Scientists on Book Tours May Mislead Us

 When writing up some scientific paper that may involve either experimental research or theorizing, a scientist often may think to himself questions such as "Is there some way to frame this work so that it sounds like important work worthy of publication?" or "Is there some way to spin this work so that it sounds like important work worthy of being cited, so that my citation count will increase?" But a scientist willing to "think big" may be more ambitious, and ask himself: "Is there some way to spin this work so that it sounds like something I could parlay into a book deal?" 

There are two main types of scientists who try to parlay their work into book deals: the "grand theory" scientist and the "lab legend" experimental research scientist.  The "grand theory" scientist is often someone thinking: how can I make my theory into a best-selling book? 

The "grand theory" scientist trying to become a best-selling author is someone we cannot trust to accurately summarize facts and accurately report on reality, because he is so very badly biased. Such a scientist tends to report everything in a way that tries to make his grand theory seem credible. 

An example of such a scientist was Charles Darwin, who did a bad job on reporting on biological reality in his books, because he was trying to make his theory of accidental biological origins seem more credible. In the title of his main work, Darwin used the misleading phrase "natural selection," which does not correspond to anything Darwin described to try to explain the origin of species.  Selection means an act of choice, and blind unconscious nature does not select things.  Describing a biological world in which we never observe random variations in an organism that are even a tenth of a new complex biological innovation, Darwin tried to make it sound like such events were happening all the time.  When it came to describing the difference between humans and apes, Darwin resorted to the most appalling deceit, making on page 99 of The Decent of Man the obviously untrue claim that "there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties." 

Another example of a "grand theory" scientist making very misleading statements was that of a certain professor trying to drum up sales of his book claiming that our solar system has been visited by an extraterrestrial spaceship. The professor did research trying to dredge up evidence for his claim that a spaceship from another solar system had burnt up in the atmosphere.  The research found nothing but the most ordinary specks of metal, but the professor tried to portray these as evidence of something of epic significance: remnants of a spaceship from another solar system. 

Another type of scientist trying to sell a book of his is what we may call the "lab legend" scientist. This type of scientist tries to capitalize on lab research he has done, by playing up some legend that his lab work was some epic breakthrough very worthy of attention. Typically the research very much fails to live up to the legend. 

To promote books they write, scientists go on book tours, in which they  engage in a series of interviews designed to promote the book. The statements scientists make during such book tours are some of the most unreliable utterances of scientists. Lining up the series of interviews for a book tour is typically the job of the publicity department of a publisher.  Typically a scientist going on a book tour will be prepped by someone working for the publisher, who will emphasize the importance of the scientist producing exciting-sounding quotes. So if the scientist has produced some boring work that does not prove anything interesting, he may be told that he should "spice things up" by making it sound like his research is some "epic breakthrough." 

When scientists write books promoting self-glorifying "lab legends,"  key factors are the dust jacket and the back cover. The left part of the paper dusk jacket customarily has text written not by the author himself, but by some employee of the publishing company. Here the PR hacks of a publishing company often engage in very bad deceit, making all kinds of claims about authors not warranted by any facts.  In either paperback or hardcover, the back cover of a book by a scientist may also have boasting claims written by the publicity department of a publisher; and such claims are often "try to make a mountain of a mole-hill" types of claims. Favorable quotations by early readers of the book (called "blurbs" in the industry) are often written by associates or friends of a scientist, with there occurring lots of "quid pro quo" expectations, along the lines of "you rub my back and I'll rub yours." So if Professor X gives a favorable quotation about a book by Professor Y, it may be expected that Professor Y will give an equally favorable "blurb" when Professor X sends Professor Y an early copy of his book. 

Not very long ago we had an example of one of the "lab legend" scientists making very misleading statements while on a book tour. In interviews of his book tour, we heard the unfounded triumphal legend that the scientist did something to physically manipulate memories. In one of these interview articles making such a claim, we have a link back to one of the papers of the scientist. It is a very bad piece of junk science guilty of very bad examples of Questionable Research Practices, such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes and the use of an utterly unreliable method of trying to judge fear or recall in rodents (the "freezing behavior" method discussed here). The scientist hawking his book never did anything to show that memories are stored in the brains of rodents, and never did anything to mechanistically modify a memory, contrary to his groundless boasts; and no scientists ever did any such thing. We have the peddling of explanatory snake-oil to gin up book sales. 

We should shake our heads in dismay while pondering the willingness of mainstream sites to fall "hook, line and sinker" when such lab legends are pushed by trying-to-glorify-themselves scientists on book tours.

The Groundless Myth of Superagers Growing More Brain Cells

 Never forget there's a "profess" in the word "professor."  And "profess" is defined as "to affirm one's faith in or allegiance to (a religion or set of beliefs)."  A recent press release from the rather strangely named University of Illinois Chicago gives us an example of a neuroscientist professor professing, and incorrectly boasting about grand things that were not at all done. 

We have a headline of "What makes superagers’ brains special?"  So-called superagers are very old people with very good memories. The press release attempts to suggest the story line that these superagers can remember better because they had higher rates of neuron creation (neurogenesis).  It's a story line that fits in with the idea that brains store memories. But it's not a story line backed up by any good evidence. 

Neurons are created before humans reach adulthood. But there is no robust evidence that significant number of neurons are created in adulthood. 

In the UIC press release we have this extremely glaring example of a scientist crowing about some grand and glorious result, when the research is actually very low-quality research because of its use of way-too-small study group sizes.  The press release says this:

" 'This is a big step forward in understanding how the human brain processes cognition, forms memories and ages. Determining why some brains age more healthily than others can help researchers make therapeutics for healthy aging, cognitive resilience and the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia,' said Orly Lazarov, a professor in UIC’s College of Medicine and director of the Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia Training Program."

But the truth is that we have here neither a  "big step forward" nor an example of a decently done scientific study. The reason is the tiny study group sizes, which were only 8 subjects per study group. 

When we look at the scientific paper "Human hippocampal neurogenesis in adulthood, ageing and Alzheimer’s disease," and search for the study group size (using the search phrase "n=") we find that the study group sizes were only 8 subjects per study group. No study like this should be taken seriously unless it used a study group size of at least 15 or 20 subjects per study group. 

