype. The only evidence it gives is to cite a group of only five people who have had these Neurona Therapeutics cell implants. We hear that for four of these people their seizures have decreased through some brain cell implants that did something involving a chemical called GABA. 

But these are self-reports, which are often unreliable. And reporting the frequency of seizures is particularly unreliable, given that when a seizure is finished, a person may be left with no memory of it occurring. (Most seizures are much less severe than the type of dramatic seizures that used to be called "grand mal" seizures but are now called tonic-clonic seizures.) The self-reports are also anecdotal word-of-mouth stuff, rather than published research results. 

One of the quotes in the MIT article is a misleading slur about people with epilepsy. The article states, "People with epilepsy have a hard time remembering things, but some of the volunteers can now recall an entire series of pictures."  That leaves us with the impression that people with epilepsy have very bad memory, and cannot even recall a series of pictures. That is misleading prose that is defaming 1% of the population. 

In scientific studies (often using too-small samples for reliable results), people with epilepsy tend to perform almost as well on memory tests as people without epilepsy.  Often the epileptic patients chosen for such studies are those with particularly severe epilepsy, which may create a misimpression about the general population of epileptics.  There is reason to suspect that a study randomly selecting 1000 patients prescribed epilepsy medication (and using IQ-matched controls) would show little difference in memory scores. One scientific paper says, "There are, however, reports that suggest that memory may not be affected in PWE [people with epilepsy] when compared with controls if the PWE and controls are matched with respect to intelligence quotients."  One of the studies on this topic that used a larger sample size was one doing cognitive tests on 176 children with epilepsy, comparing with 113 control subjects; it was entitled "Educational Underachievement in Children With Epilepsy: A Model to Predict the Effects of Epilepsy on Educational Achievement."  The study reported, "The children were assessed with a test battery consisting of tests for educational achievement, cognitive tests and tests for reaction time, and tests for memory and intelligence....For memory, none of the analyses showed statistically significant effects."

Can we imagine what an uproar would be created if some article tried to claim that people of some racial minority have trouble remembering things? But it seems that without any uproar a mainstream article can do defamatory stereotyping of  1%  of the population by saying "people with epilepsy have a hard time remembering things."  The vast  majority of people with epilepsy have good memories and  function well in school, work and society.

The link here takes you an FDA page describing the clinical trial being done. We are told the study will be completed in May of 2026. We are told subjects will "take medicines to partially suppress their immune system (aimed to prevent the body from rejecting the cells) for 1 year,"  which sounds like a significant  risk. We are told no results have been posted for this clinical trial. So why is the MIT Technology Review hyping this study, which has not even published any results?

The MIT Technology Review story tells us something that makes no sense under "brains make minds" claims. It tells us that a few people were given "inhibitory interneurons" and that "the job of these neurons is to quell brain activity."  But we are also told (without any specifics) that for the handful given such cells there have been "improvements in cognitive tests." If your brain makes your mind, why would quelling brain activity result in improvements in cognitive tests?

A story last year in the MIT Technology Review describes 25 years of hype about stem cells, and tells us, "Yet today, more than two decades later, there are no treatments on the market based on these cells. Not one." It seems we've been grossly misinformed for decades about stem cells.  And quite a few other scientific topics. By now an FDA page entitled "Approved Cellular and Gene Therapy Products" lists a small number of  treatments, some of which are supposedly stem cell treatments; but they are all cancer treatments or blood treatments.  

I can imagine a conversation that might occur between a hypothetical scientist Smith and a hypothetical scientist Jones working at some company that is testing stem cell implants:

Smith: Don't think of an embryo as a "developing human being" but merely as a bank of cells we can rob. 

Jones: So what's the plan?

Smith: We will take cells from an embryo, grow them in our lab, and then inject them into a sensitive part of the body, to see what happens. 

Jones: But that will require some very sick human "guinea pigs" willing to roll the dice. 

Smith: They can always be found.

Jones: But you know, this fooling around with stem cells has never worked very well.  They've been playing with stem cells for 25 years, and there is still almost nothing in the way of treatments.  What if our sizable investments in this company fail to pay off? 

Smith: Don't worry. To keep stock prices high, we can always feed the right type of gossip to certain "pushover" journalists eager for a "science gloriously marches onward" story. 

Jones:  But you can play that game only so long. One day you have to publish results. 

Smith: Don't worry. Large stock investments can be conveniently sold BEFORE the first results are published, when the stock price is still high. 

