Exhibit C That Neuroscientists Have No Understanding of How a Memory Could Form or Last in a Brain

 In 2020 on this site I published a post entitled "Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Store a Memory." In 2023 I published on this site a post entitled "Exhibit B That Scientists Have No Understanding of a Physical Basis of Human Memory." Now it is time for Exhibit C on this topic. 

I recently discovered a web site called The Transmitter (www.thetransmitter.org) that mainly covers neuroscience research and neuroscience theory. When read in a critical manner, an article on the last site serves to powerfully remind us that neuroscientists lack any such thing as either a real theory of memory storage or a real theory of life-long memory persistence. When scientists speak on these topics, they offer only the flimsiest catchphrases, soundbites that have the weight of soap bubbles. 

The title of the article is "What makes memories last—dynamic ensembles or static synapses?" The reference to "static synapses" is a very misleading one. Everything we know about synapses tells us that a synapse is an unstable thing that cannot last for years.

We read a neuroscientist (Jason Shepherd) making these claims:

"The debate over how information is stored in the brain is often represented as one between two extremes. One viewpoint posits that learning induces changes in gene expression that ultimately alter the structure and function of specific synapses within the physical memory circuit, or engram. These molecular changes at the synapses can remain stable for the lifetime of the memory. The other viewpoint claims that information is represented not in a specific set of cells or synapses but rather across a loose set of cells and circuits that 'drift' over time."

The narrative of two rival theories is a false one. The situation is really "no theory at all" but merely empty, vacuous sound bites and slogans such as "synapse strengthening," which may differ from one speaker to the next. The claim above that "molecular changes at the synapses can remain stable for the lifetime of the memory" is something entirely contrary to fact. We know that human memories can persist for more than 50 years. Synapses, on the other hand, are "shifting sands" type of things that are dramatically unstable. The proteins that make up synapses have an average lifetime of less than 3 weeks.  Synapses are connected to dendritic spines, which are known to have short lifetimes, not lasting for years. Remarkably synapses are built of proteins which have an average lifetime about 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans can remember things. This discrepancy is one of very many reasons why the idea that memories are stored in synapses is one of the most nonsensical ideas that scientists have ever advanced. 

Notice well the utter emptiness of what is discussed as an alternative to the utterly-vacuous-by-itself idea that memories are formed by "synapse strengthening." The alternative is presented as the idea that " information is represented not in a specific set of cells or synapses but rather across a loose set of cells and circuits that 'drift' over time." That's an utterly vague, vacuous, empty sound bite that is as much  of an empty soap bubble as the equally empty notion of "synapse strengthening." Not the slightest bit of weight is added by the next two sentences:

"In this view, the cells that initially encoded an experience are not the same set of cells that actually store the information. Indeed, the precise set of cells do not matter in this framework—the information for a specific memory is instead decoded from the computational space of firing patterns across a set of cells."

As some type of attempt to explain stable memories that can last for 50 years, this idea is as supremely goofy as the idea that memories that last for 50 years are stored in the "shifting sands" of synapses. The "firing patterns" in the brain are ever-changing. Trying to claim that stable memories are stored in "firing patterns" is as goofy as the claim that your tax records and childhood photos are stored in the wind patterns around your house. 

Shepherd gives us some "rival cases" paragraphs. Under a heading of "The case for memory engrams," he makes some untrue statements. He states this:

" In experiments that used this approach, light-sensitive receptors were expressed only in the cells active during learning. Shining a light to activate these cells days or even weeks after training resulted in the recall of a memory without any external experience or cue. This remarkable observation set the stage for the idea that 'engram' neurons that encode learning are sufficient to store and recall a memory."

No robust research of any such type ever occurred.  Shepherd is simply repeating a groundless achievement legend of neuroscientists. When you read the papers that claim to have done such things, you will always find that they were junk-science studies guilty of multiple types of Questionable Research Practices such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes, and the use of unreliable techniques for attempting to judge recall in rodents, such as the unreliable method of trying to judge "freezing behavior."

Under the heading of "the representational drift perspective," Shepherd presents nothing in the way of any evidence. We get only the most roundabout hand-waving. 

Shepherd then asks eight neuroscientists for their opinions on the topic of memory storage by a brain. Shepherd follows a senseless procedure.  A good open question to ask would be something like this:

"Do you have a good, credible theory of how a brain could store memories, and how memories could persist a lifetime? If so, describe the best evidence for such a theory, and tell us how confident you are that such a theory is true."

