They Memorized Many Times Faster Than a Brain Could Ever Do

 The main theory of a brain storage of memories is that people acquire new memories through a strengthening of synapses. There are many reasons for disbelieving this claim. One is that information is generally stored through a writing process, not a strengthening process. It seems that there has never been a verified case of any information being stored through a mere process of strengthening. Another reason for rejecting the claim is that human memories can last 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of proteins in the brain. A scientific paper states, "Recent studies have revealed that most proteins, including synaptic proteins, have half-lives that range between 5 and 7 days (Cohen et al., 2013, Dörrbaum et al., 2018)."  The average lifetime of a protein is about twice its half-life. 

The 2018 paper here is entitled "Brain tissue plasticity: protein synthesis rates of the human brain." It tells us the astonishing fact that proteins in the human brain are replaced at a rate of 3% to 4% per day. We read this:

"Where skeletal muscle tissue has been shown to turnover at a rate of 1–2% per day, here we show that brain tissue turns over much faster at a rate of 3–4% per day. This would imply complete renewal of brain tissue proteins well within 4–5 weeks. From a physiological viewpoint this is astounding, as it provides us with a much greater framework for the capacity of brain tissue to recondition. Moreover, from a philosophical perspective these observations are even more surprising. If rapid protein turnover of brain tissue implies that all organic material is renewed, then all data internalized in that tissue are also prone to renewal. These findings spark (even) more debate on the interpretation and (long-term) storage of data in neural matter, the capacity of humans to consciously or unconsciously process data, and the (organic) basis of our own personality and ego. All of this becomes quite remarkable in light of such rapid protein turnover rates of the human brain."

Such rapid replacement of brain proteins is utterly inconsistent with claims that brains store old memories of what someone learned decades ago. A person like me remembers many things he learned 50 years ago, but if my brain was storing my memories, I would not be able to remember back more than a few months, given a 3% per day replacement of brain proteins.  A 2022 scientific paper confesses this:

"Conclusive evidence that specific long-term memory formation relies on dendritic growth and structural synaptic changes has proven elusive. Connectionist models of memory based on this hypothesis are confronted with the so-called plasticity stability dilemma or catastrophic interference. Other fundamental limitations of these models are the feature binding problem, the speed of learning, the capacity of the memory, the localisation in time of an event and the problem of spatio-temporal pattern generation."

If it were true that memories were stored by a strengthening of synapses, this would be a slow process. The only way in which a synapse can be strengthened is if proteins are added to it. We know that the synthesis of new proteins is a rather slow effect, requiring many minutes of time. In addition, there would have to be some very complicated encoding going on if a memory was to be stored in synapses. The reality of newly-learned knowledge and new experience would somehow have to be encoded or translated into some brain state that would store this information. When we add up the time needed for this protein synthesis and the time needed for this encoding, we find that the theory of memory storage in brain synapses predicts that the acquisition of new memories should be a very slow affair, which can occur at only a tiny bandwidth, a speed which is like a mere trickle. Do a Google image search for "speed of protein synthesis" and you will see charts that look like this (with data point dots scattered across the lines):

Don't make the mistake of thinking that a brain storage of new memories would occur as quickly as the speed of protein synthesis.  Such a storage would rely on three things that would be slow:

(1) Protein synthesis itself, which would require an average of multiple minutes. 

(2) Much additional time required for some act by which sensory information was encoded in some never-discovered storage format allowing sensory information to be translated into brain states or synapse states. 

(3) The time needed for signal transmission to occur across various parts of the brain, which would be quite an additional slowing factor, because of the relatively slow speed of transmission across synapses and dendrites, illustrated by the diagram below:

The synaptic gaps of chemical synapses and relatively slow dendrites (speed bumps for the brain) vastly outnumber myelinated axons, meaning for the brain the slowing parts vastly outnumber the fast parts. 

Memory contests show that some humans can actually acquire new memories at a speed very many times greater than the slow speed that would occur if brains were storing memories by protein synthesis. For example, according to a page on the site of the Guinness Book of World Records, "The fastest time to memorize and recall a deck of playing cards is 13.96 seconds, achieved by Zou Lujian (China) at the 2017 World Memory Championships held in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China, on 6-8 December 2017." Memorization speeds this fast utterly discredit claims that learning occurs by synapse strengthening, which would require the synthesis of new proteins, something which would require multiple minutes. 