Astray Authorities #6

 Here is the latest in a series of videos I am making. 

The Guardian's Misleading Story on Near-Death Experiences

The British paper the Guardian recently gave us a junk story on the topic of near-death experiences. It pushed a groundless narrative that a neuroscientist named Jimo Borjigin has done something to help explain such experiences, which is not at all correct.  Borjigin's work on this topic started out with her 2013 paper with the very misleading title "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain." The paper makes a misleading use of the technical EEG terms "coherence" and "connectivity."

An EEG is a device for measuring brain waves, one requiring the attachment of multiple electrodes on the head. In the technical jargon of EEG analysts, "coherence" means some length of time in which you are getting the same type of brain waves from two different regions of the brain. The paper here states, "Coherence is one mathematical method that can be used to determine if two or more sensors, or brain regions, have similar neuronal oscillatory activity with each other."  There are different ways in which the term "connectivity" is used by neuroscientists. One of these ways is "structural connectivity" meaning the number of connections between brain cells. But, according to that paper, there's another way in which "connectivity" is used: "Functional connectivity identifies activity brain regions that have similar frequency, phase and/or amplitude of correlated activity." 

So given such speech customs, a neuroscientist analyzing the ups and downs of brain waves can claim "coherence" or "connectivity" as long as he sees any type of similarity between different regions of a brain giving the same kind of EEG readings. This is what the authors of the 2013 paper (including  Borjigin) did.  What they observed was simply the brain waves of rats quickly dying off to become a flat line. But because the brain waves from each regions quickly trailed off and died off in the same way, the authors have called this behavior "coherence" and "connectivity." 

While this may not be a very clear case of an outright lie (given the speech habits of EEG analysts), the title of the paper is misleading, because it creates a very false impression in the minds of 95% of the people who read it. 95% of the people reading a title of "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain" will think that some indication was found of increased cognitive activity in dying brains. The paper found no such thing.  The "coherence" and "connectivity" supposedly found was not a surge but merely a blip, and it did not involve anything like some surge of mental activity. Nothing whatsoever was found that can help to give a neural explanation for near-death experiences. In fact, there is every reason to think that at the time when this little blip of claimed "coherence" and "connectivity" occurred, all of the rats were unconscious. 

Figure 1 of the paper is shown below. We see EEG brain wave signals from rats who were injected with a chemical causing the heart to stop. 

Nothing impressive is seen. It's just what you would expect: brain signals trailing off and dying out very quickly after the heart stops. This data offers no justification for a title of "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain." An honest title of the paper would have been:  "Brain waves very quickly trail off and die out after hearts stop in rats." 

After this paper with a misleading title was published, we had innumerable misleading citations of it in the articles of materialist or mainstream writers, claiming or insinuating that the paper showed or suggested something it did not either show or suggest. An example was a National Geographic article with the misleading title "In Dying Brains, Signs of Heightened Consciousness." The 2013 "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain" paper had not anything whatsoever to show "signs of heightened consciousness" in the dying rats it studied. Similarly, a 2017 Big Think article linked to the 2013 paper and claimed, "One 2013 study, which examined electrical signals inside the heads of rats, found that the rodents entered a hyper-alert state just before death." This claim is totally false, and the paper suggested nothing of the sort.  

The new Guardian story has a mention of this research, and gives us the untrue claim that Borjigin "discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen." No such thing was discovered, and the paper made no mention of either serotonin or dopamine.  The Guardian story then refers to another paper Borjigin co-authored, referring to a Patient One mentioned in that paper.  The 2023 paper discussed brain readings of coma patients in Michigan, USA who had their life-support systems turned off. 

I previously described this paper like this:

• "Surge of neurophysiological coupling and connectivity of gamma oscillations in the dying human brain." Here we have another misleading use of the word "surge" in a science paper headline, a paper co-authored by one of the researchers who authored the equally mistitled rat study "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain."  The paper merely describes a little brain activity in two people after a respirator was turned off, with no evidence of brain activity continuing for more than a few seconds after the heart has stopped. The lines on brain waves charts go up and down, and there are seven or so channels of brain waves (including a gamma channel); so at any second you can usually find some little line going up and call that a "surge," although at the same time other lines (representing other brain wave channels) will probably be going down. Using the term "surge" in the title of the paper was misleading, rather like  tracking the price of Microsoft, seeing it go up 2% at 2:00, and calling that a surge. The authors of the study did not even report a surge in gamma waves, one of the brain wave channels. Eager to get something they could call a surge, the authors got their little "surge" after some statistical fiddling with the signals, to get some statistical measure that only shows up after arbitrary analytics. Almost any random ten seconds of brain wave activity can be statistically analyzed to show a little "surge" somewhere, if you're willing to dredge up secondary statistical measures. Keep torturing the data, and it will confess as you wish.  Shamefully, the journal Science has an article on this paper with the misleading headline "Burst of brain activity during dying could explain life passing before your eyes"; and the Smithsonian site has an equally misleading click-bait headline of "Surging Brain Activity in Dying People May Be a Sign of Near-Death Experiences." There is no evidence that either of these two people had an experience of "life passing before their eyes" or anything like near-death experiences. The subjects were unconscious when the respirator was turned off, and there is no evidence of any consciousness. Unconscious people have gamma wave activity (the activity reported), and you have plenty of gamma activity while you are sleeping. No "neural correlates of the NDE" were reported by the paper. As two MDs point out in a commentary on this paper, "The researchers reported no evidence whatsoever that these brain activities were correlated with conscious experiences in those two patients—and no reason to compare these results with prospective NDE studies in patients who have survived a cardiac arrest."

But senselessly our Guardian article writer attempts to portray this research as shedding some light on near-death experiences.  We have a quote by Borjigin not matching anything reported in her scientific paper. "As she died, Patient One’s brain was functioning in a kind of hyperdrive,” Borjigin tells the article writer.  That does not match any data reported in the scientific paper, which shows nothing special happening in the patient's brain as she died. In fact, see the first  visual below which plainly contradicts such a claim, showing this Patient One's brain waves trailing off into flat lines as her heart stopped.   "Hyperdrive" is a word used in science fiction, and is not a legitimate neuroscience word. We read, "Given the levels of activity and connectivity in particular regions of her dying brain, Borjigin believes it’s likely that Patient One had a profound near-death experience with many of its major features: out-of-body sensations, visions of light, feelings of joy or serenity, and moral re-evaluations of one’s life." This is a groundless and implausible speculation not supported by any evidence. 

As two MDs point out in a commentary on this paper, "The researchers reported no evidence whatsoever that these brain activities were correlated with conscious experiences in those two patients—and no reason to compare these results with prospective NDE studies in patients who have survived a cardiac arrest." There are no known neural correlates that are signs of near-death experiences, so no match  has been made to any such correlates.  So the belief attributed to Borjigin (about the patient having a near-death experience with particular features) is every bit as silly as someone looking at some EEG readouts of a dying patient and saying, "I believe she was having a vision of becoming the queen of Mars," when the patient never spoke a word. 

But that's how so many of our neuroscientists are these days.  It seems so many of them are so often squinting at data and claiming to see things that aren't really there, and jumping to conclusions without any warrant. It seems that our neuroscientists (members of a belief community with entrenched dogmas) tend to be very big People of Belief. A neuroscientist such as Borjigin believes without the slightest warrant that a silent dying patient had a near-death experience with particular features. And neuroscientists believe without any good warrant the "old wives' tales" stories of their conformist belief community, such as the claim that brains store memories and that brains produce thinking and imagination and ideas (disregarding a great wealth of evidence discussed in this site's posts that brains are too slow, noisy, unstable and unreliable to explain the wonders of human mental performance, and disregarding the failure of any microscopic examinations of brain tissue to ever find any trace of learned human knowledge). 

The Guardian article writer makes use of a little trick to fool readers into thinking that brain activity continues after the heart stops.  The trick is to discuss two cases when life support machines were turned off and brain activity continued for a tiny bit, and to try to insinuate that this means that brains keep working minutes after hearts stop, something that is not true. The article says, "At the very least, Patient One’s brain activity – and the activity in the dying brain of another patient Borjigin studied, a 77-year-old woman known as Patient Three – seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death."  No, that isn't true at all, because turning off a life support machine is not the same as stopping the heart. Both the heart and the brain may continue to work for a few minutes after a life support machine has been turned off. 

The evidence on this matter is crystal-clear: within 15 or 20 seconds after the heart has stopped, brain activity as measured by EEG dies away to become a flat line. In fact, if we look at the Supplemental Information document of Borjigin's paper on this Patient One, we get some information that very much contradicts what the quote above states (information which also shows the untruth of Borjigin's claim that this patient's brain was in "hyperdrive" as she died). 