And a good follow-up question would be questions like this:

• "Are there any physical factors in the brain that argue against such a theory? Explain how such a theory could really allow 50-year memory storage despite all the molecular and structural turnover in the brain."
• "Trying to be precise, and avoiding vague language, can you explain exactly how a detailed memory could be stored under such a theory? For example, exactly how could a brain store a page of text that someone had memorized, so that the person could retrieve that whole page?"
• "Under such a theory, how would it be possible for someone to instantly recall lots of relevant detailed information after seeing a single face or hearing a single name? For example, how could someone ever recite a paragraph describing the life of Abraham Lincoln after merely hearing his name? How could information about Lincoln stored in a brain ever be found quickly enough to allow instant recall?"

But Shepherd asks no such challenging questions to his eight neuroscientists. Instead he asks each of them the softest of softball questions. Each neuroscientist is asked these questions:

• "Is information stored in the brain at the level of cells (or circuits) or at the level of synapses?"
• "Can we reconcile observations that show distinct engram circuits seem to store memories versus observations that show the neuronal activity of these memory engram drifts?"
• "What experimental data would be helpful to reconcile these observations to help bring these theories together?"

The first question is a classic example of a stupid "either/or" question in which someone is asked to choose between two alternatives, neither of which is credible. The question is as stupid as asking, "Are UFOs spaceships from the planet Mars or spaceships from the planet Venus?" The second question is one with a false premise embedded within it. It is not true that there are "observations that show distinct engram circuits seem to store memories." Microscopic examination of brain tissue has never shown the slightest trace of anything anyone has learned or experienced. The third question is the type of question you might ask neuroscientists when they don't have any good evidence to back up their dogmas. Rather than asking them to tell about what evidence backs up their claims, you might ask them to fantasize about what type of future observations they might make that might back up their theories. 

None of the eight questioned neuroscientists has anything of any substance to offer in response to the questions. The first question at least offers an invitation for someone to start expounding about any theory he may have of neural memory storage. We get no impressive quotes in response to such a question. We get only the wobbliest hand-waving that makes the people giving the answers sound very empty-handed. 

• Andre Fenton of New York University has nothing of any substance to say. He says "information is not stored in any single element," and "it may not be practically possible to separate the process of storage from the access," both of which suggest that he has no understanding of how a brain could store a memory. People who understand how some type of information is stored do not say such things. 
• Loren Frank of the University of California gives us no impression that he understands how a brain could store a memory. He says, "It might be that changes in gene expression lead to changes in activity levels, although at the moment we really don’t understand the scope of these changes." He offers only the vaguest hand-waving, with a mention of the hippocampus. We have an example of the vaguest and most conceptually empty hand-waving in this statement by Frank: "Focusing on memories for the events of daily life, our current conception is that the events themselves drive activity across the brain, engaging specific neurons whose activity represents the various sights, sounds, smells and feelings that are part of the experience." 
• Kari Hoffman of Vanderbilt University also offers only the vaguest handwaving, an example being this statement: "I would submit that much of the heavy lifting is done at both the synaptic and circuit/ensemble level. Which levels dominate depends on factors such as memory type, when information was acquired and how it is integrated with the existing structures, themselves reflecting changes from earlier experiences. " Another statement by her indicates she has no real understanding on this topic: "That said, we may need to be careful in using the term 'these memories' or 'these memory engrams.'  Such terms suggest that experience creates biological bins to hold discrete memories, that memories exist as entities that are created 'de novo,' and that neural modifications must reside at only one level, all of which are positions that are not or may not be true." 
• Yingxi Lin of the University of Texas says, "It is, however, too early to say that those cells and synapses are sites of stored memory per se, as they may simply function to gain access to the memory."  She also says, " It is also possible that there aren’t specific sites for memory storage; cells and synapses may be part of a brain-wide code for memory expression." She seems to have no understanding of how a brain could store a memory. 
• Cian O'Donnell of Ulster University sounds like a weak scholar of neuroscience when he states, "The field has held synaptic plasticity up as the main mechanism for information storage in the brain for several decades now, and I haven’t heard any good reasons to start doubting it yet." There are very many such reasons, such as the fact that synapses are composed of proteins with very short lifetimes, the fact that synapses bear no resemblance to any system for writing or reading information, the fact that synapses do not reliably transmit information, and that synapses are connected to dendritic spines that are unstable and do not last for years. Nothing O'Donnell says makes him sound like anyone with an understanding of how a brain could store memories. 
• Timothy O'Leary of Cambridge University (not to be confused with the late Timothy Leary of Harvard) says nothing to inspire any confidence that he has any understanding of how a brain could store a memory. All he does is to reveal that he fell "hook, line and sinker" for bad neuroscience experiments using way-too-small study group sizes and the utterly unreliable technique of trying to judge recall by judging "freezing behavior." 
• Tomas Ryan of Trinity College also says  says nothing to inspire any confidence that he has any understanding of how a brain could store a memory. He engages in the emptiest of hand-waving when he says this: "It seems to me that the plausible level for the storage of long-term memories is in the topography of the connectome. So, the information is engraved through stable changes in the brain’s microanatomical circuit." The "connectome" he refers to is the collection of all synapses. But synapses are not stable, but the opposite of stable. So his claim makes no sense. 
• The last of the eight neuroscientists is Evan Schaffer of the School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He states this: "As a consequence, I don’t think information can be stored in cells or synapses in the hippocampus in a way that is stable over a lifetime. In other parts of the brain, this may not be the case." No, actually, there is no credible storage place for memories in the brain, either in the hippocampus or anywhere else. Not sounding like anyone who understands how a brain could store memories, Schaffer also sounds like a poor student of human mental performance. Most misleadingly, he tries to suggest that humans may not be able to remember things well for weeks. He says, "On a timescale of a few days, memories seem pretty stable. On a timescale of a few weeks, there’s less evidence for stability." To the contrary, there is abundant evidence that humans can very well remember things for decades. To give one of endless examples I could cite, every opera fan knows that various opera stars are able to perfectly remember over many years the very many notes and words that make up particular opera roles. Placido Domingo, for example, performed more than 150 opera roles, many of which required singing for hours on the stage, from memory. 

