The Mystery Is Not Infantile Amnesia, But How Anything Can Be Instantly Learned or Instantly Recalled

 A recent article at the neuroscience site The Transmitter is entitled "Infant Memories: Lost But Not Gone?" The article has quite a few groundless and incorrect claims about memory, which the authors (Paul Frankland, Sheena Josselyn and Nick Turke-Browne) attempt to substantiate by linking mostly to low-quality papers, some of which they co-authored themselves. 

Early on, the authors state, "The advent of activity-dependent engram labeling and optogenetic tools has enabled researchers to directly address the encoding versus retrieval debate." No such thing as engram labeling exists, and claims that scientists have discovered engrams (reputed places of memory storage in a brain) are without any foundation in good science. 

It is interesting that both of the links above are to papers authored by two of the three Transmitter article authors (Frankland and Josselyn). So we have self-citation. The first paper is a paper by Frankland, Josselyn and Kohler entitled "Engrams." We have the claim, "At the largest scale, engrams are thought to be composed of sparse neuronal ensembles, distributed throughout the brain." That sure does not sound like some specific thing discovered in some particular part of the brain. We read this: "Between 1950 — when Lashley published his scientific magnum opus (In Search of the Engram) — and the late 2000s, barely any scientific articles bore the term engram in their title."

Then we read in the paper about experiments done in recent years. The authors of the paper fail to discuss the low quality of these experiments, and how they were guilty of Questionable Research Practices such as the use of way-too-small study groups, and unreliable methods for measuring how well a rodent remembered. In a paragraph entitled "What is the best evidence for engrams?" we have a reference to rodent experiments using "freezing behavior" judgments (really just immobility tracking).  All such studies are examples of junk science, for reasons explained here. Trying to judge a rodent's immobility (and calling that a tracking of "freezing behavior") is a worthless technique for judging whether an animal remembered something. 

The other link in the quote above from the Transmitter article is to a review article by Frankland, Josselyn and Kohler. It is called "The neurobiological foundation of memory retrieval," but fails to explain how any such thing can occur. The article is one of those review articles in which many a low-quality study is treated as if it was good evidence.

Later in the Transmitter article the authors state, "In mice, researchers can tag engrams in infant pups, track their persistence across development and optogenetically reactivate them later in life to recover seemingly lost memories." That is not at all true. The link is to a low-quality paper "Recovery of 'Lost' Infant Memories in Mice" co-authored by Josselyn, Frankland and others. The study group sizes were way below the minimum of 15 or 20 rodents needed for a study like this to be taken seriously. We read, "Separate groups of infant and adult mice were tested either 1 (P17, N = 9; P60, N = 7), 15 (P17, N = 9; P60, N = 12), 30 (P17, N = 10; P60, N = 7), or 90 days (P17, N = 8; P60, N = 10) after training." The "N" refers to how many rodents were used in particular study groups. Averaging about nine rodents per study group, those are all way-too-small study group sizes. And the worthless method of trying to judge "freezing behavior" was used throughout the study. 

Referring to this low-quality paper as if it was something good, the Transmitter article states this:

"Animals that undergo contextual fear conditioning in infancy show no behavioral evidence of remembering when tested in adulthood (that is, they do not freeze when placed back in a context where they were  shocked as pups). However, optogenetic stimulation of the neurons that were active when the pup was first conditioned triggers expression of the memory; the mature animal now freezes."

But using "freezing behavior" judgments is a worthless technique for trying to measure how well a rodent remembered. And it is particularly invalid to apply "optogenetic stimulation" (a type of brain zapping), and to then claim that this shows that a memory was artificially reactivated because an animal exhibited "freezing behavior." It has been realized by neuroscientists that artificial stimulation of many areas of the brain will produce "freezing behavior" regardless of whether any memory is being recalled. 

Imagine you are running along, and suddenly a scientist switches on some weird thing that causes some energy to pour into your brain. This all by itself might cause you to stop, even if it didn't cause you to recall some memory that caused you to stop. What could have been going on in the mice was just a kind of pausing effect caused by a novel stimulus rather than a recalled fear effect. A science paper says that it is possible to induce freezing [i.e. immobility] in rodents by stimulating a wide variety of regions. It says, "It is possible to induce freezing by activating a variety of brain areas and projections, including the hippocampus (Liu et al., 2012), lateral, basal and central amygdala (Ciocchi et al., 2010); Johansen et al., 2010; Gore et al., 2015a), periaqueductal gray (Tovote et al., 2016), motor and primary sensory cortices (Kass et al., 2013), prefrontal projections (Rajasethupathy et al., 2015) and retrosplenial cortex (Cowansage et al., 2014).”

It is not sound to assume that you can judge the degree of immobility of a mouse in a cage, and then assume that the higher levels of immobility are evidence of a mouse “freezing in fear" because it remembers a fear stimulus.  The "freezing behavior" method of trying to judge recall in mice works like this. A mouse will be trained to fear a shock plate that produces an electrical shock. The mouse will later be put in a cage with such a shock plate. Scientists will then attempt to judge immobility of the mouse during some arbitrary time unit that can be either 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes or three minutes. An arbitrary criteria will be used to judge immobility. For example, not moving for most of ten seconds can be counted as immobility during those seconds, or not moving for most of 20 seconds can be counted as immobility during those seconds, or not moving for  most of 30 seconds can be counted as immobility. Or, any movement at all during those seconds can be counted as movement during that time period. This immobility will be called "freezing," even though scientists have no idea whether the mouse was afraid when it was not moving.  The result of trying to track the mouse's immobility is a "freezing percentage" graph that can be produced in any of 100 different ways. With so many possible analysis choices, it will be almost certain that the experimenter will be able to produce a graph purporting to show the desired difference in "freezing behavior." There are no standards in producing these "freezing behavior" charts. 

Neuroscientists follow this bungling method of trying to measure mouse recall because it is a "see whatever you want to see" method providing the researcher with a near-certainty that the desired results can be claimed. Instead of using so deficient a technique, there are other reliable techniques that can be used. A reliable way to judge whether a a rodent trained to fear some stimulus such as a shock plate is to use some setup such as the one shown below, in which an animal remembering the fear stimulus will take the harder path towards a reward rather than the easier path.

