When Gaslighting Psychiatric Mudslinging Defames Healthy NDE and OBE Observers

 In my 2023 post "Its News App Makes Apple Rather Like Orwell's Ministry of Truth"  I complained about the appalling materialist bias of the Apple News app that is a core feature of the very widely used I-Pad device. I wrote this:

"This interface is a masterpiece from an ease-of-use standpoint. With this interface I can access many hundreds of stories on 30 or more topics without typing anything and without ever using a mouse. The News app of the Apple iPad is so easy to use, and has access to so many stories that I would imagine a typical iPad user probably spends 30% or more of his iPad time only using the News app. 

But there is a huge problem with Apple's News app. The News app  restricts you to a very limited number of information sources. It therefore acts as a very severe 'reality filter,'  extremely restricting the type of articles that you will read when using its interface, and severely restricting the type of viewpoints you will be exposed to....

What Apple's News app has done is to pretty much restrict me to articles that parrot the 'official party line' of America's ruling class of politicians, professors and pundits, and also a vast variety of entertainment articles and articles such as sports articles and real estate articles and celebrity-oriented articles. What's wrong with that? Well, for one thing there is the problem that the stories that I get from the News app are very often stories filled with very bad  falsehoods, misrepresentations and groundless boasts. This is largely because nowadays the articles of so-called 'science news' are very often articles filled with errors and misstatements."

In 2025 we had an example of the appalling materialist propaganda so common in the Apple News app. It was a Junk Medicine article offering very bad medical advice, and very bad misinformation on the topic of out-of-body experiences. The article was a very shameful example of gaslighting and psychiatric mudslinging, in which attempts are made to defame healthy observers, by trying to insinuate that they have mental problems. 

The article started out with the false headline "75% of People Will Have an Out-of-Body Experience. How to Tell If You've Had One."  The percentage cited is not correct. The table below lists various surveys trying to determine the percentage of people who have out-of-body experiences. The average percentage of people saying they had such experiences is about 25%.

From the very beginning, the article gives us false information. It starts out stating this: "Dissociation refers to an out-of-body experience that can make you feel detached from yourself or reality." No, dissociation is not an out-of-body experience. 

Below are some definitions of "dissociation":

• The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "dissociation" as  "The separation of whole segments of the personality (as in dissociative identity disorder) or of discrete mental processes (as in schizophrenia) from the mainstream of consciousness or of behavior."
• Asked for a definition of "dissociation," Google gives this: "Dissociation is a mental process where a person disconnects from their thoughts, feelings, memories, or sense of identity."
• Psychiatry.org says, "Dissociation is a disconnection between a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions or sense of who he or she is."
• The American Psychological Association's dictionary defines dissociation as "a defense mechanism in which conflicting impulses are kept apart or threatening ideas and feelings are separated from the rest of the psyche."

None of these things have anything to do with an out-of-body experience. An out-of-body experience is an experience in which an observer says that he seemed to be outside of his physical body. Typically the beginning of such an experience involves viewing the body from outside it, from a position such as two meters away, or a position at the top of a ceiling. Out-of-body experiences typically occur as sudden surprises, and often are part of near-death experiences (which may or may not include an out-of-body experience). The diagram below shows the relation between out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences. 

An out-of-body experience very often occurs suddenly during some experience in which a person is having a close brush with death, such as when someone is having a heart attack or cardiac arrest. Other out-of-body experiences may occur suddenly when someone is not having a close encounter with death. For example, a person may wake up from sleep and be very surprised to find that he seems to be observing his body from outside of it. A small number of people claim to be able to have out-of-body experiences through conscious effort in which they are trying to have such experiences. 

 

There is no evidence that out-of-body experiences have anything to do with any type of mental illness. But very shamefully, the Apple News article is all about trying to make people who have had out-of-body experiences think that they have some type of mental illness.  It immediately gives us a section entitled "Symptoms" which includes these items:

• "Feeling like you're outside of looking down at, or floating above your own body"
• "Apathy"
• "Emotional numbness"
• "Disconnection from those around you"
• "Feelings like your surroundings aren't real"
• "Time feels like it's moving too fast or too slow"
• "Memory loss"
• "Not remembering how you got to a specific place"
• "Having flashbacks that feel like you're living them in the present moment"
• "Being absorbed in a fantasy-like world that feels real"
• "Hearing muffled voices or seeing bright lights"
• "Depressive moods"
• "Anxious thoughts"

Notice the shameful strategy. In the bullet list some of the observational features of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are mixed up with various psychiatric symptoms. Similar shameful psychiatric mudslinging might go on if you were to have a bullet list listing mostly psychiatric symptoms, a list that included items such as "hoping that tax rates are increased on billionaires" and "worrying about the homeless," with the goal being to create the impression or insinuation that people with liberal or progressive ideas are mentally ill. 

We are then told "dissociation can often be an underlying symptom of mental health conditions." We then have a "Causes" section that mostly lists a bunch of psychiatric conditions such a "dissociative identity disorder," "depersonalization/derealization disorder (DPDD)," "dissociative amnesia," "borderline personality disorder," "schizophrenia," "post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)," "depression," "panic disorder," "stress," and "epilepsy."

Then there's a Diagnosis section, in which the reader is instructed that if he is experiencing any of the items listed in the "Symptoms" section (which include some of the features of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences), then he should go to his primary care physician so that such a doctor can refer him to a psychiatrist. 

The article is the worst type of gaslighting and psychiatric mudslinging. The advice given is terrible junk-medicine advice. There is not the slightest reason why anyone having an out-of-body experience or a near-death experience should consult a psychiatrist. There is no evidence that such experiences are symptoms of any type of mental illness.  The Apple News article provides no evidence whatsoever of an association between mental illness and either out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences. No such association exists. The people reporting near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are in general normal and healthy people.  There is no credible explanation of how any kind of mental illness could be the cause of their reports. 

Sociologist Paige Sweet defines gaslighting as "making someone seem or feel unstable, irrational and not credible, making them feel like what they’re seeing or experiencing isn’t real, that they’re making it up, that no one else will believe them.” The visual below shows two examples of gaslighting:

The visual below shows two other examples of gaslighting:

The type of gaslighting that has occurred in the Apple News article is the same type of shameful gaslighting that is practiced by the lawyers of rapists, who try various rhetorical tricks to try to make reliable rape victims sound like unreliable witnesses. 

Similar to gaslighting is what we can call psychiatric mudslinging. Psychiatric mudslinging is an attempt to shame, defame or silence a witness by falsely trying to insinuate that the person has mental problems. When psychologists or psychiatrists engage in psychiatric mudslinging, they are abusing their professional skills, and betraying the public's trust of them. When psychiatric mudslinging occurs, someone who was trained to help people becomes like some sniper, trying to hurt people. 

