Neuroscience News Stories May Contain Flagrant Absurdities

The writer of a typical neuroscience news story seems to take an "anything goes" attitude in which the underlying assumption seems that any kind of boast is allowed, no matter how loony-sounding. As an example to support this claim, I offer a recent BBC news article with a headline of "Fly brain breakthrough 'huge leap' to unlock human mind."

                        Neuro-nonsense, BBC style

Here is an excerpt from the story:

"Now for the first time scientists researching the brain of a fly have identified the position, shape and connections of every single one of its 130,000 cells and 50 million connections. It's the most detailed analysis of the brain of an adult animal ever produced.

One leading brain specialist independent of the new research described the breakthrough as a 'huge leap' in our understanding of our own brains. One of the research leaders said it would shed new light into 'the mechanism of thought'."

The claim at the end of the quote is obviously very absurd.  Fruit flies don't think. So there is no conceivable study of the brain of the fruit fly that could shed light on what allows humans to think. 

The study of human brains has shed no light at all on how human beings are able to think, imagine, analyze and plan. Here are some relevant quotations, all quotes of scientists:

• "Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience.” -- Donald D. Hoffman Department of Cognitive Sciences University of California, "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem."
• "Little progress in solving the mystery of human cognition has been made to date." -- 2 neuroscientists, 2021 (link). 
• " We don't know how a brain produces a thought." -- Neuroscientist Saskia De Vries (link). 
• "You realize that neither the term ‘decision-making’ nor the term ‘attention’ actually corresponds to a thing in the brain." -- neuroscentist Paul Ciskek (link). 
• "We know very little about the brain. We know about connections, but we don't know how information is processed." -- Neurobiologist Lu Chen. 
• "Computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. Humans, on the other hand, do not — never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?" -- Senior research psychologist Robert Epstein.
• "The neuroscientific study of creativity is stuck and lost." -- Psychologist Arne Dietrich,  "Where in the brain is creativity: a brief account of a wild-goose chase."
• "How creative ideas arise in our mind and in our brain is a key unresolved question." -- nine scientists (link).
• "The central dogma of Neuormania is that persons are their brains....Basic features of human experience...elude neural explanation. Indeed, they are at odds with the materialist framework presupposed in Neuromania. Many other assumptions of Neuromania -- such as that the mind-brain is a computer -- wilt on close inspection. All of this notwithstanding, the mantra 'You are your brain' is endlessly repeated. This is not justified by what little we know of the brain, or more importantly, of the relationship between our brains and ourselves as conscious agents."  -- Raymond Tallis, Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester, "Aping Mankind," page xii (link). 
• "And so we are forced to a conclusion opposite to the one drawn earlier: that consciousness cannot be due to activity in the brain and that cerebral activity is an inadequate explanation of mental activity."  -- Raymond Tallis, Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester, "Brains and Minds: A Brief History of Neuromythology" (link). 
• "My own view of a secular universe, devoid of consciousness and intelligence 'beyond the brain' (Grof 1985) gave way little by little over several decades and now seems quite absurd." John Mack MD, Harvard professor of psychology (link). 
• "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Were we able even to see and feel the very molecules of the brain, and follow all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges if such there be, and intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem,...The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable."  -- Physicist John Tyndall (link).
• "Many who work within the SMC [standard model of consciousness] assume that a nervous system is necessary and sufficient for an existential consciousness. While this is a common stance...we have yet to see a coherent defense of this proposition or a well-developed biomolecular argument for it. For most, it is simply a proclamation. Moreover, we have not seen any effort to identify what features of neural mechanisms 'create' consciousness while non-neural ones cannot. This too is simply a pronouncement." -- Four scientists, "The CBC theory and its entailments," (link).
• "But when it comes to our actual feelings, our thought, our emotions, our consciousness, we really don't have a good answer as to how the brain helps us to have those different experiences." -- Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist, Ancient Aliens, Episode 16 of Season 14, 6:52 mark. 
• "Dr Gregory Jefferis, of the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge told BBC News that currently we have no idea how the network of brain cells in each of our heads enables us to interact with each other and the world around us."  -- BBC news article (link). 