Or, more simply, a very hungry mouse trained to fear a shock plate can be put in a cage like the one show below, and it can be recorded whether he touched the shock plate while trying to get the reward, or whether the mouse did not go get the food (as it would only do if it remembered that the shock plate produces pain). 

The Transmitter article authors then approvingly cite an appalling set of studies trying to show evidence of memory formation in infants by brain scanning them. Such studies are criticized in my post "The Reckless Foolishness of Brain-Scanning Healthy Babies in Neuroscience Experiments."  Having no value in helping to understand memory, experiments such as these run very serious risks to the infants who are needlessly put in brain scanners. There is both a risk of an accident that might harm or kill the child (a young boy once died in an MRI accident), and also a very serious risk that such brain scanning may increase the child's lifetime risk of developing cancer.  

The authors of the paper are trying in a self-serving manner to get us to believe in a socially constructed triumphal legend that researchers such as themselves have done something to substantiate the idea of an engram, a claim that has no basis in robust and well-designed experimental studies. Contrary to their insinuation that this "engram" concept has blossomed in the past 15 years, a search for references to "engram" using the Google Books Ngram viewer shows little evidence of such a blossoming. 

We may compare this result with a search for a word that seems to have skyrocketed in use since the year 2000, the word "ghosts."

Judging from the graph above, you might conclude that the observational evidence for apparitions is far stronger than the observational evidence for engrams.  

The mystery is not why a 70-year-old fails to remember the first five years of his life. The mysteries are how any human is able to remember anything at all, how people asked questions with specific answers are able to instantly answer correctly by giving information they learned decades ago, and also why old people are able to remember very well what occurred to them 50 or 60 years ago. 

Nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a device for storing learned information, and nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a device for retrieving learned information. The brain has no known writing mechanism and no known mechanism for reading learned information. The microscopic examination of brain tissue has never detected the slightest trace of anything a human ever learned, even though the brains of many corpses of recently-deceased people have been studied by scientists, and even though much brain tissue extracted from living people has been microscopically studied. 

Neuroscientists senselessly claim that memories are stored in synapses, but the proteins that make up synapses have average lifetimes 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans remember things (average lifetimes of only a few weeks). Synapses fail to even transmit data reliably, with each transmission across a synaptic gap occurring with a reliability of only 50% or less. Such signal transmission unreliability should make both a brain storage of memory and a brain retrieval of memory impossible, because signals would have to pass over so very many synapses when either event occurred (there are very many synapses for every neuron). A human can remember the answers to very many thousands of questions instantly, but nothing in a brain can explain such a wonder. Humans construct things that allow the instant retrieval of information, and so we know the type of things that make possible instant information retrieval. Those things are addresses, indexes and sorting. The brain has no addresses, no indexes, and no sorting. The physical architecture of the brain makes sorting within it impossible. Humans can learn things instantly, something that cannot be explained by synapse strengthening which is a slow affair.

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "Synaptic transmission and axonal transfer of nerve impulses are too slow to organize coordinated activity in large areas of the central nervous system. Numerous observations confirm this view [73]. The duration of a synaptic transmission is at least 0.5 ms, thus the transmission across thousands of synapses takes about hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds. The transmission speed of action potentials varies between 0.5 m/s and 120 m/s along an axon. More than 50% of the nerves fibers in the corpus callosum are without myelin, thus their speed is reduced to 0.5 m/s. How can these low velocities (i.e. classical signals) explain the fast processing in the nervous system?" -- The paper "Emission of Mitochondrial Biophotons and their Effect on Electrical Activity of Membrane via Microtubules" by 7 scientists.
• "Neural circuits consist of many noisy, slow components, with individual neurons subject to ion channel noise, axonal propagation delays, and unreliable and slow synaptic transmission." -- Four scientists (link). 
• "Neurons communicate primarily through chemical synapses, and that communication is critical for proper brain function. However, chemical synaptic transmission appears unreliable: for most synapses, when an action potential arrives at an axon terminal, about half the time, no neurotransmitter is released and so no communication happens... Furthermore, when neurotransmitter is released at an individual synaptic release site, the size of the local postsynaptic membrane conductance change is also variable. Given the importance of synapses, the energetic cost of generating action potentials, and the evolutionary timescales over which the brain has been optimized, the high level of synaptic noise seems surprising."  -- Four scientists (link). 
• "The probability of [synaptic] vesicle release [i.e. successful synaptic transmission] is known to be generally low (0.1 to 0.4) from in vitro studies in some vertebrate and invertebrate systems (Stevens, 1994). This unreliability is further compounded by the trial-to-trial variability in the amplitude of the post-synaptic response to a vesicular release." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "The release probability, the average probability that an active zone of a presynaptic terminal releases one or more vesicles following an action potential, is tightly regulated. Measurements in cultured neurons or in slices indicate that this probability can vary greatly between synapses, but on average it is estimated to be as high as 0.5....Existing evidence thus suggests that under physiological conditions in vivo, presynaptic action potentials trigger the release of neurotransmitter much less frequently than what is observed in in vitro preparations." -- A paper by two scientists, suggesting synapses transmit signals with a reliability much less than 50% (link). 
• "On average most synapses respond to only less than half of the presynaptic spikes, and if they respond, the amplitude of the postsynaptic current varies. This high degree of unreliability has been puzzling as it impairs information transmission." -- Four scientists (link).
• "Transmission at individual synaptic contacts on CAI hippocampal pyramidal neurons has been found to be very unreliable, with greater than half of the arriving presynaptic nerve impulses failing to evoke a postsynaptlc response." -- Two scientists (link). 
• "A precise estimate of the in vivo [synaptic] release probability is difficult, but...it can be expected to be closer to 0.1 than to the previous estimates of around 0.5. " -- "The low synaptic release probability in vivo" by J. Gerard G. Borst (link). 
• "The average number of connections between areas in different hemispheres is even smaller, below 1,500 axons. While previous studies have hinted that connectivity between some areas could be sparse [1], the overall sparsity of cortical connections implied by the present study still comes as a surprise. It is as if a traffic system presumed to consist of multilane highways running between most brain areas in fact consists of just a few precarious footpaths." --  The paper "The Highways and Byways of the Brain" by two scientists (link), a paper referring to "the generally very sparse connectivity" of the brain. 
• "The scale of the vast gulf in absolute connectivity between local and long-range connections is startling."--  Paper "An estimation of the absolute number of axons indicates that human cortical areas are sparsely connected" by two scientists (link).
• "Interestingly, signal propagation speeds in various conditions are similar (~0.1 m/s). Neural spikes generated by 4-aminopyridine (4-AP) travel with a longitudinal speed of 0.09/0.03 m/s along the CA3 region (Kiblerand Durand, 2011), whereas in the presence of picrotoxin, synchronous firing events propagate longitudinally at 0.14 /0.04m/s (Miles et al., 1988). High K+-, low Mg2+-, and zero-Ca2+- triggered spikes again exhibit speeds of 0.07-0.1 m/s, 0.1– 0.15m/s, and 0.04 – 0.15 m/s, respectively (Haas and Jefferys, 1984;Quilichini et al., 2002;Liu et al., 2013). In normal tissue, theta oscillations travel with a speed of 0.08 – 0.107 m/s in the hippocampus of living rodent rats (Lubenov and Siapas, 2009),whereas carbachol-induced theta oscillations travels with a speed of 0.119 m/s along the CA1 cell layer and a 0.141 m/s along the CA3 cell layer (Cappaert et al., 2009). Together, it is clear that 0.1m/s is a common propagation speed regardless of experimental models." -- Two scientists telling us that a common speed of brain signal transmission is about 3.6 inches per second (i.e. a tenth of a meter per second), 1000 times slower than the "100 meters per second" commonly given (link). 

