Crude "Finger in the Sand" Diagrams of "Engrams" Suggest Vacuous Theorizing

 There's a year 2025 paper on the Cornell physics paper server, one entitled "Engram Memory Encoding and Retrieval: A Neurocomputational Perspective." The author attempts to persuade us that he understands something about engrams (alleged memories stored in brains), something for which there is no real evidence. What we have in the paper is misstatements, hand-waving, bluffing and boasting, adorned by about the most primitive diagrams anyone could give. The "finger in the sand" crudity of the diagrams suggests that there is no real underlying understanding of how a brain could store or retrieve memories. 

Before discussing how crude are the diagrams, let me list some of the bad misstatements and half truths in the paper:

• The author states, "Despite substantial research into the biological basis of memory, the precise mechanisms by which experiences are encoded, stored, and retrieved in the brain remain incompletely understood." The truth is that scientists have no understanding at all of such a thing, and no robust evidence that any such mechanisms even exist. 
• The author states, " A growing body of evidence supports the engram theory, which posits that sparse populations of neurons undergo lasting physical and biochemical changes to support long-term memory."  This is false. The claimed evidence for engrams is all junk-science research guilty of sins such as way-too-small study group sizes and unreliable measurement techniques such as judgments of claimed "freezing behavior." 
• The author states, "These findings suggest that memory efficiency, capacity, and stability emerge from the interaction of plasticity and sparsity constraints." This is an example of vacuous hand-waving.
• The author states, "Modern discoveries of 'silent engrams' — which exist as physical traces but cannot be retrieved by natural cues, yet can be artificially reactivated — directly align with Semon’s concept of 'primarily latent modifications.' " There has been no actual discovery of 'silent engrams' or any other type of engram. All claims to have made such a discovery are unfounded, and not supported by any well-designed studies with high statistical power. 
• The author states, "Modern technological advancements have revolutionized the study of engrams, enabling researchers to investigate how specific memories translate into neuronal changes with unprecedented resolution (Luis & Ryan, 2022). These technologies include transgenic manipulation, optogenetics, chemogenetics, electrophysiology, and sophisticated behavioral techniques." The statement is untrue. Fancy technologies are used in studies looking for engrams, often as a kind of window-dressing to impress the easily impressed. But such studies have produced no robust evidence for any such thing as an engram. No one has ever found the slightest trace of any learned information in brain tissue by studying human brain tissue. Studies looking for evidence of engrams in animals have been a cesspool of junk science, and have been almost invariably guilty of very bad research practices such as way-too-small study group sizes, a lack of a blinding protocol, a lack of pre-registration, and the use of unreliable measurement techniques such as "freezing behavior" judgments. 
• The author states, "Modern neuroscience, armed with advanced technologies like optogenetics and immediate early gene labeling, has provided compelling evidence for the existence and dynamic nature of engram neurons and their ensembles." To the contrary, no such evidence has ever been produced. Any papers claiming to have produced such evidence will not hold up to critical scrutiny. 
• The author states, "Furthermore, the activity of engram neurons can be tracked in vivo during their maturation from encoding through consolidation using functional indicators like GCaMP (calcium indicators; Cupollilo et al., 2025). These experimental manipulations, particularly in the hippocampus, have demonstrated the necessity and sufficiency of engram cells for memory functions, enabling selective memory erasure, artificial recall, and even the creation of synthetic memories."  The first reference is one of many references the author makes to the paper "Early changes in the properties of CA3 engram cells explored with a novel viral tool" authored by Cupollilo and others, which is a very low-quality junk science paper using way-too-small study group sizes such as about 5 mice per study group, a paper guilty of defects such as failing to do any sample size calculation, and relying on unreliable "freezing behavior" judgments. The second sentence (beginning with "these experimental manipulations") is simply untrue, and none of the things claimed as "demonstrated" has actually been demonstrated. 

When the paper's author (Daniel Szelogowski) gives us a diagram regarding these claimed "engrams," we get a visual sign of the lack of any substantive theory underlying his claims. Below is a screen shot from the paper showing its Figure 1:

Notice the "finger in the sand" nature of the diagrams. The diagrams are like those a five-year-old child might draw, using crayons. When people understand things, they may produce very detailed diagrams showing the depth of their understanding. For example, do a Google image search for "genetic code" and you will get a very detailed diagram showing the exact scheme of representations used by DNA. But when people do not understand things, and they are merely feigning understanding, they may tend to produce very crude "finger in the sand" diagrams like those in the visual above. 

