"Brains Make Minds" Is Dumb, and "Brain Waves Make Minds" Is Even Dumber

 We have the strongest reasons for rejecting the dogma that brains make minds. Specifically:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could produce any such things as choices or decisions;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or addressing or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that the microscopic examination of very many thousands of brains of recently deceased people (and the microscopic examination of endless samples of brain tissue extracted from living people) has never produced the slightest trace of learned information, something that would have been discovered in brains 50 years ago if brains stored memories and brains are the source of the human mind;
• the fact that human brains (all very severely handicapped by cumulative synaptic delays and unreliable synaptic transmission) are way too slow and way too noisy to explain the wonders of human best mental performances, which include endless wonders of blazing fast calculation, blazing fast precise recall, blazing fast memorization,  and the recitation with perfect accuracy of very long bodies of text consisting of hundreds of pages;  
• the fact that for more than 50 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when their brains had flatlined, and they should have had no consciousness at all (under "brains make minds" assumptions), with many of the observation details they reported seeing during such brain-inexplicable should-have-been-utterly-unconscious experiences being independently verified (as described here);
• the fact that humans have very many types of well-documented experiences that are inexplicable under any claim that the brain is the source of the human mind.  

Given such realities, what is the intelligent direction to move in, to resolve the explanatory shortfall? That direction is to try to explain human minds and human memory by looking for something more than the brain. What is the wrong direction to move in, to resolve the explanatory shortfall? It is to try to explain the human mind by postulating something less than a brain. 

We have in the article here a discussion of neuroscientist named Miller  moving in such an "ass-backward" direction. It is an article entitled "MIT Neuroscientist Proposes Brain Waves are the Hidden Engine Behind Thought and Consciousness." You may start to realize how stupid this idea is once you realize that so-called brain waves are not a discrete thing that really always exist independently in the brain, but are instead a kind of measurement artifact conjured up by neuroscientists and neurologists, an artifact appearing only when a particular technological protocol is used. 

What are brain waves? They are the squiggly lines that a neuroscientist or neurologist gets when he puts on someone's head a device called an EEG headcap. Such a headcap is connected to a machine. The kind of setup is shown in the visual below:

Now, the waves shown on the computer screen are not discrete things that exist independently throughout your day-to-day existence. Such waves really only come into existence when a neuroscientist sticks one of these caps on someone's head and starts doing the reading. 

You really have every day all of these things:

• You have a brain. 
• You have neurons inside your brain. 
• You have synapses inside your brain. 
• You have electricity and chemicals traveling between different neurons of your brain.
• You have very many mental capabilities. 
• Your have a self.
• You have thoughts, feelings and experiences.
• You have memories, and various memory abilities, such as the ability to learn new things, and the ability to recall old memories. 

But today you do not really have any such thing as brain waves corresponding to the waves shown on EEG screens like the one shown above. It is possible for you today to conjure up such brain waves, by going to a doctor or neuroscientist, and having him put on your head an EEG cap like the one shown above. Or, if you paid for some at-home EEG-type device, you might be able to conjure up brain waves, by sticking such a device on your head, and seeing brain wave readings on a computer screen. 

A device that shows brain waves is one that engages in a largely arbitrary act of pictorial representation. To understand that, let's first look at the ground reality that is used as a starting point for the pictorial construction of brain waves. The brain consists mainly of neurons, and each neuron has a particular firing rate, with the firing rate varying from between 1 time a second to about 100 or 200 times per second. Over any time interval, the average firing rates of neurons can be measured.  So imagine a cube consisting of 100 smaller cubes, and imagine each of those cubes has in it a number, with the number varying over time. We can think of the numbers as being the average firing rates of one particular area in the brain. 

When an EEG headcap is put on someone's head, particular electrodes kind of line up with some of the outer parts of the brain. An analogy would be if you hooked up a wire to each of about 30 of the cubes shown in the diagram above. So you can get readings that correspond to variations of the average firing rates of particular parts of the brain. 

Such readings are not any direct capturing of a wave, comparable to a photo showing a wave on a beach. But the data received from such readings of brain firings can be visually depicted as a wave. You can plot changes in firing frequency over time, and depict that as a wave. Similarly, there are no real waves in the data of a baseball game. But you could visually plot some of that data as a wave. For example, you might have a "hits per inning" graph that used waves, as below. The graph shows how many many hits a particular team got during each of the nine innings in a baseball game. 

Baseball games don't really have "hitting waves" like shown above as parts of what happens inside them; baseball games only have events such as hits (singles, doubles, etc.) and outs (such as a strikeout or a force out). But by graphing the data in a particular way, you can construct a "hitting wave" graph. Similarly, brains don't really have "brain waves," but you can graph data on fluctuations in brain firing rates, in a way that shows waves. "Hitting waves" would be an analytic construction of baseball analysts, and "brain waves" are an analytic construction of brain analysts. 

From this discussion we can start to realize how silly is the notion suggested by some MIT scientist that "brain waves are the hidden engine behind thought and consciousness." Strictly speaking, you don't really even have in your brain today any such thing as "brain waves," and so-called "brain waves" are only what appears after some technology is used to graph  fluctuations in brain firing rates. 