Gadgets Tracking Your Brain Waves Continuously Will Probably Not Help You

 The false "brains make minds" dogma has inspired medical predators and quack gadget sellers. One guy has made an enormous fortune luring people into medically unnecessary PET scans that have a significant chance of increasing someone's risk of cancer. 

PET scans involve the injection of radioactive materials into the body. The radioactive materials have a short half-life, and neuroscientists claim the scans are not risky. But there is every reason to suspect that such scans involve very significant risks to people. PET scans involve significant doses of ionizing radiation that increase the chance of cancer. A PET scan typically involves as much radiation as a CT scan, and it is well-known that every CT scan that you have slightly increases your chance of cancer.   A page on the website of the American Cancer Society says this:

"A PET/CT exposes you to about 25 mSv of radiation. This is equal to about 8 years of average background radiation exposure."

How does that translate to an increased cancer risk? Using the calculator at the web site www.xrayrisk.com (which also allows you to calculate the risk of other things such as CT scans), we get the estimate below:

The answer is that 25 mSv of radiation increases your cancer risk by about 1 part in 328. 

The guy I refer to above is someone who lures people into paying huge amounts of money for medically unnecessary and potentially hazardous PET scans, under the false premise that such scans will tell you something you did not know about your mind.  Scanning brains sheds no insight on a person's mind. But a scammer can always dredge up some low-quality Questionable Research Practices study to try and make it look like some tiny thing found here or there in a brain scan has some value in telling you something about your mind. 

A company called ATLAS has recently announced some very expensive brain monitoring product that has similarities to what I mention above, except that in this case no objection can be made about a potential health hazard (the product seems to involve no health risk).  The product is announced in the recent press release here. Strangely, the press release has no picture of what the device looks like when someone is wearing it. Looking around in the company's site, we get this image:

You have to wonder: how could such a device stay in the shown position? Through some adhesive, perhaps? I would have thought that the way to invent a continuous EEG-like device for monitoring brain waves would have been to create something that leveraged the ear-touching parts of eyeglasses. 

But let's ignore this issue, and ask: is there any reason to think that such a device might be worth its very high cost? The device has a price tag of 499 dollars, and also requires a 30 dollar a month subscription. 

The press release fails to mention any benefit in any convincing way. The press release gives us this laughable sales pitch:

"Imagine a world where data from your own mind helps you redefine what truly matters. ATLAS enables you to ask questions to better understand how your mind works: Was I really present for dinner with my family? Who makes me feel more like myself? Do I actually perform better under pressure? Why am I defining a successful run in minutes rather than stress relief? When I'm exhausted, what do I still show up for? ATLAS helps you discover what brings out the best in you everyday and enables you to become more of that person to optimize your life."

This sales pitch is comically bungling. No, wearing some brain wave tracking device will not enable you to ask questions such as the listed questions. You can ask those questions just fine without wearing any such device. And one of the examples of a question is laughable: "Was I really present for dinner with my family?" You don't need some fancy brain wave tracking device to know that.  The last sentence in the quote is pure "hot air." 

What are brain waves? They are waves that show up in EEG readings taken when lots of electrodes are attached to someone's head. A full EEG reading will involve some cap with many different electrodes positioned at different spots on the top of someone's head.  But you can take a kind of "poor man's EEG" by using readings from just one spot in the head. 

A full EEG reading

Can EEG readings be analyzed to determine what a person is thinking or feeling? No, they cannot. Nowadays there is a great deal of pareidolia and junk science involving the analyzing of brain waves, typically occurring in studies guilty of Questionable Research Practices. There is no robust evidence that anything someone is thinking or feeling or remembering can be determined from analyzing brain waves (with a very few exceptions such as fear or rage, which might cause something like panic trembling or facial expressions that might be detectable by analyzing brain waves, because of related body movements that cause brain wave blips). 

The press release has a chief executive officer of the company telling us this bad example of groundless baloney: "ATLAS gives you a map of your own mind, so you can understand what brings out the best in you, change what doesn't, and become who you want to be." There are no are no EEG readings and no brain scans that can ever produce any such thing as a map of your mind. 

A FAQ page of the company offers no specifics that would justify a purchase. We read, "Atlas does not read individual thoughts, decode memories or know the private meaning of what you are thinking." We merely read these dubious claims:

"It can tell whether you're stressed or relaxed, or whether your mind is engaged with the outside world or if you're in your head, reflecting or focusing on deep work. It can also tell when your mind is using a lot of energy and when it is exhausted and in need of some recovery."

EEG readings cannot distinguish between (1) a motionless person with closed eyes who is doing mental work and (2) a motionless person with closed eyes who is resting his mind. But any type of muscle movements can show up in EEG readings, including mere eye movements, strong facial expressions and finger movements.   So EEG readings could probably distinguish between someone "engaged with the outside world" in the sense of reading, looking around, or using a smartphone or computer, and someone who was sitting motionless and reflecting, with his eyes closed or staring into space. But why would you need some fancy device to distinguish between those two things, when you would already know which you were doing?  And also, you don't need some fancy device to tell you when your mind is exhausted. 