For example, imagine you had no understanding of how the Apollo 11 mission was able to leave our planet, land on the moon, and return to our planet. Rather than producing detailed diagrams showing things like the Saturn 5 rocket and the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), you might produce "finger in the sand" type of diagrams like the ones below:

The Apollo 11 diagram above is as laughable a "finger in the sand" diagram as the diagrams in Szelogowski's paper. Neither Szelogowski nor any scientist has any real understanding of how a brain could ever encode and store any of the types of learned information that humans can remember. Neither Szelogowski nor any scientist has any real understanding of how a brain could ever instantly retrieve the correct information when a person hears a name or sees a face. 

When attempting to persuade us that they have some understanding of how memory could work in a brain, what those such as Szelogowski do is to mainly engage in vacuous jargon-adorned hand-waving.  Some vague wooly phrase such as "synapse strengthening" is used. Then some mentions are made of some type of actual chemistry observed in the brain, to make such vacuous hand-waving sound more substantive. There is no substance involved and no detail involved when Szelogowski states this:

"Synaptic changes primarily encode the specific content of a memory by modifying the strength of connections between neurons, while intrinsic and non-synaptic changes modulate the overall responsiveness and participation of individual neurons within the engram. This coordinated interplay ensures both the precise encoding of information and the dynamic integration of neurons into stable memory circuits."  

The claim above make no sense. Information is not encoded by some "strengthening" action. Humans are familiar with various ways in which information is encoded and stored, and none of these ways occur by strengthening.  When information is encoded and stored, what occurs is writing, according to some scheme of representation such as the English alphabet, the ASCII code, and so forth. 

For the neuroscientist, the problem is that nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to a some unit for writing information. So what do you do if you are a neuroscientist trying to suggest that brains write memories?  You appeal to "strengthening." and hope that people don't recognize how silly your language is. It's rather like a suitor who has no evidence that he is earning money, and who tries to impress a woman by bragging about how he is improving his muscles by weight training, while hoping that the woman somehow thinks that this is something like earning money. 

When people understand something and are asked to explain it, they tend to speak exactly in ways that show their understanding. Imagine you interview someone for a job as a computer programmer, and you ask the person, "How can I modify my web site so that it can store and remember data the users type in on a registration page?" If the job candidate is knowledgeable about this topic, he would tend to give a very exact and very detailed answer rather like this:

"Well, it depends on how much you want to spend, and how many people use your site.  If you don't have many users or don't want to spend much, you could use a simple pipe-delimited text file to store your data. Each row in such a file would give data on one user, and the pipe character would be used to separate the data fields such as name and email address. But finding a user in such a file requires a scan of the whole file which isn't efficient if you have many thousands of users. If you have many thousands of users, it might be better to use a relational database product such as MySQL. You could create a database, and then use the 'CREATE TABLE' command to create a new table with text storage fields such as UserName and Email. Once you had that table, you could have your web site add a new record for each new user, using the handy INSERT command available in SQL products such as MySQL. For the case of updating an existing user's data, you could use the UPDATE command available in SQL products such as MySQL. Products such as that take care of such details as converting from text strings to ASCII, and converting from ASCII to binary -- that's all encapsulated under the engine of such  relational database products. Your evocation of MySQL commands would take place in a handler function you would write that would respond to the press of a Submit button on your web site's form. Of course, some prefer never to get involved with SQL commands. If you're that type, there are various class libraries that will encapsulate all the SQL commands, so you don't have to remember any. Then you can just call the methods of some object that you have instantiated, and supply the data as arguments to a method of some class, a function that would take parameter inputs." 

But imagine you are interviewing a job candidate who does not know how a web page stores data. If you ask him how you can modify your web site to store user's data that they submit on a form, you might get some answer like this:

"Data processing is a very important function of a web site. Of course, when user's submit data, they want it to be saved not forgotten. Various components can be crafted that enable this functionality. It would require strengthening of the code that underlies your web site. It would require an encoding of information and a coordinated interplay between complex electronic components, as well as the participation of diverse units of functionality."

This job candidate apparently knows nothing about how a web site can store data a user types into a form. All he has given is some vacuous wooly phrases lacking in specifics. His answer sounds like the equally empty and vacuous lines I quote above from Szelogowski, who uses empty verbiage such as "coordinated interplay" and "modulate the overall responsiveness." Szelogowski sounds just as if he has no actual understanding of how a brain could store or retrieve a memory. And he's in the same boat as every neuroscientist, none of whom understand any such thing. 

One huge problem is that what Szelogowski is appealing to (synapse strengthening) is a slow process requiring hours or days. But that cannot explain human learning, which can occur instantly. If someone tells you that your mother or child has just died, you do not require hours or days to learn such a fact. You learn such a fact instantly. 