The page here on www.wikipedia.org describes a competition called the World Memory Championships, which has the website here.  There are various different competitions, which are described in Chapter 7 (page 57) of the handbook you can read here:

Discipline 1:  a competition to memorize as many abstract images as possible, given 15 minutes to memorize, and 30 minutes to recall.  (Page 58.) 

Discipline 2:  a competition to memorize as many binary numbers as possible  given 5 minutes to memorize, and 15 minutes to recall (national level), or 30 minutes to memorize, and 60 minutes to recall (international level).  (Page 62.)

Discipline 3:  a competition to memorize as many random decimal digits ( such as 8, 9, and 2) as possible, given 15 minutes to memorize, and 30 minutes to recall (national level), or 30 minutes to memorize, and 60 minutes to recall (international level), or   60 minutes to memorize, and 120 minutes to recall (world  level). (Page 67.)

Discipline 4:  a competition to memorize as many name and face combinations as possible, given 5 minutes to memorize, and 15 minutes to recall (national level), or 15 minutes to memorize, and 30 minutes to recall (international level or world level).  (Page 70.) Competitors are asked to provide names when shown a face. 

Discipline 5:  a "Speed Numbers" competition to memorize as many random decimal digits ( such as 8, 9, and 2) as possible, given 5 minutes to memorize, and 15 minutes to recall. (Page 75.)

Discipline 6:  a competition to memorize as many pairs of dates and fictional events as possible, given 5 minutes to memorize, and 15 minutes to recall. (Page 80.)

Discipline 7:  a competition to memorize as many separate packs of shuffled playing cards as possible, given 10 minutes to memorize, and 30 minutes to recall (national level), or 30 minutes to memorize, and 60 minutes to recall (international level), or   60 minutes to memorize, and 120 minutes to recall (world  level). (Page 82.)

Discipline 8:  a competition to memorize as many random words as possible, given 5 minutes to memorize, and 15 minutes to recall (national level), or 15 minutes to memorize, and 30 minutes to recall (international level or world level).  (Page 87.) 

Discipline 9:  a 'Spoken Numbers" competition to memorize as many spoken numbers as possible, with the numbers being read at a rate of one number per second. (Page 92, complicated rules.)

Discipline 10:  a "Speed Cards" competition to commit to memory as many cards as possible, given 5 minutes or less for memorization, and only 5 minutes for recall.  (Page 98.)

Below is performance data recorded on the site and on the wikipedia.org page here.

Discipline 1, abstract images:  Two competitors in 2021 (Huang Jinyao and Xu Yangran) were able to memorize more than 1000 abstract images in only 15 minutes (or score more than 1000 points on such a competition, indicating similar ability).

Discipline 2, binary digits: Four competitors in 2021 were able to recall more than 600 binary digits memorized in a 30-minute period. Ryu Song I was able to recall 7485 binary numbers memorized in a 30-minute period (WMSC World Championship 2019).

Discipline 3, random decimal digits: Ryu Song I was able to recall 4620 decimal digits  memorized in an hour-long  period (WMSC World Championship 2019). Seven competitors in 2021 were able to recall more than 600 binary digits memorized in a 30-minute period. 

 Discipline 4, face and name combinations:  Katie Kermode was able to recall the names of 224 previously unseen people from their images, having had only 15 minutes to memorize their names (IAM World Championship 2018). Similarly, the scientific paper here says someone identified as SM1 "memorized 215 German names to the corresponding faces within 15 minutes at the Memoriad in 2015 in Istanbul." (The paper stated that the super-memorizers it studied did not have increased hippocampal volumes.) Several Mongolian or Chinese contestants were able to recall the names of more than 600 previously unseen people from their images, having had only 15 minutes to memorize their names (2021 World Memory Championships). 

Discipline 5, Speed Numbers: Wei Quinru was able to recall 642 digits memorized in a 5-minute period (Korea Open Memory Championship 2024). Four  people were able to each recall more than 800 digits memorized in a 5-minute period (2021 World Memory Championships).