Finally in the article we have a summing up by Shepherd, who sounds just as empty-handed and theory-lacking as the eight experts he has interviewed. He says this:

"Finally, neuroscientists must do a better job of defining their terms. What is 'information,' and how is it 'represented' in the brain? What is an engram?"

The title of the article was "What makes memories last—dynamic ensembles or static synapses?" I re-read all of the answers to see whether anyone addressed the issue of how memories could last in a brain long enough to persist for decades. Not one of the eight neuroscientists even addressed the issue. Not one of them advanced any theory as to how memories could persist for decades. Not one of them advanced even a hypothesis about such a topic.  The issue of how memories could last for decades was simply ignored by the eight neuroscientists, none of whom had either a real theory of memory storage to advance, nor any theory of the life-long preservation of memory.  We certainly did not get any such thing when we got this piece of fantasy by Tomas Ryan:

"It seems to me that the plausible level for the storage of long-term memories is in the topography of the connectome. So, the information is engraved through stable changes in the brain’s microanatomical circuit." 

Engraved? No such engraving occurs in the brain. Nothing in a brain bears any resemblance to a system or component for writing learned information. There is zero evidence that anything bearing the slightest resemblance to engraving occurs in the brain. We see no "engraved" neurons, no "engraved" synapses, and no "engraved" dendritic spines.  Everything that has been learned about synapses shouts that a synapse cannot have any such thing as stable changes, in the sense of changes that last permanently for decades. The proteins that make up synapses have average lifetimes of less than a few weeks. And synapses are attached to dendritic spines that are known to have short lifetimes, dendritic spines that do not last for years. 

A 2019 paper documents a 16-day examination of synapses, finding "the dataset contained n = 320 stable synapses, n = 163 eliminated synapses and n = 134 formed synapses."  That's about a 33% disappearance rate over a course of 16 days. The same paper refers to another paper that "reported rates of [dendritic] spine eliminations in the order of 40% over an observation period of 4 days."  A paper studying the lifetimes of dendritic spines in the cortex states, "Under our experimental conditions, most spines that appear survive for at most a few days. Spines that appear and persist are rare." The rare persistence referred to was only a persistence of a few months. 

The 2023 paper here gives the graph below showing the decay rate of the volume of dendritic spines. It is obvious from the graph that they do not last for years, and mostly do not even last for six months. 

Page 278 of the same paper says, "Two-photon imaging in the Gan and Svoboda labs revealed that spines can be stable over extended periods of time in vivo but also display genesis (generation) and elimination (pruning) at a frequency of 1–4% per week." Something vanishing at a rate of 2% per week will be gone within a year. 

Below are some quotes by scientists and doctors who spoke candidly about brains and memory storage, rather than engaging in the kind of bluffing that went on from the people mentioned above:

• "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). 
• "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). 
• "It remains unclear where and how prior knowledge is represented in the brain." -- A large team of scientists, 2025 (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). 

There's No Neural Explanation for Creativity, Which Can Improve After Brain Damage

Neuroscientists have various tricks to try to fool us into thinking that there is some big relation between some aspect of the mind and some part of the brain. The major trick they have used is what I call the "lying with colors" trick. The trick works like this:

(1) The brains of a small number of people are scanned while the people were engaging in some cognitive activity. 

(2) It will be found that tiny regions of the brain may have a very slightly greater activity during such a cognitive activity, some difference such as 1 part in 200, something we would expect to occur from mere chance variations, even if the brain does not cause the particular cognitive activity. 