The author of the Apple News article should be deeply ashamed of having written this egregious piece of gaslighting and psychiatric mudslinging, as should a psychiatrist who has approved this Junk Medicine article trying to suggest that people having near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences should seek psychiatric treatments, despite a lack of any evidence that such experiences are symptoms of mental problems. Financial conflicts-of-interest may explain the psychiatrist's action here. The more people go to psychiatrists, the more money psychiatrists make. 

Another bogus article on out-of-body experiences is to be found in a recent university press release with the phony title "An Explanation for Out-of-Body Experiences." Count this as Example #1001 of a university press making utterly groundless boasts.  What has gone on  for years is that universities and colleges have been issuing groundless boasts and flagrantly untrue information in press releases designed to hype some newly released study done by scientists at such institutions.  So, for example, if there is a University of Eastern California, the press office of such a university will tend to follow an "anything goes" policy when trying to publicize newly research done by scientists at such a university. Almost always, the press releases are anonymous without any named author.  This allows some PR worker at a university press office to be uninhibited about lying, because he knows that no one will track him down as the person guilty of the lies he is telling. 

We hear about a survey of 500 people, but we get no specific details about any results. The press release claims, "The scientists found that the OBE experiencers were more frequently diagnosed with mental health conditions than those who had not had an OBE." But we are given no data substantiating this claim.  Claims like this are worthless unless you are told what a difference was. Were the OBE experiencers 5% more frequently diagnosed with mental health conditions, or was it only 1% more? We do not know, because no specific difference is mentioned. 

We may safely assume that no significant difference was found, because whenever a study finds any kind of meaningful difference, it will almost always give us a specific number mentioning the difference. So, for example, if a scientist is doing some study testing whether pornography  leads to criminality, and he finds a decent-sized difference such as 5%, he will almost always discuss the exact difference he found.  The only time when scientists fail to list a specific difference is when they found some negligible "means nothing" difference such as 1% or 2%.  Then typically the scientist will try to hide the trifling difference he found, by merely saying that he "found a difference" without telling what the difference was. 

We are referred to a paper ("Are out-of-body experiences indicative of an underlying psychopathology?") behind a paywall, incorrectly described by the press release as an "Open Access" paper.  The part of the paper that is publicly accessible consists of an abstract and some snippets. Neither of these mentions any specific difference between the mental health of those having out-of-body experiences and those not having them. The paper refers to "group difference in psychopathological profile between OBErs and non-OBErs" but gives us no specific data to indicate that those having out-of-body experiences are more likely to suffer mental health problems. The publicly accessible abstract and snippets of the paper states "we found that individuals reporting OBEs exhibited statistically worse mental health scores and a higher prevalence of psychiatric diagnoses compared to non-OBErs," failing to provide a single number to back up such claims. 

It is the same rule for scientific paper abstracts as for press releases: almost invariably whenever a study finds any non-negligible numerical difference it was attempting to find, it will  report in its abstract a specific figure telling us how much that difference was. Whenever a paper abstract or press release merely reports there was a difference without giving us any number telling us how much that difference was, we can assume with high confidence that the study found no difference worth mentioning, and that the authors were trying to prevent people from easily finding out about how tiny or negligible the difference was. 

We can actually take the paper as rather good evidence that there is no difference between the mental health of those reporting out-of-body experiences and those not reporting them, on the grounds that the study failed to report in its abstract a specific numerical difference,  which it only would have done if no difference or only the tiniest difference was found. 

We should also realize that if some academic researchers were to find some small difference in mental health outcomes between those having an out-of-body experience and those not having such experiences, almost certainly the result would not be an indicator of any real difference in mental health, but instead merely a reflection of attempts to pathologize those reporting experiences that psychiatrists and psychologists cannot explain, and a reflection of bias against the objective analysis of such persons. For example, what is the result when psychiatrists produce biased types of surveys in which those confessing to facets of out-of-body experiences or near-death experiences are classified as having a higher pathology score? The result, of course, would be some ability to report a higher pathology for such people. Similarly, if psychologists are creating Political Anxiety Syndrome surveys in which confessing to be worried about homelessness and poverty causes you to score higher, then people caring about homelessness and poverty will be wrongly analyzed as people having more mental problems. 

The paper here ("Measuring dissociation: Comparison

of alternative forms of the dissociative

experiences scale") gives us at its end the questions used for something called the Dissociative Experiences Scale, a questionnaire that is claimed to be a way of detecting a psychiatric syndrome called "dissociation."  One of the questions asks about out-of-body experiences. The question is: "Some people sometimes have the experience of feeling as though they are standing next to themselves or watching themselves do something and they actually see themselves as if they were looking at another person." People doing the survey are asked to rate how often this happens to them. Anyone having an out-of-experience would answer "Once" or "Sometimes" to such a question, causing them to get a non-zero score on such a scale. But this does nothing whatsoever to show any pathology of such people. It merely shows that people who have out-of-body experiences report out-of-body experiences. Trying to claim a non-zero score on such a survey is evidence of pathology is like creating a Liberal Pathology Syndrome questionnaire in which one of the questions asks "Do you sometimes worry about the suffering of homeless people," and then claiming that scores above zero on such a survey are evidence of mental pathology in liberals. That would be an extremely absurd methodology. All that such a survey would be showing is that people who care about the suffering of homeless people are people who care about the suffering of homeless people. 

The same  Dissociative Experiences Scale asks another question that will get a "Once" answer from very many people who have had near-death experiences.  The question is "Some people have the experience of sometimes remembering a past event so vividly that they feel as if they were reliving that event." People having near-death experiences often report having a "life review" in which they briefly re-experience key moments of their lives, in some very sped-up manner.  Anyone having such an experience might answer "Once" to such a survey item, even though they have no actual pathology. 

In the press release of the "Are out-of-body experiences indicative of an underlying psychopathology?" paper we get some laughable nonsense about childhood trauma being an explanation for out-of-body experiences.  It reminds me of similar rubbish that Sigmund Freud and his followers advanced for decades.  Freud and the Freudians would again and again claim that some mental anomaly cropping up long after childhood was caused by childhood traumas such as the repression of a male patient's sexual lust for his mother. Freudianism is now regarded as a huge error and dead end by most psychologists. The idea that someone would have an experience of floating out of his body and viewing it from above because of some childhood trauma many years ago is an attempted explanation about as silly and stupid as you could make. 

