His Bungling Panpsychism Pitch at Least Gets One Thing Right

 In academic circles it is commonly assumed that consciousness is generated by the brain. But many philosophers have been dissatisfied with this idea. Why is it that some particular arrangement of matter would cause Mind (a totally different type of thing) to emerge from the matter in a brain? To many that seems no more plausible than the idea that some particular arrangement of crystals in a rock might cause the rock to gush out blood.

One alternate idea is to assume that we have something like a soul, and that our mental experiences are produced not mainly by matter (the brain), but by something that is itself mental or spiritual. Another alternative (called idealism or immaterialism) is to believe that everything is mental, and that matter only exists as perceptions within minds.  A third alternative is the idea that the brain doesn't actually produce our minds, but somehow taps into some great external reality that is the source of our minds, perhaps in a way rather similar to how a television set receives TV signals, or how a smartphone connects with the internet. 

Yet another alternate idea is the radical notion known as panpsychism. Panpsychism has been described as the idea that consciousness is in everything.

This idea may not seem very unreasonable if we think of consciousness as some very simple thing. But the word “consciousness” describes only one aspect of human mentality, and there are many different aspects of the human mind. The visual below reminds us of the many aspects of mentality.

I doubt whether panpsychism theorists have thought out which of these aspects of mentality they think should be attributed to “all matter.” Below are some questions I would ask a panpsychist:

1. How could dead matter be said to have consciousness or mind, when objects such as rocks, atoms and electrons do not have sensory organs? Do you maintain that such objects have some existence like some person born blind and deaf into the world, who also had some brain defect preventing a sense of touch?
2. How would self-hood work under a scenario in which all matter is conscious? Is the Pacific ocean a single conscious self? Or is every drop of water its own conscious self? Or is there perhaps some particular unit of matter (such as a liter) which causes some quantity of water to achieve self-hood?
3. Does each atom on a beach have its own self-hood, or does it take a grain of sand to make a sand self? Or does perhaps the whole beach constitute a single self?
4. Do you maintain that lifeless objects have volition, the ability to will particular actions? If so, how do you reconcile such a belief with the complete lack of any evidence that lifeless matter is engaging in volition or willing actions?
5. Do you maintain that lifeless objects have memories or thoughts? If you think they have either, how could that be, since thoughts require language (which could not be known by minds without sensory experience), and memories require either thoughts or sensations (which would seem to be impossible for a mind without sensory experience)?
6. Do you maintain that lifeless objects have interests, pleasures, pains, attitudes, knowledge or ideas? How could lifeless objects have such things if they never had sensory experience?

Of course, once we consider such questions we become entangled in a great ocean of difficulties. Let us consider the question of volition, which means the power to carry out some action. There are two possibilities for a panpsychist. The first (call it option A) is to maintain that lifeless objects can carry out actions by willing them. One problem with this option is that lifeless objects do not have sensory organs. So we can't really imagine any reasonable scenario by which a lifeless natural object would will something to occur. For example, if a lifeless asteroid were traveling through the solar system, we cannot imagine it willing itself to move closer to the Earth, because lacking all sensory organs, such a rock would never know what Earth (or anything else) was.

Another strong reason for rejecting option A is that there is zero evidence that lifeless objects can will things. For example, on the subatomic level, subatomic particles such as electrons and protons act with unvarying precise obedience to the laws of electromagnetism. If they did not, you would not be reading a coherent intelligible essay at this moment, but would be seeing only a jumbled scramble of pixels. To give another example, astronomers find that things such as asteroids and comets act with unvarying precise obedience to the laws of gravity, showing no signs of independence.

So it seems option A doesn't work. The alternative for a panpsychist considering this question of volition in lifeless objects is what we may call option B: the idea that lifeless objects with minds do not have any power of volition. But when we think about this possibility, it seems very depressing. Given their lack of sensory organs, lifeless objects with a mind would be like a child born deaf, blind and incapable of any tactile sensation. If we also imagine them having no power of volition, we then imagine them like a child born completely paralyzed, blind, deaf and incapable of feeling touch.

So option B seems like quite a dismal scenario. If we have a universe filled with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 conscious objects that are like children born deaf, blind, paralyzed and without any sense of smell, taste or touch, that is a dismal and repulsive scenario. The scenario becomes even more dark and depressing when we ask ourselves: how long would these conscious but lifeless objects live? The answer would apparently be: in many cases, for billions of years. So, for example, if you were a conscious rock on the moon, you would have to hang around for billions of years in such an undesirable state: blind, deaf, and paralyzed, unable to communicate with your fellow rocks, unable to do anything. The panpsychist apparently must believe that for every conscious human such as yourself who can exercise volition and enjoy sensory experience, there are 1,000,000,000,000,000 or more conscious entities living a horrid life o of blindness, deafness and paralysis.