(3) A paper will then be published claiming that certain regions of the brain were "activated" during the type of cognitive activity. The claim will be misleading because all regions of the brain are continuously active throughout the day, with their neurons firing at a rate at about 1 time per second, or more (up to about 100 times per second). So it was not true that inactive brain regions suddenly became active when the cognitive activity was done. 

(4) The paper will include "lying with colors" brain visuals that do not correctly depict the tiny variations in activity. Instead of showing a difference of 1 part in 200 by something like a very slightly more red color corresponding to a 1 part in 200 difference, we will see the parts with the 1 part in 200 greater activity in red or yellow, surrounded by regions in black and white. 

I can give an example of such misleading visuals in brain scan studies, from a study trying to show evidence that brains produce creative thought. The first visual is from the paper "To create or to recall original ideas: Brain processes associated with the imagination of novel object uses." 42 subjects had their brains scanned while they were trying to think of novel uses for a familiar object such as a hat (an exercise in creative thinking). The sample size was much larger than typically used in studies such as these, which typically involve fewer than 15 subjects.  Figure 3 of the paper is shown below:

We have a region of the brain shown in orange, against a black and white background. The visual suggests the idea of some part of the brain "lighting up," becoming much more active. But no such thing happened. The line graph shows the reality. The "%SC" stands for percent signal change. The reported signal change is only one third of one percent, a signal change of merely .003. This is what we would expect from random fluctuations, even if brains have nothing to do with producing creative thought. In the left part of the visual above, a negligible difference is misleadingly depicted as if some big difference occurred. Most of the time this happens, you don't have the graph on the right, but only a misleading visual like the one on the left. 

We had in a recent neuroscience study and its press release another example of misleading claims by neuroscientists and their publicists.  Neuroscientists did a meta-analysis, analyzing different studies that had attempted to find a link between the brain and creativity. What they mainly found was a negative connection between creativity and what they called "the right frontal pole." But rather than candidly describing this as a negative association, the negative association was misleadingly described as "a brain circuit for creativity."

The Mass General Brigham press release had the misleading headline, "Researchers Identify a Brain Circuit for Creativity."  We have this sentence in the press release, which lets us know that the so-called "brain circuit for creativity" is actually some effect by which brain damage can cause increased creativity:  "By evaluating data from 857 participants across 36 fMRI studies, researchers identified a brain circuit for creativity and found people with brain injuries or neurodegenerative diseases that affect this circuit may have increased creativity." Got it? The sentence ends with "increased creativity," not "decreased creativity." So why on Earth is that being called "a brain circuit for creativity"?  That's like saying that being chained to a large anvil and dropped in a swimming pool is using "a metal device for swimming."

According to the paper here, brain scans of a woman showed "marked atrophy in bilateral temporopolar and frontal regions." The woman with brain shrinkage started acting oddly.  according to her relatives. But she developed an interest in art she had never had before.  Some samples of her art are given, some very good. 

The paper here refers to unilateral brain damage (on one side of the brain), reporting no change in creativity after such damage:

"Approximately 50 or so cases with unilateral brain damage (largely in one side of the brain, and where the etiology is commonly stroke or tumor) have by now been described in the neurological literature (Rose, 2004; Bogousslavsky and Boller, 2005; Zaidel, 2005, 2013a,c; Finger et al., 2013; Mazzucchi et al., 2013; Piechowski-Jozwiak and Bogousslavsky, 2013).

The key questions concern post-damage alterations in creativity, as well as loss of talent, or skill. A review of the majority of these neurological cases suggests that, on the whole, they go on producing art, sometimes prolifically, despite the damage’s laterality or localization (Zaidel, 2005). Importantly, post-damage output has revealed that their creativity does not increase, nor diminish (Zaidel, 2005, 2010, 2013b)."

Referring to the brain-damaging disease Parkinson's Disease (PD), the paper here says, "De novo artistic drive has also been reported in PD patients that had not ever shown any interest in art making whatsoever." 

The paper here ("Frontal lobe neurology and the creative mind") refers to patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). We read of what sounds like the disease caused more of an increase in artistic creativity then a decrease. We read, "All reported patients with temporal FTD (n = 19) presented the emergence (n = 11), increase (n = 2), or preservation (n = 6) of creative production but no degradation of artistic abilities (Miller et al., 1996, 1998; Edwards-Lee et al., 1997; Drago et al., 2006b; Wu et al., 2013). Most case reports on behavioral variant FTD (n = 10) noted the emergence (n = 4), increase (n = 4), or preservation (n = 1) of artistic abilities (Miller et al., 1998; Thomas-Anterion et al., 2002; Mendez and Perryman, 2003; Serrano et al., 2005; Liu et al., 2009; Thomas-Anterion, 2009). The effects of Alzheimer's disease on artistic production were more heterogeneous, with observations of both increase (Fornazzari, 2005; Chakravarty, 2011) and degradation (Cummings and Zarit, 1987; Crutch et al., 2001; Serrano et al., 2005; van Buren et al., 2013)."