Below is part of Figure S1A from the supplemental information of the paper. We see the brain waves of the dying Patient One in blue (EEG readings), and we see in the last row a red ECG reading that is a  measure of heart activity.  

The text below this visual tells us this about these stages that are labeled S5, S6, S7, S8, S9 and S10, using the term "bradycardia" which means lower-than-normal heart rate: 

"The pacemaker was automatically turned off (S5) and restarted from S6. S7 starts when rapid heartrate drop was seen which ended when pacemaker was turned off by clinical staff. S8 denotes the bradycardia period where RR interval (RRI) is longer than 5s. In S9, RRI is below 5s (partial heartrate recovery). S10 saw the reappearance of the P-waves and further recovery of heartrate. S11 ends at the last recorded heartbeat with periodical PAC-like ECG pattern."

The evidence in this case is crystal clear: there was virtually no brain activity at stage S10 (when there was "further recovery of heartrate") and no brain activity at all at stage S11, which ended with the "last recorded heartbeat." The case of this Patient One thereby shows the  untruth of the Guardian writer's claim that "At the very least, Patient One’s brain activity – and the activity in the dying brain of another patient Borjigin studied, a 77-year-old woman known as Patient Three – seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death." To the contrary, the data on this Patient One showed that her brain activity had shut down completely by the time of her last heartbeat. 

Below is the brain wave data on Patient Three, as displayed in Figure S1C of the supplemental information of the paper.  The blue lines are EEG brain wave readings, and the red line at bottom is an ECG heart activity reading. 

Below this visual is this description which refers to stages such as S5 and S6:

"In S5, heartrate was partially recovered. During this period, R-peak duration increased. P-waves became invisible. In S6, while heartrate was maintained at the same level as in S5, R-peak width returned to a normal level but still without visible P-waves. In S7, while heartrate saw further recovery (shortening of RRI), PR interval lengthening became evident on ECM. The PR-interval continued linear expansion in S8, which ended at the last recorded heartbeat."

The evidence in this case is crystal clear: there was virtually no brain activity at stage S7 ("while heartrate saw further recovery") and no brain activity at all at stage S8, which ended with the "last recorded heartbeat." Like the case of Patient One, the case of this Patient Three thereby shows the  untruth of the Guardian writer's claim that "At the very least, Patient One’s brain activity – and the activity in the dying brain of another patient Borjigin studied, a 77-year-old woman known as Patient Three – seems to close the door on the argument that the brain always and nearly immediately ceases to function in a coherent manner in the moments after clinical death." To the contrary, the data on this Patient Three showed that her brain activity had shut down completely by the time of her last heartbeat. The data of the supplemental information document tells the same story for Patient Two and Patient 4: none of the EEG lines of the four patients show significant brain electrical activity after the heart stopped beating. 

The data above is consistent with one of the main claims made by those arguing that near-death experiences are beyond any neural explanation: the claim that brain activity ceases within a few seconds after the heart starts beating during cardiac arrest. It is very baffling that Borjigin has given an interview with the Guardian trying to insinuate that the cases of such patients do anything to support any neural explanation for near-death explanation. We may reasonably ask: did Borjigin bother to study the data in the supplemental information of her paper, data that so clearly defies such insinuations?  And did the writer of the Guardian article bother to study such data, defying some of what he wrote?

Borjigin is quoted as making the statement, “The brain, contrary to everybody’s belief, is actually super active during cardiac arrest." This claim is every bit as misleading as saying that the heart is very active when someone shoots a rifle bullet through it. The fact is that a heart will stop pumping when you shoot a rifle bullet through it,  and a brain will stop its electrical activity when the heart stops.  The charts above show how misleading Borjigin's quote is. Why were such charts (contradicting  Borjigin's claims) hidden away in the supplemental information attachment of Borjigin's paper? They should have been in the main text of the paper. 

One of the many misleading parts of the Guardian article is when the author attempts to insinuate that those interested in life after death (and believing in signs from the deceased) have lost interest in near-death experiences, an insinuation that is very untrue. Always expect misleading information in mainstream publication articles about paranormal phenomena. Always remember that the authors of such articles are very rarely careful scholars of the topics they are writing about. 