Lament of a lunar rock (if panpsychism is true)

Engaging in the shadow-speaking of trying to make a human mind sound like a mere "property," panpsychists are constantly forgetting (or speaking as if they forgot) that a human mind is largely a great wealth of capabilities, capabilities not decently described by the ultra-reductionist "make it sound as tiny as possible" shadow-speaking of referring to a human mind as "consciousness."

At the atheism indoctrination site bigthink.com, we have the latest bungling sales job by a panpsychist. We have an article with a title of "The consciousness theory that connects you to everything." We don't need consciousness theories, which are examples of shadow-speaking, in which some enormous reality is spoken of as if it was a mere shadow of itself.  What we need is a credible theory that helps explain human minds, human mental experiences and human mental capabilities. Human minds are realities gigantically bigger and more complex than mere consciousness.  And it is is not true that panpsychism connects you to everything. It does not connect you to anything.  A better description of panpsychism would be "The shrink-speaking theory that puts you on the same level as a rock." 

The article by psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist has a subtitle with the false claim that "we’ve learned that even single-celled organisms can make intelligent decisions." No, we haven't learned any such thing. A cell may move in some way or act in some way that helps serve some higher purpose. But that isn't the cell making a decision. 

Sounding like someone who cannot get his story straight, McGilchrist says this:

"The brain definitely does not create consciousness. It gives rise to my consciousness." 

That does not make sense. The two terms are equivalent.  Later he refers to "when my brain or your brain produces my consciousness or your consciousness," which sounds he has forgotten that he previously claimed that "the brain definitely does not create consciousness." 

Later McGilchrist makes the silly claim that "matter is a phase of consciousness," a claim making no sense at all. He gives some rambling talk about water and whirlpools that fails to hold together in any coherent way. 

He says this:

"I think single cell organisms are conscious. Cell biologist James Shapiro wrote a long time ago that single cells make intelligent decisions. And they do. They realize what's going on, even if it's something that they couldn't be prepared for genetically or by their own experience. And they make intelligent choices as to what to do."

There is no evidence that cells are intelligent. When a biologist such as Shapiro said cells make intelligent decisions, he was probably referring only to a cell moving in some direction or changing in some way that was good for the cell's survival, or good for some higher purpose in an organism that a cell belonged to.  Such movement or change did not constitute a conscious decision by a cell, and is not evidence that cells realize anything or that cells "make intelligent choices" like a person deciding to go towards a particular destination or deciding to choose a particular career direction. 

It is very true that cells and other bodily components such as proteins and protein complexes act in endless purposeful ways "that they couldn't be prepared for genetically," ways not specified by DNA or its genes. That reality is an extremely important clue, suggesting our biology is driven by something greater than ourselves, such as a Global Organizing Activity of a Life-force or GOAL (discussed in my three posts here).  But the very dramatic reality of cells, proteins and protein molecules acting in purposeful ways necessary for our existence and perpetuation is not any evidence for panpsychism. 

But what about the problem of morphogenesis, the problem of how a speck-sized zygote progresses over nine months to become the vast organization of a human body? That is the most gigantic unsolved problem. You can start to realize how big an unsolved problem it is when you realize that DNA does not have any specification for how to make a human body, nor does it have any specification for how to make any organ system or organ in a human body, nor does it have  any specification for how to make any cell in a human body,  nor does it have any any specification for how to make any of the organelles that make up cells. Can the ocean-sized explanatory shortfalls be lessened here by imagining intelligent cells making the right decisions? 

No, it cannot. What could a cell know and perceive? Only what was in front of it, just a billionth of a human body. A cell could never know where it was supposed to go and what it was supposed to do to help serve the grand purpose of the construction of the fantastically organized body of a mobile, two-legged and two-armed human with a digestive system, a vision system and a circulatory system. Similarly a brick and a pipe could never what they needed to do to serve the purpose of building a nine-story apartment building. 

So, no, the idea of conscious cells is not useful in helping to explain the origin of human bodies. To credibly explain the unexplained origin of human bodies and their unexplained continuation over decades (requiring a thousand daily unexplained miracles of organization such as protein folding and the formation of protein complexes so complex they are called molecular machines), we must imagine causal agency by some reality grander than a human, not merely the causal agency of something a billionth of a human in weight. 

Human bodies are systems of systems of systems of systems, a reality of the most enormous organization and dynamism. Human minds, human mental capabilities and human mental experiences are as complex as human bodies. Beware of those who take "make my explanation job a million times easier" shortcuts by describing either of these realities as if they were something simple. 