Page 100 of the document here states this: "For example, Miller et al. (1996) reported several stroke patients who suffered damage to the left temporal hemisphere and dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal regions, and who developed sudden artistic abilities (see also Cela-Conde et al., 2011; Husslein-Arco & Koja, 2010; Midorikawa et al., 2008; Miller & Hou, 2004). "

The results reported are consistent with the idea that your brain is not the source of your creative thoughts or your creative impulses. Brains are involved in muscle activity, so if you do a brain scan of someone drawing or writing a new short story, the brain scan will pick up some higher activity associated with the muscle movement. But do a brain scan of a large sample of people engaging in creative thought without moving a muscle, and you will get unimpressive results like those shown in the first image of this post, results like those we might expect to get even if brains have nothing to do with creativity. 

I can give a personal account related to the topic of this post. First a prefatory comment: human brain volume supposedly shrinks by about 5% per decade, with brain connections becoming weaker and slower as we age, and various types of inflammation, structural damage, signal slowing and neural atrophy increasing in older brains.

 Between the ages of 22 and 26 I was trying very hard to produce creative output. During most of those years I held a job as a night watchman, mainly so that I could work on various literary projects during the ample free time that a typical night watchman has. But during those years my creative output was weak, even though scientists say that during these years the number of human brain cells is at its highest level and the brain is the healthiest. 

After working decades as a software developer, around 2013 I retired from programming work,  and devoted myself full-time to blogging. I won't tell you my exact age but I am at an age at which brain cell numbers are supposedly much less than during a person's early twenties. But instead of experiencing less creativity, I find myself these days as creative as I have ever been. Last month I got 150,000 page views of my blogs (blogs I do not advertise). I am so creative these days that the total number of posts I have auto-scheduled for future publication is in the hundreds; and all of these posts I wrote myself without using AI. (These posts will appear on my blogs even if I die soon.) So although I probably have much fewer brain cells than in my twenties, and have a brain much more clogged up and more plaque-tangled and subpar than during my twenties, my creativity these days seems much greater than in my early twenties.  This is the opposite of what we would expect under "brains make minds" assumptions. 

Neuroscience Research Is Floundering, So a Huge Cash Prize Recently Went to Weak Research

Inaccurate press accounts hailing low-quality research are a central part of the social construction of groundless triumphal legends in neuroscience. Another key element in the social construction of such groundless triumphal legends occurs when the unwarranted claims are repeated in the papers and textbooks and college lectures of neuroscientists and psychologists. A lesser element in the social construction of such groundless triumphal legends is when big prizes go to researchers who did poor research guilty of Questionable Research Practices. Then the researcher can start boasting, "It must be true -- my research got a big prize!"

John O' Keefe published papers in the 1970's and after claiming to have detected "place units" in the hippocampus of rats. The papers also used the term "place cells."  The claim was that certain cells were more active when a rat was in a certain spatial position.  Greater activity during some type of observation is not representation. My eyes may widen if I see a naked woman walking down the street, but that is not a case of my eyes representing the naked woman. It has always been a case of misleading language when neuroscientists attempt to pass off claimed higher activation in some neurons as an example of representation. Real representation involves the use of symbolic tokens. Neuroscientists cannot find any symbolic tokens in the brain, other than the symbolic tokens in DNA that represent amino acids. 

The "place cells" papers of John O'Keefe that I have examined are papers that do not meet standards of good experimental science. An example of such a paper was the paper "Hippocampal Place Units in the Freely Moving Rat: Why They Fire Where They Fire."  For one thing, the study group size used (consisting of only four rats) was way too small for robust evidence to have been produced. 15 animals per study group is the minimum for a moderately convincing result in animal studies looking for correlations.  For another thing no blinding protocol was used. And the study was not a pre-registered study, but was apparently one of those studies in which an analyst is free to fish for whatever effect he may feel like finding after data has been collected, using any of innumerable possible analysis pipelines. 

The visuals in the "place cell" studies done by O' Keefe compared wavy EEG signal lines collected while a rat was in different areas of an enclosed unit. You can see what I'm talking about by looking at page 1334 of the document here. The wavy signal lines look pretty much the same no matter which area the rats were in. But O'Keefe claims to have found differences.  No one should be persuaded that papers using analysis so subjective show robust evidence for an important real effect.  We should suspect that the analyst has looked for stretches of wavy lines that looked different when the rat was in different areas, and chosen stretches of wavy lines that best-supported his claim that some cells were more active when the rats were in different areas. 