An ocean wave is a real thing that requires no arbitrary special processing to create. When you see something like what is shown below, that does not involve any "try to show a wave" algorithm. 

But when brain waves are shown on electronic screens connected to EEG devices, that does involve a special arbitrary  "try to show a wave" algorithm. 

In the article mentioned above, the neuroscientist makes these full-of-falsehoods claims about brain waves, which appear as consecutive statements. 

• "The brain uses these oscillatory waves to organize itself.” No, brain waves do not do anything at all to organize brains. 
• “Cognition is large-scale neural self-organization." No, cognition is mental, and not any physical organization. 
• "The brain has got to organize itself to perform complex behaviors. Brain waves are the patterns of excitation and inhibition that organize the brain, and this leads to consciousness because consciousness is this organized knitting together of the cortex.” No, brain waves do not do anything to organize any part of the brain, and consciousness is not any such thing as an "organized knitting together of the cortex."

The article makes this untrue boast with no basis in fact: "Over three decades of research in Dr. Miller’s lab at MIT have demonstrated how these waves help organize information flow across the cortex—the outermost layer of the brain responsible for higher cognitive functions." Brain waves are an epiphenomenon of electrical activity in the brain, comparable to the scent that arises when you cook a meal. Brain waves no more organize information than the scent you make when cooking organizes the meal you are cooking. 

Later the author of the article makes all kinds of claims about Miller's research that have no basis in fact. There is no robust research backing up any of the author's statements below:

"His work suggests that brain waves act like traffic signals for thought: slower 'top-down' frequencies carry goals and rules, while faster waves deliver sensory information. Together, they guide what we perceive, remember, and decide."

This is as groundless as claiming that ocean waves carry philosophical thoughts, and that the scent from your cooking carries rules about how you cook.  The word "guide" is one of the most abused words in science writing. People writing about biology are constantly claiming without adequate warrant that this or that chemical or mechanical effect "guides" something or "regulates" something, using statements that they have no warrant for using. The author is making the most groundless and senseless speculations when he says things such as "In essence, the balance between these wave patterns determines when certain thoughts emerge and when they remain suppressed." 

The theory that brain waves create minds is disproven by the reality of near-death experiences during cardiac arrest, when the brain's electrical activity shuts down, and brain waves flatline. While the brain is electrically shut down during cardiac arrest, many people have the most vivid experiences, which they remember very well. This proves that neither brains nor brain waves are necessary for vivid experiences involving memory. 

The term "isoelectric" or iso-electric in reference to brain waves means a flat-lining equivalent to no electrical activity in the brain, as measured by EEG readings. The paper here states, "Within 10 to 40 seconds after circulatory arrest the EEG becomes iso-electric." Figure 1 of the paper here says that such an isoelectric flat-lining occurred within 26 seconds after the start of ventricular fibrillation, the "V-fib" that is a common cause of sudden cardiac death, with "cortical activity absent." Also referring to a flat-lining of brain waves meaning a stopping of brain electrical activity, another scientific paper says, "several studies have shown that EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 s [seconds] after ischemia [heart stopping] without a significant decrease in ATP level (Naritomi et al., 1988; Alger et al., 1989)."  Another paper tells us this about brain waves and infarction (obstruction of blood flow), using CBF to mean cerebral blood flow, and the phrase "the EEG becomes isoelectric" to mean a flat-lining of brain electrical signals:

"When normal CBF declines, the EEG first loses the higher frequencies (alpha and beta bands), while the lower frequencies (delta and theta bands) gradually increase. When the CBF decreases further towards an infarction threshold, the EEG becomes isoelectric." 

Similarly, another paper refers to blood pressure, and tells us, "When flow is below 20 mL/100 g/min (60% below normal), EEG becomes isoelectric." meaning that brain electrical activity flat-lines. The 85-page "Cerebral Protection" document here states, "During cardiac arrest, the EEG becomes isoelectric within 20-30 sec and this persists for several minutes after resuscitation." Another scientific paper states this: 

"Of importance, during cardiac arrest, chest compliance is not confounded by muscle activity. The EEG becomes isoelectric within 15 to 20 seconds, and the patient becomes flaccid (Clark, 1992; Bang, 2003)."

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

What people recall during near-death experiences in which their hearts have stopped and their brain waves have stopped are not some shadowy experiences only a tiny fraction as real-seeming as normal experiences. Instead, people having near-death experiences often report experiences that seemed more real and vivid than anything they have ever experienced. When people have such experiences in brains that are flatlining, with the brain waves shut down, that shows that brain waves are not any source of the human mind. 

Survey Finds About 25% Claim an Out-of-Body Experience

How many people report having out-of-body experiences? It is known  that a fair fraction of those having near-death experiences report being outside of their physical body. But the fraction of the population that has had a near-death experience is probably much less than 25%. 

Below are some of the previous reports of the prevalence of out-of-body experiences. 