There is simply no basis for concluding that super-agers have neuron creation rates any different from old people with poor memories, nor is there any good basis for thinking that adults create new neurons in significant numbers. No such generalization can be made with any reliability when you do a way-too-small study group size of only 8 people. 

Did the UIC press release tell us that only 8 subjects per study group were used? No, it conveniently forgot to mention how many subjects were used. 

We should note that in the text of the paper Lazarov sings a tune very different from her boasts in the press release. In the paper we read this (with "power" referring to statistical power):

"Notably, we observed a general increase in the number of immature neurons in SA; however, inter-sample variability and low sample number compromised the power of our analysis. It should be noted that the high level of variability from sample-to-sample in cell-type abundance limited the quantitative power of our study. Future experiments with a greater number of human brain samples will be needed to study this aspect in depth."

Wow, that sounds like kind of a confession of failing to do the work in a way that would inspire confidence. So why on Earth was Lazarov boasting in the press release that this study was "a big step forward in understanding how the human brain processes cognition, forms memories and ages"?  

Let us now look at some neuroscientists who have denied the doctrine of adult human neurogenesis, by denying that human adults  create new brain cells. 

• A 2018 paper states, "Our recent observations suggest that newborn neurons in the adult human hippocampus (HP) are absent or very rare (Sorrells et al., 2018)." The paper notes that "studies supporting the presence of adult human hippocampal neurogenesis are not consistent with each other: some report a sharp decline and small, negligible contribution in adults...others support continuous high levels of neurogenesis in old age (Spalding et al., 2013; Boldrini et al., 2018), but show extremely high variability."
• A 2018 paper states "2 independent papers coming from different parts of the world have used a similar approach and methodology leading to converging results and the following similar conclusions: hippocampal neurogenesis in humans decays exponentially during childhood and is absent or negligible in the adult." It says these papers "are Sorrells et al. (2018) from the lab of Alvarez-Buylla in USA published in March in Nature, and the study by Cipriani and coworkers from the Adle-Biassette’s lab in France published in this issue of Cerebral Cortex (2018; 27: 000–000)."
• A 2018 article in The American Scientist (co-authored by Sorrells and Alvarez-Buylla) is entitled "No Evidence for New Adult Neurons."  It said, "Adult human brains don’t grow new neurons in the hippocampus, contrary to the prevailing view." The authors criticize previous reports of adult neurogenesis partially by saying they "frequently used only a single protein to identify new neurons," which was a faulty technique because "we found that the protein most often used, one called doublecortin, can also be seen in nonneuronal brain cells (called glia) that are known to regenerate throughout life." A 2022 article entitled "Doublecortin and the death of a dogma" refers to work by Franjic, saying, "out of the 139,187 nuclei sequenced, only 2 showed appropriate transcriptomes for neural precursor cells... suggesting adult human neurogenesis is rare, if it occurs at all."
• A 2019 paper says that "a balanced review of the literature and evaluation of the data indicate that adult neurogenesis in human brain is improbable," and that "several high quality recent studies in adult human brain, unlike in adult brains of other species, neurogenesis was not detectable."
• A 2018 paper claimed that "New neurons continue to be generated in the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus of the adult mammalian hippocampus," but the paper's title was "Human hippocampal neurogenesis drops sharply in children to undetectable levels in adults."
• Describing his research, the neuroscientist  Ashutosh Kumar stated in 2020 that he had found this: "Progression of neurogenesis is restricted after childhood, and reduces to negligible levels around adolescence and onwards."
• A 2022 paper was entitled "Mounting evidence suggests human adult neurogenesis is unlikely."
• A 2022 paper states, "In this review, we will assess critically the claim of significant adult neurogenesis in humans and show how current evidence strongly indicates that humans lack this trait." The paper states that "In summary, a thorough review of the literature shows that there is no scientific convincing evidence of the generation and incorporation of new neurons into the circuitry of the adult human brain, including the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus."  Noting how false claims persist within neuroscience, the paper states, "As Victor Hamburger, co-discoverer of the nerve growth factor, said at an informal meeting: 'A single report of an incorrect finding that many people like, takes more than hundreds of papers with negative findings to make an acceptable correction.' ” 
• A 2021 paper was entitled "Positive Controls in Adults and Children Support That Very Few, If Any, New Neurons Are Born in the Adult Human Hippocampus."

There is another reason for disbelieving the "superagers make more neurons" story, besides the lack of evidence for adult neurogenesis. The additional reason is that when asked to explain memory creation, neuroscientists typically appeal not to neurons but to synapses existing outside of neurons.  The senseless story that neuroscientists keep telling is that memory creation occurs by "synapse strengthening," an idea that makes no sense for a variety of reasons, including the fact that information is never stored by an act of mere strengthening, and also the fact that synapses are made up of proteins with an average lifetime 1000 times shorter than the longest length of time that humans can remember things (50 years or more). Conceivably a neuroscientist might get a talking point in favor of such a theory of synaptic memory storage if he were to show that the synapses of superagers are stronger or more abundant than the synapses of typical agers. But you would not get a talking point to support such a theory of synaptic memory storage if you merely showed that superagers created more neurons than normal agers. 

One Year Later, the Blog of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Still Sounds Evidence-Poor

 On March 7, 2025 I posted on this blog a post entitled "Examining the Evidence-Poor Blog Archive of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 2020 to 2025," one you can read here. 

After reviewing all of the posts that sounded as if they might be relevant to "brains make minds" claims and "brains store memories" claims, I stated this:

"So examining all the posts on this [Cognitive Neuroscience Society] site from January 2020 to March 2025 that had headlines sounding like they might be some substantive evidence for 'brains make minds' and 'brains store memories' claims, I find no such substantive evidence. We have lots of cognitive neuroscientists claiming to know things they don't know. But a close look at their research always fails to find robust evidence in support of the dogmas that cognitive neuroscientists keep chanting."