Overall, McGilchrist's article is a bungling affair. But it does have one very good quote. He says, "Nature is all the time doing things in the twinkling of an eye that otherwise by chance would take literally millions of years."  That is correct. I described some of that reality in my June, 2026 post "In Your Body Every Day There's a Million Miracles of Warp-Speed Purposeful Assembly." The post discusses things such as how our existence depends on proteins constantly folding into the right shapes needed for their functions, and such well-folded proteins constantly teaming up in just the right way to become "molecular machine" protein complexes needed for our existence. The Google Gemini infographic below discusses one example (and hundreds of other equally dramatic examples could be given). 

But you cannot credibly explain such blazing-fast miracles of purposeful assembly by merely imagining molecules or cells that are conscious. If such things were conscious, they would only know tiny little molecule things or tiny little cell things, and would not know how to serve the goals of some grand human body construction process and human body maintenance process that are so complex that no human being even half-understands them.  To credibly explain such million miracles of warp-speed purposeful assembly occurring every day in each of our bodies, we can postulate some transcendent reality with a mind and a power and an understanding greater than any human's, rather than just imagine conscious cells or molecules with only the tiniest sliver of a human's understanding.  A similar idea was expressed by the co-founder of the theory of evolution by natural selection (Alfred Russel Wallace), who (after reviewing facts of biological organization and dynamism only a small fraction of what we now know of) stated, "What we absolutely require and must postulate is, a Mind far higher, greater, more powerful than any of the fragmentary minds we see around us, a Mind not only adequate to direct and regulate all the forces at work in living organisms, but which is itself the source of all those forces and energies, as well as of the more fundamental forces of the whole material universe."

He "Retained All His Faculties" Despite Losing the Left Half of His Brain

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

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

 Below is one of the very interesting cases I get when using the phrase "brain gone." We read about how Guy Morrison "retained all his faculties with half his brain gone." 

You can read the news account using this link:

https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn86069021/1908-12-04/ed-1/?sp=3&&r=0.125,0.083,0.648,0.31,0

The article tells us of a man who had a hunting accident which left him without a left half of his brain. But we are told that he "retained all his faculties." Later another shooting accident killed him. At the end of the story, we read this speculation: "The fact that he retained all his faculties with half his brain gone, the doctors say, was due to the fact that he must have been using the right lobe exclusively before his first accident." The speculation makes no sense. Nobody with two brain halves would be using only one of those halves. 

The case history above is quite compatible with my claim that the brain is not the source of the human mind. The case is not compatible with typical claims of neuroscientist literature, such as claims that speech arises from the left side of the brain. 

To read about many other cases in which people suffered little after losing the left half of their brain, read my series of posts here. 

Frustrated Neuroscientist Takes Comfort in Playing With Virtual Rodents

 An article this week at the Transmitter neuroscience site is entitled "What to do when traditional mechanistic approaches no longer work." The article (written by Harvard biologist Bence Ölveczky) has a strong note of frustration. It rather seems the author is not happy at all with the progress he is making in trying to explain behavior in a mechanistic manner. He says, "Many complex behaviors have stubbornly resisted mechanistic explanations." A more candid statement would have been that basically no complex human behavior has any mechanistic explanation. 

The first sentence is a giveaway. He begins, "Our worldview is mechanistic, so naturally we want our explanations to be too." Yes, the neuroscience community is indeed a conformist belief community all centered around an atheist materialist worldview. That is one of the biggest reasons why its members keep making statements contrary to the observations of neuroscientists themselves, which strongly contradict "brains make minds" ideology, as the posts of this site so abundantly demonstrate. 

Following the bungling neuroscientist speech custom of groundlessly claiming "representations" when no representations have been discovered, Ölveczky states, "Two regions that we had shown by lesions to make very different contributions to a behavior carried near-identical representations." The link is to an article discussing how an attempt to trace decision-making in mice to some specific brain area had failed dismally. Instead what was found (in a study implanting electrodes into an unusually large sample of mice) was roughly equal brain activity throughout the brains of mice.  That article says this:

"Activity associated with choice showed up in cortical areas, in line with previous findings, but it also occurred in subcortical areas such as the hindbrain and cerebellum, challenging the notion that only a few select areas encode information about decision-making and supporting the idea that it is widespread.

'It is interesting how much choice selectivity is everywhere,' says Long Ding, research associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the work."

The results of the study are consistent with the idea that brains do not produce decisions. The "choice selectivity" that is "everywhere" is just the brain firing randomly all over the place, as it continuously does, regardless of whether any decision or thinking is occurring. The same continuous random firing occurs at an equally strong level even when someone is sleeping.  