1. A paper  "Out-of-Body Experiences" by Carlos S. Alvarado tells us on page 185 that according to 5 surveys of the general population, 10% of the population report out-of-body experiences.  The same page tells us that there were 49 studies involving students, which found that an average of 25% reported an out-of-body experience. The same page tells us that there were 10 studies involving members of parapsychology groups, which found that an average of 48% of such people reported an out-of-body experience. 
2. We read on page 376 of the document here ("A NEW SURVEY OF PSYCHIC EXPERIENCES IN ICELAND") of a 2007 survey of 1026 people in Iceland, which found that 23% of the respondents claimed to have had an out-of-body experience.  

A new paper ("Personality Facets Systematically Relate to Nonordinary Experiences") gives us another figure regarding what percent of people report out-of-body experiences. The survey interviewed 424 people, and this was a "sample designed to approximate the general population." People were asked about 30 questions relating to non-ordinary experiences. 

One of the survey questions was: "I went through a situation where I was outside of my physical body and could perceive it as separate from myself." According to Figure 1 of the paper, the percentage who answered yes to this question was about 25%. The study attempts to detect "personality associations" with the answers given, but fails to find much of anything, reporting "mainly weak associations." 

Out-of-body experiences are one of the strongest examples of evidence standing in opposition to "brains make minds" claims. No one has stated any halfway persuasive explanation of why anyone would report being outside of his body, if the mind is a product of the brain. Attempts to explain such experiences as neural experiences are utterly lacking in credibility, and the papers making such attempts tend to be characterized by dishonesty and misrepresentation, as I document here and here. A very important type of out-of-body experience is sometimes called a veridical out-of-body experience. In such experiences a person who claimed to have floated out of his body is able to make observations that should have been impossible unless such a leaving of the body occurred. Many such cases are documented in my post here. 

We are currently in the  "anomaly accumulation" phase described by Thomas Kuhn in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the phase corresponding to item 3  in the diagram below. The main ideas of that book are summarized in the infographic below. 

Endless anomalies have accumulated which contradict the "brains make minds" claims of neuroscientists. Endless reports of paranormal phenomena such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, clairvoyance and telepathy are only some of these anomalies.  A large fraction of the anomalies are cases of high mental function despite a very large loss of brain tissue, cases you can read about in the posts here. 

Such anomalies are the seeds of a new paradigm that may replace the old "brains makes minds" paradigm. The new paradigm may be some conceptual framework wise enough to recognize the necessity of recognizing that human minds and human memory are spirit realities or soul realities that can only be credibly explained by postulating transcendent causation, a reality enormously greater than mere brains.  Or, the new paradigm may be some "halfway house" with many of the same credibility problems as the "brains make minds" paradigm. When a failing old paradigm is replaced, it does not necessarily mean the new paradigm will be something very credible. The replacement paradigm may suffer from many of the problems of the old replaced paradigm. 

No, Those "Neural Representations of Experience" Aren't Drifting -- They Simply Never Existed

 Claims by neuroscientists that they have found "representations" in the brain (other than genetic representations) are examples of what very abundantly exists in biology: groundless achievement legends. There is no robust evidence for any such representations. 

Excluding the genetic information stored in DNA and its genes, there are simply no physical signs of learned information stored in a brain in any kind of organized format that resembles some kind of system of representation. If learned information were stored in a brain, it would tend to have an easily detected hallmark: the hallmark of token repetition.  There would be some system of tokens, each of which would represent something, perhaps a sound or a color pixel or a letter. There would be very many repetitions of different types of symbolic tokens.   Some examples of tokens are given below. Other examples of tokens include nucleotide base pairs (which in particular combinations of 3 base pairs represent particular amino acids), and also coins and bills (some particular combination of coins and bills can represent some particular amount of wealth). 

Other than the nucleotide base pair triple combinations that represent mere low-level chemical information such as amino acids, something found in neurons and many other types of cells outside of the brain, there is no sign at all of any repetition of symbolic tokens in the brain. Except for genetic information which is merely low-level chemical information, we can find none of the hallmarks of symbolic information (the repetition of symbolic tokens) inside the brain. No one has ever found anything that looks like traces or remnants of learned information by studying brain tissue. If you cut off some piece of brain tissue when someone dies, and place it under the most powerful electron microscope, you will never find any evidence that such tissue stored information learned during a lifetime, and you will never be able to figure out what a person learned from studying such tissue.  This is one reason why scientists and law enforcement officials never bother to preserve the brains of dead people in hopes of learning something about what such people experienced during their lives, or what they thought or believed, or what deeds they committed.    

But despite their complete failure to find any robust evidence of non-genetic representations in the brain, neuroscientists often make groundless boasts of having discovered representations in the brain. What is going on is pareidolia, people reporting seeing something that is not there, after wishfully analyzing large amounts of ambiguous and hazy and ever-changing data. It's like someone eagerly analyzing his toast every day for years, looking for something that looks like the face of Jesus, and eventually reporting he saw something that looked to him like the face of Jesus.  It's also like someone studying endless photos of clouds, looking for a shape that looks like an animal shape, to try and back up his belief that the ghosts of dead animals live in the sky. 