Discipline 6, Dates and Fictional Events:  Prateek Yadav memorized in 5 minutes dates corresponding to 154 fictional events (2019).  Several other contestants memorized in 5 minutes dates corresponding to 700+ fictional events (2021 World Memory Championships).

Discipline 7, "Hour Cards" Card Memorization:  Kim Su Rim memorized 2530 cards in 60 minutes.  

Discipline 8, Random Words:  Prateek Yadev memorized 335 random words in 15 minutes. Several others in 2021 memorized more than 500 random words in 15 minutes. 

Discipline 9, "Spoken Numbers":  Ryu Song I was able to recall 547 decimal digits that had been read at a rate of one per second (WMSC World Championship 2019).  Tenuun Tamir and several other Mongolian or Chinese contestants were able to recall more than 600 decimal digits that had been read to him at a rate of one per second. 

Discipline 10, "Speed Cards":  Munkhshur NARMANDAK memorized 981 cards in five minutes, and several others memorized more than 600 cards in five minutes. 

Below from the World Memory Championships site is a table showing some of the best performers (link).

What we have in the performance records above is what can be roughly describing as lightning-fast memorization ability. Such an ability has been demonstrated by many subjects, doing many different types of memorization. The performances listed above are many times faster than any conceivable result that could be produced if memories are stored in brains.  There does not exist any detailed credible theory that can explain fast memorization by neural or synaptic processes. When neuroscientists say something about how memories form, they typically engage in hand-waving that vaguely refers to processes that are known to be very slow, such as synaptic strengthening. 

Routinely displaying instant recall abilities utterly unaccountable by the activity of brains completely lacking in addresses, sorting or indexes (the things that make fast retrieval possible in computers), humans do not recall at the speed of brains. Humans recall at the speed of souls. And the fastest memorizers do not memorize at the speed of brains. Such memorizers memorize at the speed of souls. 

For other posts documenting the ability of some humans to memorize at a blazing fast speed, see my posts with a tag of "photographic memory" or "eidetic memory."  On page 29 of the nineteenth century book here, we have an interesting account of photographic memory obtained under hypnosis (with it apparently progressing to become photographic memorization that could occur outside of hypnosis). The author states that eventually outside of hypnosis "the duration of a single second or a mere

glimpse at the page was sufficient for the pupils to retain in their memory the whole contents of it."

Why Your Brain Is Not Like a Computer

 Here are the definitions of the word "compute" given by the Cambridge Dictionary:

• to calculate an answer or amount by using a machine:
• to calculate something using mathematics or a calculator 
• to calculate something 

Scientists are fond of making the senseless claim that the brain is like a computer. The comparison involves the  extremely misguided strategy of trying to compare human mental experiences to computing. Humans can compute by doing mental arithmetic in their minds. But such mathematical computing is only the tiniest fraction of what goes on in the human mind. 99% of the time that the average person is awake, he is not computing anything. The strategy of those claiming the brain is a computer involves using misleading language in which human mental experiences are all called "computing."  Such language is deceptive. You are not computing when you are talking, reading,  imagining, enjoying some music or lusting after some sexually attractive person. 

The "your brain is a computer" thinkers are guilty of this type of nonsense:

(1) First, they try to claim that all human mental experiences are "computing," ignoring the fact that 99% of what goes on in the human mind is not any such thing as computing, according to regular definitions of computing. 

(2) Then, such thinkers claim that we can explain such mental activity because the brain is like a computer, ignoring the facts that physically the brain has almost no resemblance to a computer. 

The "your brain is a computer" thinker is someone speaking as foolishly as someone claiming that your hand is an interplanetary spaceship. The table below illustrates why it is nonsensical to claim that your brain is like a computer. 