It has now been one year since I wrote that post. Let us look at all the last year's posts on the blog of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, to see whether anything in the past year should change our opinion about the blog being evidence-poor in regard to the main claims of cognitive neuroscientists. 

Here are all the posts the blog has published in the past year:

March 3, 2026: "From an Outsider to a Champion for the Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion." We have an interview with a neuroscientist LeDoux who is the author of a book with the dumb title "The Emotional Brain." It is not brains that are emotional, but people who are emotional. We have this ridiculous statement by the neuroscientist: "Eventually, I would write the book The Emotional Brain [one of several books written by LeDoux], which I think helped put emotion on the map." It is an example of the kind of senseless boasting that neuroscientists frequently engage in. Obviously emotions were "on the map" long before such a book was written.  The next statement by LeDoux is equally ridiculous, with him saying , "If you take a look at the study of consciousness, one thing that's missing is emotion." No, scholars of the human mind have always made human emotions one of the main objects of their study. Nothing that LeDoux says does anything to support claims that brains make minds or that brains store memories. 

January 9, 2026: "Threading Together Attention Across Human Cognition."  We have an interview with neuroscientist Monica Rosenberg. She starts out by saying, "Brains are so commonplace in our lives that it’s easy to take them for granted, but when you stop to think about it, it’s absolutely remarkable that our minds emerge from electrified meat.” A more truthful sentence would be "it's absolutely unbelievable that our minds emerge from electrified meat." Rosenberg incorrectly states, "We have evidence that individual differences in features of brain activity, like functional connectome organization, can predict differences in behavior but we still don’t understand why." No such evidence exists, if by "differences in behavior" you mean the type of choices a person would make. Rosenberg makes unfounded boasts about things done by people she works with. She claims, "Ziwei Zhang, a PhD student in my lab, showed that dynamics of the same functional brain network predict when people are surprised as they do a learning task and watch basketball games." There's a link to the paper here, entitled "Brain network dynamics predict moments of surprise across contexts." It's not any good evidence for brains-making-minds. It is well known that particular type of emotions tend to produce distinctive muscle movements showing up as facial expressions; and particular types of muscle movements show up as distinctive blips in fMRI scans or EEG readings. 

December 16, 2025: "Taking Action Seriously in the Brain: Revealing the Role of Cognition in Motor Skills." We have an interview with a scientist studying the role of the brain in motor skills. He talks about "motor working memory" without clearly explaining what he means by that term. The idea of "working memory" has some substance in reference to a kind of "mental scratchpad" where you can remember a few things for a short time, without memorizing them. There is no brain understanding of how that works, and there is no part of the brain that corresponds to such a "mental scratchpad." The idea of a working memory involving motor skills is not one that has much substance. Motor skills such as learning to swim or ride a bicycle require repeated practice sessions. It is clear that brains have some involvement in muscle movement. But such a relation does nothing to show that your brain produces your mind. 

November 24, 2025: "50 Years of Busting Myths About Aging in the Brain." We have an interview with a neuroscientist Carol Barnes who studies aging in brains. Barnes makes this groundless claim: "For my PhD thesis, I was to build off work that had discovered the biological basis of memory, long-term potentiation (LTP)." No one has ever discovered any biological basis for memory. The claim that LTP is any such thing is a groundless legend of neuroscientists (as I discuss in my posts here). Utterly unable to account for memories that can last decades, LTP is a very short-lived change produced by artificial electrode stimulation. The very term "long-term potentiation" is a misleading one, as so-called LTP typically decays away with days or weeks. 

Barnes then proceeds to recite another groundless legend of neuroscientists, the legend that "place cells" were discovered. She says, "In my postdoctoral work with John O’Keefe, we looked at the first recordings from place cells in young and old rats." A look at O' Keefe's research on this topic will show that it was not robust research. Here is a quote from a previous post of mine:

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

We have in the interview no claims by Barnes of any substance backing up claims that brains produce minds or that brains store memories. All of her main references to research are references to weak, unconvincing research. 

November 3, 2025: "Making the Brain Language Ready: A Journey of Discovery."   We have an interview with neuroscientist Peter Hagoort, who has tried to show some brain basis for language ability. Hagoort talks on and on, but fails to show any knowledge of how a brain could acquire a language or allow people to speak as rapidly as they do. He mentions aphasia. A person can have a stroke that prevents him from being able to speak, or damages his ability to speak. But that merely shows that when people speak they are using muscles; and no one doubts that brains have a strong connection to muscle activity. 

September 10, 2025: "The Lasting Cognitive Effect of Smell on Memory." We have an interview with a scientist doing research on smells and memory. Without giving any specifics, the scientist makes vague claims trying to suggest links between smells, brains and memory. About all we know on this topic is that particular smells can evoke particular memories. 

August 14, 2025: "Language in the Brain is More Than the Sum of Its Parts."  We read this: "In a new paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bourguignon and Salvatore Lo Bue make a case for language as an emergent property of the brain." Such talk is very misleading. A property of something is some simple characteristic that can be expressed by a single number. For example, properties of a wooden cube include length, width, depth, height, color and weight, each of which can be expressed by a single number. Language is not a property, but a capability, an extremely impressive capability with many different aspects. So trying to explain language by describing it as a "property" is extremely erroneous. We hear from a neuroscientist named Bourguignon who says, "We argue for a broad, seemingly simplistic, yet unbiased, conception of language as 'any piece of information that can be verbalized.' " That is a senseless conception of language.  It sounds more simpleminded than "seemingly simplistic." Language is something gigantically more than "any piece of information."  Bourguignon confesses that "the very notion that language cannot be pinpointed in a neatly delineated area or network of the brain will be surprising to some people, and unpalatable to others." That sounds like what we might find if brains cannot explain language. 

June 30, 2025: "Exploring Auditory Interconnectivity One Sound at a Time."  We have an interview with a neuroscientist studying the brain and hearing. Nothing discussed backs up "brains make minds" claims (as opposed to mere "brains are involved in hearing" claims). 

May 29, 2025: "How Was Your School Day?: Unpacking Free Recall in Young Children." We hear nothing of any real relevance to "brains make minds" or "brains store memories" claims. 

