Be Skeptical of "Consciousness in Comatose" Claims, Which Are Probably More Brain Expert Pareidolia

Neuroscientists often make groundless boasts of having discovered things in brains that are not actually there. What is going on is pareidolia, people reporting seeing something that is not there, after wishfully analyzing large amounts of ambiguous and hazy 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 eager scanning the clouds, looking for animal shapes, while trying to confirm his belief that after an animal dies, his ghost goes up and lives in the clouds. 

On this blog I have provided very many examples of neuroscientist pareidolia. Some examples can be found in my posts here: 

Neuroscientists Claim "Drifting Representations," But It's Mainly Just Their Pareidolia

Pareidolia Progress: Neuroscientists Get Better and Better at Seeing Things in the Brain That Are Not There

Pareidolia Helps Neuroscientists Getting Nowhere Trying to Show a Brain Basis for Memory

Some Brain Wave Analysts Are Like "Face of Jesus in My Toast" Claimants

Normally when neuroscientist pareidolia occurs it is relatively harmless. There is the epistemic harm and intellectual harm caused when bad evidence is provided of things that are not true, but little other harm. However, one type of neuroscientist pareidolia can cause bad psychological harm in the relatives of those who are in a coma. I speak of the case of neuroscientists making shoddy claims of having discovered consciousness in comatose patients. 

We read some examples in a Harvard Medicine article entitled "The Covert Consciousness Dilemma." The article is written by someone falling "hook, line and sinker" for some very dubious claims that were never well-supported.  Early in the article the writer states this:

"Around the same time, Edlow heard about a paper published in Science that stunned him. The 2006 study focused on a patient who sustained extensive brain injuries following a traffic accident. Six months later she was still in a vegetative state. She showed no evidence of purposeful behaviors, such as following commands or making intentional movements. But then the researchers put her in an fMRI machine. While scanning her brain, they asked her to imagine walking through her house, moving slowly from room to room. And they told her to imagine playing a game of tennis, swinging for the ball with forehand and backhand strokes... Her brain responded to the commands with activity patterns that matched those of a healthy person, as if to say, I’m still here."

The 2006 study referred is the very low-quality paper "Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State," which fails to provide any decent evidence justifying its title. The paper provides no robust evidence that any consciousness was detected in the single subject it studied. The paper claims that "Speech-specific activity was observed bilaterally in the middle and superior temporal gyri, equivalent to that observed in healthy volunteers listening to the same stimuli (fig. S1)." The Figure S1 referred to is one of those extremely misleading visuals in which neuroscientists artificially color-highlight particular regions of the brain that showed only tiny differences such as 1 part in 200, to create the false impression that there was some big difference in brain activity in some region which merely had a difference such as 1 part in 200. 

Here is the Figure1 of the paper 

This visual is not a visual produced directly from any brain scan. The visual was produced through a process of artificial construction designed to make tiny differences such as 1 part in 200 look like big differences. Such methods are misleading. A correct visual showing the brain activity would show differences that cannot even be recognized by a human. 

The authors of the paper fail to caption their Figure 1 correctly. They say that it shows what occurred during "tennis imagery in the patient," even though they have no evidence that any tennis imagery was occurring in the mind or brain of their comatose patient when this scan was taken. Looking closely at Figure 1 above, we fail to even see any close match. The highlighted regions in the first row look significantly different from the highlighted regions in the second row. No good evidence has been provided that any such thing as "tennis imagery" or consciousness was occurring in the patient. 

There is actually no evidence in the literature of neuroscience that there exists any such thing as a neural correlate of imagination. If you scan someone's brain while asking him to keep a blank state of mind, and compare the scans to scans taken while the person was asked to imagine something, you will see no difference if the person kept perfectly still. There will be variations here and there such as 1 part in 200, but such variations can be explained as mere random variations, rather than something that resulted from an act of imagination. Muscle movements do produce blips in EEG readings and fMRI scans, but such blips are not evidence of thinking. 

The paper "Neural substrates of envisioning the future" describes a study looking for neural correlates of imagination. 21 subjects were brain scanned while they did three tasks: remembering an event in their past (such as a birthday in the past), imagining an event in their future (such as a future birthday they would have), or imagining an event in someone else future.  Figure 1 shows unimpressive results, with percent signal changes no greater than about 1 part in 200, which are the kind of differences one would expect to get from random fluctuations, even if people don't use their brains for imagining or remembering.  We read of a "statistically indistinguishable pattern of activity across time while subjects envisioned their personal future (SF) and recollected the past (SR) in response to a series of event cues (e.g., Birthday)."  The results when people were "imagining a future individual in similar scenarios" also fail to show any clear sign of neural involvement, with percent signal changes no greater than about 1 part in 200.  