A continuous EEG reader might rarely be useful in detecting epilepsy. But only about 1 in 26 people have epilepsy. And epilepsy produces seizures that allow you to detect it without any high-tech device. 

If the company selling this Atlas device wants to make a convincing case for its brain wave reader product, it will have to produce something way better than its laughable press release here. And it will need to put up a FAQ page much more convincing than its current FAQ page.

He Lost a Tenth of His Brain, But Still Had Above Average Intelligence

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

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

 Below is one of the very interesting cases I get when using the phrase "brain gone." In the 1927 news account, we read of a boy (Alfonso Bedra) who lost five ounces of his brain. The average ten-year-old boy has a brain with a weight of about 40 to 50 ounces. We read that the despite this large loss of brain tissue, the boy had above average intelligence. You can read the story here. 

Use the link here to read other post of mine describing cases of people who retained above-average intelligence despite losing very large parts of their brain.

Goofs at the Brains Blog Site

 A site with the title of "The Brains Blog" can be found at the URL of https://philosophyofbrains.com/.  It has a byline of "Since 2005, a leading forum for work in the philosophy and science of mind." Let's look at some of the posts at the site:

• "Caitlan Mace: Vehicle Indeterminacy in Memory Neuroscience." The post starts out with a repetition of groundless boasts of neuroscientists about "memory engrams," with the author stating, "I draw on neuroscientific investigations of memory engrams, which are neural representations of memory that result from learning-induced changes, retain information about some fact, feature of the world, or past experience, and are used to retrieve that information for memory recall." All such claims are spurious and bogus, and are not backed up by any robust research. No one has ever discovered in a brain any such thing as a representation of a fact or anything anyone learned. Microscopic examination of brain tissue has failed to produce a single sentence any one ever learned, and has also failed to produce a single word anyone ever learned, with there also never being any discovery of a single image anyone ever saw or a single pixel of any such image. Later the author makes this statement conflicting with her previous boast: "It remains unclear which kind of structure—molecules, synapses, or neural ensembles—performs a representational role in any case."  The correct answer is: there is no evidence that any of these things play any such role in representing something someone learned; and the failure to find such evidence is a very strong for believing that no representations of learned information exist in the brain. 
• "Self-Consciousness and 'Split'  Brains: The Objection from Unified Behavior." We have very bad misrepresentation from a writer who states, "In yesterday’s post I argued that a split-brain subject is not unitary qua thinker but is actually composed of two thinkers." Split-brain subjects are those who have two separated hemispheres of the brain. You can have such subjects by two ways. On one hand, quite a few people are born without any of the corpus callosum fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain (a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum). Then there are those born with such fibers, who undergo operations in which such fibers are severed, to prevent very bad seizures that are resistant to drug treatment. Contrary to the prediction of the claim that brains make minds, which predicts that split-brain patients should have two minds, such split-brain subjects have a single unified mind. Attempts by materialists to claim otherwise are one of the worst examples of deception by materialists. 
• "What do out of body experiences tell us about self-consciousness; Or, Disorders of Self-Consciousness Part 5". In the 300+ posts at this blog supposedly dedicated to "the philosophy and science of mind," this is the only post mentioning out-of-body experiences in its title. We have no substantive discussion of the topic, but merely an attempt to gaslight the significant fraction of the population that has such experiences, by accusing them of "disorders of self-consciousness." The post has no evidence of any deep scholarship of this topic. The author makes a bad description of conditions under which out-of-body experiences occur, failing to mention that they occur during close encounters with death such as cardiac arrest. 
• "Introduction" and "CFP: Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice." These are the only two posts that come up when I search for "near-death experience" at the Brains Blog site. The second post has only a mere mention of "near-death experience" as a bullet list of topics that will be discussed in some journal that is being promoted. The first post says nothing of any substance about near-death experience, other than the promise that in some book it will be shown that near-death "experiences are contingent on the brain." That is not true, because such experiences often occur during cardiac arrest when the brain is electrically shut down, in the state called asystole in which brain waves appear as flat lines. 

The topic of near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are two of the most important topics that should be covered by any blog dealing philosophically with the brain and the mind. But we get nothing of any substance on these topics in the 300+ posts on this blog. 

The physical design of the blog is poor.  You cannot conveniently navigate its posts, unless you wish to do endless clicking on titles that are only followed by a few lines from the corresponding post. None of the posts is tagged. So you cannot conveniently examine all posts on a particular topic, unless you are willing to laboriously type in topic names in a search bar. 

Using the blog's search tool, I search for topics that should be discussed by a blog of this type that has been published since 2005, without getting any results. Specifically:

• A search for "clairvoyance" gives 0 results. 
• A search for "telepathy" gives 0 results, as does a search for "Ganzfeld" (a word that would be used by anyone decently discussing ESP research), as does a search for "extrasensory perception." 
• A search for "HSAM" gives 0 results, as does a search for "hyperthymesia."
• A search for "autistic savants" gives 0 results, as does a search for the most famous autistic savant, Kim Peek.
• A search for "psychical research" gives only one result, the gaslighting article mentioned above. 
• A search for "eidetic memory" gives 0 results, as does a search for "photographic memory."
• A search for "hemispherectomy" gives only one badly misinforming article, which does not mention hemispherectomy cases.
• A search for "near-death experience" gives only two results, neither mentioning near-death experiences in the title, and neither discussing the topic in any depth.
• A search for "hydrocephalus" produces 0 results, as does a search for "French civil servant," meaning that the blog is failing to discuss cases of loss of most of the brain but good mental performance.
• A search for "morphogenesis" produces 0 results (see here and here for why the topic is very relevant to the topic of how minds arise).
• A search for "terminal lucidity" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "synaptic delay" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "dendritic spines" produces 0 results. 
• A search for "Questionable Research Practices" (an epidemic in today's neuroscience research) produces only 1 result, which fails to discuss the topic decently. 
• A search for "protein turnover" produces 0 results, as does a search for "protein half-life" and "protein lifetime."

These are all topics that are very relevant to "the philosophy and science of mind." It seems that the experts long writing at the Brains Blog are failing to adequately study the things that they should be studying in order to have an intelligent philosophy of mind consistent with observations. 

