Goofs at the Brains Blog Site

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On page 47 Dr. Christison says this:

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

On pages 58-59 Christison says this:

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

On the same page 59 Christison says this:

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

On page 61 Dr. Christison says this:

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

On page 62 Dr. Christison says this:

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

How to Tell Whether a Neuroscience Research Announcement Is Unjustified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step #6: look for a failure to use controls

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step #10: look for p-hacking 

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

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

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

Step #11: look for lack of pre-registration 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click to see left column more clearly

Click to see left column more clearly

The Content of Apparition Sightings Argues Against the Hallucination Explanation

 Humans often report apparition sightings. Skeptics try to explain such sightings as hallucinations. Let us consider what we would expect under the hallucination hypothesis, and compare that to what is observed in apparition sightings. 

Under the hypothesis that apparition sightings are hallucinations, we would expect all of the following things:

(1) It would be just as common, or perhaps even more common, for people to see apparitions of healthy, living people (with years of additional life)  as apparitions of dead people.

(2) It would be just as common for people to see apparitions of animals as apparitions of humans. 

(3) It would be just as common for people outside of reputed haunted places to see apparitions of historical people or celebrities as apparitions of family members or friends. 

(4) It would be just as common for people to see apparitions of lifeless things as apparitions of humans. 

(5) Almost never (except by the most improbable of coincidences) would two or more people report seeing the same apparition. If an apparition was a hallucination caused by some rare brain state, we would not expect so rare a brain state to appear identically to two people, so that they both reported seeing at the exact same an illusory thing (such as the same deceased person). That would be as improbable as two people sleeping together waking up, and both of them reporting that they just had the same dream (such as a dream of a dinosaur roaming about). 

(6) The people who reported apparitions of the deceased would be mainly mentally ill people.

All of these predictions fail to match reality. Let's look at each one. 

Prediction 1: "It would be just as common, or perhaps even more common, for people to see apparitions of healthy, living people (with years of additional life) as apparitions of dead people." Counting the entire lifespan (which often includes sightings of apparitions at the end of life), it is fairly common for people to report seeing an apparition of someone known to be dead. Also, a large class of apparitions consists of cases in which someone reports seeing an apparition of someone who was later found to have died at about the same time, or later found to have been close to death at about the same time. I give very many examples of such apparitions in the series of 16 posts you can read here (you can read all of them by continuing to press Older Posts when you come to the bottom). But it seems to be rare for someone to report an apparition of a living, healthy person who had years of additional lifespan ahead of him. Such cases seem to be many times  less common that apparitions of someone who previously died or died at about the same time the apparition was seen. 

Prediction 2: "It would be just as common for people to see apparitions of animals as apparitions of humans." For a large fraction of people, pets are almost like family members. But it seems to be very rare for someone to report seeing an apparition of a deceased pet. The topic is discussed in the news article below, published after the Society for Psychical Research had published hundreds of accounts of apparitions of humans: 

We read at the top left a statement that apparitions of animals are very scarce. 

Prediction 3: "It would be just as common for people outside of reputed haunted places to see apparitions of historical people or celebrities as apparitions of family members or friends." In England there are various old castles or old buildings where there are supposedly apparitions of historical figures sometimes seem. Outside of such cases, it seems to be very rare for anyone to see an apparition of a historical figure. 

Under the theory that apparitions are hallucinations, we would expect apparitions of Jesus to be very common in countries where Christianity is predominant. Apparitions of Jesus seem to be very rare for those not being diagnosed with schizophrenia.  The Chronicling America web site allows you to do text searches of American newspapers from 1756 to 1963.  Searching for the phrase "apparition of Jesus" on the Chronicling America web site produces only 11 matches, with only one of the newspaper accounts referring to an apparition of Jesus reported in modern times.  For some reason, searching for the phrase "ghost of Jesus" on this site does not work to find matches of that exact phrase, but instead picks up any page (very many) referring to the Christian Trinity using the older phrasing such as "the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost."