Claims that there are non-genetic representations in the brain often appeal to the existence of "place cells." Nature does not tell us that there is any such thing as "place cells."  We merely know that there are cells, and that neuroscientists started to use the term "place cells" for some small set of cells, to try to spread ideas that cells help to represent some place where an organism has been in. 

What would a convincing experiment showing representations in a brain look like? It might work like this.  You might have some "blinded" analysts who had no idea of what claims were being made about representations, and no idea of what the goals, procedures or suspicions of the neuroscientists were. Such analysts might be shown some data such as EEG data or brain scan data, and the analysts might be told, "We think that in this data may be representations of something an organism observed or experienced -- can you guess what that was?"  If most of the analysts gave the same answer (such as describing the layout of a particular type of maze that a rat ran through), that might be good evidence that neural representations had been found; for there would be very many thousands of possible answers, so we would not expect most of the answers to coincidentally agree.  

Nothing like that has occurred in any of these experiments claiming evidence for brain representations.  Instead, we typically have some procedure vastly less convincing, in which  a scientist (who knows that some rodents observed some particular thing) attempts to sift through lots of data, looking for something that he can claim is evidence for a representation of that thing, rather like some person walking through a forest of 1000 trees, eagerly looking for some tree that has a face shape on it. 

There is no robust evidence for any spatial representations in the brain. "Place cells" are a social construct of neuroscientists, not something with an objective reality in nature.  What would we expect to find if such claims of representations in the brain are not well-founded? One thing we might expect to find is that there would be great inconsistency in the descriptions of such claimed representations, with little replication of the same results. That is just what seems to have happened. Neuroscientists have invented an inaccurate phrase to describe such inconsistencies. The phrase they are now using is "representational drift." The phrase is an inaccurate one, because there are no actual representations that are drifting. It is simply claims of such representations that are varying, or failures to replicate the original claims of representations. 

The science journal Nature just published an article on so-called "representational drift." We have this title and subtitle:

Below is the text (for those reading this post in a non-English translation:

"The brain’s code seems to be in constant flux. Neuroscientists are baffled

Neurons fire much more erratically than researchers thought. What does that mean for how the brain works?"

We read this in the article:

"Over a single day, neurons in the parietal cortex, a hub for processing sensory information, fired predictably in response to specific things, such as the position of the mouse in a virtual maze. But over the course of a few weeks, even though the task of navigating the maze remained the same, these activity patterns underwent major reorganization1. Some of the neurons stopped firing in response to stimuli that had previously activated them; others did the reverse....Since then, many more researchers have reported evidence for neurons changing how they respond to certain stimuli or behaviours over time, a phenomenon that neuroscientists have dubbed representational drift (see ‘How neuronal activity drifts over time’). Evidence has been found for it in various brain regions and when using several different techniques....Drift kept turning up in more areas, including some unlikely places, such as the visual cortex and the olfactory cortex. For instance, finding representational drift in the piriform cortex6, a key region for processing olfactory information, was 'completely contrary to how we and all of our colleagues had thought about that cortex', says Fink. Scientists had thought that activity in the neurons in this region would have to be fixed to enable animals to identify smells, but Fink and his colleagues discovered that such activity patterns were almost completely unrecognizable one month after the original recordings."

We have in the Nature article this schematic depiction of this "representational drift." A set of brain cells are tracked on different days when some animal is undergoing the same stimulus or having the same experience. There is no consistency in the responses, with the recorded brain waves varying from day to day. 

We have in the Nature article some goofy-sounding groundless speculations about imagined deep significance of these claimed "representational drifts":

"One hypothesis is that representational drift, at least in the hippocampus, helps the brain to keep track of time. In fact, years before the word ‘drift’ was widely used, Jill Leutgeb, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues observed shifts in the activity of groups of neurons in the hippocampus over time and suggested that they might encode the passing of time between events7.

Other have posed similar ideas: Yaniv Ziv, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, suggests that drift is required for the 'time stamping' of events for long-term memories. And Denise Cai, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, says that drift might enable the brain to link memories that are formed close together in time."

The most likely explanation of what is going on with these claimed "representational drifts" is something much simpler. It is not that these claimed representations are drifting -- it is that they never existed. What happened is that neuroscientists very eager to find some evidence of non-genetic representations in a brain published claims of representations that were not well-founded, and were mere examples of pareidolia, like someone claiming to find an image of Jesus in his toast. Since there never was any sound basis for the original reports of representation, it is no surprise that they fail to be well-replicated. 

Neurons in the brain fire very frequently (between about 1 and 200 times per second), with the firing occurring at unpredictable intervals. Anyone analyzing the firing rates of 500 neurons in some brain location will be able to find some neurons that fired more frequently when the organism having those neurons had some experience.  It is a mistake to ever claim that such higher firing rates are representations of the experience the organism is having, or any part of such an experience. The next time such an experiment is tried, there will be some different set of neurons that have higher firing rates. This is exactly what we would expect under the assumption that the original report of "representations" was groundless, and that all that was going on was noise-mining of random, frequently fluctuating data. Noise mining is when someone analyzes random, rapidly varying data, and tries to suggest it has some deep significance that it does not actually have.  

The visual below is a schematic giving some idea about the variation in the number of times per second that neurons fire in some part of the brain. 