Study of the human brain has shed no light on how humans are able to think, write, plan, analyze and imagine. The idea that we might get some great insight on such a topic by studying the brains of fruit flies (that do not  think, write, plan, analyze and imagine) is absurd. 

We are given only this example of some insight from studying the fruit fly brain:

"The researchers have been able to identify separate circuits for many individual functions and show how they are connected. The wires involved with movement for example are at the base of the brain, whereas those for processing vision are towards the side. "

Yes, there is a motor cortex that helps in moving muscles, and a visual cortex that helps in vision. But scientists have known that for fifty years, and we sure didn't learn that by mapping all the neurons and connections in the brain of a fruit fly. 

No progress has been made here in understanding the human mind, contrary to the bogus headline that there occurred a "huge leap" in understanding the human mind. But don't blame the writer.  Blame the neuroscientist quoted as making the bogus claim that this "huge leap" occurred.  Who was that? We'll never know, because the story has merely said "one leading brain specialist" said such a thing, without ever identifying who that scientist was. 

The story epitomizes the BBC's tendency to uncritically parrot the most groundless and silly-sounding claims whenever they are made by scientists. BBC science journalists covering scientists act like North Korean journalists covering North Korean dictators. 

Faltering Neuroscientists Improperly Offer Computer Science Papers as Examples of Neuroscience Progress

 A recent scientific paper was entitled "The coming decade of digital brain research: A vision for neuroscience."  Consisting of little more than 100 paragraphs, the paper has more than 100 authors, reminding us of the ridiculous tendency these days for neuroscience papers to have excessive numbers of people listed as authors. We may wonder: what rule was going on here, a rule of "only one paragraph per author"?

Papers like this may remind us of the sad state of current neuroscience, in which it seems that the Supremely Important Things are not good science methodology and strict accuracy of statements but instead an author's paper count (his total of published papers) and an author's citation count (how many citations the papers have got).  So we have endless Questionable Research Practice papers following a bad methodology, often making untrue but interesting-sounding claims in their paper titles or paper abstracts, papers that typically list more than ten authors each. It is as if "quick and dirty" is the operating rule rather than "slow and clean," as if people were trying "at all costs" to increase their count of published papers and the numbers of citations such papers get, and paying relatively little attention to the quality of such papers. It is as if "quantity not quality" is the operating principle. Things get supremely ridiculous when researchers then dishonestly make claims such as "I am the author of 75 published scientific papers" when such a researcher has merely co-authored most of those papers, with the co-authorship mostly merely being a measly "decile co-authorship" in which the author is only one of ten or more listed authors. 

The paper starts out immediately by making a boastful baloney claim, the claim that "in recent years, brain research has indisputably entered a new epoch." No, the kind of brain research we are getting in the 2020's is very little different from the kind of brain research we got in the 2010's.  The authors discuss the Human Brain Project, which (despite billions in funding) failed to make any real progress in supporting the "brains make minds" claims that neuroscientists like to make, completely failing to provide evidence of a brain storage of memories. The paper authors attempt to persuade us otherwise. They make the following statement:  "To give a few examples, research in the project has led to new insights into the mechanisms of learning (Bellec et al., 2020; Cramer et al., 2020; Deperrois et  al., 2022; Göltz et  al., 2021; Jordan et al., 2021; Manninen et al., 2020; Masoli et al., 2021; Stöckl & Maass, 2021; van den Bosch et al., 2022), visuomotor control (Abadía et al., 2021; Pearson et al., 2021), vision (Chen et al., 2020; Svanera et al., 2021; van Vugt et  al., 2018), consciousness (Demertzi et  al., 2019; Lee et al., 2022), sleep (Capone et al., 2019; Le Van Quyen et  al., 2016; Rosanova et  al., 2018), spatial navigation (Bicanski & Burgess, 2018; Northoff et al., 2020; Stoianov et al., 2018; van Beest et al., 2021), predictive coding and perception (Oude Lohuis et al., 2022), as well as language (Dehaene et al., 2015) and has resulted in new theoretical concepts and analysis methods."