There is actually much evidence that near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences produce a beneficial effect on the minds of those who have them.  I could provide endless examples of people who had such experiences and who claimed that their worldview had been deepened, and that they now regarded their existence as more meaningful than they previously realized. 

The 2023 study "Incidence of near-death experiences in patients surviving a prolonged critical illness and their long-term impact: a prospective observational study" found that 19 out of 126 survivors of Intensive Care Unit hospitalization (15%) had a near-death experience. There was only a very low association between such experiences and positive responses on a Dissociative Experiences Scale questionnaire discussed above, with an odds ratio of only 1.13. The low association seems to argue against hallucinatory explanations for near-death experiences.  Also, when we factor in that such a questionnaire is one that unfairly has two questions that might cause people having a near-death experience or out-of-body experience to score above 0 on such a scale, as mentioned above, we should suspect that the reported very low association is more like a zero association. 

The Dissociative Experiences Scale has been criticized as an invalid survey asking questions about too many types of different experiences. A paper says, "Dissociative Disorders (DD) are perhaps the most controversial psychiatric diagnoses." The same paper tells us that half of the theorists of so-called dissociative disorders think that dissociative disorders are a "socio-cultural construct" and that people report having them mostly because of a kind of social contagion in which they have been encouraged to believe they have such a disorder. 

Another type of psychiatrist survey promoting gaslighting, psychiatric mudslinging and weaponized psychology against healthy subjects is something called the Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule or DDIS.  Described here, it is a questionnaire that asks many questions. One of the questions (Question 64) asks whether you have experienced "having thoughts taken out of your mind." Another asks if you have ever experienced "thinking thoughts which seemed to be someone else's."  Anyone having the extremely common and healthy human experience of ESP or telepathy might answer "yes" to such questions; but that would cause them to have a higher pathology rank on this poorly designed survey.  The same survey asks as its Question 94, "Do you ever have memories come back to you all of a sudden, in a flood or like flashbacks?" The question would cause anyone reporting the common life review of near-death experiences to rate a higher score on this supposed test for "dissociation."  Then there are Questions 100 to 107, which will cause anyone having any of many different paranormal experiences to score high on this supposed test of dissociation.  The questionnaire is a blatant example of specialists trying to engage in gaslighting, psychiatric mudslinging and weaponized psychology; and it is also a blatant example of when medicine goes astray because people are trying to wage ideological warfare against observational reports that offend them. 

We should not have any trust in any claims of "higher dissociative disorder" obtained by the use of techniques such as this appalling "pathologize the spooky" junk medicine "Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule" (DDIS) or the not-as-bad but also very faulty "Dissociative Experiences Scale." 

We may reasonably wonder whether something like this ever went on in someone's mind:

Materialist Jim: I'm so sick of hearing about all those apparitions sightings, out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences! Many people say they disprove my cherished belief that I am just a brain, not a soul.

But wait a second.  I think there's a way to fight such accounts! The key is make it look like the people reporting such things are crazy. 

I can just create some "Official Survey" I can say is a questionnaire designed to detect signs of mental illness.  Some of the questions will ask people if they ever experienced things just like what is reported in apparition sightings, near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences. Any "yes" answer will create a score above zero, providing what we can call evidence of mental illness. 

The current reigning "manual of psychiatry"  (the DSM-5) has only one sentence referring to out-of-body experiences, a mere passing reference. The authors of the manual show zero signs of having studied this complex phenomenon, and do nothing to substantiate any claim that it is associated with mental illness. A paper on the DSM-5 manual states this:

"The DSM-5 perpetuates some of the problems of previous editions and creates some new ones. The new definition of mental disorder is tautological, encourages reification and circular reasoning, and creates nine new distinct pathways whereby a client can be diagnosed with a mental illness, absent any scientific breakthroughs that would justify this new definition. Conditions with clearly established organic etiologies continue to be labeled as mental disorders... Fundamental errors in logical reasoning appear to form the manual’s conceptual foundation. The DSM-5 unjustifiably expands to scope of practice of psychiatry by pathologizing normative reactions to environmental stresses and one’s personal learning history. Heterogeneously presenting conditions are collapsed into singular categories of mental disorder, which confuses the assessment and diagnostic process, and deflects attention away from demonstrable person-in-environment variables to hypothetical inner causes. One consequence of these problems is an unwarranted focus on treating mental disorders via medications and other somatic therapies said to impact the client’s mind, as opposed to improving the client’s ability to effectively y engage the environment reducing the level of stressful and aversive encounters....With time, we may look back on the current mania for psychotropic treatment, aided and abetted by the DSM-5, with the same sense of incredulity and horror that we now read about ovariectomies, nasal cauterizations, teeth extractions, and lobotomies [previous bungling psychiatric treatment techniques]."

Very many have complained that the diagnostic categories in the DSM-5 are largely arbitrary and dubious social constructs of some small committee, and that many of the claimed syndromes have no clear and distinct observational basis or known biological cause. 

We have another example of gaslighting and psychiatric mudslinging in the paper "The Creative Experiences Questionnaire (CEQ): a brief self-report measure of fantasy proneness."  We have a questionnaire that is billed as something measuring "fantasy proneness."  Among the 25 questions are questions in which people are asked whether they agree with these statements:

• "I sometimes feel that I have had an out-of-body experience."
• "During my life I have had intense religious experiences which influenced me in a very strong manner."
• "I often have the experience of thinking of someone and soon afterwards that person calls or shows up."

Each of these three items is a normal, healthy type of human experience that has nothing to do with "fantasy proneness." The only reason you would include such items on a scientific survey would be to do gaslighting and psychiatric mudslinging, to try and defame certain witnesses by branding them as "fantasy prone."  We have an appalling use of the survey in the gaslighting paper here, which improperly compares the responses to the survey of those having near-death experiences to a control group of 100 subjects, ignoring the much larger survey group of 332 subjects discussed in the paper introducing the survey.  If the average score of the subjects in that larger group (a score about 9) had been used, the gaslighting paper would not have been able to report any evidence that those having near-death experiences are more "fantasy prone." 

 

All of the people who engaged in the type of gaslighting and psychiatric mudslinging described above should be ashamed of abusing their positions to engage in this type of groundless character assassination.  They have done nothing to show pathology in those having near-death experiences or out-of-body experiences or other common types of paranormal experiences, but may have done something to demonstrate a little pathology in their own minds or ethics. 