April 21, 2025: "Moving Beyond Traditional Pathways in Cognitive Neuroscience." We hear nothing of any real relevance to "brains make minds" or "brains store memories" claims. 

April 1, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 4 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

April 1, 2025: "How VR Technology is Changing the Game for Alzheimer’s Disease." The headline is incorrect. VR technology (virtual reality technology) is not "changing the game" in regard to Alzheimer's disease. We hear merely about some fancy virtual reality system used to diagnose Alzheimer's disease. The disease can be diagnosed through much simpler methods. 

April 1, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 3 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

March 31, 2025: "How Dreams, Novelty, and Emotions Can Shape Memories: Lessons from Smartphone Studies."  We have a discussion of some research involving memory, conducted with smartphones. It is pure psychology research. The authors claim connection between sleep and memory recall. But there's no discussion of any brain data, so the post does nothing to back up "brains store memories" claims. 

March 31, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 2 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

March 30, 2025: "CNS 2025: Day 1 Highlights." We have only skimpy one-sentence mentions of presentations at a scientific conference. 

It would seem from the last year of posts at the blog of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society that cognitive neuroscientists are not making any real progress in their attempts to provide evidence backing up claims that brains make minds and that brains store memories. 

Neuroscientists Have No Brain-Based Explanation for Either Remembering or Forgetting

Decades ago I regarded Time Magazine as being the epitome of respectable journalism. I remembered there was a 48-story skyscraper in New York City that was called the Time-Life Building. I imagined the building stuffed with conscientious reporters and fact checkers, who would make sure that what you read in the weekly Time magazine was something you could trust. In the days of my youth, the average man might keep up on world events by watching his 6:30 Evening News broadcast, by reading his daily newspaper, and by reading his weekly copies of Life magazine and Time magazine. 

Now the Time-Life Building has been renamed, and is merely called 1271 Avenue of the Americas. Life magazine ceased publishing in the year 2000. Time magazine still publishes in print, but only 22 editions a year, rather than the previous weekly editions. Time magazine also has an online presence. But judging from its recent defective article on memory, we may wonder how trustworthy its science coverage is these days. 

The article (which you can read here) was one was a typical example of a type of article we can call a why-or-how-misspeaking article. Such an article starts out with the word "How" or "Why," and does not end with a question mark, offering an attempt to explain some thing that may have puzzled you, while offering only some unbelievable story line. The title of the article is "Why You Can't Remember Being a Toddler."  

Referring to the tendency of people to not remember their youth before age 4, the article states this:

"In recent years, scientists who study this phenomenon—sometimes called childhood or infantile amnesia—have made some surprising findings that illuminate how this nearly universal form of forgetting works. At the lab of Paul Frankland, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, researchers tagged the cells in the brain that were activated as young mice learned to fear a chamber. Three months later, when the full-grown mice had forgotten their fear, the researchers activated those cells again—and suddenly, the mice remembered."

All of these claims are false. No, scientists have not illuminated how forgetting of childhood memories works or how any type of forgetting works. There are no cells in the brain that are activated only when you learn something or form a memory. Almost every cell in the brain is continually active, and there is zero evidence that some type of cell "turns on" or activates only when something is learned or only when a memory is formed. The claim about the experimental result is unfounded, being based on a very poor example of junk science. 

The link in the quote above takes us to only the abstract of a paper entitled "Recovery of 'Lost" Infant Memories in Mice." An examination of the full paper shows it to be a poor piece of neuroscience. We have way-too-small study group sizes of only 7, 9 or 10 mice. No study like this should be taken serious unless at least 15 to 20 mice were used for each of the study groups. In addition, the study depends on an utterly unreliable method for trying to determine how well mice remembered: the worthless technique of judging how much a mouse moved during an arbitrary time period, and then referring to that as a "freezing percentage." For reasons discussed here, all studies based on so unreliable a method are examples of junk science. 

Here we have the use of "freezing behavior" methodology in its most unreliable and untrustworthy form, with claims being made that some mice remembered better, claims based on reports they "froze" more (in other words, moved less) after some part of their brain was zapped by optogenetic stimulation. Researchers who use this method are compounding the folly of trying to measure fear or recall by judging "freezing behavior," because it is known that zapping many different parts of the brain will itself produce "freezing behavior" even if there is no difference in fear or recall. So it's like this:

What the neuroscientist said: "I zapped the mouse's brain, and he 'froze' in the sense of moving less so I must be reactivating his forgotten fear memories which are causing him to 'freeze in fear.' "

What the neuroscientist should be saying: "I zapped the mouse's brain, and he 'froze'  in the sense of moving less, and that's probably just a response to the very action of zapping the mouse, telling me nothing about whether the mouse remembered something the mouse was trained to fear."

The title of the paper is misleading. Nothing has been done here to show "Recovery of 'Lost' Infant Memories in Mice." No decent study group sizes were used. No claim is made by the authors to have a sample size calculation to determine whether they were using adequate sample sizes. And no reliable method has been used to measure whether any of these mice remembered anything. So no evidence has been provided that any lost memories were recovered. 

Referring to the loss of infant memories, the Time article says this: "Animals whose brains tend to add smaller crops of neurons after birth—guinea pigs, for instance—do not show signs of this amnesia, Frankland and colleagues have found." This makes no sense under "brains store memories" claims. Under such ideas, you would expect that adding more neurons would tend to produce stronger memories. 

The Time article then gives us a claim based on another low-quality neuroscience paper, one using the same bad methods for judging fear, as well as a way-too-small study group size of only 8 mice. 

The Time article then gives us this make-your-head-hurt piece of silliness, stating, "However, Nick Turk-Browne at Yale University and his colleagues have managed to scan the brains of a growing number of little kids, and they’ve discovered that kids as young as a year old do appear to be forming memories, in the same way that adults create recollections of past events, called episodic memory."  The reference is to a senseless child-endangering set of experiments in which small infants have their brains scanned, without any medical justification. The experiments do not do anything to show that such infants are forming memories. There is nothing an MRI scan can ever produce that will ever show that someone is forming a memory.  And the last thing we would ever need is brain scans of infants to show that they are forming memories. The ability of an infant to learn in many ways as it progresses proves its ability to form memories. 