Near-death experiences are one of the strongest lines of evidence against claims that the brain is the source of the mind. Contrary to the predictions of such claims, when brains have shut down during cardiac arrest (showing only flat lines in their electrical activity), minds often have long, vivid experiences -- not merely some type of experience, but experiences that people routinely report being more vivid than regular life experiences.  And very vivid and detailed memories are formed. In near-death experiences people very commonly report perceiving their bodies from outside of their bodies, from meters away. There is no credible explanation of such reports under the assumption that the brain is the source of your mind and the storage place of your memories. Remarkably, the recent Guardian article is a very long article, and it kind of presents Borjigin's Patient One as its "star witness" for the claim that near-death experiences have a neural explanation. But as I show above, this is a farce, because the actual data of Patient One's death (shown in my second visual above) provides no support  for the claim that near-death experiences have a neural explanation, and strongly supports one of the pillars of the claim that such experiences have no neural explanation: the claim that brains shut down when hearts shut down or a few seconds later. 

A 2017 paper was "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death." That 2017 paper studied the brain waves of four humans who died in Ontario, Canada after their hearts stopped. These were patients different from the four Michigan, USA patients whose deaths were documented in the 2023 Borjigin paper described above. Referring to the 2013 paper co-authored by Borjigin, the 2017 paper stated, "We also did not observe any well-defined EEG states following the early cardiac arrest period as previously reported in rats." Of course -- brain electrical activity stops when the heart stops, or only a few seconds later. The paper points out that "one must be careful about false positive EEG signals from muscular and/or cardiac sources."  Motion and muscle activity shows up on EEG readouts, producing what are called motion artifacts. An involuntary muscle twitch (or a movement by a medical person of part of an unconscious body) a few seconds after death may show up as a blip on an EEG reading. Such a thing is no actual evidence of brain activity during conscious experience. A scientific paper commentary says, "Contamination of EEG recordings by muscle artifact is a well-recognized problem, especially in the high-frequency gamma range, leading to erroneous estimates of EEG spectral power and coherence  (Goncharova et al., 2003; Pope et al., 2009; Fitzgibbon et al., 2013)."  It is just such a false-alarm-prone gamma range that Borjigin's papers on this topic have been centered around. 

Below is Figure 3 from the paper.  In Patients 1, 2 and 3 there is no significant brain wave activity (as shown in the blue EEG lines) after the time point marked 0 (time of last heart beat).  In Patient 4 the EEG lines flatline at five seconds after the heart stopped, and there is about 15 seconds later merely a weak blip or two around the time 20 to 30 seconds after the heart stopped, but that dies away after a few seconds. 

In none of the eight patients graphed in these two papers do we have any substantive evidence of brains working for more than an instant after the patient's last heart beat. 

Traumatic Brain Injury Results Clashing With Prevailing Dogmas About Brains

I have at this site written quite a bit about the preservation of mind and memory after surgeries that removed large portions of the brain, sometimes half of the brain. Examples were my posts "Preservation of Mind and Memories After Removal of Half a Brain" and "Cases of High Mental Function Despite Large Brain Damage." There is another way to look for evidence of how sensitive the mind is to brain damage: we can look for cases of cognitive effects of traumatic brain injury (often referred to as TBI).  Every year we have many cases of traumatic brain injury or TBI that result from events such as accidental falls, traffic accidents, car crashes or people being shot in the head. 

Before discussing such cases, I will need to discuss how there are several reasons why we should assume that the cognitive effects of traumatic brain injuries are probably not as high as typically reported in scientific studies.

Confounding factor #1: the incentive of many to perform poorly on cognitive tests after a brain injury.  There is strong reason to suspect that in many cases people given cognitive tests after a traumatic brain injury may not be trying as hard as they can on the tests. Some of the subjects (such as those injured in a car accident either inside or outside of a vehicle or those who fell in a work accident) may have pending law suits or pending benefit applications, and may think that good performance in cognitive tests may reduce their chance of being rewarded lots of money in a law suit or through a benefit application.  There are three ways in which a person might receive money after a traumatic brain injury:

(1) The person might engage in a law suit against a car driver that results in a large settlement such as an award of $100,000 or more.

(2) A person might apply for benefits under the Worker's Compensation program that provides monthly payments to workers injured on the job. 

(3) A person might apply for disability benefits that can be provided by the Social Security Administration if a worker has been judged to be disabled. 

Given all of these possibilities for potential financial gain after having a traumatic brain injury, it would not be surprising if many people who have had traumatic brain injury do not try as hard as they can on tests of their cognitive abilities. Many people who have traumatic brain injury may think that getting a high score on a cognitive test might damage their ability to get future benefits or future settlement money. 