Page 138 of the 2025 research document here gives us an idea of how unfounded are attempts to associate reports of the paranormal with mental pathology:

" At that time, 1500 people from a representative sample were interviewed by telephone about the conceivability of paranormal phenomena and about personal paranormal experiences. The openness to paranormal phenomena was high, and more than 50% of the Germans had already had a paranormal experience in their lives (e.g., ESP-dream, coincidence, apparition of the dead, or observation of an UFO). Statistically at least, we were able to establish that the paranormal is quite normal and our findings are in line with comparable results from other country studies in Europe and the USA; e.g. Castro, Burrows & Wooffitt, 2014; Greeley, 1975. In addition, there was a rather relaxed approach to the extraordinary experiences, which were often reported anecdotally and described as life-enriching. Very rarely were these experiences associated with 'existential shock' or the need for therapeutic counselling."

Psychology Today's Bunk Article Trying to Persuade You That Thinking Causes Brains to Hurt

The brain does nothing to naturally suggest the idea that it is the cause of human thinking, human learning or human recall. When you recall something, your body does nothing to suggest that you are using your brain to retrieve the memory. If I retrieve an apple on my table, my body gives me two different signals that my hand is being used to retrieve the apple. The first is the sight of my hand grasping the apple, and the second is the feeling of the apple in my hand. But if I retrieve a memory of my childhood, my body does absolutely nothing to hint to me that my brain is being used to perform this retrieval. The memory could be stored locally in my soul, or non-locally in some mysterious external consciousness infrastructure unknown to us.

Even when we scan brains with medical devices such as MRI machines, when a person recalls something there is no convincing evidence that information is being loaded from a brain location. A typical MRI scan of someone retrieving a memory will show something like a half of 1% variation from region to region in the brain, something that tells us basically nothing.

When you run very fast, your body does something to tell you that your heart helped to enable such fast running. You can feel your pulse and see that your heart is beating faster than normal. But when you engage in demanding mental activity, the brain does nothing at all to suggest to you that it is the source of such mental activity. You are not able to detect any sign of a brain working harder, such as pulsations coming from your head. If you attempt to read your pulse by touching your head after demanding mental activity, you will not feel such a pulse. 

If you connect a human to an EEG device that reads brain waves, the readings from such a device will not show any greater brain activity during demanding mental activity. If you do an fMRI scan of a brain while someone is doing demanding mental activity, the scan will show no evidence that brains are working faster when you think harder. What such a scan mainly shows is blood flow. There is no increase in blood flow when people think harder. 

So what can someone do if he is a believer in the "brains make minds" dogma, and he wants to make it seem like brains are worker harder when you are doing more difficult work? Lacking any real evidence to support such an idea, what a person may do is just make things up, shoveling baloney and BS. That is what went on in a recent article in Psychology Today. 

The article by T. Alexander Puutio had the misleading title "Great Thinking Is Supposed to Make Your Brain Hurt" followed by the doubly misleading bunk title "Thinking hard hurts, and that’s exactly how you get smarter." No, thinking hard does not hurt, and thinking hard does not make you smarter. Exercising physically (such as running every day) actually improves the ability of the body to perform at a task such as running. But there is no evidence that thinking hard improves your intelligence. 

Puutio makes this claim:

"Those who’ve tried may have found that good thinking—the insightful, heavy-lifting kind—is not just hard. It can bring about sensations startlingly close to physical fatigue, even pain."

You may feel your body feel a little tired after spending hours working on a problem, but it is not at all true that you feel any sensation at all from your brain after such activity. Brains do not at all hurt after heavy thinking. 

Puutio makes these unfounded claims, which are certainly not established by a low-quality scientific paper he cites:

"In effect, sustained mental effort generates a kind of 'metabolic residue,'  not unlike the lactic acid that accumulates in overworked muscles. The brain, sensing this, sends fatigue signals to encourage you to stop before damage sets in."

The scientific paper he cites provides no robust evidence for any such claim. The paper's claims that there were slightly higher levels of glutamate in the brains of subjects who engaged in more strenuous mental tasks.  The study was one of those fishing-expedition affairs in which there is no pre-registered hypothesis to be tested, and checks may be made for dozens or hundreds of different things, looking for some difference. The sample size was too small for a robust result study of this type -- only about 20 subjects. Anyone checking in dozens or hundreds of places in two small sets of about 20 subjects will always be able to find some little difference somewhere. The technique used (something called diffusion-weighted H-MRS) is not a reliable technique for measuring the chemical contents of brains. It's a technique depending on spectroscopic analysis, in which all kind of weak, hard-to-interpret noisy signals are received. 

In experiments like this, spectroscopic analysis is like being in a noisy high school cafeteria trying to pick up what someone on a distant cafeteria table is is saying. To give another analogy for what it is like trying to analyze spectroscopic data coming from the brain,  consider the visual below:

This text consists of many different sentences, overlaid on top of each other. Imagine trying to extract a particular word from such a mess. That's pretty much impossible. It's a similar deal for a neuroscientist analyzing spectroscopic data from a brain, because what such a person gets is signals from many different  chemicals, arriving all at once. Unless you are very lucky, there is almost no way to reliably extract which part is a signal from which chemical, compound or element. But with a mess like a scientist gets in such a situation (or a mess like the one shown above), there are unlimited opportunities to see what you are fervently hoping to see. All that can be truthfully said about such a mess is something like this: "The data is too noisy for me to say much of anything reliable about it." 

Providing no evidence that heavy mental activity causes brains to hurt, Puutio gives us this lame BS claim: "In a sense, good thinking should make your brain hurt." Later he makes this baloney claim: "When your brain tells you it’s tired, it’s not being lazy. It’s protecting itself."  Brains don't tell you they are tired, and no one has ever hurt their brain by thinking too much. 

The main idea in the article of Puutio is that your brain hurts when you think too hard. That is a fictional notion contrary to human experience. People don't experience head pain or brain pain from thinking too long or too hard. Someone may sometimes get a headache when doing heavy cognitive work, but there is no evidence that headaches occur more commonly during heavy cognitive activity. 

Below is Figure 3 from the paper "Perceived triggers of primary headache disorders: A meta-analysis."  We see a report on what previous studies listed as triggers for a headache, largely based on the reports of those who had headaches. We have no mention of cognitive activity as a headache trigger. 

Over the past 12 years I have spent endless hours working on the posts of my blogs, many of which involved topics requiring the most subtle reasoning. Not once did such activity ever cause me to feel the slightest bit of head pain. In my life I have noticed only one possible headache trigger: that extreme disruptions in sleep schedules can cause a headache. 

The term "I'm tired" or "I'm tired of" means quite a few different things in English. A person may say that his arm is tired, and may mean he has an aching sensation in his arm.  Or when a person says he is tired of something, he may merely mean he is looking for some change in his activity. For example, a person may say, "I'm tired of reading this book," or "I'm tired of playing this game," meaning he wishes to engage in some different activity, without actually feeling physically tired. Asked to work on some hard math problems, you may say, "I'm tired of doing this." But there is no actual ache of weariness in your body or your brain. Brains do not have muscle tissue, and cannot get tired. 