	COMPUTER	BRAIN
Made of metal?	Yes	No
Has an operating system?	Yes	No
Has application programs?	Yes	No
Has a known system for writing information to itself?	Yes	No
Has a known system for reading non-genetic information from itself?	Yes	No
Has addresses, indexes or a position notation system?	Yes	No
Great effects or disabling if you remove small parts?	Yes	No
All components stable?	Yes	No
Reliably transmits information?	Yes	No
Digital?	Yes	No
Has known encoding systems for storing images and language?	Yes	No
Very fast signal transmission throughout system?	Yes	No
Images or text found in removed parts?	Yes	No
Has no effect on consciousness?	Yes	No

The image below has the same table, using "check box" graphics:

I can justify some of the claims above:

• An operating system is a software framework providing low-level services that are needed for application software programs to work. Examples include UNIX, Linux, MS-DOS, the various versions of Windows, and the various versions of the Apple operating system. Creating an operating system requires man-years of intentional programming work by programmers. The brain has nothing like an operating system. 
• Application programs are software programs created by software developers using programming languages such as Java, C, Python and C++. The brain has nothing like application programs. Genes are mere lists of amino acids, and are not application programs. A key feature of application programs is abundant use of "if/then" logic, something not found in genes, proteins or DNA. 
• No one has ever shown that a brain has any system or capability for writing learned information. Claims that information is written by "synapse strengthening" or "LTP" are examples of groundless hand-waving. No one has ever shown how even the simplest phrase such as "my dog has fleas" could be written by either synapse strengthening or LTP. 
• Like all parts of the body, the brain is capable of reading genetic information from DNA. No one has ever shown that the brain has any such thing as a system or capability for reading non-genetic information such as information learned in school. We know that humans can recall school-learned information, but do not know that brains can do that. 
• While neurons are stable components, the synapses and dendritic spines of the brain are unstable components. The average lifetime of the proteins in synapses is less that two weeks. Imaging of dendritic spines show they are unstable components that do not last for years. It is estimated that the average synapse does not last for years. 
• The average speed of signal transmission in the brain is not very fast. While some components such as myelinated axons can transmit information very quickly, the brain is full of chemical synapses that transmit signals relatively slowly, because of the delays caused by chemical transmission across synaptic gaps. Also, signals travel relatively slowly through dendrites. 
• The great majority of synapses in the brain are chemical synapses, and signals do not reliably transmit across chemical synapses. Tests have shown that signals transmit across the gaps in such synapses with a transmission likelihood of only about 10% to 50%. A scientific states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower." The failure of synapses to reliably transmit information is a major reason for thinking that recall and thinking does not come from the brain. Recall of very large amounts of memorized text can occur with 100% accuracy, and humans can do complex math calculations in their minds with 100% accuracy. But it would seem such feats should be impossible if achieved by brains that transmit signals so unreliably.  
• A computer engineer can detach the hard drive of a computer, and retrieve very many images and a great deal of written text from such a detached component.  No one has ever found by microscopic examination of brain tissue any such thing as something someone saw or something someone read or experienced.  Not a single word anyone ever read has ever been found through microscopic examination of brain tissue. This failure is a major reason for rejecting the claim that brains store memories. 
• No one has ever discovered any system by which a brain could encode learned information so that it could be stored in brain states or synapse states, nor has anyone ever even advanced a detailed credible theory of how such a thing could be done. 
• Computers can be made unusable (or all-but-unusable) by removing small parts such as the CPU. Brains, on the other hand, can operate well even when large parts of them have been removed. See my posts here and here for examples of people who suffered relatively little cognitive damage after very large parts of their brains were lost due to disease or surgery. 

 By claiming over and over again that the brain is a computer,  neuroscientists have been guilty of a deception as bad as if they were to claim that your bath towel is a flying carpet that can transport you from city to city.  The human brain is not a computer and is not at all like a computer. And even if the brain were a computer, that would not explain human minds, because computers do not have experiences,  are not persons, and do not have selves. 

Newspaper Accounts of Memory Marvels (Part 1)

The normal facts of human memory performance are sufficient to discredit claims that memory formation and memory recall are brain activities, given what we know about the brain's physical shortfalls. There is not a neuroscientist who can credibly explain how a brain can store a detailed memory.  Nothing known to neuroscientists can explain how learned information or experiences could be translated into brain states or synapse states. Neuroscientists claim that memories are stored in synapses, but we know that the proteins in synapses have average lifetimes of only a few weeks, 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans can remember things (more than 50 years).  We know the kind of things  (in products that humans manufacture) that make possible an instant retrieval of stored information: things such as sorting, addressing, indexing, and read/write heads.  The human brain has no such things.  Humans such as actors playing the role of Hamlet can recall large bodies of text with 100% accuracy, but such recall should be impossible using a brain in which each chemical synapse can only transmit a signal with 50% accuracy or less.  Brains are too slow, too noisy and too unstable to be the source of human memory recall which can occur at blazing fast speeds with 100% accuracy, often involving recall of things learned 50 years ago or earlier. 