When I looked for later "place cell" papers by O'Keefe, I saw papers that seemed to just continue the same Questionable Research Practices. Specifically:

• A 1993 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "Phase Relationship Between Hippocampal Place Units and the EEG Theta Rhythm." The paper used way-too-small study group sizes of only three rats and two rats.  No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study. We have some wavy-line analysis that seems extremely subjective and arbitrary.
• A 2008 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "The boundary vector cell model of place cell firing and spatial memory." The paper used a way-too-small study group size of only two rats. For example, we read "Twenty five place cells were recorded from the two rats."  No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study. We should chuckle when the paper says that "we followed 11 cells for time courses varying from a day to the duration of the experiment" and confesses ungrammatically that " it is difficult to draw firm conclusions from such as small data set."  There are millions of cells in the brain of a rat. Paying attention to only a handful of such cells seems like ridiculous cherry picking. 
• A 2012 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "How vision and movement combine in the hippocampal place code." The paper used a way-too-small study group sizes of only six mice.  No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study. We have some data analysis that seems extremely subjective and arbitrary. 
• A 2014 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "Long-term plasticity in hippocampal place-cell representation of environmental geometry." The paper used a way-too-small study group sizes of only three animals.  No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study.

Studies like this are generally not good evidence unless a very stringent blinding protocol is used, and studies like this almost invariably fail to follow any kind of blinding protocol. It's easy to find the failure: just search for the word "blind" or "blinding" in the text of the paper, and note well when it fails to occur. 

In general, there is nothing scientific about using nicknames such as "place cells" to describe cells. The justification given for the use of such a term is based not on observations of permanent features of any cells, but on subjective judgments of how the cells behaved at particular moments. That's as unscientific and subjective as saying that certain people have "fear eyes" or "sorrow eyes," based on subjective judgments of how their eyes looked at particular moments.  

Although O'Keefe's "place cell" papers were not at all a robust demonstration of any important effect, the myth that "place cells" had been discovered started to spread around among neuroscience professors, aided by the use of a catchy memorable catchphrase: "place cells."  O'Keefe even got a Nobel Prize in 2014. The Nobel Prize committee is normally pretty good about awarding prizes only when an important discovery has been made for which there was very good evidence. Awarding O'Keefe a Nobel Prize for his unconvincing work on supposed "place cells" was a very bad flub of the normally trusty Nobel Prize committee. Even if certain cells are more active when rats are in certain positions (something we would always expect to observe from chance variations), that does nothing to show that there is anything like a map of spatial locations in the brains of rats or mice. 

This year something similar went on. A 2.5 million Euro prize was awarded to psychologist Christian Doeller for his work on what he calls "grid cells." Granting this award is a very bad error, because Doeller's work on so-called "grid cells" is just as weak and unconvincing  as O'Keefe's work on so-called "place cells."

On the page announcing this award, we read these claims:

"How do human thought processes and the brain work? The psychologist Christian Doeller has been exploring this question for decades. He is a leading memory researcher and his work has led to ground-breaking findings in the field of neuronal spatial cognition, which is the ability of human beings to orient themselves in a physical space, and to apprehend and navigate it. Doeller demonstrated that spatial contexts can also be recoded into abstract categories and that they therefore form the neuronal basis of thinking and decision-making. Among other things, Doeller developed imaging analysis methods that allowed him to detect, for the first time ever, signals in the human brain that correspond to the grid cells. These are cells that were originally found in rats and that provide the animals with a system of coordinates that enables them to determine their own position."

The middle sentence here (in boldface) makes no sense. If "spatial contexts can also be recoded into abstract categories," that does nothing to show a "neuronal basis of thinking and decision-making." The claim about "a system of coordinates" that allow animals to "determine their own position" is spurious and groundless, and does not match any well-designed and robust neuroscience research.  No one has ever discovered any coordinate or any number or any letter of the alphabet inside a brain by examining brain tissue or brain scans or EEG readings of brain waves. No one has any coherent and credible tale to tell of how any such thing as a "system of coordinates" could exist in any organism's brain. 

On the page announcing this award, we have no direct links to particular papers written by Doeller, and no mention of the titles of such papers. There is an "information system GEPRIS" link that takes us to a page from which you can access two papers co-authored by Doeller, which are discussed below:

• There is a link to a project called "At first glance: How saccades drive communication between the visual system and the hippocampus during memory formation." But we have no link to a paper, and Google Scholar makes no mention of such a paper. 
• There is a link to a project called "Episodic integration under stress," and there is a link for a paper, one entitled "Stress disrupts insight-driven mnemonic reconfiguration in the medial temporal lobe." That paper has a good study size of about 60 humans. But it does not say anything about grid cells. Nor does it do anything to establish a "neuronal basis of thinking and decision-making." The paper does nothing to show a "mnemonic reconfiguration in the medial temporal lobe." We have some psychology test involving stress and memory. The paper fails to show any clear link between mind states and brain states. 