What are some of the things a philosopher of mind should be doing? They include these:

• He should be constantly testing the claims that brains make minds,  by looking for physical shortfalls of the brain which may discredit such a claim. 
• He should be enumerating all of the mental powers that humans have, and be asking whether there are credible neuroscience explanations for each such power, expressed in the form of detailed theories "hitting all the bases," rather than just vacuous hand-waving catchphrases. 
• He should be constantly testing the claim that brains store memories, by looking for physical shortfalls of the brain which may discredit such a claim, and observation failures that may discredit such a claim. 
• He should be critically examining the research output of today's neuroscientists, always asking whether best-practices are being followed, and looking for cases in which low-quality research is being produced because of the use of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes and unreliable measuring techniques. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to cases of exceptional human mental performance, cases in which people seem to remember better and recall better and think faster and calculate better than a brain could ever do. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to reports and experiments suggesting psychic phenomena and paranormal human mind abilities, reports suggesting humans have mental abilities that a brain could never allow. 
• He should be giving the deepest study to reports of experiences such as out-of-body experiences, reports we would never expect to occur if the brain is the source of the mind. 
• He should  be giving the deepest study to medical case histories involving loss of brain tissue or loss or half or more of the brain, to see whether they produce results expected under "brains make minds" and "brains store memories" assumptions, or whether they produce results not expected under such assumptions. 
• He should be making a very deep study of human biology and morphogenesis, to see whether there is a "failure to explain the origin of a human body" that is of great relevance to the discussion of whether there is a failure to explain the origin of a human mind.

I don't see much of these activities going on at the Brains Blog site. 

They Had Good Minds After Losing the Left Half of Their Brains

Although neuroscientists are brain specialists, very many neuroscientists are not very deep and broad scholars of the topic of human brains. A typical neuroscientist may be able to tell you in very great detail about some narrow facet of human brains, and may be able to tell you in the greatest detail about how to use some machine that is used to study brains. But the same neuroscientist may have failed to properly study the topic of human brains in a way that involves learning about every relevant thing you could about human brains. Ask that neuroscientist to tell you what happens when you remove half of a human brain, and you may get an answer that is wrong. Ask that neuroscientist to tell you how reliably chemical synapses transmit nerve signals (action potentials), and you may get an answer that is wrong. Ask that neuroscientist to tell you how quickly a brain electrically shuts down when the heart stops (reaching a state called asystole), and you may get an answer that is wrong. 

Part of the job of properly studying brains is to study very thoroughly all of the most impressive cases of high mental performance despite very high brain damage. Relatively few neuroscientists show signs of having studied such a topic. In order to properly study such a topic, you must study unusual medical case histories.  Very many of the most important and relevant medical case histories are recorded in books, newspapers and magazines. But can you ever recall reading of a neuroscientist searching newspapers for unusual case histories in neuroscience? I can never recall reading of such activity by a neuroscientist. 

Luckily there are some web sites that contain very many of the most relevant examples of such medical case histories that are relevant to the question of whether the human mind is the source of the mind and whether the human mind is the storage place of human memories. One of those sites is the very site you are reading.  In my series of posts labeled "High Mental Function Despite Large Brain Damage," which you can read here, I describe many of the most important case histories that are  relevant to the question of whether the human brain is the source of the mind (keep pressing Older Posts at the bottom right to read the whole series). Now let me provide another such case, one I learned about from searching old newspaper articles for a use of the phrase "half a brain." The 1976 case is one that you can read about using the link here. Below are some excerpts from the newspaper article.

We read of a young man named Bruce Lipstadt who had a hemispherectomy operation when he was five years old, an operation that removed the left half of his brain.  Operations of that type are only done when someone is being plagued by very severe seizures, and the seizures cannot be controlled by medication.  The operation was done because as a young boy Bruce was suffering from 10 to 12 seizures a day. 

We are told that despite having the left half of his brain surgically removed, Bruce can ride a bike, swim and play sports. We are told that Bruce got an A grade (the best grade) in a course on statistics at a university. We are told Bruce's speech is normal. We are told that "although not a genius, Bruce has superior intelligence." We are told that Bruce works as a traffic controller, and that next spring he will get a degree in sociology from a university. 

The 1976 newspaper article here gives us some more details on Bruce Lipstadt. We read that his IQ tests showed his verbal IQ to be 126, well above the average IQ of 100. We read this:

A verbal IQ of 126 in a subject who had the left half of his brain removed is a result that would seem to "make mincemeat" out of claims that the brain is the source of the human mind. One of the accounts above mentions an authority named Sugar. The Bruce Lipstadt case seems to be the same one mentioned in the scientific paper here co-authored by Oscar Sugar MD, one entitled "Development of above normal language and intelligence 21 years after left hemispherectomy."

The newspaper article here tells of a film about a man who had the left half of his brain removed, but who (five months after the operation) could still "sing, distinguish colors, and pass simple tests of reading, writing and arithmetic."

At the 2:59 mark in the Youtube.com video here, we get the table below, which shows some impressive intellectual achievements in patients who underwent a hemispherectomy operation to remove half of their brains:

We have some stunning results. All of these people with half a brain had some college studies. Two had achieved a two-year Associate's Degree. One had achieved a Master's Degree. The top row tells whether the left or the right half of the brain was removed.  The two rightmost columns give details for people who had the left half of their brain removed, both of which had some college studies, and both of which were employed. 

At the 5:03 mark in the video, we have the chart below. It shows the IQ of 7 subjects who had a hemispherectomy operation to remove half of their brains. The dots in yellow are people who had left half of the brain removed. Each column represents a particular type of IQ. The first column is full IQ. The second column is verbal IQ. The third column is performance IQ, something that does tests involving non-verbal tasks and motor tasks, with speed of completion affecting the score. We see that one of the subjects who had the left half of his brain removed had above-average verbal IQ. 

At the 8:07 mark in the video, we have a chart showing that one of the left hemispherectomy patients (who had the left half of the brain removed) had a way-above-average 130 score on reading comprehension. 

At the link here, you can read the very interesting paper "AN ENORMOUS CEREBRAL TUMOUR" by William E. Conroy M.D. We read of a patient F. H. who was observed in 1889. The patient had an operation to remove the tumor, but died soon thereafter. 