Abraham Lincoln was the most famous US president between 1820 and 1920, but searching for "apparition of Lincoln" on the Chronicling America web site produces no cases of anyone reporting an apparition of Lincoln. Similarly, searching for "apparition of Napoleon" on that site produces no cases of anyone reporting an apparition of Napoleon, merely a few repetitions of someone loosely using the word "apparition" to merely mean a sighting of Napoleon while they were in the presence of the living Napoleon.  Without using such a term, I did find one account of someone claiming to see an apparition of Napoleon. 

By comparison, searching for the phrase "apparition of her husband" produces 45 results, many of which are accounts of people claiming to see apparitions of husbands; and searching for "ghost of her husband" produces 126 matches. 

For example, in one newspaper account we read this:

"Calling together her friends and neighbors, she told them she had just seen an apparition of her husband, who, for two years had been absent In New York. He appeared to her to be lying

in a hospital with one hand covering his breast, and he told her that he had been gravely wounded. The day after she received a cablegram from America Informing her that her husband was

dying, having been stabbed by an emissary of the Black Hand."

Similarly, searching for "apparition of his wife" produces 11 matches, searching for "ghost of his wife" produces 119 matches,  searching for "apparition of his father" produces 20 matches, searching for "ghost  of his father" produces 119 matches, searching for "apparition of his mother" produces 6 matches, searching for "ghost of his mother" produces 58 matches, searching for "apparition of her mother" produces 7 matches,  searching for "apparition of her father" produces 9 matches, searching for "ghost of her father" produces 47 matches, searching for "apparition of his brother" produces 5 matches, searching for "apparition of his sister" produces 5 matches, searching for "apparition of her sister" produces 11 matches, searching for "apparition of his friend" produces 11 matches, searching for "apparition of her friend" produces 7 matches, searching for "ghost of her friend" produces 4 matches, and searching for "ghost of her friend" produces 47 matches.

Clearly Prediction #3 does not match reality. It is very much more common for people to report seeing apparitions of deceased family members or deceased friends (or family members or friends at about the same time they died) than to see apparitions of historical figures or celebrities. 

Prediction #4: "It would be just as common for people to see apparitions of lifeless things as apparitions of humans."  It seems to be extremely rare for anyone to see an apparition of a lifeless thing. Automobiles have long played a central role in the life of Americans. But a search for the phrase "apparition of an automobile" on the Chronicling America web site produces only two matches, both of which refer only to horses being scared by automobiles, not humans reporting an apparition of an automobile. No one ever reports seeing an apparition of an automobile in their house or back yard. 

Prediction #5: "Almost never (except by the most improbable of coincidences) would two or more people report seeing the same apparition."  This prediction fails. There are hundreds of cases of more than one people reporting the sight of the same apparition. Such cases can be examined by using the link here, and continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right. Among the posts you can read using that link are these:

When Multiple Witnesses See the Same Apparition

When Two or More See the Same Apparition

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 Cases

When an Apparition Is Seen by Multiple Observers: 17 More Cases

More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers
Many an Apparition Is Seen by More Than One
Still More Apparitions Seen by Multiple Observers

When an Apparition Is Seen by Not Just One

Prediction #6: "The people who reported apparitions of the deceased would be mainly mentally ill people." There is no evidence that this is the case. The great majority who report seeing an apparition of the deceased are normal people who never previously hallucinated.  I personally have published many posts describing many hundreds of apparition sightings, and I can almost never recall such a reported sighting coming from someone with signs of psychosis. 

The content of apparition sightings (mainly involving either family members or friends who either died earlier or at about the same time as the apparition was seen) argues strongly against the claim that apparition sightings are mainly hallucinations. Apparition sightings are an extremely important clue about the nature of our minds: one of many clues that our minds are not the products of our brains, and that minds can exist outside of bodies.  There are many other types of clues telling us the same thing, clues discussed in the posts of this blog. 

The ignoring of apparition sightings by today's neuroscientists is an example of people senselessly ignoring a very important clue, rather like a trusting wife ignoring the very important clue of strange panties repeatedly found under her bed, panties she does not recognize as her own. Senselessly, today's scientists profess belief in things humans never have observed (such as dark matter, dark energy and synapse-stored memories), while refusing to believe in things (spirits of the deceased) that very many people have claimed to have directly observed. It's as if their inner rule was a senseless and unscientific  rule of "believe as my peers believe, not in proportion to how many observations there were of something." 