They Lost Huge Parts of Their Brains, But Their Knowledge and Recollection Were Preserved

 When people think of neuroscience experiments, they typically think of experiments done with mice. If they think of neuroscience experiments involving humans, they may think of some experiment involving the use of some drug, with a test to see whether the drug affects mental performance.  Such experiments are formally designed with things such as a set of test subjects, a set of control subjects that do not have any intervention occurring to them, and so forth. 

But some of the most important experiments in neuroscience have been those that were not part of some procedure declared as an experiment. The experiments have occurred when some large part of a human brain was removed in surgery. Whenever such an operation is done, it is an important experiment that tests the credibility of the claims that neuroscientists so often make. 

Neuroscientists are always claiming that learning occurs through some brain action, that memories are stored in brains, and that recall of a memory occurs by some action of the brain. Neuroscientists senselessly keep making such claims despite their lack of any credible theory describing how any such things could be done by a brain. When a neuroscientist is asked to explain how a brain could store some newly learned knowledge, a scientist will typically engage in some vague, vacuous hand-waving which typically consists of merely reciting some little slogan or sound bite such as "synapse strengthening." There is nothing to speak of behind such a phrase, which is a mere vacuous catchphrase. When asked to explain how a human can instantly recall some knowledge, a neuroscientist will typically say nothing but the most vacuous phrase such as "stored information is recalled." 

Although not called "experiments," every time a large part of the brain is removed from a human, a very important experiment is being performed, one that sheds light on whether neuroscientist claims about memory are credible.  Under the theory that memories are stored in brains and retrieved by brains, we should expect to observe certain things:

(1) We should expect that there should be some deterioration in the ability of humans to learn new information. Such a deterioration might be small or large, depending on where brain tissue was extracted, and how brain tissue was extracted. 

(2) We should expect that there should be some loss of learned knowledge and episodic memories. Such a deterioration might be small or large, depending on where brain tissue was extracted, and how much brain tissue was extracted. 

Item (2) is often overlooked, but is obviously something to be expected under the theory that brains store memories. Imagine if someone writes down what happened to him each day, in a large book that originally consisted of blank pages. Obviously if you were rip out a large chunk of these pages and burn them, that would cause a large loss of the information that had been recorded.  It is just as obvious that if memories are stored in brains, then surgically removing some large chunk of the brain should cause some large loss of what a person had learned or the memories the person had. 

If memories are stored in the brain we should expect that a surgical removal of a large amount of brain tissue might produce effects such as these:

(1) A loss of the ability to understand some words in a person's language. Each recognition of a word that occurs when a person hears something involves the use of some learned knowledge that a person acquired sometime in his life.  

(2)  A loss of the ability to speak or write some words in a person's language. Each use of a word that occurs when a person speaks something or writes something involves the use of some learned knowledge that a person acquired sometime in his life.  

(3) A loss of the ability to recognize various types of images such as particular faces or particular words or particular symbols. Every time a person recognizes a word or a face or an object or a symbol, that involves the use of some  learned knowledge that a person acquired sometime in his life.  

(4) A loss of the ability to recall various concepts and facts that the person had learned at some time in his life. For example, a person might no longer remember what country or city he lived in, or what his name was, or what his address was. Or a person might no longer be able to explain who some famous historical figure was, someone such as Jesus or Napoleon. 

(5) A loss of episodic memories. For example, a person might no longer be able to tell you the story of his life, or tell you what type of activities he engaged in last year. 

To test whether memories are stored in brains, we can track down case histories of people who had large amounts of brain tissue surgically removed, and examine which, if any, of the effects above occurred.  Let's look at some examples of such cases. 

First, let's look at the case of Beth Usher of Storrs, Connecticut (part of the USA). Beth was mentioned in an article in the LA Times, which says she was one a group of epileptic children who had half of their brain removed, to stop very bad seizures that drugs could not stop. The article stated this:

 "How is it that 8-year-old Beth Usher of Storrs, Conn., can lose her left hemisphere, yet retain her large repertoire of knock-knock jokes? Beth’s memories survived not just the loss of brain tissue, but also the 32 days that she spent in a coma, the result of some brain stem swelling that occurred in response to the trauma of surgery. Shortly after Beth regained consciousness, her father began quizzing her about people and places from her past. Brian Usher didn’t get very far. 'Dad,' Beth interrupted, with a trace of impatience. 'I remember everything.'" 

We have here the explicit claim that Beth's memories survived the removal of the left half of her brain.  The article mentions specific things that Beth could still remember, and makes no mention of any memory or knowledge that was lost after half of her brain was removed. 

Another case is discussed here, in a book chapter of a textbook. We read of a patient E.C. who had a large brain tumor. To treat the tumor, the left half of the patient's brain was removed, in a hemispherectomy operation. We read that "the entire hemisphere was removed in one piece" on December 7, 1965. We read that "immediately following hemispherectomy" the patient had an "ability to follow simple verbal commands."  We read on page 107 that "the patient spontaneously articulated words and short phrases fairly well immediately after the operation."  

The discussion of the patient's retention of previous knowledge is rather frustrating in its lack of a comprehensive treatment. We read that this patient E.C. "gave the correct number of years when asked how long he had lived at his house." We read on page 107 that on January 26, 1966 (about six weeks after the operation) he "slowly but correctly selected four of the first six items from six pages, each with four items to choose from, before indicating he was tired" when given the Peabody picture vocabulary test. Such a test involves a tester speaking a word, and the user pointing to the correct picture in a grid of 4 pictures. 

The image below (from the paper here) shows an example of one of the pages. The word spoken by the tester is "citrus."

The result described above (4 out of 6 correct on six such pages) clearly suggests that patient E.C. retained his learned knowledge after the left half of the brain was removed. Since the test was given only six weeks after the operation, and E.C. was in a recovering state during those weeks in which he was not being schooled, we cannot explain such a result as being due to knowledge acquired during those six weeks. We also read on page 107 that on June 3, 1966 patient E.C. correctly named 85 out of 112 items on such a test. No mention is made of schooling occurring during the first six months of 1966. 

According to the paper here, "In the fifth postoperative month, E.C. showed sudden recall of whole old familiar songs (e.g., My

Country 'Tis of Thee, Home on the Range, church hymns)."

On page 109 we read of three other cases of the removal of the left half of the brain, and we read that "speech and verbal comprehension were present immediately after left hemispherectomy in all three cases." We read nothing about any loss of knowledge or episodic memories in any of these cases. 