Referring to a length of time that is only a tenth of a second (100 milliseconds), the study's authors claim, "The animal’s choice could be decoded from neural population activity during a 100-ms time window before the first wheel-movement time in many analysed regions." The claim is groundless if it is interpreted to mean something going on in a brain prior to muscle activity. It is very well-known that muscle activity causes blips in electrode readings of the brain's activity. All that is going on is that the authors picked up a tenth of a second of muscle activity prior to the instant when some wheel starts being turned by a mouse.  It is fallacious to assume that a mouse would start using its muscles at the exact tenth of  a second that some wheel turned by a mouse starts turning. And if I start using my muscles to open a jar, there will surely be a tenth of second or more of my muscle activity before the jar's lid starts turning. 

There is no neural correlate at all of making decisions that have no muscle movement associated with them. If you do a study of a motionless eyes-shut person connected to an EEG machine with electrodes, and tell the person to first keep a blank resting mind for 20 seconds, and then make a series of decisions in his mind during some time interval of the same length (such as what to eat and wear tomorrow), the brain wave readings for such a person will be essentially the same. In a later post I will substantiate this claim with some original research using headband technology allowing a reading of brain waves (technology that the average person can experiment with at little cost). 

In the quote below, Ölveczky first seems to suggest that attempts to create circuit-based explanations for behavior are pretty much dead ends, a blind alley. But he then comforts himself with the idea that scientists like himself can play around with "virtual animals" that exist only in a computer, and do experiments with such software creatures. 

"To work our way back to a mechanistic explanation, we need to align population dynamics and function with the underlying biology. This will require accounting for how cellular mechanisms, circuit motifs and specific brain areas contribute to those dynamics and the functions they support. No experiment I can conceive of in a real animal will let us do this in a clean and comprehensive way.

Are we toast? Maybe not. The field is rapidly developing tools to create virtual animals, complete with realistic biomechanics and artificial neural networks for brains. Such critters—informed, constrained and validated by experiments in real animals—can be brought to 'life' in a physics simulation. These so-called 'digital twins' are fully observable, fully manipulable and endlessly repeatable."

You may laugh at the quotation above, which Ölveczky follows by the assertion that his lab is experimenting with virtual rats. You might ask: "What's the matter,  Ölveczky -- real life didn't give you the results you wanted, so now you've taking comfort in a virtual playground sandbox where you can program computer software rodents to get the results you want?"  Ölveczky sounds like some person whose team loses the Super Bowl, and who then seeks consolation by replaying the game, using Madden Football on his PlayStation video game machine. 

A New Experimental Study Suggests the Hippocampus Is Not Crucial for Memory

The hippocampus is a tiny area of the brain, and in humans it is about  twice the size of a peanut. Neuroscientists have often made the claim that the hippocampus is necessary for the formation of new memories. Typically they offer as their main evidence for this claim the assertion that a patient H.M. suffered damage to his hippocampus and could no longer form new memories. Although often made, the claim about patient H.M. is incorrect, as I discuss in my post here, and in the Appendix at the end of this post. Although he had memory difficulties, patient H.M. clearly could form new memories, according to several papers that studied him. 

In my 2023 post here ("Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths") I discuss a wide body of evidence that debunks claims that the hippocampus is crucial for memory. Now let us look at a new paper discussing new experimental evidence  discrediting the idea that the hippocampus is crucial for memory. The paper (entitled "Is Memory Spared in Monkeys With Selective Lesions of the Hippocampus?") documents experiments done on monkeys that had been given drugs causing the destruction of most of the hippocampus. 

One of the drugs was ibotonic acid, and the group of monkeys that was given this drug is referred to in the paper as "the IBO lesion group." We read this:

"Stereological quantification of histological material in the IBO lesion group revealed an overall reduction of 53% in the volume of the hippocampus relative to intact brains. The average hippocampal volume was 732 mm³ for controls and 346 mm³ for monkeys with lesions, with volume in the experimental animals ranging from 270 to 414 mm³ (Figures 1 and 2). It should be noted, however, that these values significantly underestimate the extent of the lesions, since 24% of the remaining hippocampal tissue in IBO lesion monkeys appeared grossly atrophied and dystrophic. Summing this damaged tissue together with the estimated frank loss yields an overall 63% reduction in hippocampus volume in the IBO group."

Another group of monkeys got a drug called NMDA. We are told that for this group, "The volume of the hippocampus was reduced 72% in lesion monkeys relative to intact controls (see Supplemental Figure 1, J.)." 

Roughly speaking, we may say that the hippocampus-tested monkeys had about two-thirds of their hippocampus destroyed by the drugs given them. The brain has a left hippocampus and a right hippocampus. Figures 2 and 3 of the paper make clear that this roughly two-thirds destruction occurred for both the left and right hippocampus of the monkeys tested. 