Groundlessly Boasting Mouse Hibernation Study At Least Reveals the Short Lifetimes of Synapses and Dendritic Spines

 The recent paper "Artificial hibernation reveals synaptic engram architecture associated with memory retention" is another neuroscience paper making a groundless boast in its title. The authors did nothing at all to reveal a "synaptic engram architecture associated with memory retention."  But this weird study involving putting mice into a kind of artificial hibernation does at least reveal something that helps to debunk all claims of synaptic memory storage. 

The final version of the paper is behind a paywall. But when I search for the paper on Google Scholar, it gives me a preprint as the corresponding .pdf file. The preprint is by the same authors, and has an almost identical title, a title of "Artificial hibernation uncovers distinct synaptic engram architecture for memory retention." So I can use that preprint to analyze the research that went on here.  My use of "the paper" below refers to the preprint. 

The paper is one that has many untrue or groundless statements that reflect the author's dogmas and "improperly jumping to conclusions" thinking. Any statements that the authors make using the words "engrams" or "representations" are groundless. These days cognitive neuroscientists are misusing those words very abundantly. Being guilty of "see what you are hoping to see" pareidolia, neuroscientists are frequently claiming without any good warrant to have seen "representations" of this or that in the brain. It's a "Jesus in my toast" kind of affair.  Similarly, whenever neuroscientists use the term "engram" these days, they are making groundless claims in which some cells or synapses are called "engrams," despite a lack of any decent evidence that any such thing as memory storage has occurred in such cells. "Engram" is a word referring to a claimed place of memory storage in the brain. 

The paper is guilty of methodological sins. The study group sizes were ridiculous, consisting of way-too-small study group sizes such as only three mice, only four mice, only five mice, and a study group size imprecisely described as "6-10 mice for each group."  No study like this should be taken seriously as experimental evidence unless it used a study group size of at least 15 or 20 animals per study group. The authors have used the worthless "freezing behavior" method of trying to judge memory recall, which means that what they claim about experimentally demonstrating memory retention should not be regarded as very reliable. Read my post here for why such a method is worthless as a technique for measuring whether a rodent recalled anything. 

But we do get something of value from the paper: some observations of how unstable and short-lived are synapses and dendritic spines. These are observations which help to discredit the popular but groundless dogma that memories are stored in synapses of the brain, which tend to protrude from dendritic spines. 

A dendritic spine is a tiny protrusion from one of the dendrites of a neuron. The diagram below shows a neuron in the top half of the diagram. Some dendritic spines are shown in the bottom half of the visual. The bottom half of the visual is a closeup of the red-circled part in the top of the diagram. 

Neuroscientists have often speculated that dendritic spines could be some type of memory storage system, although such a speculation is silly. Dendritic spines no more resemble a memory storage system than do the little twigs on the branch of a tree. And while memories can last decades, dendritic spines are very unstable, typically having a lifetime of only weeks or months.  

We read this (the "QIH" refers to a roughly 48-hour period of artificial hibernation produced by the experimenters):

"We also evaluated the similarity of the locations of all dendritic  spines before and after QIH. The similarity in spine locations between Day 1 and 3, with QIH in between, was 0.91 on average, which was not significantly different from the similarity between Day 3 and 7 without QIH (0.88)."

So in a mere two days or four days, the dendritic spines on the mice lost about 9% of their previous appearance. You can extrapolate from that to get a dendritic spine average lifetime of only several weeks, which is consistent with previous observations by others reported here. Because synapses are typically attached to dendritic spines, anything we learn about the short lifetime of dendritic spines is something also telling us about the short lifetime of synapses. 

The paper also tells us something about the lifetime of synapses. It states this, referring to a hibernation period of only two days. 

"In the current study, we used artificial hibernation in mice to induce extreme downscaling of the neuronal activity and dendritic structures in the hippocampus. During this hypothermic and hypometabolic state, hippocampal neurons show a ~70% reduction in firing rate and the elimination of more than 50% of synapses." 

This is a devastating answer for any one believing that memories are stored in synapses. Extrapolating from such a rate of decay, we would guess that synapses have an average lifetime of only a few days or maybe a few weeks. 