Here are some relevant quotes:

• "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" 
• "The fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them." -- Juan Alvaro Gallego, neuroscientist. 
• "The search for the neuroanatomical locus of semantic memory has simultaneously led us nowhere and everywhere. There is no compelling evidence that any one brain region plays a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all sorts of semantic knowledge."  Psychologist Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, "Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: inferring 'how' from 'where' ".
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts'’ about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." -- Neuroscientist David Eagleman.
• "How could that encoded information be retrieved and transcribed from the enduring structure into the transient signals that carry that same information to the computational machinery that acts on the information?....In the voluminous contemporary literature on the neurobiology of memory, there is no discussion of these questions."  ---  Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience,"  preface. 
• "The very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to memory and reads from memory....Yet we do not really know how this most foundational element of computation is implemented in the brain."  -- Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution," page 50. 
• "When we are looking for a mechanism that implements a read/write memory in the nervous system, looking at synaptic strength and connectivity patterns might be misleading for many reasons...Tentative evidence for the (classical) cognitive scientists' reservations toward the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain has accumulated....Changes in synaptic strength are not directly related to storage of new information in memory....The rate of synaptic turnover in absence of learning is actually so high that the newly formed connections (which supposedly encode the new memory) will have vanished in due time. It is worth noticing that these findings actually are to be expected when considering that synapses are made of proteins which are generally known to have a short lifetime...Synapses have been found to be constantly turning over in all parts of cortex that have been examined using two-photon microscopy so far...The synapse is probably an ill fit when looking for a basic memory mechanism in the nervous system." -- Scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift? (link).
• "Most neuroscientists believe that memories are encoded by changing the strength of synaptic connections between neurons....Nevertheless, the question of whether memories are stored locally at synapses remains a point of contention. Some cognitive neuroscientists have argued that for the brain to work as a computational device, it must have the equivalent of a read/write memory and the synapse is far too complex to serve this purpose (Gaallistel and King, 2009; Trettenbrein, 2016). While it is conceptually simple for computers to store synaptic weights digitally using their read/write capabilities during deep learning, for biological systems no realistic biological mechanism has yet been proposed, or in my opinion could be envisioned, that would decode symbolic information in a series of molecular switches (Gaallistel and King, 2009) and then transform this information into specific synaptic weights." -- Neuroscientist Wayne S. Sossin (link).
• "We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer."  -- Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience."  page Xvi (preface). 
• "Current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition."  -- Neuroscientist Hessameddin Akhlaghpourƚ (link). 
• "We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words." -- Scientists David Poeppel and, William Idsardi, 2022 (link).
• "If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? How can the memories outlast their putative constitutive components?" --Neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian (link).
• "After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved." -- Psychologist James Tee and engineering expert Desmond P. Taylor, "Where Is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?"
• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures. Researchers searching for the physical basis of memory are looking for the wrong thing (the associative bond) in the wrong place (the synaptic junction), guided by an erroneous conception of what memory is and the role it plays in computation." --Neuroscientist C.R. Gallistel, "The Physical Basis of Memory," 2021.
• "To name but a few examples, the formation of memories and the basis of conscious  perception, crossing  the threshold  of  awareness, the  interplay  of  electrical  and  molecular-biochemical mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses, the role of glial cells in signal transduction and metabolism, the role of different brain states in the life-long reorganization of the synaptic structure or  the mechanism of how  cell  assemblies  generate a  concrete  cognitive  function are  all important processes that remain to be characterized." -- "The coming decade of digital brain research, a 2023 paper co-authored by more than 100 neuroscientists, one confessing scientists don't understand how a brain could store memories. 
• "The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’....We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." -- Robert Epstein,  senior research psychologist, "The Empty Brain." 