The infographic below also discusses variations in the firing rates of neurons. When it refers to 1 Hertz or 1 Hz , it means a firing rate of 1 time per second. When it refers to 200 Hertz or 200 Hz , it means a firing rate of 200 times per second. 

The infographic below shows some of the factors that cause random variations in the firing rates of neurons.

When firing rates in the brain are varying so often and so randomly because of factors like those depicted above, there are endless opportunities for people wishing to eagerly seek out correlations between firing rates somewhere and what an organism has  experienced,  someone who then wrongly calls this evidence of representations.  But when such correlations are claimed, we should not regard them as something unexpected, even if brains have no representations of anything someone has learned or anything someone is experiencing. 

A paper on so-called "representational drift" states this:

"Cells whose activity was previously correlated with environmental and behavioral variables are most frequently no longer active in response to the same variables weeks later. At the same time, a mostly new pool of neurons develops activity patterns correlated with these variables. Less commonly, cells previously correlated with certain variables become correlated with new variables. In one example of these findings, as mice move through an environment, a subpopulation of hippocampal place cells are informative about the animal's spatial position. Over time, the pool of place cells that make up this spatial code changes, despite the environment staying the same."

There is a simple and plausible explanation for such results:

(1) Brains do  not actually contain representations of anything learned or experienced by humans or animals, and no neuroscientist has ever produced a credible theory of how learned information could be stored as brain states or neural states. 

(2) Experimental claims that the brain contains such representation were never robust science, but involved experiments guilty of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes, a lack of a blinding protocol, a lack of pre-registration, and subjective "see whatever you want to see" cherry-picking analysis by overeager correlation fishers guilty of pareidolia. 

(3) The reported "representational drift" is the kind of random variation and vanishing of reported correlations we would expect given a scientific result that was never robust, but was always based on dubious subjective analysis of randomly varying ambiguous data. and mere pareidolia (people seeing patterns in random data that they were hoping to see).  

Neuroscientists are using extremely misleading language when they claim to see something they call "superior activations" or "higher activations" or "activation patterns," and then pass off such claimed observations as evidence for representations. The concept of a "cell activation" is not even a solid one, and the term "higher cell activation" or "activation pattern" has no precise  meaning. Letting us know exactly when they are active, light switches have an "on" position and an "off" position; but cells have no such things. Representations involve tokens or symbols in which one thing stands for another.  If there were to exist some mere "higher activation" of a cell,  that would not be a representation.  If I see a naked woman on the street, there may be some higher activation of my eyes, with my eyes widening. Such a thing is not a representation of a naked woman.  

When the genetic code was discovered in DNA, that was not some  thing merely involving fleeting "higher cellular activations." That was a discovery of a massive storehouse of symbolic tokens in DNA -- particular combinations of nucleotide base pairs which represented particular amino acids.  Other than such a genetic code, there simply is no evidence of representations in the brain. There is zero robust evidence that brains store representations of any learned knowledge or any place where an organism has visited or any experience an organism is having. 

The latest example of a low-quality science paper making a false claim of observing representations in the brain is the paper here, entitled "Neural representation of action symbols in primate frontal cortex." We have an experiment in which monkeys had electrodes implanted  into their brains, to record brain activity while monkeys were drawing. The authors claim some correlation between brain firing spikes and what the monkeys were drawing, incorrectly claiming this as a "representation of action symbols." What is going on seems to be mainly  noise mining, eager correlation-fishing and pareidolia, the mining of correlations that you would inevitably be able to get even if no such symbols or representations existed in a brain. A halfway-reliable result in an experiment like this would require 15 or 20 animals per study group. The authors used only two monkeys. A sample size calculation would have revealed how very inadequate such a study group size was, but the authors do not report doing any sample size calculation. Much or all of the claimed correlation can be explained as mere EEG spikes caused by muscle movements, which are known to create spikes in EEG readings. Probably a good fraction of the claimed correlations are artifacts of the fancy data-juggling statistical rigmarole that was going on. We don't have here any decent evidence of neural representations, but we do probably have evidence of needless harm to primates being caused by scientists doing poorly-designed experiments. 

Her Mind Was "Much Improved" After They Removed a Huge Part of Her Brain

 One of the very great investigation failures of today's psychologists and neuroscientists is their tendency to only search scientific papers when writing scientific papers. The fact is that there are huge additional sources of information providing very important cases of medical case histories. Those include newspapers and magazines. It is not hard to search for medical case histories documented in newspapers. For example, the free Chronicling America site allows you to search through more than 100 years of American newspapers. You can use the site by using the link below:

https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/about-this-collection/

Another good site for this purpose is the University of California site here:

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/

 Below is one of the very interesting cases I get when using the phrase "brain gone." We get a 1935 account of a woman whose mind was "much improved" after "an operation that removed nearly the entire 'thinking portion' of her brain." We can presume this "thinking portion" of her brain was the prefrontal cortex or the frontal lobes, as those were presumed at 1935 to be the "thinking portion" of the brain.  You can read the account here. We read that the woman's intelligence was average despite this loss of so much of her brain. We read that the woman's power of concentration sharply improved after this removal of most of the supposed "thinking portion" of her brain. The whole story is the opposite of what we would expect under "brains make minds" assumptions. 