Figure 3 shows the results of one series of tests involving six IBO-group monkeys with these hippocampus lesions, and four normal controls. We see no significant difference in performance. 

Below is part of Figure 4 of the paper, showing performance on something called  "Delayed Nonmatching-to-Sample Performance Averaged Across Test Episodes." Again, the difference in performance between the monkeys without most of their hippocampus and normal undamaged controls was insignificant. 

Below is part of Figure 5 of the paper, showing performance on something called  " Trial-Unique and Repeated Objects Versions of Delayed Nonmatching-to-Sample." We have a group of six normal control monkeys and six "NMDA-group" monkeys (with about 72% of the hippocampus destroyed) performing without any significant difference. (B) graphs "recognition accuracy across increasing retention intervals" while (D) graphs "recognition accuracy across delays (D) on the delayed nonmatching-to-sample retest with a single, repeated object set." 

Figure 6 is very similar, showing no significant difference between the hippocampus-damaged monkeys and controls. 

Figure 7 gives us the data below comparing memory performance in normal control monkeys and monkeys with very severe hippocampus damage. The (A) and (C) portions of the graph are remarkably similar. In the (B) part of the graph the control monkeys (having no damage) perform slightly better than the heavily hippocampus-damaged monkeys; but in the (D) part of the graph the opposite is true (with the heavily hippocampus-damaged monkeys performing better than the undamaged control monkeys). And the damaged monkeys in the (D) part of the graph were significantly more damaged than the damaged monkeys in the (B) part of the graph. The paper says the NMDA group had 72% destruction of the hippocampus compared to roughly two-thirds destruction of the hippocampus in the IBO group. 

The authors conclude that "the specific operating characteristics of memory supported by the primate hippocampus—and that might serve as proxies for hippocampus integrity in clinical disorders that feature memory impairment as an early symptom— remain enigmatic." This is a very understated conclusion. 

A more blunt conclusion would say something like this: we have been told a huge myth by those claiming that the hippocampus is some "memory center" of the brain; and when monkeys lose 62% to 72% of their hippocampus, this produces no major difference in the performance of the monkeys on memory tests. 

Appendix

The claim is commonly made that following a 1953  operation damaging his hippocampus, patient H.M. (Henry Molaison) was unable to form new memories. But a 14-year follow-up study of patient H.M. actually tells us that H.M. was able to form some new memories. The study says this on page 217, referring to the assassination of Kennedy in 1963:

"In February 1968, when shown the head on a Kennedy half-dollar, he said, correctly, that the person portrayed on the coin was President Kennedy. When asked him whether President Kennedy was dead or alive, and he answered, without hesitation, that Kennedy had been assassinated...In a similar way, he recalled various other public events, such as the death of Pope John (soon after the event), and recognized the name of one of the astronauts, but his performance in these respects was quite variable."

Another paper tells us that patient H.M. was able to learn new motor skills., stating this: "H.M. could successfully acquire, and subsequently retain, new motor skills in the context of several other experimental tasks (e.g., rotary pursuit, bimanual tracking, tapping)."  Another paper ("Evidence for Semantic Learning in Profound Amnesia: An Investigation With Patient H.M.") states this:

"We used cued recall and forced-choice recognition tasks to investigate whether the patient H.M. had acquired knowledge of people who became famous after the onset of his amnesia. Results revealed that, with first names provided as cues, he was able to recall the corresponding famous last name for 12 of 35 postoperatively famous personalities. This number nearly doubled when semantic cues were added, suggesting that his knowledge of the names was not limited to perceptual information, but was incorporated in a semantic network capable of supporting explicit recall. In forced-choice recognition, H.M. discriminated 87% of postmorbid famous names from foils. Critically, he was able to provide uniquely identifying semantic facts for one-third of these recognized names, describing John Glenn, for example, as 'the first rocketeer' and Lee Harvey Oswald as a man who 'assassinated the president.' Although H.M.’s semantic learning was clearly impaired, the results provide robust, unambiguous evidence that some new semantic learning can be supported by structures beyond the hippocampus proper."

Another paper tells us on page 15 to 16 that patient H. M. was able to draw an accurate map of a bungalow he had moved to after his hippocampus damage, and that he was also able to correctly state the address of that bungalow. On page 20 that paper tells us that patient H.M. had close-to-normal skills in being able to remember visual information:

"In  a  picture  recognition  experiment,  H.M.  was  asked  to  look  at  complex colorful  pictures,  for  20  seconds  each,  and  to  try  to  remember  them  (Freed & Corkin, 1988 et al.,  1987). H.M.'s performance revealed a normal recognition of the  pictures  after 10,  24  hours,  72  hours,  and  one  week  after  encoding (Augustinack et al., 2014; Corkin, 2020; Freed & Corkin, 1988). Surprisingly, six months later, H.M. could score within one standard deviation from the controls’ average (Freed & Corkin, 1988)."