 The low-quality paper "Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State" fails to provide any decent evidence for consciousness in the comatose. To have decent evidence for such a thing, you would need a much larger sample size than the paper's way-too-small sample size of a single subject. The authors are guilty of runaway pareidolia when they claim this about their comatose patient "Moreover, her decision to cooperate with the authors by imagining particular tasks when asked to do so represents a clear act of intention, which confirmed beyond any doubt that she was consciously aware of herself and her surroundings." They have provided no decent evidence of either imagination, intention, cooperation or consciousness in the comatose patient they brain scanned.  The authors engage in the old fallacy of claiming that "significant activity was observed" in particular brain regions when the subject was asked to imagine something. All brain regions are continually active in any living patient with a heartbeat, so showing that "significant activity was observed" in particular brain regions does nothing to show consciousness, intention or imagination. 

We then have in the Harvard Medicine article an emotional quote from neurologist Brain Edlow saying that this low-quality paper "just blew my mind," followed by the groundless claim that this paper "completely reframed the way that we think about consciousness and opened up the possibility that a substantial number of patients may be conscious even if we cannot detect purposeful behavior at the bedside." Once again, we have a brain expert getting all super-excited over the flimsiest of evidence. 

The Harvard Medical article then refers us to a 2024 paper with a larger size, the paper "Cognitive Motor Dissociation in Disorders of Consciousness." The paper is one of those deals in which you have a claim of a fairly large sample size, but the claim is made by adding up the study group sizes in a bunch of papers, which all used very small samples. 

The two sentence abstract of the paper starts out by making unfounded claims, saying this:

"Patients with brain injury who are unresponsive to commands may perform cognitive tasks that are detected on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). This phenomenon, known as cognitive motor dissociation, has not been systematically studied in a large cohort of persons with disorders of consciousness."

No such phenomenon has ever been established by high-quality studies, and this paper is not any such high-quality study. The "detection" it refers to are very likely example of pareidolia or errors-to-be-expected, in which over-eager researchers see things that are really there, because of a biased interpretation of borderline, varying data in which an over-eager analyst could see 101 things that are not really there. 

The authors claim, "We detected cognitive motor dissociation in 60 of the 241 participants (25%) without an observable response to commands, of whom 11 had been assessed with the use of fMRI only, 13 with the use of EEG only, and 36 with the use of both techniques."  The visual below shows the type of devices used. 

The paper incorrectly states, "Cognitive motor dissociation is an established phenomenon in which persons with severe brain injury who are behaviorally unresponsive to commands show brain activation on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or electroencephalography (EEG) when presented with cognitive tasks, such as motor imagery commands." No robust evidence has ever shown the existence of such a "cognitive motor  dissociation" phenomenon. 

Supplementary Figure S4 (in the Supplementary Information of the paper) gives us an indication of how weak the evidence of this paper is. The figure refers to a CRS-R scale that is a measure of how deeply someone is in a coma. According to an AI overview, "A total score of ≥ 8 generally indicates a transition from a vegetative state to a minimally conscious state, while a score of ≥ 10 helps identify patients who have achieved emergence from a minimally conscious state." The Figure S4 graph below shows no robust evidence of  any responses from any patients with a score of less than 11 on this CRS-R score. Below is the graph:

The left half of the graph plots responses in those being in stronger and deeper comas. The right half of the graph shows responses in those who are not fully comatose.  The claimed evidence for responses (as detected by fMRI or EEG activity) is found in the bar sections that are light blue or pink. 

But as you can see by closely studying this graph, there is almost no pink or light blue color in any of the bars on the left half of the graph. Any of the very small pink areas we see in the left half of the graph above can easily be explained as being mere pareidolia or garden-variety analysis error from over-eager researchers eager to report "responses" after analyzing data that did not actually show any good evidence of a response. 

So we see the "secret sauce" behind this paper "Cognitive Motor Dissociation in Disorders of Consciousness." It may have some got some evidence of responses from the subjects that underwent scanning by fMRI scanning or EEG scanning. But almost all of those claimed responses come from those not fully comatose (those scoring higher than 10 on the CRS-R scale). No strong evidence has been produced of responses or cognition or imagination or will in any of those who are fully comatose (the people graphed on the left half of the graph above). 