Read my post here for a discussion of other cases in which intelligence reportedly increased after much brain tissue was removed. 

At the University of California site, using the search phrase "brain gone," I get the interesting account below, which you can read here. We read that after a bad accident, sixty grams was removed from the frontal lobe of the brain of Martin Strabowski. This was about 12 percent of his frontal lobes, because the frontal lobes of the human brain weigh about 500 grams. Despite the removal of this big chunk of the part of the brain claimed to be responsible for thought, the removal apparently caused no damage, because the story tells us that Martin's mind "fully recovered."

They Keep Giving Awards for Weak Neuroscience Research

 It is a pitiful thing when an award goes to research that is poorly designed and follows poor research practices. Whenever such an award is given, it sends a message to today's neuroscientists, a message rather like this:

You can follow Questionable Research Practices, and get away with it. Not only can you get away with it, you may even get a prestigious award for doing some poorly designed piece of schlock work that no scientific journal with high standards should have even published. 

In my posts here, here and here, I gave examples of inappropriate neuroscience awards that were given for low-quality neuroscience research. Now we have another example, from the site StatNews.com.

Statnews.com is a site that tries to create an aura of a serious, respectable science news site. It bills itself as "your go-to source for the world of life sciences, medicine, and biopharma." My guess is that the site gets funding from pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers, and that it exists largely to serve their interests. On the site's pages we don't get the usual swarm of ads that you see these days on so-called science news site; but there are some ads. You should always be suspicious of any science news site containing ads.  Every time you see an ad on the pages of Statnews.com, you should remember that online science news sites containing ads will tend to have clickbait headlines that drive people to click on headlines, so that they go see ads that make the site owners money

The statnews.com site has some prize it calls the STAT Madness Editors Pick. This year the award has gone to Maiken Nedergaard for research relating to brains flushing out waste, research found in the paper here.  We read about the awarding of the prize in the article here, which you will only be able to read part of, without signing up for something. But I can read the full article on my I-Pad, without doing the sign-up. There I learned the prize was awarded for the paper "Norepinephrine-mediated slow vasomotion drives glymphatic clearance during sleep," which you can read here.  It is a low-quality paper because of its way-too-small study group sizes. 

It is usually easy to find what study group sizes were used in a research paper. You just do a search in the text of the paper for the phrase "n=" or "n =" which gives study group sizes. Sometimes such a search will fail to tell you the study group size, and you must take additional steps such as these:

(1)  Go to each of the figures in the study, and click on each of the "Expand caption" links, to get the full text of the captions. Then look in the text of such captions, for phrases such as "n=" or "n =" in the text. 

(2) If this still fails to give you the study group size, you may need to take the additional step of searching for a phrase such as "mice" or "rats" or "humans" or "subjects" in the text of the paper. 

Doing that in this paper (which requires us to take the first step above because of a hiding of details in captions that require clicking to see), we find that the study group sizes were very low. The full caption of Figure 1 tells us that only 3 mice and 5 mice and 6 mice were used to get some of the results shown in that figure. The full caption of Figure S1 tells us  that only 5 mice and 3 mice were used to get some of the results shown in that figure.  The full caption of Figure 2 tells us  that only 3 mice or 7 mice were used to get some of the results shown in that figure.  The full caption of Figure S2 tells us  that only 3 mice were used to get some of the results shown in that figure. Clicking on Figure 3 tells us of study group sizes of only 5-8 mice. Similar way-too-small study group sizes are mentioned in the captions for the other figures. For example, Figure 4 mentions study group sizes of only 4 mice for some of the experiments. 

Did the authors do a sample size calculation to determine whether they used adequate study group sizes? They make no mention of doing such a thing. There's pretty much only one reason why the authors of such a study would fail to do such a sample size calculation: because they knew or suspected that the sample sizes that they were using were way too small. The authors do not mention observing any large effect size, so we may presume any observed effects would have been no more than medium or small. Effect sizes in neuroscience research are almost always small, so the number of required mice would have been at least 15 to 20, much more than the very small number of mice that were used. 

We have no mention of any blinding protocol, which means that any difference between the control group and the experimental group may be merely due to bias of those analyzing the groups, bias from observers who knew which was the experimental group and which was the control group. 

The paper is largely devoted to trying to prove some utility for a drug call zolpidem (also called Ambien). When papers serve to promote a particular drug,  the research is typically paid for by the manufacturer of the drug, to help promote sales of the drug. Was that going on here? You cannot tell. There is a mention of a bunch of grants that helped to fund the research, but it is a funding trail too complex to unravel. We do hear that one of the authors is a paid consultant for "CNS2," which is not identified. 

It seems what we have here is some low-quality experimental work failing to use study group sizes even half as large as should have been used. So why did Statnews.com award this research an annual prize? What does it say about the state of neuroscience research these days, when experimental studies this weak get prizes? 