Indeed, in the paper "Noncredible Explanations of Noncredible Performance on Symptom Validity Tests" we read quite a bit about reasons for thinking that some of those tested after traumatic brain injury might not have been trying as hard as they could.  Here are some excerpts:

"Invalid test results from poor effort or deliberate underachievement do not occur only in groups where there is an obvious external incentive to appear cognitively impaired, such as those seeking financial compensation for cognitive impairment. Even in groups previously assumed to be highly motivated to do well, effort may be poor, leading to invalid test results....Neuropsychologists now know that, in many different contexts, effort can be low to a degree that is sufficient to invalidate test results, especially if there is an incentive to appear impaired (e.g., Chafetz, 2008; Chafetz, Prentkowski, & Rao, 2011; Flaro, Green, & Robertson, 2007; Sullivan, May, & Galbally, 2007)....For people with an incentive to appear impaired and who fail effort tests, the observed test scores typically underestimate actual ability to a marked degree (Fox, 2011; Green, 2007; Meyers et al., 2011; Stevens et al., 2008). In groups of disability claimants or compensation claimants, including those who were already receiving financial disability benefits, it was found that about 30% of cases were not making enough effort to produce valid test results, and in the MTBI group, the figure was roughly 40% (Green et al., 2001)."

There are techniques that can be used to help weed out "memory malingering" in memory tests of those with traumatic brain injury. One technique is to include some easy tests that almost no one fails, and look for failure in such tests, which might be an indication of lack of effort. Another technique is to take the same tests at different intervals, taking the best result at any interval as being the more reliable indication of memory performance. 

Confounding factor #2: selection bias in picking subjects having traumatic brain injury. We must wonder whether the scientists selecting the subjects for papers on traumatic brain injury have a bias in looking for subjects with particularly bad memory problems, because they are hoping to get a result that fits in with the expectations of their colleagues and peer reviewers of their papers. We should look for any confession by the paper authors that they selected patients who had reported memory problems, rather than selecting random patients with traumatic brain injury, regardless of how good their memory was. Any such confession means that the paper may not be telling us about what percentage of traumatic brain injury patients suffer from similar problems. Similarly, if scientists select for some study only people who are gay alcoholics, they may report a high alcoholism rate among gay people; but we won't learn from such a method what percentage of gay people are alcoholic. 

Confounding factor #3: the group of those with traumatic brain injury may be less intelligent and more forgetful than an average group of non-injured people of the same size. While traumatic brain injury often occurs for reasons beyond any person's control, very often such injury happen because of some causal factor that might have been avoided by someone of excellent intelligence and memory. For example, many traumatic brain injury cases occur to reckless or intoxicated drivers, to people who failed to use seat belts, or people who were walking in some dangerous way, to people who were not wearing helmets while bicycling or riding motorcycles, to people who recklessly jaywalked, and so forth. We therefore have a strong reason to suspect that the group of all people with traumatic brain injuries may have had a below-average intelligence or a below-average memory, or both. Accordingly, showing  a small difference in memory or intelligence between those with traumatic brain injury and those without injury does not necessarily show that brains make minds or that brains store memories. 

Confounding factor #4: traumatic brain injury may degrade perception, muscle skills, eyesight and hearing skills without decreasing core intelligence and memory, in a way that causes lower scores on cognitive tests.  Cognitive tests are rarely pure measures of memory and intelligence. For example, a person with a damaged brain may have a damaged vision ability that degrades his performance on paper-based cognitive tests.  Also, a person with a damaged brain may have a damaged muscular ability that degrades his performance on any test requiring muscle skills such as filling in the right little circles on a test sheet. 

Confounding factor #5: incidents producing traumatic brain injury may increase apathy, depression or pain, resulting in lower scores on memory tests that are not caused by lower cognitive ability.  It is has often been reported that following a traumatic brain injury someone may experience pain, depression or an increased level of apathy. Such factors might tend to cause a person to perform more poorly on cognitive tests, for reasons other than cognitive deficits. 

Confounding factor #6: memory tests often involve subjective scores by analysts who may be biased towards giving negative scores to those with traumatic brain injury.  Some memory tests can be performed without any subjective analysis by an analyst. For example,  with the Famous Faces Test, a person either does or does not name the person shown in a photograph.  But in other widely used memory tests, there is a strong possibility of biased analysis. For example, there is an Autobiographical Memory Interview test in which an analyst rates how well a subject has performed when asked to recall incidents at various parts of his life.   But if an analyst knows that a subject has had traumatic brain injury, the analyst may be more prone to rate the subject's response poorly.  To avoid such a bias, a robust blinding protocol would be needed, so that the analyst cannot tell whether the subject had a brain injury.  But neuroscience experiments typically fail to use blinding protocols, and when they are used they are typically not robust protocols.  A robust blinding protocol for a memory test would be one in which analysts could not even see the people giving answers, as such people would often have physical signs of their injury. 