The myth that patient H.M. lost the ability to form new memories after hippocampus damage is therefore an "old wives' tale" of neuroscience literature, a claim not justified by the facts. 

When Pure Computer Work Is Passed Off as Neuroscience Research

Neuroscientists are unable to produce any solid research supporting the claim that the brain could do anything such as store memories. See the appendix of this post for more than 40 statements by more than 100 scientists, all essentially confessing that scientists do not have any good understanding of how a brain could store memories. Nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a device or component for storing learned information. 

So how does the neuroscientist belief community coverup the shortfall? One technique is to take pure computer work, and try to pass that off as neuroscience research about the brain and learning. 

We saw an example of that in the recent press release here. The press release is entitled "Learning may rely on stronger neural connections, not expanding networks."

 The press release states this:

"How does the brain learn? Does it acquire new knowledge by creating new neural pathways or by strengthening existing connections? A new study from Bar-Ilan University offers evidence in favor of the latter, suggesting that learning is driven primarily by changes in the strength of existing neural connections rather than by expanding the brain's underlying architecture."

The claim in the last sentence is groundless. The study referred to (which you can read here)  is not a neuroscience study, but a computer science study discussing some way to store information in human-designed computer systems. The paper makes no substantive mention of brains, human learning or any parts of brains until its last paragraph. That paragraph reads as follows:

"Finally, one of the major unresolved questions in the study of brain learning is the nature of its underlying mechanism. Specifically, it is not yet known whether learning primarily results from modifications of synaptic weights[42], [43], [44] and dendritic learning[45], [46], [47], [48], [49], [50] or from changes in network topology. The second observation presented in this work demonstrates that, for a fixed token set, model accuracy increases with dataset size. However, the maximum dilution level that preserves the performance of the undiluted network is largely independent of dataset size. This observation suggests that gains in language-learning performance are predominantly achieved through weight adaptation driven by larger training datasets. By contrast, the number of neurons in the brain remains approximately constant over time, and there is currently no evidence for a biological mechanism that enables gradual large-scale reconfiguration of neural topology during learning."

We have here nothing of any substance in the way of neuroscience research.  The authors have confessed that there is no well-established theory of how a brain could store memories.  They suggest that their computer-science work is more compatible with the idea that memories are stored by a "modification of synaptic weights."  But there are very many reasons for rejecting such an idea.  One is that the idea is the most vacuous hand-waving.  Information is stored by writing, not by a modification of weights. And there's no component in a brain that could do the writing of learned information. 

We do know of several important characteristics that synapses have which should cause us to reject the claim that memories are stored in synapses. One is that synapses are made up of proteins that are very short-lived. The average lifetime of a synapse protein is only a few weeks. There are more than a thousand proteins used in synapses, and fewer than five have been determined to have a lifetime of more than a month.  The 2018 study here precisely measured the lifetimes of more than 3000 brain proteins from all over the brain, and found not a single one with a lifetime of more than 75 days (figure 2 shows the average protein lifetime was only 11 days). It has not been proven that any synapse protein has a lifetime of more than a year. But old people can remember things for 50 years or longer. Astonishingly, the maximum length of time that people can remember things is about 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of a synapse protein. If the proteins in synapses have short lifetimes, it seems impossible that synapses could be storing memories for 50 years. Similarly, you couldn't store your childhood recollections for 50 years if you wrote them on maple leaves that crumble away after a few months.

How is it that a synapse could store a memory? Our neuroscientists never give a precise answer to this question, and never even give an exact speculation as to precisely how synapses could possibly store an episodic experience such as, say, your experience of hitting a home run in the big ball game. All that neuroscientists do is to make vague claims in this regard, typically the claim that memories are stored when synapses are strengthened. This idea makes no sense. We know that when information is stored, symbolic tokens are written. There is no proven case of any information ever being stored by an act of mere strengthening. I'm not counting cases in which some computer system increments a numerical value stored at some place, and someone calls that "strengthening," although it really is not. 

Moreover, we know of an exact reason why memories cannot be stored through some act of synapse strengthening. It is the fact that synapse strengthening requires a synthesis of proteins, which takes minutes. But it is not at all true that a person requires minutes to form a new memory. If someone tells you that your parent or child just died,  you will instantly form a permanent new memory that you will never forget. There is no neuroscience theory of the formation of memories in the brain that is consistent with the fact that humans can form permanent new memories instantly.