Normally the misleading language and "see what you are hoping to see" pareidolia of brain experts is fairly harmless. But in this case such pareidolia is extremely harmful. The people doing low-quality studies like this are causing the relatives of those in a coma to needlessly fear that their relatives are enduring what many would regard as a fate worse than death: a fate of being conscious in a body when you cannot open your eyes and cannot move your muscles.  There is no robust evidence that anyone in a coma is suffering such a fate. "Eager for another paper publication" brain experts are causing needless mental anguish in the relatives of those in comas, by groundlessly causing them to fear their relatives are undergoing some horrible fate, when there is no sound evidence basis for such fears.  When studying such papers, we should always remember that brain experts studying the ever-varying data from fMRI scans and EEG readings have a long history of frequently claiming to see things that are not really there, and a long history of conjuring up phantasms that don't really exist. 

You cannot actually tell whether someone is imagining something by looking at EEG readings taken from such a person's brain or by looking at fMRI scans. Studies that claim to provide evidence for such a thing are often studies that improperly leverage EEG traces of muscle movements. If you give someone an instruction such as "imagine yourself playing tennis," a person might well make subtle movements matching such thoughts, movements that show up in EEG readings. Evidence of muscle movements are not evidence of imagination. No one disputes that muscle movements produce EEG blips. 

A look at one of the papers referenced by the "Cognitive Motor Dissociation in Disorders of Consciousness" paper shows the kind of arbitrary and convoluted statistical rigamarole that was going on to gin up some of these claims of "responses" in comatose patients being spoken to:

"We used two complementary methods to determine the significance of differences in the frequency content of the EEG signal between the task and rest conditions: a univariate (frequency-by-frequency) approach and a multivariate approach. For each subject, both analyses were applied on a channel-by-channel basis to each run individually and to all runs combined.

For the univariate approach, we used a z-statistic, the Two Group Test (TGT) (Bokil et al., 2007), as implemented by the Chronux toolbox routine, two_group_test_spectrum (http://chronux.org), with a cutoff of p≤0.05 by jackknife method. Because spectral estimates within 2 Hz of each other are correlated by the taper functions, a difference identified by the TGT was only considered significant if it was present for all frequencies contiguously over a range greater than 2 Hz. This implies significance over at least two neighboring but non-overlapping windows of the multi-taper estimate and is indicated in figures with a rectangle drawn around the results (Figure 3B). Spectral differences over ranges narrower than 2 Hz represent only a trend to significance. To compensate for multiple comparisons (60 frequencies per channel in 29 or 37 channels), the False Discovery Rate (FDR) (Benjamini and Hochberg, 1995; Benjamini and Yekutieli, 2001) was applied to the TGT p-values determined from analyses of all runs combined.

To look for spectral differences that might only be apparent if combinations of frequencies are considered, we employed a multivariate approach, Fisher’s linear discriminant (FLD) (Fisher, 1936). This approach has been used successfully for classification of EEG responses to motor imagery (Hung et al., 2005; Bai et al., 2007). To limit dimensionality, we binned the log spectra from 4 to 24 Hz into 2 Hz windows, reducing the spectrum to 10 values. The FLD was then defined as the linear combination of these quantities that maximized the ratio of the power variance between the conditions to the power variance within the conditions. To determine the significance of the FLD, we used a shuffle method: we recomputed the FLD from 1000 shuffles of the two conditions, and determined the p-value as the fraction of shuffled datasets that yielded an equal or larger value to the actual FLD. To take into account the possibility that neighboring snippets had similar spectra because of a slowly changing underlying brain state (rather than the task) (Menzer et al., 2010), the shuffled datasets kept the snippets from the nine-second-response period after each command together during all shuffles. To control for multiple comparisons (since the FLD was applied separately to each channel), the FLD p-value was only considered significant for a channel if it was less than an FDR-corrected rate of 0.05. This is shown as an asterisk on the summary figures (e.g. channel Oz in Figure 3B). For each subject, this analysis was applied to each run individually, and to all runs combined."

Of course, when researchers are free to use "keep torturing the data until it confesses" methods like these (methods as arbitrary, convoluted and opaque as the researchers may wish), it is hardly a surprise that there might be conjured up here and there a little so-called "response evidence," even when data from the brains of utterly unconscious coma patients is being analyzed. 

So many ways to conjure up phantasms that don't exist

No, There Did Not Occur Cognitive Rejuvenation Through Reprogramming of Cells

 A recent article in MIT Technology Review is entitled "Why 'reprogramming' is the buzziest approach to reversing aging right now." It starts out by correctly discussing previous dead ends in rejuvenation research, attempts to slow or reverse aging. Then the article goes into hype mode, trying to promote something called "cellular reprogramming." The article claims this:

"Some promising studies in mice suggest that this approach might help wind back the clock. It seems to improve tissue healing, restore vision, and even improve learning and memory."