Every additional piece of evidence establishing extraordinary human memory abilities is an additional nail in the coffin of the doctrine that brains store memories. Given a brain lacking any of the characteristics that would be required to allow the best examples of human memory performance, the credibility of the claim that brains store memories is inversely proportional to the highest observed speed, accuracy, duration and depth of human memory performance.  The longer humans can remember things and the more they can remember and the better they can remember and the more quickly they can remember and the more quickly they can form new memories, the less credible are claims of brain memory creation and storage.  

Let us look at some clips from newspaper accounts of marvels of human memory.  Below is a 1921 account of a memory marvel:

The account can be read below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn92070146/1921-07-27/ed-1/seq-2/                  

The account below is from 1931:

The account can be read here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82014085/1931-10-31/ed-1/seq-5/

The account below (from 1921) is part of an article entitled "An Elevator Dispatcher Who Never Forgets":

Yu can read the account below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89060136/1921-01-21/ed-1/seq-7/

The 1918 news article below claims that a man knew everyone in Chester, Pennsylvania and where he was born. Chester now has a population of about 33,000, and in 1918 probably had a population of at least 10,000.

The article can be read here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045211/1918-06-15/ed-1/seq-15/

Below is a news story from 1922:

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84029386/1922-03-16/ed-1/seq-4/

The account below describes a multitasking ability I have never heard before of anyone doing:

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038485/1923-01-14/ed-1/seq-53/

I was rather surprised to find that I can do two-thirds of the feat mentioned in red, because I am able to simultaneously sing a few lines in German while writing an English sentence.  But I could never write in two languages with two different hands at the same time. 

Below we have an account of an infant with an unusually good memory:

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020422/1935-02-21/ed-1/seq-3/

Below is a news story from 1903:

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85033139/1903-07-16/ed-1/seq-2/

The newspaper article below comes from 1890:

The story can be read using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020355/1890-03-26/ed-1/seq-2/

George Vogan de Arrezo memorized the entire text of Virgil's Aeneid (consisting of 9,896 lines). Aitken and JB  performed similar feats when they memorized epic poems of about 10,000 lines. According to an old newspaper account, Leste May Williams memorized 12,000 verses of the Bible, including the entire New Testament. The New Testament has about 180,000 words, so the feat of Leste May Williams would seem to be far more impressive than the memorization of Virgil's Aeneid, which has only 63,719 words. The same feat of memorizing the New Testament was achieved by a male minister (Henry M. Halley). 

Neuroscientists give us nothing but the most vacuous hand-waving when they try to explain such marvels of memory by an action of brains.  Today I saw a recent paper that offered us the diagram below. We have only the flimsiest cobweb of an attempted explanation, something a million times too flimsy to explain marvels of human memory like the ones discussed above. Strengthening is not storage. 

Old Newspaper Stories Relevant to Whether Brains Make Minds

The Chronicling America web site allows you to make a full-text search of many decades of American newspapers. Below are some interesting clips from old newspaper articles, all having some relevance to whether the human brain makes the human mind. 

Below is a clip from an 1899 newspaper article, one suggesting there is no relation between brain size and intelligence:

You can read the article here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86064199/1899-09-26/ed-1/seq-2/

Here is a news story from 1912:

You can read the news story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn89053729/1912-09-20/ed-4/seq-2/

The news story below tells us that a man who lost part of his brain "larger than a teacup"  is "nearly as well as before," with the weird detail that doctor's put part of a calf's brain in his head. 

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn86092151/1899-06-16/ed-1/seq-1/

Below is a clip from an old newspaper story, one ending with a statement "more than half his brain was destroyed, and yet he retained his mental faculties in full force till he died":

The newspaper story can be read here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84020422/1876-03-01/ed-1/seq-4/

The newspaper account below discusses some topics relevant to whether brains make minds:

You can read the story using the link below:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83016209/1875-10-29/ed-1/seq-1/

The following is part of a news article that appeared in 1936:

You can read the full article here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1936-09-11/ed-1/seq-30/

According to the Guinness Book of World Records article here, the largest human brain ever recorded was a brain of 2850 grams (about 100 ounces), which belonged not to some genius, but to a man with "intellectual difficulties." 