The claim that any of these studies provided "new insights into the mechanisms of learning" is incorrect, and neuroscientists lack any understanding of any neural mechanism of learning.  Neuroscientists give us nothing other than empty hand-waving whenever they try to speak of a brain mechanism of learning. Let's take a close look at the papers cited, to see how none of them provide any insights into a brain mechanism of learning:

• "Bellec et al., 2020": This refers to the paper "A solution to the learning dilemma for recurrent networks of spiking neurons" here. This is a computer science paper and mathematics paper that brags about some Atari video game result produced by a software program. It is a not a paper involving any experiments with living organisms or any new observations of living organisms or their cells. 
• "Cramer et al., 2020": This refers to the paper "Control of criticality and computation in spiking neuromorphic networks with plasticity." This is a computer science paper that talks about some result produced using an electronic hardware chip that was inaccurately described as "neuromorphic," a term presumably meaning "like a neuron." A visual of this chip shows something looking nothing like brain tissue.  This is  not a paper involving any experiments with living organisms or any new observations of living organisms or their cells. The visual below shows some misleading labels and captions used in the paper. 
• "Deperrois et  al., 2022": This refers to the paper "Learning cortical representations through perturbed and adversarial dreaming." The paper discusses experiments done with some fancy electronic device or computer software implementation  depicted in Figure 8 of the paper. This is a not a paper involving any experiments with living organisms or any new observations of living organisms. 
• "Göltz et  al., 2021":  this refers to the paper "Fast and energy-efficient neuromorphic deep learning with first-spike times." The paper discusses experiments done with some fancy electronic device or computer software implementation, misleadingly using the term "neurons" repeatedly for parts of such a thing that are not actually neurons. This is  not a paper involving any experiments with living organisms or any new observations of living organisms or their cells. By now we can learn the lesson that whenever you read the word "neuromorphic" in a science paper title (a term meaning "like neurons"), the paper is talking about some computer software and/or computer hardware setup rather than something actually in a brain. 
• "Jordan et al., 2021": this refers to the paper "Evolving interpretable plasticity for spiking networks." The paper discusses experiments done with some fancy electronic device or computer software implementation. This is  not a paper involving any experiments with living organisms or any new observations of living organisms or their cells.
• "Manninen et al., 2020": this refers to the paper "Astrocyte-mediated spike-timing-dependent longterm depression modulates synaptic properties in the developing cortex." This paper involves what it calls "in silico experiments," a term meaning experiments done with some fancy electronic device or computer software implementation. This is  not a paper involving any experiments with living organisms or any new observations of living organisms or their cells. 
• "Masoli et al., 2021": this refers to the paper "Cerebellar golgi cell models predict dendritic processing and mechanisms of synaptic plasticity." The paper discusses experiments done with some fancy electronic device or computer software implementation. This is  not a paper involving any experiments with living organisms or any new observations of living organisms or their cells.

• "Stöckl & Maass, 2021": this refers to the paper "Optimized spiking neurons can classify images with high accuracy through temporal coding with two spikes." This is  not a paper involving any experiments with living organisms or any new observations of living organisms or their cells.
• "van den Bosch et al., 2022": this refers to the paper "Striatal dopamine dissociates methylphenidate effects on value-based versus surprise based reversal learning." Unlike all the papers discussed above, this paper actually involved some experiments with living organisms: some humans who were given two drugs. The experiments report a slight improvement in performance on those given one of the drugs, but only a very slight performance. Supplementary Table 1 in the Supplementary Information  shows those given a placebo scored .90, that those given one drug scored .94 and those given another drug scored .88.  The results are not very impressive, and do not constitute anything like "new insights into the mechanism of learning."

So I have now discussed all of the papers that were claimed to have provided "new insights into the mechanism of learning." by the recent paper "The coming decade of digital brain research: A vision for neuroscience" with 100+ authors. We have been seriously misled. The paper has boasted that the Human Brain Project produced  "new insights into the mechanism of learning," and has given the papers above as its evidence. None of the papers provides any evidence of any such thing as a neural mechanism of learning. All of the papers except one are papers that were mere computer science papers, and not a paper involving any experiments with living organisms or any new observations of living organisms or their cells. Repeatedly in these papers there occurs the deception of referring to purely computer software components or electronic components, and misleadingly calling them "neurons," "synapses," and "dendrites." An example of such a deception is shown below, which is a visual from one of the papers mentioned above:

 

The paper "The coming decade of digital brain research: A vision for neuroscience" with 100+ authors has no description of any progress made in explaining how brains could produce learning, memory, consciousness, self-hood or thinking. The paper fails to use the word "engram." The paper offers some lame excuses for the lack of progress in these areas. It states this: "Our current understanding of the mechanistic operations which subserve cognitive functions, such as memory or decision making, is limited by the scale and precision of existing technologies—simultaneous microscopic recordings are limited to a few brain regions, while full-brain imaging lacks the spatial and/or temporal resolution needed." There are no "mechanistic operations which subserve cognitive functions, such as memory or decision making." The claim that there are such things is a groundless myth of the belief community of neuroscientists.  The excuse given is one that sounds as phony as a three-dollar bill. For decades microscopes have had a power which should have been sufficient to discover memories stored in brains, if they existed.  

Below is a diagram from the paper "Materials Advances Through Aberration-Corrected Electron Microscopy." We see that since the time the genetic code was discovered about 1953, microscopes have grown very many times more powerful. The A on the left stands for an angstrom, a tenth of a nanometer (that is, a ten-billionth of a meter). 

Currently the most powerful microscopes can see things about 1 angstrom in width, which is a tenth of a nanometer. How does this compare to the sizes of the smallest units in brains? Those sizes are below:

Width of a neuron body (soma): about 100 microns (micrometers), which is about 1,000,000 angstroms.

Width of a synapse: about 20-30 nanometers, about 200-300 angstroms.  

Width of a dendritic spine: about 50 to 200 nanometers, about 500 to 2000 angstroms.

Clearly the resolution of the most powerful microscopes is powerful enough to read memories stored in neurons or synapses, if such memories existed. And more than 14,000 brains have been microscopically studied in recent years. The failure to microscopically read any  memories from human brain tissue is a major reason for thinking that brains do not store human memories.  

Besides failing to find specific memories and items of learned knowledge by microscopically examining brains (such as the information that the New York Yankees belong to the American League of US baseball), scientists can find no evidence of a mechanism for storing learned information in brains.  If such a mechanism existed, its fingerprints would be all over the place. Since humans can learn and remember so many different types of things (sights, sounds, feelings, facts, beliefs, opinions, numbers, smells, tastes, physical pains, physical pleasures, music, quotations, and so forth), any brain mechanism for storing all of these things would have a massive footprint in the brain and in the genome. No sign of any such thing can be found. The workhorses that get things done in the body are proteins, and humans have more than 20,000 types of proteins. No one has ever identified a protein that helps to write a memory of experiences or numbers or words to the brain or neural tissue, in any kind of way that helps explain how memories or knowledge could be stored in brains.  Of course, you can find studies maybe showing that protein XYZ was used when someone learned something, but that does nothing to show a mechanism of memory storage. 

The paper "The coming decade of digital brain research: A vision for neuroscience" with 100+ authors fails to seriously discuss the gigantic rot at the core of today's neuroscience: the massive production of irreproducible results caused by countless experimenters doing "quick and dirty" research following Questionable Research Practices such as inadequate sample sizes, lack of blinding protocols, and the use of poor measurement techniques such as judgments of freezing behavior.

The paper makes this laughable statement: "Brain simulation is expected to play a key role in elucidating essential aspects of brain processes (by demonstrating the capacity to reproduce them in silico),

such as decision-making, sensorimotor integration, memory formation, etc." What silly drivel this is. Computers are computers, and brains are brains. You do nothing to show that brains produce decisions or that brains form memories by showing that computers can make decisions or that computers can store new information in computer memory systems. 

It is rather clear what is going on. Our neuroscientists are getting nowhere trying to show that brains can produce thinking or learning or store memories or retrieve memories (things that brains do not actually do).  To try to cover up their lack of progress, neuroscientists are appealing to computer science papers that merely show examples of computers storing, retrieving and processing data. It's kind of like a husband who is failing to earn a salary, and bragging to his wife about all the virtual money he is making in some life-simulation game such as The Sims. 

Click to see left column more clearly

Click to see left column more clearly

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.