On page 179 we read that an autopsy was performed, and that after the tumor was removed, the left half of the brain was all but gone, being only the size of the palm of a hand:

On page 180 we read that this "enormous" tumor in the left half of the brain produced almost no mental effects. We read that the boy was "intelligent" and "expressed himself well" and "read much with enjoyment" until his eyesight failed. We read that the mental faculties were "not seriously impaired."  We read this:

On page 16 of an 1899 book J. Sanderson Christison, M.D.  states this: "And when we find that individuals have filled the business and social functions of life in the ordinary way, who were either destitute of a corpus callosum (see page 65) or had but little more than half a brain (see page 62), it is evident that external features are not necessarily of fundamental significance." 

On page 47 Dr. Christison says this:

"Dr. E. W. Taylor reports a man, 36 years of age, with extensive destruction of the left frontal lobe of the brain, and yet, says Dr. Taylor: 'When I last saw him the whole impression was that of a clear-headed vigorous man of exceptional intellect, but neurasthenic. A few days before his death he was filling a responsible position, and making decisions of importance with accuracy and judgment.' "

On pages 58-59 Christison says this:

"Dr. Charles Phelps reports a man who died at the age of 25 years with a large abscess in the middle area of the left cerebral hemisphere, while a large proportion of both hemispheres was either softened or invaded with punctate hemorrhages. Yet Dr. Phelps reports that this man 'had absolute integrity of all his mental faculties and special senses without either having aberration or decadence, and was cheerful and slept well.' "

On the same page 59 Christison says this:

"Drs. J. J. Putnam and M. H. Richardson report a business-man, 30 years of age, whose entire left cerebral hemisphere (except the occipital lobe and the lower portions of the frontal and temporal lobes) was occupied by a diseased growth, 'which everywhere compressed the adjoining brain tissues and to a great extent destroyed them,'  and yet in this man 'no notable mental changes were observable.'  'His mind was clear and he read and understood with pleasure, and enjoyed the society of his family and friends,' and although 'he dragged his right leg he walked well, going to church and back half a mile off, and he drove his horse to town eight miles away, four days before his death.' "

On page 61 Dr. Christison says this:

"Dr. W. B. Haddon reports a man, 21 years of age, with an enormous tumor occupying the left cerebral hemisphere, and severely compressing adjacent structures. Yet, although he occasionally had an epileptic fit and stammered slightly from childhood, he had no paralysis. He was somewhat opinionated, but evinced no moral perversion. At the time of his death (in a fit) he was a clerk in the Steward's office of St. Thomas' Hospital, London, and a few days later he would have entered the government examination for a second grade certificate in perspective and drawing, branches in which he was pronounced by experts to be exceptionally proficient."

On page 62 Dr. Christison says this:

 "Andral reports a man who died at the age of 28 years with the whole of his right cerebral hemisphere so completely atrophied that its covering membrane (pia mater) formed a cyst in which there was not a trace of brain tissue. The floor of the cyst was formed by the optic thalamus, the corpus striatum, and the parts on a level with these two bodies. Yet, says Andral, this man  'had received a good education, had a good memory, and exhibited as much intelligence as most men' (19)."

How to Tell Whether a Neuroscience Research Announcement Is Unjustified

Questionable Research Practices and shoddy methods are extremely abundant in today's neuroscience research.  How is it that you can detect such examples of poor research? I will give here a method. The method mainly involves looking for certain types of defects in scientific papers, but also involves looking for defects in press announcements about such papers. 

Step #1: open up a "defect list" file

You will be using this file to record any defects you find in either the original scientific paper or any of the press announcements that occur about that paper.  You can create such a file by getting a blank piece of paper, opening up a new file using a tool such as Notepad, opening up a file using Google Docs, clicking on the Notes utility on your I-Pad, and so forth. 

Step #2: Look for a claim in the headline of an article or press release announcing the research that is not justified by any claims in the text of the article or the text of the academic press release. 

An article that you read announcing the research may or may not be the academic press announcing the research. If the press article is not the original academic press release, it may have a link to the academic press release.  The academic press release will typically have a link to a newly published scientific paper, and such a link may also be found in some article based on the press release. 

An extremely common defect of press articles about scientific papers is that they very often make boastful headline claims that are not justified by anything claimed or established in the articles underneath such headlines. This often occurs for economic reasons, to create the effect known as clickbait. Clickbait is when online articles have sensational-sounding headlines or interesting-sounding headlines that lure you into going to some web page that has ads. The people running or funding such pages thereby get advertising revenue when such pages are viewed. 

Clickbait is enormously abundant in the world of science journalism. University press releases very often contain headlines never justified by anything mentioned in the story underneath such headlines. Press articles based on such press releases very often contain headlines never justified by anything mentioned in the story underneath such headlines, or never justified by anything stated in the body of the press release such articles were based on.

A simple starting point in detecting unjustified neuroscience research announcements is to simply compare headlines to the text underlying such headlines, and note cases in which the headline is unjustified. Record any such cases in your "Defects list" file, nothing the URL of the corresponding press article or press release.

I will give a very simple example of such a thing. A headline may announce "Scientists Unlock the Secret of Human Memory Retrieval" But the underlying story may refer to research that only dealt with mice. In such a case the unjustified hype is obvious -- the research told us nothing about human memory. 

Step #3: find a copy of the scientific paper that is the basis of the press release or press article. 

Generally the press article or press release will have a link to a scientific paper that is the basis of the research announcement. In the easiest case, you will simply be able to click on that link to get the full text of the paper.  But in many cases when you click on the link, you will go to a page that merely has the abstract of the paper. There may be some "Full Text" link that asks you to pay money. Such a barrier to you reading the paper is called a paywall. I strongly advise against ever paying money merely to research the quality of a neuroscience paper.  Most neuroscience research papers these days are poor quality papers guilty of multiple examples of Questionable Research Practices. 

But if you find yourself blocked by a paywall, there are some things you can do to try to get the paper:

(1) Go to the Google Scholar site (https://scholar.google.com/), and copy the name of the paper into the search bar. See whether the paper shows in the search results, with a link to the full text of the paper.

(2) Go to the biology preprint server (https://www.biorxiv.org/) and copy the name of the paper into the search bar. See whether the paper shows in the search results. If it does, you will typically be able to get the full text of the paper by clicking on the Full Text tab on that site. 