We are told that billions are being invested into startups trying to do this "cellular reprogramming," and a mention is made of three startups that are not publicly traded (Altos Labs, Retro Biosciences and NewLimit) We are told that billionaires are pouring lots of money into these startups. 

The link above for the phrase "improve learning and memory" takes you to the paper "Cognitive rejuvenation through partial reprogramming of engram cells."  Let me explain why that paper is a low-quality paper that fails to provide any decent evidence for any such thing as "cognitive rejuvenation." The paper claims to have improved memory in mice, but does not publish any robust evidence to support such a claim. 

The first reason the paper is not a high-quality study is its failure to use large enough study group sizes. You should not get the wrong idea when the paper refers to using 39 mice. Those mice were divided into various different study groups, leaving too-small study group sizes such as a study group size of only 7 mice and a study group size of only 15 mice, a study group size of only 11 mice, a study group size of only 12 mice, and a study group size of only 5 mice. No paper like this should be taken seriously unless all of its study groups were at least 15 to 20 animals per study group. Almost always the study group sizes needed for reliable results in neuroscience experiments of this type are sizes of 20 animals or greater. 

The second reason the paper is a low-quality study is that it used poor methods to test memory in the mice it used. The first type of method used was the utterly unreliable method of trying to judge "freezing behavior" in mice. My post here explains at great length why this method is utterly unreliable as a technique for testing memory performance. That post is entitled "All Papers Relying on Rodent 'Freezing Behavior' Estimations Are Junk Science."

When "freezing behavior" estimations go on, things typically work like this. A rodent will be trained to fear some thing such as a shock plate that gives the rodent a shock when the rodent steps on it. Then later the rodent will be placed in a cage that includes the fear stimulus such as the shock plate. The researchers will attempt to record what percentage of some time (say, a minute or 3 minutes) that the rodent was immobile when placed in such a case. This will be called a "freezing percentage," and will be claimed as a measure of how well the rodent remembered the fear stimulus. 

The technique makes no sense. In the real world, rodents don't usually freeze and become immobile when they are afraid. They are much more likely to flee. So trying to judge recall of a fearful stimulus by judging how much time a rodent was immobile in a cage makes no sense as a measuring method. The thing that utterly destroys the credibility of all "freezing behavior" graphs is that they can be produced in any of more than a dozen ways. A researcher can put a rodent in the cage for three minutes and graph the whole three minutes. Or he can graph only the first 30 seconds, or only the first minute, or only the first two minutes. In each ten seconds of such a three minutes, the researcher can count it as "moving" if the rodent moves one second during that period; or the researcher can count two seconds of movement as being mobility; or the researcher can use three seconds, or four seconds, or five seconds. 

There are no prevailing standards for how "freezing behavior" is judged. With there being a dozen different possibilities of how "freezing behavior" can be judged and graphed, with each having a possibility of success of about 50%, it will be almost certain that the researcher will be able to choose some analysis method that will show the desired difference in "freezing behavior," even if the memory intervention being tested had no real effect. This is a large part of the reason why "freezing behavior" judgments are worthless as evidence for an increase or decrease in memory in rodents. Such "freezing behavior" judgments are very common in neuroscience research, but that is just another indication of the very sick state of today's neuroscience research, where there prevails a wide variety of pathologies. 

Here is the "freezing behavior" graph from Figure 1 of the paper "Cognitive rejuvenation through partial reprogramming of engram cells." Its appearance matches closely the general appearance of a junk science "freezing behavior" graph as I outlined it in the diagram above that I made months before reading this paper.

We have three indications here of utterly unconvincing results and junk science:

(1) A use is made of the "freezing behavior" method which is an utterly unreliable method, for the reasons discussed above. 

(2) Failing to follow principles of good science, the authors have failed to even list in their graph what span of time was used to judge this alleged "freezing behavior."

(3) The study group sizes used were too small for any reliable result to be claimed. You can tell the study group sizes here by counting up the number of circles in front of each of the bars in the graph above. Each circle represents one mouse. The graph showed that the study group sizes were only 12 mice for one study group, and only 9 mice for another study group. A convincing study would have required at least 15 or 20 mice per study group. 