Below is a news story from 1904, telling of a man whose "intellectual capacity was not effected in the slightest" despite a very serious brain injury:

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84024827/1904-08-10/ed-1/seq-7/

Here is a similar story of a man who shot himself through the head in an attempt to kill himself, but still survived so well that he "talks rationally":

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038489/1912-04-30/ed-1/seq-1/

I've saved the best for last. It is an account to be found on page 603 of the September 17, 1936 edition of the periodical Light, and deals with the widely noted phenomenon called terminal lucidity:

You can read the account using the link below:

http://iapsop.com/archive/materials/light/light_v56_n2906_sep_17_1936.pdf

In 1941 the Editors of Scientific American Confessed That Telepathy Was Proven

In 1941 the publication Scientific American announced that it was going to offer a $15,000 prize for proof of the paranormal. The announcement can be read on the page here.  Ending with a byline of "The Editors," the announcement started out with a misrepresentation which stated this:

"In JANUARY, 1923, Scientific American inaugurated an exhaustive two-year exploration of the subject of psychic phenomena, both in Europe and in America, in an endeavor to discover a basic, scientific truth upon which the wide-spread belief in spiritism might be solidly founded. Those efforts were fruitless in that no objective spiritistic manifestation of physical character, in the form of a psychic photograph or otherwise, was produced which bore sufficient authority to warrant approval by the co-operating committee, or which was not capable of duplication or explanation by Houdini, then the world’s most noted conjurer, and a member of that committee."

The statement is not an accurate summary of either the investigation that went on or the findings of the investigation that Scientific American reported in November 1924 on the page that can be read here. The page is below:

On the page we read conclusions of members of a five-man Scientific American committee that investigated reports of paranormal events in the seances of Margery Crandon (we are told the fifth member was unavailable for comment).  First we read William Franklin Prince state inconclusively that the experiments "have not scientifically and conclusively proved the exercise of supernormal powers."  Next we read the conclusion by Hereward Carrington that "I have arrived at the definite conclusion that genuine supernormal (physical) phenomena frequently occur at her seances."  His statement is below:

The third member of the committee (Comstock) said "my conclusion therefore is that rigid proof has not yet been been furnished, but that the case at present is interesting, and should be investigated further."  The fourth member (the magician Harry Houdini) said he thought it was all fakery, which was consistent with the bitter hostility he expressed towards all mediums for so many years. 

So clearly the statement of the editors of Scientific American in their April 1941 edition was a deceit. Instead of it being that "no objective spiritistic manifestation of physical character, in the form of a psychic photograph or otherwise, was produced which bore sufficient authority to warrant approval by the co-operating committee" it was the case that one of the four members of that committee stated that "I have arrived at the definite conclusion that genuine supernormal (physical) phenomena frequently occur at her seances."  Scientific American deceived its readers by misrepresenting the findings of its own committee, making it sound like the committee had delivered a negative verdict, when one of its four members had declared "I have arrived at the definite conclusion that genuine supernormal (physical) phenomena frequently occur at her seances." 

Moreover, the Scientific American article lied when it said "in JANUARY, 1923, Scientific American inaugurated an exhaustive two-year exploration of the subject of psychic phenomena." No such "exhaustive" investigation was carried out. Some of the main psychic phenomena that had been reported by this time were telepathy, mysterious raps and a phenomenon called "direct voice" (described here)  in which mysterious voices would be heard in seances. But in a 1943 interview describing the 1923-1924 investigation and also something it did in early 1940's, the publisher of Scientific American (Orson D. Munn) had stated this:

"We were not after just plain spirit messages. Table rappings. mental telepathy. and the ordinary oral messages have not been included in either of our investigations. We want specific evidence in physical form that the spirits do converse or try to converse with the living." 

Get the picture? So if an investigator went to a medium, and the medium started telling accounts of the investigator's experiences with his dead grandmother, experiences known only to the investigator, that would be ignored by the investigator. And if the investigator heard a mysterious voice sounding just like the voice of his dead grandmother, telling secrets only she knew, that would be ignored. And if the investigator went to a seance where mysterious raps were heard as the alphabet was recited, with the raps spelling out a message describing facts about the investigator only the investigator and a deceased person would have known, that would be ignored by the investigator, on the grounds that the investigators were looking for "specific evidence in physical form." But what sense did it make to claim that mysterious raps on a table was not  "specific evidence in physical form"?  No sense at all. Raps on a table are a physical effect.  