 Szelogowski's only mention of this issue is a feeble one. Appealing to some wild speculation, he says, "Furthermore, non-synaptic plasticity, such as the regulation of neural membrane properties, can operate on faster timescales, potentially enabling rapid initial information storage, complementing the slower, more enduring synaptic plasticity processes (Ferrand et al., 2025)." This is basically equivalent to a goofy statement such as, "I say memory storage occurs to synapse strengthening, but that isn't fast enough, so maybe there might be something else that is fast enough." 

Szelogowski's Figure 2 in the paper is just as vacuous a "finger in the sand" affair as his Figure 1. Below is his Figure 2:

This is not the kind of diagrams that people produce when they understand something.  A group of connected nodes as we see above is not even a sensible depiction of any such thing as the encoding of learned information. 

Just as unimpressive is Szelogowski's Figure 6. He takes a pentagram of circles, and repeats that pentagram about 13 times, with variations of how the circles are colored. It's another very crude "finger in the sand" kind of diagram suggesting that Szelogowski has no substantive understanding of how a brain could store a memory or preserve a memory for a lifetime or instantly retrieve a memory. 

Were anyone to ever explain how a brain could store memories and allow for instant memory retrieval, they would have to pay very much attention to speed. One of the biggest reasons why a brain cannot be the storage place of human memories is that humans can remember just the right information instantly, upon seeing a face or hearing a name. But there is nothing in a brain that can account for such blazing speed. We know the type of things that make possible fast retrieval in products humans make: things such as addresses, sorting and indexes. The brain has no addresses, no sorting and no indexes. So when a human instantly recalls many relevant facts after hearing a single name such as "Obama" or "Napoleon,"  that cannot be the result of brain activity. 

In this regard Szelogowski fails entirely. His paper makes zero uses of the word "speed," and has zero substantive references to the topic of  speed. The paper fails to even explain how so small an item as the word "cat" could be converted to some neuron state or synapse state. 

But think for a moment of how utterly impossible it could be to explain how a brain could encode (translate into neural and synapse states) all the types of things humans can learn and remember, which includes all of these types of things:

• Memories of daily experiences, such as what you were doing on some day
• Facts you learned in school, such as the fact that Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theater
• Sequences of numbers such as your social security number
• Sequences of words, such as the dialog an actor has to recite in a play
• Sequences of musical notes, such as the notes an opera singer has to sing
• Abstract concepts that you have learned
• Memories of particular non-visual sensations such as sounds, food tastes, smells, pain, and physical pleasure
• Memories of how to do physical things, such as how to ride a bicycle
• Memories of how you felt at emotional moments of your life
• Rules and principles, such as “look both ways before crossing the street”
• Memories of visual information, such as what a particular person's face looks like

Below are some quotes:

• "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).
• "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).

The Failure of Neuroscientist Dogmas Is Intensified by HSAM Cases Such as Jill Price

The credibility of claims that memory recollections come from brains is inversely proportional to the speed and capacity and reliability at which things can be learned and recalled. There has never been found in the brain any component known to be capable of a fast storage of learned information, or storage of learned information at any speed. The protein molecules in brains have a high rate of molecular turnover,  and have an average lifetime of less than two weeks.  There are numerous signal slowing factors in the brain, such as the relatively slow speed of dendrites, and the cumulative effect of synaptic delays in which signals have to travel over relatively slow chemical synapses (by far the most common type of synapse in the brain). As explained in my post here, such physical factors should cause brain signals to move at a typical speed very many times slower than the often cited figure of 100 meters per second: a sluggish "snail's pace" speed of less than a tenth of a meter per second. 

 I just found a paper from last year that documents the slow speed of signal transmission in dendrites (which make up more than 90% of brain tissue), with the paper saying that one of the two main transmission types occurs at the sluggish speed of less than a tenth of a meter per second (too slow to explain blazing fast human recall and thinking). I will discuss the paper in a future post. 

Ordinary everyday evidence of very fast thinking and instant recall is therefore evidence against claims that memory recall occurs because of brain activity, particularly because the brain is totally lacking in the things humans add to constructed objects to allow fast recall (things such as sorting and addressing and indexes). Chemical synapses in the brain do not even reliably transmit signals. Scientific papers say that each time a signal is transmitted across a chemical synapse, it is transmitted with a reliability of 50% or less.  (A paper states, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another 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.")  The more evidence we have of very fast and very accurate and very capacious recall (what a computer expert might call high-speed high-throughput retrieval), the stronger is the evidence against the claim that memory recall occurs from brain activity. 