The authors of the paper also used another technique to try to measure memory performance. That technique was the widely used Morris water maze test (MWM). The Morris Water Maze test can be a fairly reliable way of measuring recall in rats, if the test is used in a straightforward way. The water maze consists of a circular open tank rather like a child's bathing tub, deeper than a rodent's length, with a hidden platform on one side of the tank, about an inch or two below the water surface. The tank is filled with a milk-colored white fluid, typically by pouring something in water to make it opaque.. A rodent is placed in the tub, and has to tread water to stay alive. Eventually the rodent will discover that by swimming to the hidden platform the rodent can comfortably rest, without having to tread water.  You test the rodent's memory by exposing him to the water maze a certain number of times, until you find that the rodent immediately goes to the hidden platform.  Then later the rodent's memory can be tested by putting the rodent in the same Morris Water Maze tank, and seeing whether it quickly swims to the platform. 

The Morris Water Maze test (MWM) may be a fairly reliable technique for testing memory, when it is used with rats, in a straightforward way, with an adequate study group size. By "in a straightforward way," I mean doing something such as simply recording the time it took rats placed in the Morris Water Maze to reach the submerged platform. This time is called the "escape latency" time.  When the Morris Water Maze test is done in a reliable way, we will see a simple bar graph comparing this "escape latency" time for two different groups, an experimental group and a control group. That "escape latency" is simply the average time it took a rat in the group to reach the submerged platform. The graph might look like the graph below. If the study group size was large enough, this might be good evidence that the experimental group was remembering better than the control group. 

But there are many studies that use the Morris Water Maze test (MWM) in an objectionable way, doing analytics in a way that is not straightforward, in a way that smells like "keep torturing the data until it confesses." For example, we may see charts showing how much time rats spent in a particular quadrant of the Morris water maze. Or we may see charts plotting the exact path that particular rats traversed in the Morris Water Maze test.  When data analysis this complicated and arbitrary starts going on, there then occurs a plummeting of the reliability the Morris Water Maze (MWM) as a test of memory. Whenever you are allowed to analyze data in very many different ways, you will be able to find some desired difference between a control group and an experimental group. Finding that difference will be as easy as getting a desired "heads" flip of a coin when you are free to flip the coin a dozen times. 

It is just that type of shortcoming that occurs in the paper "Cognitive rejuvenation through partial reprogramming of engram cells." We have some data showing results of experiments using the Morris Water Maze test (MWM). But the results do not include a single diagram like the one shown above. Instead we have convoluted analysis that smells like "keep torturing until it confesses." We fail to get any convincing simple and straightforward graph seeming to show superior memory in the rodents that supposedly underwent "cellular reprogramming." The study group sizes used in the Morris Water Maze test part of the paper are all lower than the minimum of 15 to 20 animals per study group that are required for decent statistical evidence. 

There's another reason why the results of the Morris Water Maze test (MWM) in the paper "Cognitive rejuvenation through partial reprogramming of engram cells" are not convincing: the fact that in that paper the test was done with mice rather than rats. The Morris Water Maze test is not a reliable way to test memory when it is done with mice. 

Referring to the scientific paper here, the Wikipedia.org article on the Morris water maze test (MWM) now states the following:

"Changes in measures of Morris water navigation task performance may not necessarily reflect specific impairments in mechanisms of spatial learning or memory. The reason for a longer time spent looking for the platform, or the lack of searching in the target quadrant, may not necessarily have to do with an effect on the rat's or mouse's spatial memory, but can be due to other factors. For example, a large study of Morris water navigation task performance in mice concluded that almost half of all variance in performance scores was due to differences in thigmotaxis, the tendency of mice to stay close to the walls of the pool. About 20% of the variability was explained by differing tendencies of mice to float passively in the water until 'rescued' by the experimenter. Differences in spatial memory were only the third factor, explaining just 13% of the variation between animals' performance.[16]"

The result above is one that clearly tells us that the Morris Water Maze test (MWM) is simply not a reliable test of memory when it is performed on mice. It's a different story with rats, because with rats the test is more reliable. 

So the truth is that the paper "Cognitive rejuvenation through partial reprogramming of engram cells" fails to provide any convincing evidence that its claimed "partial reprogramming" did any such thing as a memory improvement or a "cognitive rejuvenation" on the mice that were manipulated. The paper also fails to provide any decent evidence of any such thing as "engram cells" in the sense of cells storing memories. A groundless use of the phrase "engram cells" is epidemic in today's cognitive neuroscience. Neuroscientists are groundlessly applying that term to groups of cells, without doing anything to adequately justify the use of that term. 