A child once died in an MRI accident. The use of MRI scans in healthy infants by experimenting scientists is a morally troubling affair. Some studies have suggested a cancer risk from MRI scans, and no one knows whether MRI scans in infancy increase cancer likelihood over a 70-year time span.  The younger the subject, the more objectionable it is to be exposing that subject to any unnecessary MRI scans that might increase his chance of getting cancer decades later. 

We then have this quote in which a neuroscientist makes a silly statement: 

"To get a better sense of precisely when memories are formed and forgotten, Sarah Power at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and her colleagues built a media room where children have experiences they will never encounter in the outside world. 'One of the really important things about the task is that everything only exists inside the lab space. We wanted to make sure it was completely unique in the sense that…the contextual environments don't exist anywhere outside in the real world, so that we could know that if they did remember these associations, it could only be from the fact that they had been in the lab,' she says. They have so far observed 400 toddlers between the ages of 18 and 24 months, having them form memories of the lab space, and they intend to follow them over time. The project is still in its early stages, but  'from the preliminary data, we've been very surprised at their ability to encode and retain these episodic-like memories,' she says."

But why on Earth would someone be surprised by these results? Is it not extremely obvious that every infant has to form memories to progress as an infant normally does, learning skills such as crawling and walking and the beginnings of language? The scientists Power here sounds like someone who jumps in a swimming pool, and then says that she is very surprised to have got wet. 

The Time article then states, "It’s a mystery why our brains, and those of other mammals, forget our early lives." It thereby confesses that the article's title ("Why You Can't Remember Being a Toddler") is bogus clickbait. We then have a quote from the scientist who is senselessly brain-scanning healthy infants in MRI scanners, without medical justification. He says, "There's tons of behavioral evidence that even newborn infants are really good at aggregating statistics." Yeah, right -- and my neighbor's dog is the King of Mars.

The article and its quotes and the papers its cites may make you shake your head and ask some question such as "What has caused these people to say and do things so silly-sounding?"

Neuroscientists have been studying brains for many decades, trying to shed some light on how memory occurs. They have got nowhere, although you might think differently from all the misleading papers they have written. No neuroscientist has ever found the slightest trace of learned information by microscopically studying brain tissue.  No neuroscientist has any credible tale to tell of how a human could form a memory allowing him to later recall complex information. No neuroscientist has any credible tale to tell of how a human could ever instantly recall lots of relevant information he learned decades ago, after merely hearing a name or seeing an image (the kind of thing that happens when a child asks a parent to tell him about some famous historical figure). No scientist has any credible tale to tell of why a 70-year-old can remember in very great detail very many things that happened in his teenage years more than 50 years ago, while a typical 20-year-old cannot remember anything that happened in his first four years. 

Don't Think It's a Theory of Brain Memory, When It's Just Vacuous Hand-Waving

 A very important skill in life is the ability to distinguish vacuous hand-waving when it happens. Vacuous hand-waving is when someone tries to make it sound like he understands something he does not understand. Such hand-waving is often characterized by empty phrases and the use of jargon used merely to create some impression of understanding. 

To illustrate the use of vacuous hand-waving. let's consider the question: how do you store patient's information at a doctor's office? We can distinguish the kind of talk we might get from a woman named Jane (who understands very well how it is done), and a man named John (who does not understand how it is done). Jane might give an answer like this:

Jane:  We store medical records the old-fashioned way, rather than doing everything by computers. We use a separate manila folder for each patient. The top edge of the folder has a blank slot. In that slot, you write the patient's name: last name, followed by a comma, followed by a first name. Whenever a new patient comes in for the first time, you have to take a blank manila folder, and write the person's name on the folder tab, last name first. You also have to get the patient to fill out one of our forms marked "New Patient Form." That form asks for the patient's name, phone number, email, health insurance type, health insurance number, and so forth. That "New Patient Form" must be put in the patient's folder. Once the patient has seen the doctor, the doctor puts his notes in the patient's folder. That way we can always know what happened with any particular patient. The new patient's folder is then added to our file shelf, and you have to be careful to put that folder, in the correct spot, using alphabetical order.  The folders are sorted in alphabetical order, by last name. But what happens if a patient comes in and says he has already visited the doctor? Then we have to retrieve his file from our file shelf.  That's easy to do, because all of the files on our file shelf are kept in alphabetical order. So once we have retrieved the patient's folder on the day he has an appointment, we give that patient's folder to the doctor, so he can add new notes to the file. Later that day, we file the patient's folder back in our file shelf, being careful to put it in the correct spot, so that alphabetical order is maintained."

It is clear from this very detailed answer that Jane is aware of an exact system for storing patient data at a doctor's office, and how such a system can meet all of the requirements for storing patient's data at that office.  The system involves no fancy technology, but at least it is clear from her answer that Jane knows exactly how the system works. But let's imagine a different answer from John, an example that is merely a case of vacuous hand waving. 

John:  "So how would you store patient's records in a medical office? That would have to be done very carefully. It would cause all kinds of problems if the data for two different patients were mixed up. It is clear that such an office would involve some type of literary specification that would allow the exact details of a patient's treatment to be preserved. The real explanation for how the storage would work is: paper accumulation. As more and more patients were seen, more and more pieces of paper would accumulate. But paper cannot be very easily copied.  So an alternative would be an electronic accumulation of data, that would allow rapid digital backups." 

Nothing in John's answer indicates that he actually understands the specifics of how you could store medical records at a doctor's office. John's answer is an example of vacuous hand-waving. It sounds like he has no understanding of basic issues such as how to create a way of storing a new patient's data, how to avoid getting the records of two patients mixed up, how to add new treatments notes for a particular patient, how to easily find the data for a particular patient, and so forth. Jane's answer shows that she knew the answers to such questions, but John's answer makes us doubt that he has any understanding of such matters. 