It is therefore very important to collect and study all cases of exceptional human memory performance (as well all cases of exceptional human calculation performance). The more such cases we find, and the more dramatic such cases are, the stronger is the case against the claim that memory is a neural phenomenon. Or to put it another way, the credibility of claims that memory is a brain phenomenon is inversely proportional to the speed and reliability of the best cases of human mental performance.  The more cases that can be found of humans that seem to recall too quickly for a noisy address-free brain to do ever do, or humans that seem to recall too well for a noisy, index-free, signal-mangling brain to ever do,  the stronger is the case that memory is not a neural phenomenon but instead a spiritual or psychic or metaphysical phenomenon.  

In my post here I discussed the case of Daniel McCartney, a well-documented case of Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) from the 19th century. The case was well-documented in the paper "Remarkable Cases of Memory" by W. D. Henkle in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January, 1871), Asked what he knew about dozens of random dates from the past 20 years, McCartney appeared to have the ability to recall the day of the week, the weather and what he was doing on each date. Henkle made transcripts of McCartney's answers, and verified the correctness of the days of week McCartney gave. In a later interview Henkle asked about the same dates. He reports that McCartney's answers were consistent from one interview to the next, but with variations, indicating he was really recalling what he remembered, and not some memorized words. Henkle also verified that McCartney had an astonishing math calculation ability, and was able to do many blazing-fast math calculations such as calculating the cube root of 76,507 in 17 seconds. 

A similar case is documented in the 2006 paper "A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering" by Elizabeth S. Parker, Larry Cahill and James  L. McCaugh. We read about the astonishing memory skills of a subject AJ, who has since been identified as Jill Price. My references below to Jill appear in the paper as references to AJ. 

We read that Jill says her memory goes back to an event when she was only about 18 to 24 months, and was awoken by a barking dog. We read this:

"She says that from 1980, age 14 onward, her recall became 'automatic'… 'give me the day and I see it. I go back to the day and I just see the day and what I was doing'....She says her personal memories are vivid, like a running movie and full of emotion. As described in the Introduction, AJ told us that her remembering is automatic and not under her conscious control. Her answers were immediate and quick, not deliberate and reflective. Once given a date within her period of strong memory she would, within seconds, produce the day of the week, or what she did on that day, or what event took place on that day. If allowed to talk uninterrupted, AJ would go on at length telling stories about what she did on that day, or something she did before or after that day, such as a trip home from college with a friend, or the restaurant where she ate and with whom."

The paper authors tried asking Jill about what she was doing on dates they randomly selected. She gave the correct day of the week in almost all cases. She also would give detailed recollections on what she was doing on the days asked about. The authors were able to verify the accuracy of the recollections by consulting Jill's diaries. She had written diaries from the age of 10 to age of 34.  We read of this astonishing feat:

"In 2003, we decided to test this by asking her to write down all the Easter dates from 1980 onward. In ten minutes, with no prior warning, she wrote the 24 dates presented in Table 1. All but one date is accurate and it is off by two days. This struck us as particularly impressive in that Easter falls on different days, anywhere between March 22 and April 15, based on the Paschal full moon, and AJ is Jewish."

The feat is all the more remarkable for a Jewish person, given that Jews do not celebrate Easter. We read that two years later she was asked "without forewarning" to reproduce this table, and wrote all of the correct Easter dates for each of the 24 years, producing the results in under ten minutes. In the year 2000 Jill was asked to name the dates she had previously been asked about when she met with the paper authors. She answered "without hesitation" dates of June 24, 2000, July 8, 2000, July 15, 2000, July 23, 2000 and August 19, 2000, which were all correct. 

Below are answers Jill given when asked to identify the dates that particular things happened, and when asked to identify what happened on particular dates. The answers all seem to be correct, except that the date of October 5, 1983 was the date Lech Walesa won the Nobel Prize, not the date of the bombing in Beirut, which was October 25, 1983; and the date of the Atlanta bombing in 1996 was July 27 rather than July 26. 

Although having an enormously powerful memory for what happened to herself and others during the past twenty years, Jill's performance on short-term memory tests were normal.  Solomon Shereshevsky was called "S" in the book The Mind of a Mnemonist by Alexander Romanovitch Luria. Asked to memorize the table of random numbers below, Shereshevsky reproduced the table perfectly, in 40 seconds, after only three minutes of studying it. 

On this test Jill performed very poorly, as bad as you or 1 would do. She also performed poorly when asked to recall the hard-to-recall short story "The War of the Ghosts." As discussed in the appendix of this post, a Latvian memory marvel called VP had remarkably good recall of the story an hour after reading it, and also six weeks after reading, even though he was not told he would be asked to recall it a second time. 