I looked on Google Scholar for other papers that Doeller might have authored on so-called "grid cells." I find these papers:

• "Evidence for grid cells in a human memory network." This 2010 paper co-authored by Doeller includes a poorly-designed experiments with rats. one using a way-too-small study group size of only 8 rats. The term "grid cell" is used without any justification, and without any proper definition of what such a term means. The closest the paper comes to defining the term "grid cell" is when it says, "Grid cells recorded in medial entorhinal cortex of freely moving rodents fire whenever the animal traverses the vertices of an equilateral triangular grid covering the environment (see Fig. 1a), and may provide a neural substrate for path integration." But neurons in brains fire between 1 and 100 times per second. So it makes no sense to define a grid cell as a cell firing whenever some point or line is traversed. All neurons in the brain of rats and humans are continually firing. After some statistical gobbledygook that smells like "keep torturing the data" and "see whatever you are hoping to see" pareidolia, the paper claims, "Our results provide the first evidence that human entorhinal cortex encodes virtual movement direction with 6-fold symmetry, consistent with a coherently-oriented population of grid cells similar to those found in rat entorhinal cortex and pre- and parasubiculum." We should always be suspicious when neuroscientists claim to have found "the first evidence" for something. That amounts to a confession that at the time their paper was written, no other evidence for the claimed effect existed.  Figure 3 gives an example of how unconvincing the paper's evidence is. We have some fMRI brain scan data purporting to show changes in brain activity. But if you take a close look at the scale, you will see that the differences are only small fractions of a half of one percent.  The differences being graphed are about 1 part in 400. These are negligible differences that are not convincing evidence for anything. Anyone "noise mining" a brain scan and free to search any of 1000 little areas looking for such differences would be able to find such differences, purely because of random fluctuations.
•  "Grid-cell representations in mental simulation." This 2016 paper makes  this untrue claim: "Electrophysiological recordings in freely moving rodents have demonstrated that positional information during navigation is represented by place cells in the hippocampus (O’Keefe and Dostrovsky, 1971) and grid cells in entorhinal cortex (Hafting et al., 2005)." The claims are untrue; no such things were demonstrated. O'Keefe's work on so-called place cells is not convincing because of the poor experimental practices I discuss above. The Hafting paper was guilty of Questionable Research Practices such as the use of fewer than 15 subjects per study group, the lack of a control group, and the lack of a blinding protocol. The authors of the paper "Grid-cell representations in mental simulation" then discuss some experiment they did while having a small number of people doing some imagination task while they had their brains scanned. The results are not any convincing evidence for either so-called grid cells or for brains being involved in imagination. The study group size is not that bad (24 subjects). But nothing in the paper does anything to give any convincing evidence for "grid-like representations" in the brain. We have no pre-registration of a hypothesis to be tested and an experimental protocol to be followed, and no blinding protocol. 
• "From Cells to Systems: Grids and Boundaries in Spatial Memory." This is a review article by Doeller, one containing many unfounded claims about research done by him and others. The paper claims, "The background firing rate of place cells is very low, effectively zero." But contrary to such a claim, very many sources tell us that all neurons in the brain continuously fire, at a rate between about 1 and 100 times per second. 
• "Hexadirectional Modulation of High-Frequency Electrophysiological Activity in the Human Anterior Medial Temporal Lobe Maps Visual Space." This 2018 paper lacking any blinding protocol claims, "Our findings provide first evidence for a grid-like MEG signal, indicating that the human entorhinal cortex codes visual space in a grid-like manner." Again, I must emphasize that we should typically have little confidence in neuroscience researchers claiming to have provided the first evidence for some claim, as such a confession about "first evidence" is typically an admission that the claim is not well-replicated. The term "grid-like" is so flexible that almost anyone looking for something "grid-like" in a large body of data can find it somewhere. No convincing evidence is presented here that brains are representing visual space. It's just more pareidolia in which neuroscientists eagerly seeking grids claimed to have found something "grid-like." Similarly, give eager cloud analysts thousands of photos of clouds, and if the analysts are eager to find "grid-like" patterns, they will surely be able to find them somewhere. 