Philosophers Appealing to Zombies Are Firing Blanks

Thinkers in the philosophy of mind have wasted too much ink on the topic of philosophical zombies, which has been the subject of many an article and essay.  The first mention of a zombies argument against materialism (using that term zombies)  occurred in the paper "Zombies v. Materialism" by Robert Kirk and J. E. R Squires. Kirk made an argument that was not very clearly stated. Later in his work The Conscious Mind David Chalmers stated the argument more clearly. 

On page 94 of that work we have section entitled "Argument 1: The Logical Possibility of Zombies."  Here is some of the reasoning by Chalmers:

"The most obvious way (although not the only way) to investigate the logical supervenience of consciousness is to consider the logical possibility of a zombie: someone or something physically identical to me (or to any other conscious being), but lacking conscious experiences altogether. At the global level, we can consider the logical possibility of a zombie world: a world physically identical to ours, but in which there are no conscious experiences at all. In such a world, everybody is a zombie. So let us consider my zombie twin. This creature is molecule-for-molecule identical to me, and indeed identical in all the low-level properties postulated by a completed physics, but he lacks conscious experience entirely....The most obvious way (although not the only way) to investigate the logical supervenience of consciousness is to consider the logical possibility of a zombie: someone or something physically identical to me (or to any other conscious being), but lacking conscious experiences altogether. At the global level, we can consider the logical possibility of a zombie world: a world physically identical to ours, but in which there are no conscious experiences at all. In such a world, everybody is a zombie. So let us consider my zombie twin. This creature is molecule-for-molecule identical to me, and indeed identical in all the low-level properties postulated by a completed physics, but he lacks conscious experience entirely....What is going on in my zombie twin? He is physically identical to me, and we may as well suppose that he is embedded in an identical environment. He will certainly be identical to me functionally: he will be processing the same sort of information, reacting in a similar way to inputs, with his internal configurations being modified appropriately and with indistinguishable behavior resulting. He will be psychologically identical to me, in the sense developed in Chapter 1. He will be perceiving the trees outside, in the functional sense, and tasting the chocolate, in the psychological sense. All of this follows logically from the fact that he is physically identical to me, by virtue of the functional analyses of psychological notions."

What Chalmers has said here should be enough for us to lose any confidence in what he saying. He is imagining some zombie twin of himself that is unconscious (he says " lacking conscious experiences altogether") but who he claims is "psychologically identical to me." That is nonsense. Psychology is the study of the human mind. If you had a zombie twin that was unconscious, such a being would not at all be "psychologically identical" to you. 

It is clear from the above description that the "philosophical zombie" imagined by Chalmers is not simply some unmoving body with the same structure as his body, but also someone acting as he acts "reacting in a similar way to inputs." But an unconscious being would never react in a similar way to inputs as a conscious human does. So there could never be such a "philosophical zombie" that is unconscious but acting like a human and having a human body. 

Chalmers then gives us some Darwin-style reasoning using the "I see no difficulties here" kind of language that Charles Darwin loved to use when suggesting the most fantastically improbable claims. Chalmers says this:

"Arguing for a logical possibility is not entirely straightforward. How, for example, would one argue that a mile-high unicycle is logically possible? It just seems obvious. Although no such thing exists in the real world, the description certainly appears to be coherent. If someone objects that it is not logically possible—it merely seems that way— there is little we can say, except to repeat the description and assert its obvious coherence. It seems quite clear that there is no hidden contradiction lurking in the description. I confess that the logical possibility of zombies seems equally obvious to me. A zombie is just something physically identical to me, but which has no conscious experience—all is dark inside. While this is probably empirically impossible, it certainly seems that a coherent situation is described; I can discern no contradiction in the description. In some ways an assertion of this logical possibility comes down to a brute intuition, but no more so than with the unicycle. Almost everybody, it seems to me, is capable of conceiving of this possibility."

This is extremely bad reasoning. There is nothing intrinsically illogical or incoherent about the idea of mile-high unicycle. It is simply an impractical thing that no one has ever built. But the philosophical zombie that Chalmers is suggesting is an impossible, incoherent idea. People act the way they do largely because they are conscious human beings who have the kind of mental experiences that humans have. If you remove human consciousness, no one would ever act in most of the more interesting ways that a human being acts. It is impossible that there could ever exist a physical being having exactly the same physical characteristics and behavior that a human has, but also no consciousness. The idea is as incoherent and impossible as a triangle that is missing one of its three sides. Take out one of the three sides of a triangle, and it is not a triangle, but merely an angle. Take away the consciousness of a human, and he would never act in any of the more complex ways that humans act. 

In the paragraph above when Chalmers says "a zombie is just something physically identical to me," he is contradicting his early sketch of his philosophical zombie, in which he described such a zombie as not just someone physically identical to him, but also behaving the same as he behaves "with indistinguishable behavior resulting." So first Chalmers has described his hypothetical zombie as someone physically identical to himself and also behaving the same; and then later he tries to make that idea sound not too unbelievable by saying "a zombie is just something physically identical to me," mentioning only half of what he had previously mentioned.   