In light of these six confounding factors, under the hypothesis that the brain does not make the mind and does not store memories, we might still expect to see some modest differences in cognitive test scores between those with traumatic brain injuries and those without such differences.  But we should expect that the differences will usually not be terribly dramatic, and that differences might tend to show up sometimes and be absent in other cases.  Let us look at some scientific papers to see whether such an expectation is met. 

• The paper "Cognitive Impairment 3 Months After Moderate and Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Prospective Follow-Up Study" gives us the result of cognitive tests on people who had brain injuries as the result of events such as falls and traffic accidents.  In the Discussion section we read that after moderate Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), "most patients had a normal neuropsychological assessment," with no more than 1 score much below normal (or, to put it more technically, no more than 1 score below 1.5 standard deviations below the norm).  We read that "even after severe [brain] injury, normal performances were found in one third of patients." The authors say, "This was unexpected." We are told that the average total IQ score of 35 subjects with moderate traumatic brain injury was an above-average score of 109, and the average total IQ score of 26 subjects with severe traumatic brain injury was an above-average score of 103. 
• The paper "Neuropsychological functioning during the year
  following severe traumatic brain injury" studied cognitive functioning in 65 subjects who had severe brain damage, mostly after road traffic crashes. The patients were rated with a level of impairment of "mild" or "severe" on various measures, based on tests 6 months after the injury and 1 year after. Fewer than half of the subjects were rated as having "severe" impairment in memory performance tests taken at the 1-year mark. Only 9% of the subjects were rated as having "severe" impairment in one test of executive function at the 1-year mark, with a minority rated as having "severe" impairment in another test executive function at the 1-year mark. One test of attention at the 1-year mark result showed only 8% with a severe impairment, and another test of attention at the 1-year mark result showed only 28% with a severe impairment.  The average IQ of the brain-damaged subjects was 93, and we don't know whether this below-average result was caused by brain injury.  There is reason to suspect that the set of average people suffering from traffic accident brain damage may be slightly below average in IQ, given that those with higher IQ might tend to avoid such accidents. 
• The paper "Association of Traumatic Brain Injury With Dementia and Memory Decline in Older Adults in the United States" used a very large sample of 9,794 patients who had an assessment of traumatic brain injury.  The study says, "There was no significant relation between history of TBI [traumatic brain injury] with LOC [loss of consciousness] and memory score or memory decline." We read this: "In a nationally representative prospective cohort of older adults free of dementia at baseline, we did not find evidence for any long-term associations between history of TBI [traumatic brain injury] with LOC [loss of consciousness]  (of unknown frequency and severity) and risk of dementia over 14 years of follow-up. " We read that "similarly, decline in memory performance did not differ between participants with or without history of TBI with LOC." The authors state, "Our findings showing no association between TBI history with LOC and dementia are consistent with the results of several other recent studies looking at dementia, AD [Alzheimer's Disease], or AD biomarkers or neuropathology." 
•  The paper "Working memory after severe traumatic brain injury" tested 30 subjects who had almost all suffered brain damage due to high-velocity motor vehicle accidents. All of the patients had a post-traumatic amnesia (typically an inability to remember what happened a certain number of days before the accident). We are told that this post-traumatic amnesia lasted for at least seven days in all patients, and thar for 14 of 21 patients the post-traumatic amnesia lasted 30 days or more, "suggesting that the majority of patients sustained an extremely severe TBI [traumatic brain injury]." The paper has nice easy-to-read graphs comparing the difference in performance between these brain-injured patients and control subjects. For a "digit span" working memory test (Figure 1) and a "word span" working memory test (Figure 3), we see no major difference between the brain-damaged patients and control subjects. There is also no difference in a "Brown-Peterson task" test, when conducted with "no interference."  On some other tasks there is a substantial difference.  
• The paper "Working Memory after Traumatic Brain
  Injury in Children" tested working memory in eighty children with mild or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). The paper has nice easy-to-read graphs comparing the performance of the brain-injured with controls, and the first two of the graphs show no appreciable difference in performance in two working memory tests, even when comparing the severe cases with control (uninjured cases).  
• The paper "Central executive system impairment in traumatic brain injury" is one that does not give us a random sample of patients with traumatic brain injury, because the paper tells us this about its 64 patients: "Patients were selected for participating in the study if they complained of lack of attention, poor
  memory or loss of efficiency in everyday life." Despite such a selection bias, Table III of the paper tells us that the majority of the subjects had "normal performance" in long-term memory acquisition, long-term memory storage, long-term memory delayed recall, sustained attention and short-term memory, with an average of about 60% of the subjects being normal in such areas.  
• The paper "Working memory outcomes following traumatic
  brain injury in children: A systematic review with
  meta-analysis" presents no new experiments, but reviews existing papers on the topic. Using the acronym CE to mean "central executive," the paper says, "Further analyses revealed significant, moderate effect sizes for studies that utilized verbal CE tasks (k = 19, d = −0.56, 95% CI −0.71, −0.41, p < .001), but non-significant and small effect sizes for studies that utilized visuo-spatial CE tasks (k = 7, d = −0.26, 95% CI −0.60, 0.08, p = .13)." The paper notes that "Several studies, however, did not find deficits in CE [executive functions] in children and adolescents who had sustained TBI [traumatic brain injury]." The paper says, "The results of our meta-analysis, however,
  indicate that children with TBI do exhibit deficits, albeit small-to-moderate ones, in the PL[phonological loop] relative to controls, but not in the VSSP [visual-spatial sketchpad]." We read that "no relation was found between TBI severity and the two storage components," and that "In contrast to findings relating to the impact of TBI severity and to our expectations based on literature suggesting that the frontal lobes play a critical role in WM [working memory], no relationship was found between frontal injuries and WM [working memory] outcomes." 