The paper here is a 2022 paper entitled "Individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory do not show enhanced creative thinking." The paper gives us this description of the memory tests given to 14 subjects with  Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), and also twenty-eight normal control subjects:

"We assessed participants’ ability to recollect public and personal past events using the Public Event Quiz and the Random Dates Quiz (LePort et al., 2012). The Public Events Quiz consisted of thirty questions, based on public events selected from five categories: sporting events, political events, notable negative events, events concerning famous people and holidays. For fifteen of these questions, participants were asked to retrieve the date of a given significant public (national or international) event (e.g., 'Please give the day of the week and precise date with day, month and year of when Federica Pellegrini, the famous Italian swimmer, won the gold medal at the Olympic game in Beijing'); the remaining fifteen questions requested participants to associate a given date with a highly significant public event (e.g., 'What happened on the 25th of June 2009?'). All questions concerned events that took place when the participants were at least 8 years old. For each question, individuals were asked to name the day of the week on which the date fell. One point was awarded for each correct response (i.e., the event, the day of the week, the month, the date and the year); the maximum total score was 88 points. The Random Dates Quiz consisted of ten computer-generated random dates, ranging from the individuals’ age of fifteen to five years before the testing. Individuals were asked to provide three details for each date: (1) the day of the week; (2) a description of a verifiable event (i.e., any event that could be confirmed via a search engine) that occurred within a few days before and after the generated date; (3) a description of a personal autobiographical event. One point each was awarded for the correct day of the week, a correct public event, and unverified personal autobiographical memory. A maximum of three points per date could be achieved (30 points total)." 

The results were spectacular.  The 14 subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) scored more than 25 times higher on the Random Dates test, scoring an average of 68.57% of the maximum possible.  The control subjects scored an average of merely 2.62% of the maximum possible on the Random Dates test. On the Public Events test, the 14 subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) scored more than 5 times higher, scoring an average of 58.20% of the maximum possible. The control subjects scored an average of merely 10.39% of the maximum possible on the Public Events test. The best-performing of the 14 subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) scored 96.67% of the maximum possible, an almost perfect score. 

Such results of stunning memory recall ability are very impressive, but they are "icing on the cake" in terms of showing memory performance beyond what brains could ever do. The instant recall performance of ordinary people is enough to show ability far beyond what a brain could ever do. Every time someone asks you some obscure question such as "who was Brutus" and you instantly answer correctly, you are showing performance utterly beyond what a brain without addresses and indexes could ever do.  We do not recall at the speed of brains. We recall at the speed of souls. 

Appendix:  In the 1972 book "Coding Processes in Human Memory" we have a  chapter entitled "How Good Can Human Memory Be?" written by Earl Hunt and Tom Love of Washington University.  Registered users at www.archive.org can read the whole chapter using the link here. The authors start telling us about a subject they studied who they call VP. We are told VP was born in Latvia in 1935, and that by the age of five he had memorized the street map of Riga, a city of 500,000.  We are told he could play up to 60 games of chess simultaneously by correspondence, without consulting written records. 

The authors did tests on VP. The most impressive result is the result shown below, in which VP manages to recall a short story almost verbatim an hour after reading it twice, and also six weeks later, even though he had not been told he would be tested on the story a second time. 

At the end of the chapter, we are given the text of the story, VP's first recollection of it, and the recollection six weeks later. The story is about 350 words long. Here is one example of how good the recollection was. The story begins, "One night two young men from Eugulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they

were there it became foggy and calm." An hour later VP recalls all words of this sentence in correct order, missing only the "and." Six weeks later VP recalled the same sentence exactly as well as he did the first time. 

Later I will have to write a post entitled "The Failure of Neuroscientist Dogmas Is Intensified by a Case Such as John von Neumann." The case is one offering almost endless examples of someone thinking faster than a brain could ever do. Here is just one quote from the wikipedia.org article on von Neumann, a quote by Herman Goldstine:

"One of his remarkable abilities was his power of absolute recall. As far as I could tell, von Neumann was able on once reading a book or article to quote it back verbatim; moreover, he could do it years later without hesitation. He could also translate it at no diminution in speed from its original language into English. On one occasion I tested his ability by asking him to tell me how A Tale of Two Cities started. Whereupon, without any pause, he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes."

The Groundless Myth of an Electrically Surging Dying Brain

 British mainstream news sources often misinform us very badly on science-related topics. In 2024 the British paper the Guardian gave us a junk story on the topic of near-death experiences. It pushed a groundless narrative that a neuroscientist had done something to help explain such experiences, which is not at all correct.  My widely read post "The Guardian's Misleading Story on Near-Death Experiences" gave an in-depth expose of all of the errors and misleading statements in that article. I was actually invited by someone at a scientific journal to turn that article into a scientific paper, but I declined, mostly because I am too busy writing posts for my three blogs (all which have many posts scheduled for future publication). 