In the scientific paper here, we have on page 248 and page 250 before and after test scores for various subjects who had of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations.  The IQ score differences are slight. IQ tests don't involve learned information, but almost any IQ test would be largely a test of memory, as it would be a largely a test of ability to read test questions.  

On the same pages we have before and after test scores for Peabody Picture Vocabulary Tests given to various subjects who had  half of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations.   In these tests, someone is shown picture cards like the one below. The tester speaks a word corresponding to one of the pictures, and the subject tested is asked to point to the correct picture matching that word.  These tests are tests of memory retention after removal of half of the brain.  On these memory tests there was no decline in the score of 21 subjects mentioned on page 248, and no decline in 7 subjects mentioned on page 250. 

The 2021 paper "Preserved Cognition After Right Hemispherectomy"  by Mark Bowren, Jr,  Daniel Tranel and Aaron D. Boes tells us the fairly recent case of a woman who had almost the entire right half of her brain removed, but is apparently suffering very little cognitive damage from this removal. We read that the woman had a brain stroke at age 29, and that doctors treated her brain problem by removing almost all of the right half of her brain, in an operation called a hemispherectomy. We read that "In the days after surgery, she was described as alert, cooperative, and having normal language and interactions with her providers." We read no mention in the paper of a loss of acquired memories.  

The phrase "having normal language" is a very important indication that learned knowledge was preserved after almost all of the right half of the brain was removed.  Every time a person uses language in speech, that involves a use of acquired memories. Every single use of a particular word requires a memory of the definition of that word.  

Also we read that two months after the stroke, this patient CB had "intact expressive language and reading comprehension."  The paper does not tell us how many weeks after the stroke there occurred the removal of almost all the right half of the brain. But from the timeline given we know that this sentence refers to some time less than two months after the operation occurred.  Because you cannot learn a large fraction of a language in less than two months, we can presume that the patient had "intact expressive language and reading comprehension" directly after having had almost all of the right half of her brain removed, particularly given that we are told that the patient had "normal language" days after the operation. 

In a scientific paper ("Why Would You Remove Half a Brain? The Outcome of 58 Children After Hemispherectomy −−The Johns Hopkins Experience: 1968 to 1996") we read about how surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medical School performed fifty-eight hemispherectomy operations on children over a thirty-year period. Eleven of these children had the left hemisphere of their brains removed; most of the rest had the right hemisphere of their brains removed.  The paper states this:

"Despite removal of one hemisphere  [i.e. one half of the brain], the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved....Although there have been major concerns about loss of language after left hemispherectomy, all eleven of these children have regained virtually normal language....It is tempting to speculate, that the continuous electrical activity of these severely dysfunctional hemispheres interferes with the function of the other, more normal hemisphere. This might explain why motor function improves after hemispherectomy and why language recovers after removal of the dysfunctional left hemisphere, but does not seem to fully transfer before surgery. Perhaps it also partially explains intellectual improvement in these children after removal of half of the cortex. We are awed by the apparent retention of memory after removal of half of the brain, either half, and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humor."

There is a reason why we can be confident that removal of half of a brain in hemispherectomy operations does not cause any major loss of learned memories.  If there was a case of any such thing happening, you can believe that it would be endlessly recited by those who wish for us to believe that memories are stored in brains. But there is no such case that is cited. 

The visual below "speaks volumes" on this topic. It is the result of a search on Google Scholar for "amnesia after hemispherectomy." "Hemispherectomy" is the standard name for the operation that has been performed thousands of times, in which half of the brain is removed to stop very bad seizures. "Amnesia" is the main term used for a loss of episodic memories.  Any search on Google Scholar will produce very many results when there are cases corresponding to such a search. For example, doing a Google Scholar search for "vision loss after automobile accident" produces many results. But doing a search for "amnesia after hemispherectomy" produces zero results.

Entitled "Man With Half a Brain," the 1912 newspaper article below (which you can read here) tells us of a soldier who was shot in the head. First, we are told that he lost his memory, but then the article says that "gradually his memory has returned, and he recollected what happened in his childhood." Then the article tells us this: "And now he remembers everything up until the third day before he was shot." 

The news story here documents a very clear case of the preservation of memory after the removal of the left half of the cerebrum. We read of a 47-year-old man who had the left half of his cerebrum removed. We read this:

"Dr. Smith said the patient's memory of events before the operation 'was well preserved, much better than anyone expected.' Tests following surgery show Coe can perform many functions traditionally thought impossible after removal of the brain's dominant hemisphere. Immediately following surgery, Coe still had the ability to speak spontaneously."

A report like this does not merely contradict the claim that the brain is the source of the mind. It also contradicts the claim that the brain is a storage place of memories. 

The results discussed in this post deserve to be pondered at great length. The results indicate very strongly that the human brain is not any storage place of human memories. After considering such results, you should also ponder the most important null result of neuroscience research: the fact that brain tissue from thousands of living and recently deceased humans has been microscopically studied at great length, with the most powerful microscopes; but no one has ever found the slightest trace of learned information or any episodic memory by such microscopic examination. No one found a single phrase, a single word or even a single letter of the alphabet after microscopically examining brain tissue. Nor did anyone ever find by microscopic examination of brain tissue any trace of anything a human ever saw or heard. 

New Poll Suggests About 29% of Neuroscientists Doubt the Synaptic Memory Theory

 Although it is often claimed that memories are stored in the brain (specifically in synapses), there is no place in the brain that is a plausible storage site for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer. The proteins that make up both synapses and dendritic spines are quite short-lived, being subject to very high molecular turnover which gives them an average lifetime of only a few weeks or less. The 2018 study here precisely measured the lifetimes of more than 3000 brain proteins from all over the brain, and found not a single one with a lifetime of more than 75 days (figure 2 shows the average protein lifetime was only 11 days).  

Both synapses and dendritic spines are a “shifting sands” substrate absolutely unsuitable for storing memories that last reliably for decades. Synapses are connected to dendritic spines, which have short lifetimes. A 2018 paper has a graph showing a 5-day "survival fraction" of only about 30% for dendritic spines in the cortex.  A 2014 paper found that only 3% of new spines in the cortex persist for more than 22 days. Speaking of dendritic spines, a 2007 paper says, "Most spines that appear in adult animals are transient, and the addition of stable spines and synapses is rare." A 2016 paper found a dendritic spine turnover rate in the neocortex of 4% every 2 days. A 2018 paper found only about 30% of new and existing dendritic spines in the cortex remaining after 16 days (Figure 4 in the paper). 