We now have a very ironic situation in which billionaires overflowing with cash are sometimes investing many millions or billions in a way that will probably be pretty much flushing money down the toilet. Such investments are based on "brains make minds" and "brains store memories" ideas that are incorrect. Such investments are being made by those eager to never have an earthly death. But when you adequately understand the many reasons why brains cannot possibly be the source of the human mind and cannot possibly be the storage place of human memories, and why each of us must be mentally something vastly more than any brain effects (reasons discussed in great detail in the posts of this blog and in 280+ posts and very many other posts of another blog of mine), you will tend to lose your fear of having an earthly death. Those very reasons are reasons telling us strongly that we are souls that will survive earthly death. 

"Microelectrode Rape": Experimenters Penetrating Sickest Epilepsy Patients Too Dazed to Provide Real Informed Consent

There is a very serious scandal that has been long covered on this blog, a scandal that the mainstream press has ignored. This is the scandal of very sick epilepsy patients being recklessly endangered by experiment-performing brain experts implanting medically unnecessary microelectrodes deep into the brains of such patients.

Epilepsy patients suffer from seizures, which have been described as electrical storms in the brain. When people have epilepsy, the first line of treatment is drugs such as levetiracetam. Such drugs work to prevent seizures for the great majority of epilepsy patients. But for a  small fraction of epilepsy patients, such drugs do not work. Such patients are called drug-resistant epilepsy patients.

The sickest type of epilepsy patient is one suffering from frequent seizures that cannot be controlled by drugs, seizures so bad and so frequent that brain surgery is needed, to stop seizures that may be occurring in the patient as often as 15 times a day. Such surgery typically involves extracting a portion of the brain, for the sake of preventing the seizures. It's a drastic approach, but it can be surprisingly effective. And the cognitive effects are typically relatively minor -- just as we would expect if the brain is not the source of your mind, and not the storage place of your memories. Amazingly, there has often occurred the removal of an entire half of the brain in operations to prevent epileptic seizures.  My post here discusses how such operations have often involved little damage to either memory or mental capacity, contrary to the dogma that brains store memories and that brains produce thinking. 

Usually the surgical operation to try to prevent seizures involves some excision of brain tissue less than the removal of a full half of a brain. To try to help determine where to extract brain tissue without causing cognitive damage or functional damage, medical professionals will typically use electrodes to try to determine which brain areas seizures are coming from. So the skull of a sick epilepsy patient may be opened up, and electrodes may be placed on particular spots of the brain.

At this point there may enter an experimental neuroscientist.  The experimental neuroscientist may say something like this to a doctor: 

"So, you're already opening up this guy's skull to implant electrodes on his brain. How about implanting some additional electrodes -- some more deeply implanted microelectrodes that will monitor the firing of individual neurons? I would like to do a particular type of experiment that requires data on the firing of individual neurons, and this is a great opportunity for such an experiment." 

At this point a good doctor properly guarding the best interests of his patients should always give the same answer, saying something like this:

 "Get the f*** out of here, you parasite! The last thing in the world my horribly suffering patient needs is to be involved in is some damn experiment that may endanger him unnecessarily! I am trying to HEAL this sick-as-hell person, goddammit!"

But very sadly, many doctors are failing to act in such a way. Instead many doctors are giving a green light to neuroscientists wanting to use very sick epilepsy patients for neuroscience experiments involving microelectrode implantation. The goal of the neuroscientist may be to monitor the exact firing rate of individual neurons. Such a thing has no use in evaluating what parts of the brain should be removed to stop seizures. And no reliable science results, because what goes on is typically pareidolia "noise mining" correlation fishing using study group sizes way too small to provide robust evidence of anything. 

While the implanting of regular electrodes may be necessary for surgical evaluation of epilepsy patients, the implanting of microelectrodes is not necessary for surgical evaluation. A scientific paper tells us, "Sixty-five years after single units were first recorded in the human brain, there remain no established clinical indications [i.e. medical justifications] for microelectrode recordings in the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy (Cash and Hochberg, 2015)."

Implanting microelectrodes in the brain of very sick epilepsy patients about to undergo surgery is a sickening case of the abuse of the weakest for the sake of the powerful, the powerful being the scientists conducting such experiments. The medically unnecessary implantation of microelectrodes has very serious risks. 

A paper tells us this:

"A recent meta-analysis reviewed complication rates and types of complications in patients undergoing subdural grid implantation for seizure mapping [41]. The most common complication which was reported was intracranial haemorrhage with a mean rate of 4% closely followed by other complications such as neurologic infections, superficial infections and elevated intracranial pressure. They also found that an increased number of electrodes (>67 electrodes) was independently associated with complications."