There certainly is an extremely gigantic contradiction in the philosophical zombie that Chalmers describes.  I will give a simple example illustrating why. Imagine a normal human walking down the street sees a lion walking towards him, a lion that escaped from the zoo. The normal human will have a conscious experience of recognition that causes him to sense the danger; and as a result he will flee or hide. But let us imagine a philosophical zombie encountering  such a lion on the path ahead of him. Not being conscious, there could occur no recognition at all for such a philosophical zombie. Nor could such a philosophical zombie ever have such a feeling as fear, for you cannot fear something when you are unconscious.  And the philosophical zombie could not make a decision to hide or flee, because you can't decide something when you are unconscious. So it is obviously nonsense to imagine such a philosophical zombie behaving as a human would behave in such a situation. 

I could provide endless similar examples. How could Chalmers have gone so wrong? Perhaps he made the mistake of thinking that consciousness is a kind of luxury that can occur in addition to things such as recognition, recollection, decision-making, speech, reading, writing, and so forth. Instead consciousness is a prerequisite for such things.  You cannot have in human beings things such as recognition, recollection, decision-making and many other facets of human minds without the prerequisite of consciousness. So it's nonsensical to think that you could get rid of consciousness and still have all those other things, having a philosophical zombie that behaved like a human. 

None of these things can occur in an unconscious human being:

• imagination
• abstract idea creation
• appreciation
• memory formation
• moral thinking and moral behavior
• instantaneous memory recall
• instantaneous creation of permanent new memories
• emotions
• desire
• speaking in a language
• understanding spoken language
• creativity
• insight
• beliefs
• pleasure
• pain
• reading 
• writing 
• visual perception
• recognition
• planning 
• auditory perception
• attention
• fascination and interest
• the correct recall of large bodies of sequential information (such as when someone playing Hamlet recalls all his lines correctly)
• spirituality
• philosophical reasoning
• volition

Since all of these things would be excluded from an unconscious human, it is nonsensical to say that an unconscious human could behave just like a conscious human. 

Now, it is quite possible that you might build a robot that could behave very much like a human. Such a robot would involve electronic functionality and transistor functionality and computer software functionality unlike anything in the human body. But that is not what Chalmers has imagined. He has claimed that there could exist something that could be physically identical to a human and behave just like a human without being conscious. There could not be any such thing. 

"Supervenient" is a philosophy jargon word meaning "coming or occurring as something additional, extraneous, or unexpected." The idea of the supervenience of mind is the idea that mind is additional to matter, or something unexpected from any arrangement of matter. We do not need any appeal to philosophical zombies to establish the idea that the human mind is something unexpected to exist from the matter in a brain. The person wanting to show that the brain fails to explain the mind can discuss the facets of human experience that do not correspond to any reality in the brain. These are very many, including these:

(1) The ability of human minds to instantly form permanent new memories (such as learning of the death of a family member), an ability that does not correspond to any reality in the brain (there being nothing in the brain having any resemblance to a component capable of instantly storing new sensory information, or storing learned information at any rate of storage). 

(2) The ability of human minds to instantly recall many detailed facts about a person after merely hearing their name or seeing an image of that person, an ability that cannot be explained by brains that lack any reading-of-brain-tissue mechanism and lack any of the things that humans put in devices they allow for instant retrieval (there being no sorting, indexing or addressing in the brain). 

(3) The ability of humans to preserve memories for 50 years or more, something unaccountable in a brain subject to very high molecular turnover and high structural turnover, with things such as synapses and dendritic spines not lasting for years, and brain proteins having an average lifetime of only a few weeks.  

(4) The ability of some humans to recall with perfect accuracy extremely long sequences such as all 6000+ verses of the Quran, an ability that cannot be explained by human brains which have no structure capable of explaining the retrieval of very long sequences of learned information. 

(5) The ability of many humans to have out-of-body experiences in which they view their bodies from a position outside of it, during cardiac arrest when the brain is electrically inactive, an ability that cannot be credibly explained under any theory that the brain is the same as the mind or the source of the mind. 

(6) The ability of humans to perform very high-above-chance on tests of telepathy, ESP and clairvoyance, something beyond any neural explanation. 

(7) The ability of some humans (with eyes closed) to perform with blazing speed and perfect accuracy extremely hard mathematical calculations, something that should be impossible in a very noisy brain with so many signal slowing factors, in which chemical synapses (by far the most common type) do not even reliably transmit nerve signals (with the transmission reliability being only 50% or less for each transmission across a synaptic gap). 

The study of these and quite a few other abilities (combined with a close study of the physical shortfalls of the brain) are enough to establish the supervenience of mind, its lack of equivalence to matter, and that human minds are unexpected from any arrangement of matter in a brain. There is no need to be appealing to "philosophical zombies" to try to establish such a thing, and such armchair reasoning appeals are not examples of sound reasoning. 

I may also note that claims about a logical possibility of philosophical zombies have a possibility of doing great moral harm. A man who believes in such a thing may cheerfully rob you and assault you on the street, while thinking to himself that he's not really sure he caused any harm, because maybe his victim was just a philosophical zombie. It is best to avoid such nonsense, and think in a sensible, commonsense way, by thinking that every human you see walking or talking is conscious.