A post of mine from 2025 ("The BBC's Science News Coverage Is Often Third-Rate") gave quite a few examples of third-rate coverage of science by the British Broadcasting Company or its affiliate or licensee that publishes under the name of BBC Science Focus. My post here documents falsehoods and misleading statements in a year 2025 BBC Science Focus article on near-death experiences. The latest example of poor science-related journalism from BBC Science Focus is a year 2026 article entitled "We're finally learning what it's like to die. And it's not as bad as you think...". 

Near the beginning of the article the author (Nate Scharping) states this, referring to EEG devices that read brain waves by means of electrodes attached to a head: 

"But scientists have recently begun to explore what happens in the final moment of life by gathering data on brain activity from patients who are dying. Using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, researchers are able to watch how patterns of brain activity change in the moments leading up to death."

We then have from the BBC article a very misleading statement trying to suggest the false idea that brains stay active for a minute after the heart has stopped. The article says this:

"That means that a flatlining heart monitor alarm – the classic Hollywood marker of death – doesn’t actually represent brain death.  According to Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist in Louisville, Kentucky, real brain death occurs later, likely more than a minute after the heart stops. That’s when an EEG shows a halt in brain activity."

I don't know who got it wrong here (Zemmar or the article writer Scharping), but the statement is false. The reality is that EEG devices show brains flatlining within 15 to 30 seconds after the heart stops, not "more than a minute" after the heart stops. 

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

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

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

A recent scientific paper referring to EEG readings of brain waves states this: 

"The trajectory of EEG activity following cardiac arrest is both well defined and simple. It consists of an almost immediate decline in EEG power, which culminates in a state of isoelectricity [flatlining] within 20 s [seconds]." 

A year 2025 scientific paper ("Near-death experience during cardiac arrest and consciousness beyond the brain: a narrative review") states this:

"In the context of circulatory arrest, cortical electrical waves in the alpha (8-13Hz) and beta (13-30Hz) bands disappear after an average of 6.5 seconds, while at the same time, the background activity of EEG is replaced by slow waves at delta frequency (<4Hz), which progressively attenuate and lead to a flat EEG recording with no measurable electrical wave pattern around 10-30 seconds—a neural process called isoelectricity or electrocerebral silence (Clute & Levy, 1990; de Vries et  al., 1998; Singer et  al., 1991; Smith et  al., 1990; van Lommel, 2023, p. 28; Visser et  al., 2001; Vriens et  al., 1996). Furthermore, in monkeys and cats, the EEG becomes isoelectric within 20 seconds of the cessation of cerebral blood flow (Hossmann & Kleihues, 1973). The EEG results suggest that cortical electrical activity critical for consciousness, namely alpha and beta activity reflecting top-down connectivity, is eliminated within an average of 6.5 seconds following CA [cardiac arrest]."

You can find quite a few additional papers asserting that brains flat-line very quickly after cardiac arrest by doing Google or Google Scholar searches for the phrase "EEG becomes isoelectric" or "EEG becomes iso-electric." 

The BBC Science Focus article states this:

"At some point during hypoxia, brain cells begin to die. This starts with a process known as depolarisation, where nerve cells lose their electrical charge. This prompts the brain to release neurotransmitter chemicals, as well as sodium, potassium and calcium ions, among other things. This process could be responsible for the massive surge of activity seen in EEG readings of animal brains after death."

We have in this statement explicit or implicit appeals to two different groundless myths: (1) the myth that there is a flood of chemicals released by dying brains that could be relevant to explaining near-death experiences; (2) the myth that there is a "massive surge of activity seen in EEG readings of animal brains after death." The second myth is the exact opposite of the truth. Instead of any "massive surge of activity seen in EEG readings of animal brains after death," EEG readings show the exact opposite: brains flatlining within 15 to 30 seconds after the heart stops (as shown by all the quotes above asserting exactly this). 

Both of these myths are thoroughly debunked in my long 2025 post "

The Groundless Myth That 'Floods'' or 'Surges' Help Explain Near-Death Experiences," which you can read here. One of the reasons the appeal above to "neurotransmitter chemicals, as well as sodium, potassium and calcium ions" is lame is that such things are not hallucinogens, but are things constantly flowing around in living brains.  

The BBC Science Focus article by Scharping then mentions Ajmal Zemmar, a co-author of the paper "Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain. It was a paper reporting on some EEG readings of a silent dying patient.  The press tried to make the paper sound as if it had some relevance to near-death experiences, which was ridiculous, because the silent dying patient reported no experience at all. The paper had a misleading title, because no actual "coherence" was observed in the dying patient. 