So it should be doubly-clear that synapses cannot store memories that can last for decades. Similarly there are two reasons why information would not last long if written on maple leaves outdoors: (1) the fact that maple leaves decay after a few months, and (2) the fact that the wind tends to blow away leaves lying outdoors. 

If humans were storing their memories in brains, there would have to be a fantastically complex translation system (almost infinitely more complicated than the ASCII code or the genetic code) by which mental concepts, words, images and episodic memories are translated into neural states. But no trace of any such system has ever been found, no one has given a credible detailed theory of how it could work, and if it existed it would be a “miracle of design” that would be naturally inexplicable.

If human brains actually stored conceptual and experiential memories, the human brain would have to have both a write mechanism by which exact information can be precisely written, and a read mechanism by which exact information can be precisely read. The brain seems to have neither of these things. There is nothing in the brain similar to the “read-write” heads found in computers.  

If memories were to be stored in a brain, it would take you "ages" to retrieve an answer to a question, because brains are totally lacking in any of the things that make fast retrieval possible: sorting, addresses and indexes. The brain has no type of addresses or coordinates or indexes. The brain has a structure in which neurons are rooted in place like trees in a forest, and synapses are rooted in place like the roots of trees in a forest. With such a physical arrangement, sorting is impossible. 

 So if memories were stored in brains, you would have to suffer the most ridiculously long delays every time you wanted to retrieve knowledge or a memory. 

As discussed here, humans can form new memories instantly, at a speed much faster than would be possible if we were using our brains to store such memories. It is typically claimed that memories are stored by “synapse strengthening” and protein synthesis, but such things are relatively sluggish processes that do not work fast enough to explain the formation of memories that can occur instantly.

For decades microscopes have been powerful enough to detect memories in brains, if memories existed in brains. Very much brain tissue has been studied by the most powerful microscopes: both brain tissue extracting from living patients, and brain tissue extracted from someone very soon after he died. Very many thousands of brains preserved soon after death have been microscopically examined.  Microscopes now allow us to see very clearly what is in the tiniest brain structures such as dendritic spines and synapse heads. But microscopic examination of brain tissue has failed to reveal any trace whatsoever of learned information in a brain.  No one has found a single letter of the alphabet stored in a brain; no has found a single number stored in a brain; and no one has ever found even a single pixel of something someone saw a day or more before.  If memories were stored in human brains, microscopes would have revealed decisive evidence of such a thing decades ago.  But no such evidence has appeared. 

There is nothing in the brain that looks like learned information stored according to some systematic format that humans understand or do not understand. Even when scientists cannot figure out a code used to store information, they often can detect hallmarks of encoded information. For example, long before Europeans were able to decipher how hieroglyphics worked, they were able to see a repetition of symbolic tokens that persuaded them that some type of coding system was being used. Nothing like that can be seen in the brain. We see zero signs that synapses or dendritic spines are any such things as encoded information. 

We know that human memory recall can occur massively with complete accuracy. There are numerous cases of people who memorized with complete accuracy the text of books of hundreds of pages. But synapses do not reliably transmit information. Scientists have repeatedly told us that an individual synapse will transmit a nerve signal with a reliability of 50% or less. So every time a nerve signal crosses a synapse, it is a coin flip as to whether that signal will be successfully carried across the synapse gap. So how could memories could ever be reliably retrieved from synapses? That would require a gigantic number of traversals across synaptic gaps, with a 50% chance of failure during each such traversal. You could never get perfect recall of large bodies of text from such a state of affairs, or even recall that was 10% accurate. 

The theory that human memories that can last for 50 years and can be instantly recalled are stored in synapses is a theory that contradicts pretty much everything we know about systems that can permanently store and instantly retrieve information, and contradicts everything we know about synapses, and contradicts everything we observe about the best examples of human memory performance. You could reasonably compare such a theory to the theory that certain clouds in the sky are nuclear missile bases set up by the Swiss to threaten your nation. That would pretty much contradict everything we know about the Swiss, everything we know about clouds, and everything we know about nuclear missile bases. 

But, you may say, "We should trust the theory of synaptic memory because all the neuroscientists believe in it." Do they really? We don't know that at all. To determine what percentage of neuroscientists believe the dogmas typically stated by neuroscientists, you need well-designed secret ballot opinion polls; and such polls are almost never done.  A recent study attempted to poll neuroscientists on their beliefs about memory storage.  The study (which you can read here) is entitled "What are memories made of? A survey of neuroscientists on the structural basis of long-term memory." 

Unfortunately the study fails to follow some of the main principles that should be followed by any study attempting to do an opinion poll of scientists. Specifically:

(1) The survey was not a secret ballot survey. Scientists were sent emails encouraging them to participate in the survey. The survey form promised anonymity, but it seemed like an arrangement where the participants had to trust that those running the survey would not reveal how individual scientists had voted. Anyone responding might have suspected that there might be some way in which his responses could be identified publicly as coming from him, if there were some future  breach in the promised confidentiality. 

Imagine you are a scientist getting an email like this:

Hello, Professor Waterskein. We have here a survey we would like you to fill out, asking you about all kinds of controversial questions. Please send it back to us. Don't worry, we won't ever publicly reveal which answers you gave. We'll only publish the collected results from the entire group of respondents. 

Are you going to feel it is safe to speak your mind? Or, are you going to still fear that somehow your answers might get you into trouble if they are too candid? I think you might tend to "play it safe" by assuming the person who sent you this email (who you know nothing about) cannot be trusted. 

Devising a true secret-ballot opinion poll (as opposed to a "promised anonymity" opinion poll) requires some cleverness and ingenuity, which did not go on in this case. So we can't know how much the responses were affected by scientists thinking "I had better answer as they expect me to answer."

(2) Contrary to all good standards of properly doing opinion polls, the badly fumbling survey organizers wrote a survey form in which the survey questions are preceded by statements strongly tending to bias  respondents towards a particular type of answer.  The survey form is found here. On page 4 of the survey form, before any questions are asked, we have the statement, "Memories are not standalone entities but are embedded within the complex network structure of the brain." Such a statement precedes questions about the nature of memory creation. But the statement "stacks the deck" in favor of a particular type of answer that could be given to one or more of the questions later asked. 

The clumsiness here is very big. It is a cardinal rule of serious polling that you should not precede questions with statements tending to yield particular types of responses to that questions. So, for example, if you are doing an objective poll about Presidential Candidate William Tygersoll, you absolutely should not precede your questions about this person with a statement such as "Here are some questions about that great American hero and patriot William Tygersoll."  Or, to give another example, if you polling people about some scandal involving this candidate, you absolutely should not be preceding your questions by some statement such as "Many are deeply upset about the scandal involving William Tygersoll. We would like to ask you your opinion."