Another paper tells us this:

"There are definite medical risks associated with the use of intracranial electrodes. The complication rate of subdural electrodes has been reported to range between 6% and 26%.19–23) Relatively common adverse events associated with subdural electrodes are fever, headache, and nausea.24) Another group reported transient cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leakage (13–31%), infection (6–8%), intracranial bleeding (8%), and cerebral edema in addition to an intracranial mass effect.25) Nair et al. reported that complications included (in the order of their frequency) infection, transient neurological deficit, epidural hematoma, increased intracranial pressure, and infarction.2) An increase in the complication rate was associated with (a) a greater number of grids/electrodes, (b) longer duration of monitoring, (c) older age of the patient, (d) left-sided grid insertion, (e) the use of burr holes in addition to craniotomy, and (f) an earlier year of monitoring (most likely a reflection of the aforementioned surgeon’s experience)."

But, you may say, the scientists doing these experiments say that they got "informed consent" from the epilepsy patients who they penetrated with microelectrodes. But did they really do that? There is the serious question of whether it is really possible to get any meaningful or adequate degree of "informed consent" from some patient suffering from very bad or very frequent seizures, seizures so bad that doctors are about to cut out a sizable part of the person's brain. 

What do you call it when someone penetrates another person, a person who is not mentally fit to be providing full meaningful consent? Typically such actions fall under categories called second-degree rape or third-degree rape. 

When people think of rape, they think of first-degree rape, when someone rapes another person who is actively resisting or screaming her non-consent. But under the law there are other categories of rape, what are called second-degree rape or third-degree rape. In some of the 50 states of the United States, a person is guilty of third-degree rape if he commits sexual penetration into someone lacking the mental capacity to give consent.  That lack of mental capacity may be for various reasons including intoxication or other factors that may affect normal mental functioning. In Louisiana, for example, you can be found guilty of third-degree rape if you had sex with a person who was intoxicated. 

But, we may ask, is there any big difference between the mental incapacitation of someone intoxicated and someone suffering up to 15 seizures a day? Are not both of these in the same class of mental incapacitation?

What is it called in Louisiana if you unnecessarily penetrate the vagina of some woman who is drunk? That is called third-degree rape. But what should we call it when a neuroscientist unnecessarily penetrates with microelectrodes the brain of some epilepsy patient suffering many seizures a day, some patient too dazed and debilitated and confused to be giving any "informed consent" worthy of the name? Perhaps that should be called "microelectrode rape."

In the conversation below, an authority is setting up a rape.

Authority: So you have those horrible seizures 15 times a day -- I want to help. So can I open up your brain to evaluate you for surgery?

Groaning, dazed epilepsy patient: Sure, Doc, whatever you want, just stop these damn seizures that are driving me crazy!

Authority: And my colleague wants to insert his penis into your vagina. 

Groaning, dazed epilepsy patient: Sure, Doc, whatever you want, just stop these damn seizures that are knocking me out 15 times a day! 

No very meaningful degree of "informed consent" is going on here, so there would probably be a crime of third-degree rape if this proceeds. And what goes on in the conversation below seems just as bad. 

Authority: So you have those horrible seizures 15 times a day -- I want to help. So can I open up your brain to evaluate you for surgery, and hook up some electrodes?

Groaning, dazed epilepsy patient: Sure, Doc, whatever you want, just stop these damn seizures that are driving me crazy!

Authority: And I also want to insert into your brain another type of electrode called microelectrodes, for the sake of an experiment I want to perform.   

Groaning, dazed epilepsy patient: Sure, Doc, whatever you want, just stop these damn seizures that are knocking me out 15 times a day! 

No very meaningful degree of "informed consent" is going on here, and the authority doing such penetration is probably guilty of a crime of abuse and endangerment, something as bad as third-degree rape. We might reasonably use the term "microelectrode rape" to describe such crimes of abuse and endangerment, which take place against people so sick and so dazed and mentally disabled that they probably are not giving any meaningful or sufficient degree of informed consent. 

The fact that the authorities doing such sinister penetrations get a signed document from those they abuse and endanger means very little. Is there any meaning when you get a "hurry up and sign" signature under conditions such as these? 