The paper here casts cold water on the "Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain" paper discussed above, implying that whatever it observed may have been an artifact of muscle movement, which produces confounding signals in EEG readings. 

We get a claim in the BBC Science Focus article by Scharping that Zemmar referred to a "triphasic wave of death," but that phrase does not appear in his paper, and does not match what is observed in EEG readings of dying people. The term "wave of death" was used in a 2011 paper "Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death." The paper gave data consistent with my statements about about brains flatlining with 15 to 30 seconds after cardiac arrest. The paper showed that when rates are decapitated, their brain waves flatline within 20 seconds, as shown by the graph below from the paper:

The so-called "wave of death" reported in the paper was a mere single blip in the EEG reading of brain waves, occurring minutes after decapitation, and lasting only about a second. Such a thing has no relevance to near-death experiences. 

We then get more "exact opposite of the facts" statements by the BBC article's author Scharping, in which he claims that "it appears the brain is kicking itself into a kind of overdrive" at death. EEG readings show the exact opposite: brains very quickly flatlining during cardiac arrest, and becoming electrically inactive with 15 to 30 seconds. 

We get this profoundly misleading mishmash from Scharping, mixing speculation, irrelevant claims and falsehood: 

"If a human being experiences anything during this process, it’s likely to be at the beginning, during the initial rush of brain wave activity, when it appears the brain is kicking itself into a kind of overdrive.

Unlike the ‘wave of death’, this activity is highly coordinated and likely represents a conscious experience, Zemmar explains. It’s something that both those who report NDEs and those who have actually died may experience – though science can’t yet say for certain. 'Usually the brain does this when you meditate, when you perform very high [level] cognitive tasks,' he says. 'It’s like the brain is… trying to pull off this very coordinated activity.' ”

The truth is that as soon as hearts shut down, brains very quickly start to flatline, and become electrically inactive within 15 to 30 seconds. There is zero neuroscience basis for thinking that conscious activity of any substantial length occurs during cardiac arrest. There is zero legitimacy in the attempt above to draw some similarity between brain activity during cognitive tasks and meditation  and brain activity during cardiac arrest. Zemmar's paper provides zero warrant for speculating that the silent dying patient it involved was conscious, and zero warrant for speculating that his data has any relevance to the topic of near-death experiences. 

Scharping then has a link to the paper "Surge of neurophysiological coupling and connectivity of gamma oscillations in the dying human brain." Referring to "four Michigan Medicine patients who died while being monitored by EEGs and electrocardiograms (ECGs)," Scharping then tells us this: 

"Two of the four had little to no change in their brain activity before they died. But the EEG readouts for the other two patients recorded significant bursts of gamma waves beginning just seconds after their ventilators were removed. Gamma waves are the highest frequency of brain waves and are typically associated with higher levels of conscious processing."

In my post here I carefully analyzed the data on all four of the patients that this study dealt with. In every case, the brain waves of the subjects shut down very promptly within a few seconds after their hearts stopped. I include visuals from the paper in that post. The reality is the exact opposite of what Scharping is trying to suggest. Instead of there being EEG readings suggesting "higher levels of conscious processing," for each of the four patients there were EEG readings indicating the exact opposite: brains electrically shutting down with 15 to 30 seconds after the heart stops. 

The article then gives us a false assessment of the work of neuroscientist Jimo Borjigin. In my post here I document two  misleading statements by Borjigin, and debunk claims that this neuroscientist did anything to provide evidence relevant to explaining near-death experiences. 

Below is a screen shot giving an example of one of Borjigin's misleading statements on this topic. It shows part of the paper Borjigin co-authored involving cardiac arrest in rats, a paper with the misleading titlte "Surge of neurophysiological coherence and connectivity in the dying brain," a title not matching the reported data.  The screen shot shows Figure 1 of the paper and part of its caption. We see in the top right corner EEG data showing the brain of a rat flatlining within about 15 seconds after cardiac arrest. But in a misleading statement, this very quick flatlining is described in the caption as "EEG displays a well-organized series of high-frequency activity following cardiac arrest." A correct description of the data would have been "a rat brain flatlining within 15 seconds after the rat's heart stopped."

Trying to back up his groundless claim of a surge of brain activity at death, Scharping then refers us to the 2017 study "Characterization of end-of-life electroencephalographic surges in critically ill patients." There are quite a few problems with that study. First, it did not use the type of EEG device used by neurologists, but a much cheaper device called the SEDLine device, one "developed as an assessment of hypnosis during anesthesia." The manual of the device tells us that it computes a single number, something called a Patient State Index which it defines as the likelihood that a patient is anesthetized. The devices were not designed for the purpose the paper authors used them for. The paper authors did not have heart-rate data corresponding to their brain wave data, as they were analyzing solely from a head-only device (SEDLine) that does not take pulse or heart rate measurements (according to its manual). So we do not  know how many (if any) of these so-called "end-of-life electroencephalographic surges" were things occurring after someone's heart stopped. 