Equally bad is that the survey conductors have stated on page 4 of their survey form this untrue claim: "Some studies have already demonstrated the ability to decode simple information such as visual field from brain maps (e.g. Scholl et. al. 2020." The reference is to the "no real evidence at all" study here involving a way-too-small sample size of only three monkeys. The quoted claim is an untrue one. The paper mentioned did not "demonstrate the ability to decode simple information such as visual field from brain maps."

Once again the scientists conducting the survey have violated the first rule of conducting a survey, which is "do not do anything to pre-sell a particular answer."  Here is Question 11 that appears in the survey form:

"11.Some neuroscientists have suggested that while molecular and subcellular details play a role, the majority of information for long-term memories is likely physically stored in the brain at the level of neuronal connectivity patterns and ensembles of synaptic strengths (e.g. Poo et al., 2016).

To what extent do you agree with the following statement: ' The structural basis of long-term memories primarily consists of lasting changes in neuronal connectivity and ensembles of synaptic strengths, rather than in molecular or subcellular details.'  "

This is a blunder from any standpoint of trying to objectively survey the opinion of scientists. We have a survey question that is preceded by a sentence pre-selling a particular answer to the survey question, as if the survey conductors were interested in pushing a particular response.  

Here are the responses the survey got from the question above asking neuroscientists about agreement with the following statement: "The structural basis of long-term memories primarily consists of lasting changes in neuronal connectivity and ensembles of synaptic strengths, rather than in molecular or subcellular details."

Strongly Agree:  51 respondents

Agree:  111 respondents

Not Sure: 37 respondents

Disagree:  26 respondents

Strongly Disagree: 5 respondents

So 68 out of 230 respondents (or about 29%) refused to endorse the synaptic theory of memory, even though the survey was strongly pre-selling such a theory. 13% flatly said they disagreed or strongly disagreed with such a theory.  We can only wonder how much higher that 29% figure would be if a true secret ballot had been used, and if the survey had followed proper standards of opinion surveying, such as not trying to pre-sell some answer to the questions it was asking. 

Clearly there is no consensus of neuroscientists about the theory that memories are stored in synapses. We are being misinformed when people try to suggest that such a consensus exists. A bad example of that type of misleading statement occurred in the paper "What is memory? The present state of the engram," a paper with many misstatements and many references to junk neuroscience studies failing to qualify as robust research. In that paper Mu-ming Poo stated, "There is now general consensus that persistent modification of the synaptic strength via LTP and LTD of pre-existing connections represents a primary mechanism for the formation of memory engrams." The new poll discussed above shows there is no such consensus. 

When someone tries to make a theory sound more popular than it is, they have done one of the bad deceits of science theory pitchmen. It's a deceit as old as the hills. It works by people trying to make some not-yet-triumphant theory gain more popularity by insinuating that almost everyone already believes in it. For a discussion of the trickery and equivocation and deceit that so often occurs in such cases, see my post "So Much Misleading Talk Occurs in Claims of a Scientific Consensus."

A better-designed poll might have asked a question such as this:

"Which reflects your thinking:

• 'Human memories are stored mainly in synapses.'
• 'Human memories are stored by some other brain mechanism, perhaps something involving neurons or brain chemistry.'
• 'Most memories are not stored in brains, and human memory is mostly a spiritual, psychic or metaphysical phenomenon, or some other subtle reality different from information storage in brains.'
• 'I don't know/no answer.'

Given a question such as this, and also a secret ballot not requiring respondents to trust the confidentiality of those doing a survey,  I doubt whether even 60% of neuroscientists would choose the first answer. 

The poll discussed above also shows us that most of those professing belief in the synaptic theory of memory lack a strong confidence in it. When given a set of poll choices allowing you to choose "agree" or "strongly agree," a mere 22% of the respondents chose to say that they "strongly agree" with the theory of synaptic memory storage. 

I have been generously referring above to a synaptic theory of memory, although it is probably more accurate to say that such a thing is not even a theory, but merely a small group of vague, vacuous jargon phrases repeated by scientists who have yet to develop a real theory on this topic. It's really a "there's no there there" situation. 

Given the huge diversity of the types of things that human can remember, an actual theory of neural memory encoding would require maybe 1,000,000 times more effort than involved in the production of the diagram above. 

Below are some relevant quotes, all statements by scientists:

• "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?" 
• "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). 
• "While a lot of studies have focused on memory processes such as memory consolidation and retrieval, very little is known about memory storage" -- scientific paper (link).
• "While LTP is assumed to be the neural correlate of learning and memory, no conclusive evidence has been produced to substantiate that when an organism learns LTP occurs in that organism’s brain or brain correlate."  -- PhD thesis of a scientist, 2007 (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). 
• "How memory is stored in the brain is unknown." -- Research proposal abstract written by scientists, 2025 (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).
• ""Despite over a hundred years of research, the cellular/molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory are still not completely understood. Many hypotheses have been proposed, but there is no consensus for any of these."  -- Two scientists in a 2024 paper (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." 
• "Despite recent advancements in identifying engram cells, our understanding of their regulatory and functional mechanisms remains in its infancy." -- Scientists claiming erroneously in 2024 that there have been recent advancements in identifying engram cells, but confessing there is no understanding of how they work (link).
• "Study of the genetics of human memory is in its infancy though many genes have been investigated for their association to memory in humans and non-human animals."  -- Scientists in 2022 (link).
• "The neurobiology of memory is still in its infancy." -- Scientist in 2020 (link). 
• "The investigation of the neuroanatomical bases of semantic memory is in its infancy." -- 3 scientists, 2007 (link). 
• "Currently, our knowledge pertaining to the neural construct of intelligence and memory is in its infancy." -- Scientists, 2011 (link). 
•  "Very little is known about the underlying mechanisms for visual recognition memory."  -- two scientists (link). 
• "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."  -- Two scientists in 2022 (link). 
• "The mechanisms governing successful episodic memory formation, consolidation and retrieval remain elusive,"  - Bogdan Draganski, cogntive neuroscientist (link). 
• " The mechanisms underlying the formation and management of the memory traces are still poorly understood." -- Three scientists in 2023 (link). 
• "The underlying electrophysiological processes underlying memory formation and retrieval in humans remains very poorly understood." --  A scientist in 2021 (link). 
• "As for the explicit types of memory, the biological underpinning of this very long-lasting memory storage is not yet understood." -- Neuroscientist Cristina M. Alberini in a year 2025 paper (link).