Step #4: examine the title of the paper and read its abstract, looking for a claim in the title that is not matched by any claim in the abstract

It is surprisingly common these days for the titles of neuroscience research papers to make claims that are not justified by any statements made in either the abstract of the paper or the full text of the paper. If you find any discrepancy between the title of the paper and the results announced in the abstract, record such a discrepancy in your "defects list" file.

Step #5: if the paper is an experimental research file, look for evidence of insufficient study group size

Since the use of way-too-small study group sizes is amazingly predominant these days in experimental neuroscience research,  the abstract of every paper should tell how many subjects were used in each of the study groups. But like people who are trying to hide their shortcomings, the abstracts of experimental neuroscience research papers rarely list the study group sizes used. So you will usually need to search the text of the paper for an indication of the study group sizes used.  

Any experimental neuroscience paper using fewer than 15 subjects in any of its study groups should be regarded as a paper that has used a way-too-small study group size. There are actually reasons for thinking that any use of fewer than 25 subjects in any of the study groups is a reason for doubting the quality of the study, particularly if the work involves brain scans of humans.  

Do not stop looking for study group sizes if you see a statement indicating a fairly large study group size such as 50. What very often happens in neuroscience papers is that the paper will announce a fairly large number of subjects (such as stating "50 mice were analyzed"), but will then divide this group up into smaller study groups, so that the smallest study groups used is much smaller than such a fairly large number. Look for any cases of any study group sizes smaller than 15. 

How do you find what study group sizes were used? The easiest way is to search in the text for the phrases "n=" or "n =". It is a custom in neuroscience research papers to list study group sizes using phrases such as "n =8." For example, the text may vaguely refer to "subjects" or "mice" without specifying how many. Then the text of the paper may state the exact number of subjects by using a phrase such as "n = 10." Another way to search for study group sizes is to search for the phrases "mice," "rats," "subjects" or "humans" and look for a number preceding such phrases. 

Whenever any such searches reveal a study group size of less than 15 or 20, you have discovered prima facie evidence of a too-small study group size, and you should record such a defect in your "defects list" file. Rarely you will find a paper that makes no mention of how many experimental subjects were used. The failure to record so vital a fact is itself a defect that you should note in your "defects list" file.

When an experimental neuroscientist is doing his job right, he will use some statistical method to do what is called a power analysis or a sample size calculation or a power size calculation. This involves some mathematical calculation of what sample size was needed to achieve some particular degree of statistical power.  Many science journals require that a paper state whether or not such a calculation was done. Search for the phrase "sample size calculation" or "power size calculation" or "power calculation" to see whether such a calculation was done. You will often read a confession that no such calculation was done.  If you find such a confession, write that down in your "defects list" file.  If you fail to find any mention of such a calculation, that is also a defect that should be noted in your defects list file. 

Step #6: look for a failure to use controls

Almost any experimental neuroscience experiment should be using controls.  In experimental science a control can be a subject that does not have some characteristic or variable or intervention being tested, or a control can be a neutral state that does not match some experience or condition being tested.  For example, if you are testing some medicine, you can give 15 subjects the medicine, and give 15 other subjects some placebo that is not some medicine. Or, if you are testing whether some cognitive activity such as memory recall causes increased activation of some brain region, you might take 15 brain scans while a subject was engaging in memory recall, and 15 brains "control" scans on some other day in which the subject was asked to think of nothing.

It is easy to check whether a scientific study made use of controls. Just do a text search in the paper for the word "control" looking for usage that indicates controls were used. Typically phrases such as "control subjects" or "control state" will be used.  If you fail to find any evidence controls were used, record that failure in your "defects list" file.

Step #7: look for a failure to follow a detailed blinding protocol

In experimental neuroscience a blinding protocol is usually needed for a robust result. A blinding protocol is a procedure that helps to minimize the chance of a biased analysis.  I can give some examples to illustrate the concept. Imagine you brain scan 15 subjects who were asked to recall memories while their brains were scanned, and you also brain scan 15 other subjects who were asked to think of nothing while their brains were being scanned.  Then suppose you give the brain scans to some analyst.  If the analyst knows that the first 15 brain scans were from people who were recalling things, and the second 15 subjects were from people thinking of nothing, and also that the purpose of the test is to look for brain differences in memory recall, such an analyst will be all too likely to "see what his bosses are hoping he sees," and produce a biased result.  The risk of such bias could be avoided by a careful blinding protocol.  Each set of brain scans could be assigned a random number, with someone recording which number matched a person recalling something, and which number corresponded to a person not recalling something.  If there was a stack of 30 folders, each containing one subject's brain scans, the folders could be shuffled so that the analyst could not tell which one came from some one recalling something. It could then be stated in the paper that the person analyzing the brains was "blind to which subjects had engaged in memory recall." 

There is another type of blinding that could occur. Instead of the brain scan analyst being told that half of the subjects were engaging in memory recall, and half were not, the analyst could be told nothing at all about what the people were doing during the scans. This would make it all the more unlikely that the analyst would see some effect that wasn't really there.  Normally in every study there are multiple ways in which blinding should occur. 

A failure to follow blinding protocols is one of the most egregious defects of today's neuroscience research. Most experimental neuroscience studies fail to follow any blinding protocol. The failure can easily be found if you have the full text of the paper. Simply do a text search for the word "blind." If you fail to find meaningful uses of the word "blind" in the text of the paper, thereby indicating a failure to follow a blinding protocol, record that failure in your "defects list" file.

One or two uses of the word "blind" in the text of a paper does not show that an effective blinding protocol was used. It is all too easy for some experimenter to have an ineffective blinding protocol that fails to achieve much of any real blinding. The smaller the study group size, the easier it is for any attempt at blinding to be ineffective.  I will give an example. Suppose a study used only seven rats for an experimental group, and seven rats for a control group.  The seven rats in the experimental group might be given some modification not given to the seven rats in the control group.  After being given foot tags to identify them with random numbers, the fourteen rats might then be given to an analyst asked to test for some difference.  But if the analyst was involved in applying the modification, it might be all too easy for him to recognize which rat had the modification, and which did not.  For example, only the rats given the modification might have some surgical mark showing they had the modification. What this example shows is that to be effective, a blinding protocol must be a detailed, carefully thought-out plan that prevents "sham blinding" in which someone supposedly blind to which subjects were in the control group is not really blind to such a thing.  