These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the brain is not the storage place of memories, and that the mind is not the product of the brain. We see some differences in the cognitive scores of those who had traumatic brain injury and those who did not. But the differences are not very dramatic; they have a kind of "sometimes you see them and sometimes you don't" nature; and the differences seem to be largely absent in a large fraction of the people with traumatic brain injury.  The reported differences can be mostly explained by the six confounding factors listed at the beginning of this post.

As for evidence of damage of episodic memories or learned information after traumatic brain injury, the evidence for it seems to be scant and anecdotal. In general, school-learned knowledge and knowledge of personal experiences seems to survive well after traumatic brain injury. It is sometimes reported that after a traumatic brain injury a person may forget what happened on the day of the injury or for a few days beforehand. It is often said in the literature that people have difficulty recalling only memories acquired a short time before the injury, not older memories. A 2018 paper ("Retrograde Autobiographical Memory From PTA Emergence to Six-Month Follow-Up in Moderate to Severe Traumatic Brain Injury")

says this::

 "There is evidence to suggest that retrograde autobiographical memory deficits exist after severe TBI, although there have been no prospective studies of autobiographical memory in a representative sample of moderate to severe cases recruited from hospital admissions...The overwhelming focus on memory following TBI [traumatic brain injury] has been on anterograde amnesia, and there has been very little research on retrograde amnesia [people losing memories acquired before the injury]... A deficit in retrograde autobiographical memory performance among individuals with TBI has been found in a handful of studies." 

Judging from such lack of study, and such weak evidence, it would seem that people losing memories or knowledge after traumatic brain injury is not a very big problem.  The study quoted above tries to show evidence of memory difficulties in patients with traumatic brain injury, but finds only minor score differences between such patients and control subjects. The minor differences can easily be explained by referring to the six confounding factors listed at the top of this post. In this case the traumatic brain injury patients studied were all patients who had already been diagnosed as having post-traumatic amnesia of at least seven days, before they were tested. So the study tells us that patients with memory difficulties may have memory difficulties, but it does not tell us about what percentage of people with traumatic brain injuries have serious memory difficulties. Also, the study failed to use a robust blinding protocol. We are told that there were two analysts doing the memory tests (apparently only one blind to whether the subjects had brain injury), and that the scores given were based on a discussion between the two analysts.  That is not a robust blinding protocol, and knowledge of whether the subjects had a brain injury may have affected the ratings given in the memory tests. 

Claims that minds are produced by brains and claims that brains store memories are examples of belief traditions passed on from one generation to the next. The latest generation of college students to adopt such beliefs does not adopt them from a long unbiased independent study of the facts, but as an act of social conformity in which people believe as they are told to believe, like some Sunday school student trustingly accepting whatever belief tenets are taught to him.