Now, how do neuroscientists sound when they speculate about how a brain might store or retrieve memories? Do they sound like Jane, or do they sound like John?  They always sound like John. Dictionary.com defines "hand waving" as "insubstantial words, arguments, gestures, or actions used in an attempt to explain or persuade." When neuroscientists attempt to explain memory by referring to the brain, they offer only the most hazy hand-waving. Typically what occurs is the repetition of empty slogans and catchphrases.  

For example, a neuroscientist may claim that memories are formed by "synapse strengthening." There is no substance in this claim, which is mere hand-waving. We have many examples of the storage of knowledge in human-made things such as books, drawings, computer files, messages, handwritten notes and electronic data.  Such knowledge storage never occurs through strengthening.  Instead what typically happens when knowledge is stored in books,  messages, notes and computer files is that there occurs a repetition of symbolic tokens by some kind of writing process, and the use of some encoding system in which certain combinations of symbolic tokens represent particular words, things or ideas.  That is not strengthening.  

To give another example of empty hazy hand-waving, a neuroscientist may vaguely claim that memories are formed by "the formation of synaptic patterns." There is no substance in this claim, which is mere hand-waving.  It is possible to store information by the use of pattern repetitions. For example, you might consider each word in the English language as a pixel pattern, and then say that each use of the word "dog" in a printed book is a pattern repetition. But synapses do not form any recognizable repeating patterns. And if synapses did form such patterns, there would need to exist some synapse pattern reader to read and recognize such patterns; but no such thing exists.  Instead of being anything that could consist of stable repeating patterns, synapses are unstable "shifting sands" kind of things. Synapses are built from proteins that have an average lifetime of only two weeks or less.  The maximum length of time that humans can remember things (more than 50 years) is 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of the proteins in a synapse. So synapses cannot be the storage place of memories that can last reliably for so long. 

Another example of the empty hand-waving of neuroscientists in regard to memory can be found in the paper here, entitled "Why not connectomics?" We have this example of conceptually empty hand-waving about memory storage:

"Brains can encode experiences and learned skills in a form that persists for decades or longer. The physical instantiation of such stable traces of activity is not known, but it seems likely to us that they are embodied in the same way intrinsic behaviors (such as reflexes) are: that is, in the specific pattern of connections between nerve cells. In this view, experience alters connections between nerve cells to record a memory for later recall. Both the sensory experience that lays down a memory and its later recall are indeed trains of action potentials, but in-between, and persisting for long periods, is a stable physical structural entity that holds that memory. In this sense, a map of all the things the brain has put to memory is found in the structure—the connectional map."

The first sentence is groundless dogma. There is no evidence that brains "can encode experiences and learned skills in a form that persists for decades or longer."  There is merely the fact that humans can have experiences and learn skills that they remember for decades.  The beginning of the second sentence is a confession that there is no understanding of how such a brain storage of memories can happen. The authors confess that "the physical instantiation of such stable traces of activity is not known,"  The claim that memories are stored by "the specific pattern of connections between nerve cells" is empty hand-waving, and the speculation stated is unbelievable. No one who has ever studied the connections between nerve cells (neurons) has ever seen anything like some symbolic pattern that could encode a record of human experiences or human learned skills or learned conceptual knowledge such as school learning.  The brain does not have any such thing as a connection pattern reader that could read and interpret such patterns if they existed. 

Another example of utterly vacuous hand-waving by a neuroscientist can be found on the page here, where we have a neuroscientist state, "That is what learning is – forming new connections between neurons that didn’t exist before." You do not explain a storage of information by imagining new synapses forming between neurons.  A forming of new synapses between neurons is a structural effect that would require many minutes or hours, but humans can learn new things instantly. If you hear from a police officer that your child or spouse or father has died, you do not have wait for new connections to form between neurons (which would take hours). Instead you instantly form a permanent new memory of that very important fact.  

I had a medical incident this Friday, from which I have recovered.  I reported to an emergency room and reported symptoms that a good physician should have been able to diagnosis and treat by the simple use of a particular liquid. My case was bungled by some physician who sent some completely unsuitable medication to my pharmacist. "You're being discharged" was used as a phrase meaning "we don't know what your issue is,  so get out of here." The people were all very nice, but I was reminded again how biomedical authorities may blunder.

The "Speed Bump" Nerve Signal Bottlenecks That Make Up 90% of Your Brain Tissue

 Scientists have long advanced the claim that the human brain is the storage place for memories and the source of human thinking. But such claims are speech customs of scientists rather than things they have proven. There are numerous reasons for doubting such claims. One big reason is that the proteins in synapses have an average lifetime of only a few weeks, which is only a thousandth of the length of time (50 years or more) that humans can store memories. Another reason is that neurons and synapses are way too noisy (and synapses too unreliable signal transmitters) to explain very accurate human memory recall, such as when a Hamlet actor flawlessly recites 1476 lines. Another general reason can be stated as follows: the human brain is too slow to account for very fast thinking and very fast memory retrieval.

Consider the question of memory retrieval. Given a prompt such as a person's name or a very short description of a person, topic or event, humans can accurately retrieve detailed information about such a topic in one or two seconds. We see this ability constantly displayed on the long-running television series Jeopardy. On that show, contestants will be given a short prompt such as “This opera by Rossini had a disastrous premier,” and within a second after hearing that, a contestant may click a buzzer and then a second later give an answer mentioning The Barber of Seville.  Similarly, you can play with a well-educated person a game you can call “Who Was I?” You just pick random names of actual people from the arts or history, and require the person to identify the person within about two seconds. Very frequently a person will succeed. We can imagine a session of such a game, occurring in only ten seconds:

John: Marconi.

Mary: Invented the radio.

John: Magellan.

Mary: First to sail around the globe.

John: Peter Falk.

Mary: A TV actor.

We can also imagine a visual version of this game, in which you identify random pictures of any of 1000 famous people. The answers would often be just as quick.

The question is: how could a brain possibly achieve retrieval and recognition so quickly? Let us suppose that the information about some person is stored in some particular group of neurons somewhere in the brain. Finding that exact tiny storage location would be like finding a needle in a haystack, or like finding just the right index card in a swimming pool full of index cards. It would also be like opening the door of some vast library with a million volumes and instantly finding the exact volume you were looking for.