If you either fail to see the word "blind" being used in the text of an experimental neuroscience paper, or if you find the word "blind" or "blinding" only being used once or twice "in passing," you should note the result in your "defects list" file. Also note it in your "defects list" file if you fail to find a detailed discussion of a blinding protocol. If a study merely claims that some analysis was done by analysts "blind" to whether the subjects were control subjects, and fails to discuss how a careful detailed plan was followed to prevent "sham" blinding, that also should be recorded in your "defects list" file. 

Step #8: look for convoluted analysis pathways that may have "conjured up" some illusory result

In my post "Convoluted 'Spaghetti Code' Analysis Pathways Help Neuroscientists Conjure Phantasms That Don't Exist," I gave two examples of scientific papers that used ridiculously convoluted analysis pathways.  Don't be impressed when you see such methods, which may seem like gobbledygook or rigmarole.  Such over-complicated methods are typically not signs of good experimental methods, but instead a failure to follow a straightforward technique for analyzing data. What is going on often can be describe as "keep torturing the data until it confesses." 

Besides doing a quick scan looking for byzantine analysis pathways that sound like statistical "monkey business," there are some things you can look for:

(1) Look for the word "iterations" which typically indicates that some data was passed through a programming loop in which the data may have been distorted or contorted or convoluted. 

(2) Look for the phrases "processing" (particularly "data processing," "preprocessing" or "pre-processing" or "post-processing" or "postprocessing"), phrases which indicate that data has been passed through some computer program.  Once data has been passed through a computer program, there are any number of ways in which the data can be contorted, distorted or corrupted.  Often computer programs processing neuroscience data are written by scientists who are not professional computer programmers, and who can often produce unreliable results. If the programming job is given to a professional programmer, the person may be someone who does not understand the data, leading to unreliable results. Programming code used in scientific research is very often poorly written and poorly commented, producing effects that may be known only to the original programming. Very often the result is a "black box" situation in which even the original programmer does not understand what is happening to the data. 

If you find evidence of such dubious-sounding analysis pathways or dubious pre-processing or post-processing of brain scan data or neuroscience data, add some lines to your "defects list" file recording such a finding. 

Step #9: look for fake data in the science paper, which may be described using the word "simulated" or "simulation." 

Neuroscientists often look for things they cannot find but are hoping to find. When they cannot find such things, they often resort to generating simulated data to try to fill in the gap. Whenever you hear the word "simulated" in a neuroscience paper, you should presume that this actually means "fake."  Search for the words "simulated" or "simulation" in a neuroscience paper. Note the resorting to such simulated data in your "defects list" file. Trying to pass off simulated data rather as if it was real-world data is a sleazy trick you should "throw a flag on" when critically analyzing neuroscience papers. 

Step #10: look for p-hacking 

Modern experimental science has the silly rule that a result is treated of worthy of publication if someone found it to have a "statistical significance" of .05 or less.  This rule ends up being a very silly one in many cases in which it is very easy to get such a result when it is merely a false alarm. Very roughly you can think of a statistical significance of .05 as a result you might get by chance once in 20 tries. Given a lack of pre-registration in scientific studies, it is rather easy to get such a result. You can just keep trying something multiple times, calling these trials Experiment 1, Experiment 2, and so forth. When you get a result that you would get by chance once in 20 times, you can then write up that result, and describe only it. 

How do you find evidence of unimpressive results such as this in a scientific paper? Statistical significance is reported using a phrase such as "p < .05" or "p < .01" or "p < .001."  You can search for such phrases. Whenever you find the phrase "p < .05"  it is a sign that an unimpressive result was obtained.  Write down any such occurrence in your "defects list" file. The more examples you find of the phrase "p < .05" the stronger the case you can make that "p-hacking" went on. 

Don't be impressed if you find a stronger statistical significance reported in addition to a marginal statistical significance of "p < .05." What often happens is that the most relevant result will be some marginal borderline result of "p < .05" but other results not very relevant will be reported with a stronger statistical significance such as "p < .01" or "p < .001." This is often done as a kind of window dressing to give you the impression that the paper has more impressive results than it has. The results with higher statistical significance may be irrelevant to the main claim made by the paper. 

Step #11: look for lack of pre-registration 

It has been pointed out many times that when an experimenter fails to state before gathering data a hypothesis to be tested and a detailed research plan for how to gather and analyze data, there will be a much higher chance of some false alarm being reported. A researcher who is free to "make up his method as he goes along" will be free to keep playing around with data analysis pathways until he seems to find something he was hoping to find.  Pre-registration (also called the use of "registered reports") is when a researcher publishes a hypothesis to be tested and a detailed research plan before any data is gathered. It is widely recognized that following such a method greatly reduces the number of false alarms that are reported. 

It is easy to search in a scientific paper for whether pre-registration occurred. Simply search in the text of the paper for the terms "registered report," "pre-registered" or "pre-registration." If no such terms are found, note this in your "defects list" file. 

Step 12: look for unreliable measurements of memory, such as attempts to judge "freezing behavior." 

There are reliable ways to judge whether an animal remembered something, and also unreliable ways. A reliable way to judge whether a a rodent trained to fear some stimulus (such as a shock plate) is to measure heart spikes when the animal is placed near the pain-inducing stimulus.  Heart rates very dramatically spike in rodents when they are afraid. Another reliable way to judge whether a a rodent trained to fear some stimulus such as a shock plate is to use some setup such as the one shown below, in which an animal remembering the fear stimulus will take the harder path towards a reward rather the easier path.

A very unreliable way of measuring rodent recall of a fearful stimulus is to try to judge "freezing behavior," defined simply as immobility. My post here explains why such a technique is very unreliable as a way to judge whether recall or fear occurred.  Attempts to judge so-called "freezing behavior" are massively used in experimental neuroscience involving rodents and memory. This is an example of a dysfunctional research community tradition. If you find that the neuroscience paper you are examining made any use of judgments of "freezing behavior," note that in your "defects list" file.  All neuroscience papers relying on "freezing behavior" judgments are junk science.  

Once you have taken such steps, you have the basis for a critical review of a neuroscience paper.  Very often your "defects list" file will contain multiple examples of Questionable Research Practices, often more than five. Mentioning such defects, you can explain to a reader why some triumphal announcement of neuroscience progress is unjustified. 

Click to see left column more clearly

Click to see left column more clearly