Reviewing Doeller's work, I fail to find anywhere any convincing evidence for anything like representations in the brain of visual space or anything non-genetic, or anything like convincing evidence that justify the use of the terms "place cells" or "grid cells." Failing to use pre-registration, his papers typically seem to involve someone being free to analyze brain data in endless number of ways, with the analyst then announcing that after using such-and-such an elaborate gobbledygook rigmarole scheme of convoluted analysis, something "grid-like" was supposedly found. Typically I am left with suspicions of noise-mining, pareidolia, and "keep torturing the data until it confesses." None of the gathered brain data seems to do anything to naturally suggest any such thing as neural representations of the subject's position or orientation or what the subject is seeing, something that would come up from a simple and straightforward analysis. But when neuroscientists are free to slice, dice and massage data in endless possible ways, they may get data to produce the faintest whiff of a suggestion of something, whenever neuroscientists are eager to conjure up such a suggestion. 

Things such as neuron firing rates (picked up by EEG devices) or tiny variations in blood flow rates in brains (picked up by fMRI scanners) are randomly fluctuating data. Anyone eagerly analyzing some large body of randomly fluctuating data hoping to find some desired correlation or pattern will always be able to find little bits of "superior activity" or "increased activation" here or there, about as good as the weak evidence Doeller gives for his so-called "grid cells." But that's not decent evidence of something being represented in the brain. Similarly, someone eagerly analyzing thousands of pictures of clouds in the sky and hoping to find something that looks like the ghost of an animal will be able to find now and then some shape that looks a little like an animal. But that's no evidence for any real representation of animals shapes in the sky. 

The term "representation" is enormously misused and abused by neuroscientists, who abundantly use the term in an imprecise way, without any adequate warrant.  Assumptions underlying Doeller's papers are implausible. If there were to be increased firing in some cells when some subject was in some area of a grid (as picked up by an EEG), that would not actually be a representation of the subject's surroundings. And if there were to be a tiny bit more brain activity in some tiny fraction of the brain when some subject was in some area of a grid (as picked up an fMRI machine), that would not actually be a representation of the subject's surroundings.

The fact that Doeller has got some 2.5 million Euro prize for his weak research is a commentary on how little progress is being made in trying to substantiate "brains make minds" claims and "brains store memories" claims. When a top prize goes to research this weak, it shows you how badly neuroscientists are failing in their attempts to substantiate their untenable dogmas about brains, already discredited by so many facts discussed in the posts of this blog. 

To get an example of some robust grid-related science, you can look at the periodic table shown below:

Credit: National Institute of Standards and Technology (link)

There's no pareidolia going on in the periodic table shown above, no "see what you were hoping to see" noise mining like in papers about so-called grid cells. Nature really does have the number of elements listed in this table. Each of the listed types of elements really does have a number of protons exactly equal to the number shown in the top left corner of the square representing the element. Each of the listed types of elements really does have an average weight equal to the atomic weight shown under the element's name in the square representing the element. 

We may contrast this rock-solid good-as-gold example of robust science with the socially constructed will-of-the-wisp legend-mongering pareidolia dross of "place cell" papers and "grid cell" papers producing no robust evidence of representations in any brain cells, papers that engage in unjustified cell-nicknaming that is not at all robust observational science. 

Below is a relevant quote from a scientist:

• "Neuroscience, as it is practiced today, is a pseudoscience, largely because it relies on post hoc correlation-fishing....As previously detailed, practitioners simply record some neural activity within a particular time frame; describe some events going on in the lab during the same time frame; then fish around for correlations between the events and the 'data' collected. Correlations, of course, will always be found. Even if, instead of neural recordings and 'stimuli' or 'tasks' we simply used two sets of random numbers, we would find correlations, simply due to chance. What’s more, the bigger the dataset, the more chance correlations we’ll turn out (Calude & Longo (2016)). So this type of exercise will always yield 'results;' and since all we’re called on to do is count and correlate, there’s no way we can fail. Maybe some of our correlations are 'true,' i.e. represent reliable associations; but we have no way of knowing; and in the case of complex systems, it’s extremely unlikely. It’s akin to flipping a coin a number of times, recording the results, and making fancy algorithms linking e.g. the third throw with the sixth, and hundredth, or describing some involved pattern between odd and even throws, etc. The possible constructs, or 'models' we could concoct are endless. But if you repeat the flips, your results will certainly be different, and your algorithms invalid...As Konrad Kording has admitted, practitioners get around the non-replication problem simply by avoiding doing replications.” -- A vision scientist (link). 

The paper here ("Investigating the concept of representation in the neural and psychological sciences") says this: "Neuroscientists and psychologists do not appear to have a precise idea about what kind of brain structure or pattern counts as representation." 

There are no components in the brain that have a physical structure resembling a grid. No electron microscope photos of anything in a brain show anything looking like a grid. This is one of the reasons why it is misleading to be using the term "grid cells" to refer to claimed grid resemblances that only arise after convoluted dubious data analysis has been done by scientists.