There are certain design features that a system can have that will allow for very rapid retrieval of information. One of these features is an indexing system. An indexing system requires a position notation system, in which the exact position of some piece of information can be recorded. An ordinary textbook has both of these things. The position notation system is the page numbering system. The indexing system is the index at the back of the book. But the brain has neither of these features. There is nothing in the brain like a position notation system by which the exact position of some tiny group of neurons can be identified. The brain has no neuron numbers, and a brain has no coordinate system similar to street names in a city or Cartesian coordinates in a grid. Lacking any such position notation system, the brain has no indexing system (something that requires a position notation system).

So how is it that humans are able to recall things instantly? It seems that the brain has nothing like the speed features that would make such a thing possible. You can't get around such a difficulty by claiming that each memory is stored everywhere in the brain. There would be two versions of such an idea. The first would be that each memory is entirely stored in every little spot of the brain. That makes no more sense than the idea of a library in which each page contains the information in every page of every book. The second version of the idea would be that each memory is broken up and scattered across the brain. But such an idea actually worsens the problem of explaining memory retrieval, as it would only be harder to retrieve a memory if it is scattered all over your brain rather than in a single little spot of your brain.

We also cannot get around this navigation problem by imagining that when you are asked a question, your brain scans all of its stored information. That doesn't correspond to what happens in our minds. For example, if someone asks me, "Who was Teddy Roosevelt," my mind goes instantly to my memories of Teddy Roosevelt, and I don't experience little flashes of knowledge about countless other people, as if my brain were scanning all of its memories.  

When we consider the issue of decoding encoded information, we have an additional strong reason for thinking that the brain is way too slow to account for instantaneous recall of learned information.  In order for knowledge to be stored in a brain, it would have to be encoded or translated into some type of neural state. Then, when the memory is recalled, this information would have to be decoded: it would have to be translated from some stored neural state into a thought held in the mind. This requirement is the most gigantic difficulty for any claim that brains store memories. Although they typically maintain that memories are encoded and decoded in the brain, no neuroscientist has ever specified a detailed theory of how such encoding and decoding could work. Besides the huge difficulty that such a system of encoding and decoding would require a kind of "miracle of design" we would never expect for a brain to ever have naturally acquired (something a million times more complicated than the genetic code), there is the difficulty that the decoding would take quite a bit of time, a length of time greater than the time it takes to recall something. 

So suppose I have some memory of who George Patton was, stored in my brain as some kind of synapse or neural states, after that information had somehow been translated into synapse or neural states using some encoding scheme.  Then when someone asks, "Who was George Patton?" I would have to not only find this stored memory in my brain (like finding a needle in a haystack), but also translate these synapse or neural states back into an idea, so I could instantly answer, "The general in charge of the Third Army in World War II."  The time required for the decoding of the stored information would be an additional reason why instantaneous recall could never be happening if you were reading information stored in your brain.  The decoding of neurally stored memories would presumably require protein synthesis, but the synthesis of proteins requires minutes of time. 

There is another reason for doubting that the brain is fast enough to account for human mental activity. The reason is that the transmission of signals in a brain is way, way too slow to account for the very rapid speed of human thought and human memory retrieval.

Information travels about in a modern computer at a speed thousands of time faster than nerve signals travel in the human brain. If you type in "speed of brain signals" into the Google search engine, you will see in large letters the number 286 miles per hour, which is a speed of 128 meters per second. This is one of many examples of dubious information which sometimes pops up in a large font at the top of the Google search results. The particular number in question is an estimate made by an anonymous person who quotes no sources, and one who merely claims that brain signals "can" travel at such a speed, not that such a speed is the average speed of brain signals. There is a huge difference between the average speed at which some distance will be traveled and the maximum speed that part of that distance can be traveled (for example, while you may briefly drive at 40 miles per hour while traveling through Los Angeles, your average speed will be much, much less because of traffic lights). 

A more common figure you will often see quoted is that nerve signals can travel in the human brain at a rate of about 100 meters per second. But that is the maximum speed at which such a nerve signal can travel, when a nerve signal is traveling across what is called a myelinated axon. Below we see a diagram of a neuron. The axons are the tube-like parts in the diagram below. The depicted axon is a myelinated axon (the faster type); but a large fraction of axons are unmyelinated (the slower type). 

The less sophisticated diagram below makes it clear that axons make up only part of the length that brain signals must travel.

Below is a depiction of these components by Google's Gemini AI:

There are two types of axons: myelinated axons and non-myelinated axons (myelinated axons having a sheath-like covering shown in blue in the diagram above). According to this article, non-myelinated axons transmit nerve signals at a slower speed of only .5-2 meters per second (roughly one meter per second). Near the end of this article is a table of measured speed of nerve signals traveling across axons in different animals; and in that table we see a variety of speeds varying between .3 meters per second (only about a foot per second) and about 100 meters per second. 

But from the mere fact that nerve signals can travel across myelinated axons at a maximum speed of about 100 meters per second, we are not at all entitled to conclude that nerve signals typically travel from one region of the brain to another at 100 meters per second. For one thing, only about half of the axons in the human cortex are myelinated, and the transmission speed of the unmyelinated axons is only about a meter per second. Moreover,  nerve signals must also travel across dendrites and synapses, which we can see in the diagrams above. It turns out that nerve signal transmission is much slower across dendrites and synapses than across axons. To give an analogy, the axons are like a road on which you can travel fast, and the dendrites and synapses are like traffic lights or stop signs that slow down your speed.

According to neuroscientist Nikolaos C Aggelopoulos, there is an estimate of 0.5 meters per second for the speed of nerve transmission across dendrites (see here for a similar estimate). That is a speed 200 times slower than the nerve transmission speed commonly quoted for myelinated axons. Such a speed bump seems more important when we consider a quote by UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta: "Dendrites make up more than 90 percent of neural tissue."  Given such a percentage, and such a conduction speed across dendrites, it would seem that the average transmission speed of a brain must be only a small fraction of the 100 meter-per-second transmission in axons. 