 Scharping then refers us a 2009 paper based on readings from the same  SEDLine device, a study with the same problems as the study referred to above. Neither study shows any such thing as a surge in electrical activity in a brain when a heart has stopped. 

The reality of near-death experiences dramatically contradicts "brains make minds" claims. During cardiac arrest in which their hearts have stopped and their brains have flatlined, people often people report the most vivid near-death experiences, which are often described as very vivid "realer than real" type of experiences. No such thing should be possible if your brain is the source of your mind. 

According to four papers on the phenomenology of near-death experiences that I studied to make the table below, there are features that recur in a large fraction of near-death experiences.  The papers mentioned in the table below are these:

Study 1: The phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 78 subjects (link), a 1980 study, producing results similar to a smaller study group year 2003 in-hospital study by one of its co-authors. 

Study 2: "Qualitative thematic analysis of the phenomenology of near-death experiences,” 34 subjects (link), a 2017 study on people who survived cardiac arrest. 

Study 3: "Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands," a 2001 study of 62 subjects who were known to have suffered cardiac arrest and survived it, and who also reported a near-death experience (a subset that was 12% of a larger group of cardiac arrest survivors), link. The average duration of cardiac arrest was 4 minutes. 74% were interviewed within 5 days of their cardiac arrest. 

Study 4: "The Different Experience: A Report on a Survey of Near-Death Experiences in Germany," 82 subjects (link).

	Study 1	Study 2	Study 3	Study 4
Seeing a light or “unusual visual phenomena” such as lights or auras	48%	74%	> 23%	40%
Meeting other beings	55%	44%	32%	42%
Positive emotions or intense feeling of well-being	37-50%	29%	56%	50%
“Hyper-lucidity”		41%
ESP during the near-death experience	39%	12%
"Awareness of being dead" or awareness of dying		26%	50%
Distortion of time	79%	47%
Celestial landscape or other realm of existence	72%		29%	47%
Contact or communication with the dead	30%	23%	32%	16%
Out-of-body experience	35%	35%	24%	31%
Having some sort of nonphysical body separate from the physical body	58%
Passing through tunnel or similar structure	31%	26%	31%	38%
Life reviewed or relived	27.%	15%	13%	44%

The third of these studies (Study 3 in the table above) was limited to people reporting near-death experiences during cardiac arrest. The vivid experiences reported should have been impossible under "brains make minds" assumptions, because brains electrically shut down within 15 to 30 seconds after the heart stops, with that shutdown showing as a flatlining of EEG signals. And as for out-of-body experiences (in which an observer sees himself outside of his body), which are often part of near-death experiences, such out-of-body experiences are the least likely thing that anyone would ever report if his brain were the source of his mind. 

Postscript: The BBC Science Focus article discussed above was followed by a just-as-misleading materialist article entitled "Think you're the same person every day? This brain experiment says otherwise."  We read of no experiment matching this deceptive clickbait claim. We have the false claim in the article about the tempero-parietal junction region: "When researchers electrically stimulated this brain region during brain surgery, it triggered an out-of-body experience in the patients." The statement is backed up a link to a paper behind a paywall. You can get the full paper on Google Scholar, and it describes no such experiment done in 2005, nor does it describe any such experiment done with multiple subjects. The paper does mention a 2002 paper that was based on a single subject. I debunked the paper in a previous post:

• "Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions." This 2002 paper has some quotes by a subject in whom the authors had brain-zapped with electricity, by inserting electrodes in her brain. The authors have attempted to portray this as evidence of an artificially induced out-of-body experience. But the only sentence that the paper quotes from the subject is one that does not indicate a full out-of-body experience. That sentence is this: "I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk." That sounds like some weird electricity-induced perception anomaly that is not properly described as an out-of-body experience. During an out-of-body experience a person will typically report leaving his body and seeing his entire body (not just the legs and lower trunk) from outside of the body. Eager to report some experimental induction of an out-of-body experience, our authors seem to have taken some account that does not match those of out-of-body experiences, and called that an out-of-body experience. The authors make this claim: "Two further stimulations induced the same sensation, which included an instantaneous feeling of 'lightness' and 'floating' about two metres above the bed, close to the ceiling." Since this is not an actual full-sentence quote from the subject, it has very little value as evidence. A second-hand account of a person's weird experience during brain zapping (by some other person who did not have that experience) is pretty worthless as evidence. What would we have read from a transcript of what the subject said, one including any questions the subject was asked? We have no idea.