On the same page of the April 1941 Scientific American, we had a box describing an offer of the magazine to pay $15,000 for proof of the paranormal. Here is part of that box:

Note well item 6 in the list of conditions. We read, "Since experiments by Dunninger and others have proved telepathy to an acceptable degree, demonstrations of this nature are not eligible for the award."  That is a confession that the reality of telepathy had been proven. At the time this was written, the person who had done the most to prove telepathy was Duke University professor Joseph Rhine (whose laboratory experiments are discussed here), and other researchers such as Professor Riess (whose enormously convincing experiment is discussed here). Later researcher Louisa Rhine documented very many cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book Hidden Channels of the Mind, which may be read here. Sally Rhine Feather documented very many other cases of telepathy outside of laboratory settings, in her book The Gift: ESP, the Extraordinary Experiences of Ordinary People, which can be read here.

So why in so many decades after the 1940's have Scientific American writers and Scientific American editors deceived us by claiming that there is no good evidence for ESP? Nothing happened to warrant such a change. To the contrary,  experiments after 1941 using the Ganzfeld protocol provided extremely well-replicated evidence for the reality of ESP. A paper on the Cornell Physics Paper server gives this summary of the telepathy evidence from the ganzfeld experiments run in recent decades, in which the success rate expected by chance is 25%:

"From 1974 to 2018, the combined ganzfeld database contained 117 studies. Of those, studies using targets sets with 4 possible targets included 3,885 test sessions, resulting in 1,188 hits, corresponding to a 30.6% hit rate. With chance at 25%, this excess hit rate is 8.1 sigma above chance expectation (p = 5.6 × 10^-16). Analysis of these studies showed that similar effect sizes were reported by independent labs, that the results were not affected by variations in experimental quality, and that selective reporting biases could not explain away the results. The Bayes Factors (BF) associated with the last 108 more recently published ganzfeld telepathy studies was 18.8 million in favor of H1 (i.e., evidence favoring telepathy). Given that BF > 100 is considered 'decisive' evidence, this outcome far exceeds the 'exceptional evidence' said to be required of exceptional claims.[48,49] By comparison, in particle physics experiments effects resulting in 5 or more sigma are considered experimental 'discoveries.' ”

The probability of 1 in 5.6 × 10^-16  cited is a likelihood of less than 1 in a quadrillion. 

The only explanation for the telepathy denialism of Scientific American in recent decades is that the reality of telepathy is strong evidence against a cherished belief of the writers at that publication: the belief that the brain makes the mind.  Within the framework of prevailing neuroscience dogmas, all such results are inexplicable.  Since the results are largely remote results produced by people separated by sizable distance, they cannot be explained by any speculative theory that the brain can act as a radio transmitter and radio receiver (a theory not supported by any neuroscience studies).  And such a radio transmitter theory makes no sense. Your head does not have any  antenna that might pick up radio signals being sent by someone else's brain, and brains don't emit anything like radio signals. 

The 1941 money offer of Scientific American was pretty much a farce. There was the arrogant requirement that only phenomena performed in front of some Scientific American committee would be considered. There was the statement sounding as if unlimited number of successful retests might be asked for, under any conditions whatsoever that some Scientific American committee might request. Then there was the statement that no matter what was observed, Scientific American might or might not publish the results.  Hardly any sensible person would agree to such conditions.  They would tend to think that no matter what phenomena was produced, that the committee would just keep asking for retests under ever-more troublesome conditions, until getting something it would call a failure. 

During the past 60 years, Scientific American has followed a "head in the sand" approach toward spooky psychical phenomena, a "lazy as it gets" approach that has been basically "ignore it and hope it goes away." In the rare cases in recent decades when Scientific American writers say anything about the topic of ESP and telepathy, they tend to sound just as if they never seriously studied such a topic; and they say things on the topic that are false and contrary to the magazine's 1941 confession of the reality of telepathy. The visual below illustrates the kind of treatment such very  important and very-well established phenomena get from the guys at Scientific American.