It has long been known that synapses are built from proteins that have very short average lifetimes of only a few weeks.   Richard Huganir led a study that was specifically dedicated to trying to find long-lived proteins in synapses. None were found.  The scientific paper found no such thing. Quite to the contrary, the paper found the following:

• Studying thousands of brain proteins, the study found that virtually all proteins in brains are very short-lived, with half-lives of less than a week.
  
• Table 2 of the paper gives specific half-life estimates for the most long-lasting brain proteins, and in this table only 10 out of thousands of brain proteins had half-lives of 10 days or longer.
  
• Of the proteins whose half-life is estimated in Table 2, only one of them has a half-life of longer than 30 days, that protein having a half-life of only 32 days.
  
• A graph in the paper indicates that none of the synapse proteins had a half-life of more than 35 days.
  

Below is a graph from the Huganir paper. It shows that the study found that virtually all proteins in synapses are very short-lived.

Below is another graph from the same paper. It shows that the study found that virtually all proteins in synapses are very short-lived.

Judging from these graphs, none of the proteins found had a half-life of longer than 35 days, and only a few had a half-life of more than 14 days.

The 2025 paper here states this:

"We measured the lifetime of the major excitatory synaptic scaffold protein PSD-95 over a range of spatial scales from brain regions to single synapses. PSD-95–HT lifetimes ranged from 11 to 14 days, depending on the brain region (Fig. 2f,g)."

So if synapses are made from proteins with short lifetimes of only a few days or weeks, we should not be surprised that a researcher would find that about 48 hours would produce a 50% reduction in synapses. Most synapses are attached to dendritic spines. So the previous result about the short lifetime of dendritic spines reinforces the conclusion that synapses have short lifetimes. 

The paper here states, "Experiments indicate in absence of activity average life times ranging from minutes for immature synapses to two months for mature ones with large weights."  The paper suggests that even larger synapses last only two months.  A 2025 paper states that  "the synaptic turnover rate is as high as 1% per day in the visual cortex." Such a rate of turnover is equivalent to a synaptic lifetime of only about a year. Another paper  states that in  hippocampal CA1 cells the synapses have an  estimated lifetime of only 1–2 weeks.

The lifespan of synapses is of very great relevance to whether there is any credibility in the claim that synapses store memories. Old humans can remember very well many things they learned and experienced 50 years ago. But if synapses have short lifetimes, they cannot possibly be a storage place of knowledge humans learned 50 years ago,  and synapses cannot be a storage place of memories humans had 50 years ago.  If synapses have short lifetimes, the synaptic theory of memory is untenable. 

The issue that synapses are made of proteins with short lifetimes has been known for decades. So why on Earth do so many neuroscientists keep claiming that memories are stored in synapses? It's simply that they have no other alternative theory of brain-stored memories that is any better.  Nothing in the brain looks anything like a system for storing, preserving or retrieving learned information or experiences an organism had.  

We know that the body does one type of reading of information: the reading of genetic information from DNA. We understand some of the extremely complex molecular machinery that is involved in such reading. The transcription of DNA requires the RNA Polymerase II protein complex described in my post here. It is a very complex component requiring a special arrangement of more 10,000 amino acids.  Other complex components are required for the reading of DNA, which takes minutes. 

If information were to be stored in synapses or dendritic spines, there would have to be very complex components capable of reading such information. But no trace of any such component can be found. If any such component existed, it would require minutes to read information from synapses and dendritic spines.  Such a hypothetical reality would be utterly incapable of explaining the wonder of instant memory recall. If you ask me, "Who was Abraham Lincoln?" it does not take me minutes to give a detailed answer. I will instantly answer: "The US president during the American Civil War who was assassinated in 1865." 

A search for "DNA reading" on Google Scholar gives ten pages of search results, because DNA reading is a real thing. A search for "synapse reading" on Google Scholar produces only one page of six results. One of these results does not refer to synapse reading; another result is in a foreign language; and the other four results do not refer to a reading of synapses in the human body, but merely refer to something going on in computer  systems in which parts of the system are being inappropriately called "synapses."  We get results so weak because "synapse reading" is not a real thing.  A search for "dendritic spine reading" on Google Scholar gives zero results.