Almost always the brain experts we might suspect of being guilty of these "microelectrode rapes" (similar to third-degree rapes) fail to publish any informed consent document signed by the subjects horribly endangered by these experiments. Such studies almost always fail to give us specific information on the small number of patients that had microelectrodes implanted.  So we are left unable to judge just how dazed, confused, disabled and mentally damaged the victimized experimental subjects were. We never seem to get something such as MMSE test results allowing us to know how mentally competent the experimental subjects were, or links to videos demonstrating that the patients were mentally fit to be giving a sufficient amount of informed consent. We also never get follow-up information informing us about whether or not there were medical complications arising from such unnecessary implantation of microelectrodes. When analyzing these microelectrode implant experiments, our rule of thumb should be: whenever a paper fails to document mental competency in its experimental subjects, and fails to document them signing completely candid documents that people in their state would be able to understand, then we should assume a lack of any real informed consent, with the result being something we might rightfully call  "microelectrode rape" resembling third-degree rape.

I was able to find an example of an informed consent form for one of these microelectrode implant experimental studies. One was a 4-page form looking about as long as the form in my visual above. The form was so badly filled with jargon and confusing text that there would seem to be little chance that it would be adequately understood by anyone suffering from many seizures every day. This informed consent document falsely described the risks involved, claiming that microelectrodes do not involve risks beyond those posed by regular electrodes implanted in the brain. The reality is that the risk is proportional to the number of electrodes implanted, and that implanting microelectrodes (in addition to regular electrodes) always does involve very much additional risk to the patient, risk that does him no good. 

This so-called "informed consent" document I found for microelectrode experimentation fails to even state the most basic fact of what will occur, which is experimenters inserting tiny wires deep into someone's brain.  It is deceptive to claim that a document of this type is getting "informed consent" for microelectrode experimentation in which such penetrations occur in the brains of epilepsy patients. We can only wonder: how many other so-called "informed consent" documents for microelectrode experiments have the same huge defect?  

Informed consent documents for experiments like this routinely have a "Possible Benefits" section. Typically such sections confess that no benefit is coming to the patient participating. The same section will routinely have some claim such as the claim that "Society will benefit from the scientific knowledge obtained." Experiments involving microelectrode implants in epilepsy patients almost always are very low-quality junk science studies involving very bad Questionable Research Practices such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes much lower than 15. Failing to provide robust evidence of anything important, such studies do not actually benefit society, and often harm society to a tiny degree, when their authors write misleading boastful claims about their activities plagued by noise-mining, dubious correlation-fishing and pareidolia. Almost always, the only people really benefiting from such studies are scientists who get an additional paper to add to their count of published papers, and who get the desired research grant money from some government which should not be funding morally objectionable studies of this type.  

When neuroscience experiments are being done on humans, the very idea of following a mere "informed consent" is a profoundly defective one. A more stringent standard would have to be followed in order for good morality to be practiced in neuroscience experiments on humans. You might call such a standard the standard of "risk-cognizant consent."

The idea of risk-cognizant consent would be to verify that a subject understood all of the risks involved in an experiment, not merely that he had been informed of such risks in a way that might well have failed to cause a good understanding of the risks. Here is how such a protocol of risk-cognizant consent might work. 

(1)  Consent documents would be crystal-clear documents carefully written according to a "plain English" standard.

(2) All risks would be candidly discussed, including known risks, and unknown risks that it might be reasonable to suspect the subject was incurring. 

(3) Before any subject was asked to sign such a document, his or her reading skills would be verified (for example, he might be asked to read the first paragraph aloud). 

(4) Anyone lacking very good reading skills would be offered the consent document in an audio form or video form, or would have the consent document read to him.

(5) It would be made clear that a test would be given on the content of the consent document, and that therefore it should be studied very carefully. 

(6) It would always be verified that the person had spent adequate time studying the written consent document or listening to the audio form of the document, without any of the nonsense going on in emergency rooms, where people are routinely given long documents and pressured to quickly sign them, with medical personnel routinely accepting signatures when people obviously had not taken adequate time to sign what they had read. 

(7) All persons signing such a document would then be given a ten-question multiple-choice test trying to determine how well they understood the information in the consent document. 

(8) Any persons failing to score very highly on such a test (such as scoring 9 out of 10 or higher) would be excluded from participation in the experimental study.

It is not practical to follow this type of protocol in a rushed hurry-up environment such as a hospital emergency room in which someone's life may depend on speedy action  But neuroscience experiments never have so tight a time factor. With neuroscience experiments, there is abundant available time to follow a morally responsible protocol such as the risk-cognizant standard I have described. A mere "informed consent" protocol is not an adequate standard for neuroscience experiments. 

I advise anyone involved in any type of neuroscience experiments to save a copy of any consent document signed,  to gather the names of any persons involved in the experiment, and to carefully document any health problems that may conceivably have been caused by participation in the experiment. Such data may be useful if the person wants to later file a lawsuit seeking damages.