One simple fact with gigantic implications is the fact that synapses inside the human cortex do not reliably transmit signals. It has been found that synapses inside the cortex transmit brain signals with a reliability of between 10% and 50%. A scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower."

Senselessly ignored by dogma-clinging neuroscientists, the fact that  synaptic transmission is unreliable has very big implications. It means that when you instantly give a detailed correct answer to some general knowledge question such as who was this person or who was that person was, such a feat cannot be occurring through a retrieval of information stored in synapses. There are more than a trillion synapses in the brain, and every neuron connects to many synapses. If information was being retrieved from synapses, and each transmission of a signal across a synapse occurred with less than 50% reliability, it would be like doing an Internet search in which each letter or character was received with less than 50% reliability. 

So, for example, imagine you tried to remember the beginning of the Gettysburg Address, which starts out like this:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this."

If you tried to retrieve that information from synapses that transmit with less than 50% accuracy over each synaptic gap, the result might be something like this:

"four sroce and seven yraes ago our farhets bhrugot forth on this cneoinntt, a new nitoan, cvoceined ii ltrebiy, and dtdeciaed to the poirostpion that all men are cteared eauql. now we are eenaggd in a greer civ3l wir, tentisg weethhr that noaitn, or any noaitn ss ccnveoeid and ss daetciedd, can long ednure. we are met oo a gaert bfti-elateld of that war. we have come to detacide a piotorn of that field, aa a fanil rnstieg pcale for tsohe who here gave their levis that that notain might live. it ii alhtgeeotr fnititg and perpor that we soluhd do this."

Think of what happens when someone sings one of the longer opera roles, such as the role of Siegfried, Tristan, Isolde or Norma. A singer of these roles has to sing on the stage for hours, remembering thousands of words and also which notes correspond to each word.  Many humans perform such memory recall tasks flawlessly, not missing a single word or a single note, getting every word and note correctly. Such feats of recall could never occur if memory recall was occurring by a retrieval of information from synapses that transmit so unreliably. 

Then there's the fact that memory recall would be way too slow if it required retrieval from information stored in synapses. Every transmission of a signal across a synaptic cleft involves a delay of between about 1 and 5 milliseconds, something called synaptic delay. But the brain has trillions of synapses. If a brain stored memory in synapses, recalling complex answers would require a cumulative synaptic delay of many seconds or minutes, preventing people from ever being able to instantly give a complex answer to a question. You can't get out of this jam by appealing to brain addresses or brain sorting or brain indexes. The brain has none of these three things. 

We don't answer questions at the speed of brains. We answer questions at the speed of souls. 

Below are some relevant quotes:

• "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" 
• "The fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them." -- Juan Alvaro Gallego, neuroscientist. 
• "The search for the neuroanatomical locus of semantic memory has simultaneously led us nowhere and everywhere. There is no compelling evidence that any one brain region plays a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all sorts of semantic knowledge."  Psychologist Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, "Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: inferring 'how' from 'where' ".
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts'’ about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "While a lot of studies have focused on memory processes such as memory consolidation and retrieval, very little is known about memory storage" -- scientific paper (link).
• "While LTP is assumed to be the neural correlate of learning and memory, no conclusive evidence has been produced to substantiate that when an organism learns LTP occurs in that organism’s brain or brain correlate."  -- PhD thesis of a scientist, 2007 (link). 
• "Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." -- Neuroscientist David Eagleman.
• "How could that encoded information be retrieved and transcribed from the enduring structure into the transient signals that carry that same information to the computational machinery that acts on the information?....In the voluminous contemporary literature on the neurobiology of memory, there is no discussion of these questions."  ---  Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience,"  preface. 
• "The very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to memory and reads from memory....Yet we do not really know how this most foundational element of computation is implemented in the brain."  -- Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution," page 50. 
• "When we are looking for a mechanism that implements a read/write memory in the nervous system, looking at synaptic strength and connectivity patterns might be misleading for many reasons...Tentative evidence for the (classical) cognitive scientists' reservations toward the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain has accumulated....Changes in synaptic strength are not directly related to storage of new information in memory....The rate of synaptic turnover in absence of learning is actually so high that the newly formed connections (which supposedly encode the new memory) will have vanished in due time. It is worth noticing that these findings actually are to be expected when considering that synapses are made of proteins which are generally known to have a short lifetime...Synapses have been found to be constantly turning over in all parts of cortex that have been examined using two-photon microscopy so far...The synapse is probably an ill fit when looking for a basic memory mechanism in the nervous system." -- Scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift? (link).
• "Most neuroscientists believe that memories are encoded by changing the strength of synaptic connections between neurons....Nevertheless, the question of whether memories are stored locally at synapses remains a point of contention. Some cognitive neuroscientists have argued that for the brain to work as a computational device, it must have the equivalent of a read/write memory and the synapse is far too complex to serve this purpose (Gaallistel and King, 2009; Trettenbrein, 2016). While it is conceptually simple for computers to store synaptic weights digitally using their read/write capabilities during deep learning, for biological systems no realistic biological mechanism has yet been proposed, or in my opinion could be envisioned, that would decode symbolic information in a series of molecular switches (Gaallistel and King, 2009) and then transform this information into specific synaptic weights." -- Neuroscientist Wayne S. Sossin (link).
• "We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer."  -- Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience."  page Xvi (preface). 
• "Current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition."  -- Neuroscientist Hessameddin Akhlaghpourƚ (link). 
• "It remains unclear where and how prior knowledge is represented in the brain." -- A large team of scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "How memory is stored in the brain is unknown." -- Research proposal abstract written by scientists, 2025 (link). 
• "We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words." -- Scientists David Poeppel and, William Idsardi, 2022 (link).
• "If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? How can the memories outlast their putative constitutive components?" --Neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian (link).
• "After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved." -- Psychologist James Tee and engineering expert Desmond P. Taylor, "Where Is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?"
• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• ""Despite over a hundred years of research, the cellular/molecular mechanisms underlying learning and memory are still not completely understood. Many hypotheses have been proposed, but there is no consensus for any of these."  -- Two scientists in a 2024 paper (link). 
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures. Researchers searching for the physical basis of memory are looking for the wrong thing (the associative bond) in the wrong place (the synaptic junction), guided by an erroneous conception of what memory is and the role it plays in computation." --Neuroscientist C.R. Gallistel, "The Physical Basis of Memory," 2021.
• "To name but a few examples, the formation of memories and the basis of conscious  perception, crossing  the threshold  of  awareness, the  interplay  of  electrical  and  molecular-biochemical mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses, the role of glial cells in signal transduction and metabolism, the role of different brain states in the life-long reorganization of the synaptic structure or  the mechanism of how  cell  assemblies  generate a  concrete  cognitive  function are  all important processes that remain to be characterized." -- "The coming decade of digital brain research, a 2023 paper co-authored by more than 100 neuroscientists, one confessing scientists don't understand how a brain could store memories. 
• "The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’....We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." -- Robert Epstein,  senior research psychologist, "The Empty Brain." 
• "Despite recent advancements in identifying engram cells, our understanding of their regulatory and functional mechanisms remains in its infancy." -- Scientists claiming erroneously in 2024 that there have been recent advancements in identifying engram cells, but confessing there is no understanding of how they work (link).
• "Study of the genetics of human memory is in its infancy though many genes have been investigated for their association to memory in humans and non-human animals."  -- Scientists in 2022 (link).
• "The neurobiology of memory is still in its infancy." -- Scientist in 2020 (link). 
• "The investigation of the neuroanatomical bases of semantic memory is in its infancy." -- 3 scientists, 2007 (link). 
• "Currently, our knowledge pertaining to the neural construct of intelligence and memory is in its infancy." -- Scientists, 2011 (link). 
•  "Very little is known about the underlying mechanisms for visual recognition memory."  -- two scientists (link). 
• "Conclusive evidence that specific long-term memory formation relies on dendritic growth and structural synaptic changes has proven elusive. Connectionist models of memory based on this hypothesis are confronted with the so-called plasticity stability dilemma or catastrophic interference. Other fundamental limitations of these models are the feature binding problem, the speed of learning, the capacity of the memory, the localisation in time of an event and the problem of spatio-temporal pattern generation."  -- Two scientists in 2022 (link). 
• "The mechanisms governing successful episodic memory formation, consolidation and retrieval remain elusive,"  - Bogdan Draganski, cogntive neuroscientist (link). 
• " The mechanisms underlying the formation and management of the memory traces are still poorly understood." -- Three scientists in 2023 (link). 
• "The underlying electrophysiological processes underlying memory formation and retrieval in humans remains very poorly understood." --  A scientist in 2021 (link). 
• "As for the explicit types of memory, the biological underpinning of this very long-lasting memory storage is not yet understood." -- Neuroscientist Cristina M. Alberini in a year 2025 paper (link). 
• "We still lack fundamental knowledge about the mechanisms involved." -- Neuroscientist Eleanor A. Maguire, after mentioning "autobiographical memory" (link).
• "We still lack an integrative computational framework capable of jointly explaining the main empirical findings on semantic and episodic memory and their dynamic interactions." -- Five scientists (link).