A scientific paper from 2025 documents precise measurements of the speed of signal transmission across both axons and dendrites, in both humans and rats. The paper is entitled "Accelerated signal propagation speed in human neocortical dendrites" and can be read here. 

The paper gives us a speed of nerve signals (which are called action potentials) in the axons which are the fastest parts of a brain. Using the term AP to mean an action potential or nerve signal, the paper states, "We found no significant difference in the propagation speed of APs in the axons of rats and humans (rat: n=8, 0.848±0.291 m/s vs. human: n=9, 0.851±0.387 m/s, two-sample t-test: p=0.282, Figure 2F)." In that quote the paper gives an axon transmission speed of about .8 meter per second,  which is more than 100 times slower than the "100 meters per second" figure commonly cited in popular literature as the speed of brain signals. 

For the speed of signal transmission across dendrites (which make up 90%  or more of brain tissue), the paper gives us two numbers, one for what it calls "forward propagating sEPSP speed" and another it calls "back propagating AP speed." We are told that these speeds were measured:

• "The AP propagation speed was calculated for each cell from the time difference between the somatic and dendritic APs divided by the distance between the two points. We found that the propagation speed was, on average, ~1.47 fold faster in human (rat: 0.233±0.095 m/s vs. human: 0.344±0.139 m/s, Mann-Whitney test: p=6.369 × 10–6, Figure 2F, Figure 2—figure supplement 1B)". This is a speed of about one third of a meter per second, roughly ten centimeters per second, the same as about one foot per second. The "m/s" in the quote above means meter per second. 
• " We found that sEPSP propagation speed was, on average, ~1.26 fold faster in human (rat: 0.074±0.018 m/s vs. human: 0.093±0.025 m/s, two-sample t-test: p=0.004; Figure 2D, Figure 2—figure supplement 1D)." This is a speed of about one tenth of a meter per second, roughly ten centimeters per second, or about four inches per second. The "m/s" in the quote above means meter per second. 

In Table 2 of the paper we have five different rows marked with names such as Human1, Human2, Human3, Human4 and Human5. The last column in the table is marked "Velocity." All of the velocities listed are less than a tenth of a meter per second. The average of the five velocities is 0.085 meter second. 

Dendrites, it would appear, are sluggish bottlenecks or speed bumps (by which I mean a physical feature that slows something down).  And since it is often claimed that dendrites make up 90% or more of brain tissue, what does this tell us about whether brains are fast enough to account for instant human recall?  It tells us that brains are way too  slow to explain humans who can think at blazing fast speeds, and give the right answers instantly when asked rarely asked questions. 

Besides the slow speed of dendrites, a very important additional speed bump or bottleneck is that of synaptic delay. Synaptic delay is the fact that every time a nerve signal passes the synaptic gap of a chemical synapse, there is a delay of about .5 millisecond. In a brain with an estimated 100 trillion synapses, synaptic delay would be an enormous slowing factor. This is because nerve signals would have to travel across very many synapses, resulting in a cumulative delay that might add up to quite a few seconds or many seconds. 

The diagram below shows fast, slow and no-so-fast parts of the brain. The snail symbols indicate slow parts, parts that would slow down nerve signals. The thin rabbit represents a relatively fast part. The fat rabbit represents a not-so-fast part.  Here "slow" and "fast" refers to the speed at which signals could transmit through such parts, which do not themselves move. 

A brain is something packed with a gazillion speed bumps or bottlenecks: the speed bumps or bottlenecks of dendrites, and the speed bumps or bottlenecks of synapses, with their delays at every synaptic junction. The brain therefore screams to us in a loud voice: "I'm way too slow to explain your instant recall." 

Postscript: 

There are two factors we can consider that will help clarify why a dendrite signal transmission speed of only about a third or a tenth of a meter is way too slow to account for instant human recall  The first factor is the total area of the human cortex. The brain tissue in the human cortex is highly folded. This means that the total area of the human cortex is surprising large, much larger than the surface area needed to make a hat. 

If you use a Google search phrase such as "total area of the human cortex," you will be told that such a surface area is between 1.5 square feet and 2.5 square feet, "roughly the size of a standard pizza." A standard pizza is about 14 inches in diameter, about the distance from a man's elbow to a ring on his finger. 

When you type in "compute the average distance between two points in a circular area" in a modern browser such as Chrome, you get an AI overview answer telling you that for a circular area with a radius of r, the average distance between two points is about .9r.  Using the formula above, we can (ignoring the complication of tortuosity) crudely estimate that the average distance between two random points in the cortex is about .9 times 7 inches, which is about 6 inches. 

But such a number would be a significant underestimation of the average distance that a brain signal would have to travel to go from one point to another in the cortex. The reason why it would be an underestimation is a reason called tortuosity. The word "tortuosity" refers to the fact that neural pathways are not straight lines but twisty, wiggly, squiggly lines. And it takes longer for signals to travel along such twisting lines than it does for a signal to travel along a straight line. 

The Google Gemini diagram below illustrates quite well the concept of the tortuosity of brain pathways. 

How much does this tortuosity factor affect the length of the pathways that brain signals must travel? You can get an estimate by typing "numerical estimate of the tortuosity of brain pathways" into Google Chrome.  This produces the answer that this tortuosity is estimated to be about 1.6.  The scientific paper here ("Extracellular space structure revealed by diffusion analysis") says that diffusion measurements show that 1.6 is the tortuosity of brain signal pathways. 

Because of the tortuosity of brain signal pathways, it seems that we should multiply the previous estimate of six inches by a factor of about 1.6.  Doing that leaves you with an estimate of about 10 inches for the average distance that a brain signal would have to travel to go from one random point to another random point in the cortex.

Such a distance may seem small, but when you are dealing with a nerve signal transmission speed of about one tenth of a meter per second (about 4 inches per second), such a distance means a delay of two seconds or more. The problem is that human recall can very often occur instantly. You can ask someone his address or telephone number or the names of his family members, and he will be able to answer instantly, without this requiring a delay of two seconds. And if you ask me, "What's the New York baseball team?" I will answer instantly. There must be a thousand questions you could answer instantly, as soon as someone finished asking them.