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 two different groundless myths: (1) the myth that there is a flood of chemicals released by dying brains; (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.  

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. 

Neuroscientists Keep Peddling Explanatory Snake Oil

 In the nineteenth century a widely practiced scam was the sale of snake oil. A snake oil salesman would typically travel around from town to town, typically new towns in the western United States that had a shortage of doctors.  He would often travel in a horse-pulled wagon called a medicine wagon. The snake oil salesman would make all kinds of groundless claims about the medicinal value of his worthless bottles. After a good day's sale, the snake oil salesman would be off to the next town. By keeping on the road, he would avoid the problem of customers demanding their money back because the product failed to work. Below we see a newspaper ad placed by one of the traveling snake oil salesmen:

Notice the sweeping claim in the ad: the claim that the seller could "heal all manner of disease." Typically the person making such a claim would be selling products of little or no medicinal value. 

As the Wild, Wild West of the United States got more and more tame and adequately filled by regular doctors, snake oil treatments fell into disrepute, and the very term "snake oil" became a term synonymous with cons and cheats. But it is easy to imagine how snake oil manufacturers could have caused snake oil to become very prestigious.  All that would have been needed was the establishment of Departments of Snake Oil Medicine in colleges and universities, populated by Professors of Snake Oil Medicine. 

Once some type of claim gets taught by some type of department in colleges and universities, the public starts thinking of the claim as respectable and well-founded. What happens is that a university or college has great prestige, and is regarded as a lofty teacher of truth and a storehouse of knowledge. So when some new claim gets institutionalized by the establishment of a university department or college department, people tend to think such a claim is well-established. If there were hundreds of Departments of Astrology in colleges and universities all over the country, people would tend to think that astrology is well-established, and that consulting your horoscope is a good way to judge your future. 

We can imagine Departments of Snake Oil Medicine getting established in universities and colleges, aided by the social construction of the triumphal legend that snake oil advocates like Texas Jack were giants of medicine whose authority we should kneel to:

But how could some Department of Snake Oil Medicine ever produce research that would give some veneer or aura of scientific respectability to the claims of snake oil advocates? That would be relatively easy. A variety of bad research techniques could be employed. It would work rather like this:

(1) When snake oil advocates did studies that showed no medical effectiveness in people using snake oil, such studies would simply be filed away in the file drawers of scientists, and not submitted for publication. 

(2) Snake oil advocates would run very small studies, and by pure chance a certain number of them (maybe 5% or so) would seem to show marginal effectiveness. Such studies would be the ones submitted for publication in journals. 

(3) Noise-mining and cherry-picking could be heavily utilized. The case histories of thousands of snake oil users could be very carefully scanned, to look for cases in which some type of ailment (perhaps an infectious disease such as the flu) seemed to become less troubling at about the same time someone had drunk or applied snake oil. Such cases would be heavily promoted as proof of the wonderful effectiveness of snake oil. 

(4) Bad measurement techniques and poor analysis techniques could be used when evaluating someone's health, allowing a kind of see-what-you-are-hoping-to-see analysis. For example, when studying the effectiveness of snake oil in treating fevers, snake oil advocates might rely on dubious "rate how you feel on a scale of 1 to 10" survey answers, rather than much more reliable thermometer measures of a person's temperature. 

(5) Misleading visuals might be used, such as body maps showing in bright red regions of the body allegedly treatable by snake oil medicine. 

By the use of such techniques and many similar misleading and poor-practice techniques, Professors of Snake Oil Medicine could easily produce papers or articles that seemed to provide superficial evidence for the effectiveness of snake oil treatments, even though the treatments had no effectiveness. And if the Professors of Snake Oil Medicine were to get heavy funding (directly or indirectly) from snake oil manufacturers who made tons of money from selling snake oil, we can imagine that many university and college Departments of Snake Oil Medicine could stay well-funded. Of course, such professors would have a strong financial motive to produce results pleasing to their corporate sponsors. 

 In a previous post I stated the rule below:

The rule of well-funded and highly motivated research communities: almost any large well-funded research community eagerly desiring to prove some particular claim can be expected to  occasionally produce superficially persuasive evidence in support of such a claim, even if the claim is untrue.  

Such a rule would help Professors of Snake Oil Medicine to be able to claim that they were producing some studies in support of their claims. What would also help very much would be if the Professors of Snake Oil Medicine were to succeed in enforcing taboos and if such professors were to succeed in demonizing, slandering and gaslighting all those who presented evidence against the effectiveness of snake oil.  If such professors somehow made it a taboo to do research discrediting the claims of snake oil proponents, that would be a huge element in helping Departments of Snake Oil Medicine to become well-established.

Now, you may think that the imaginary tale I describe above is one too hard to believe. But the truth is that there actually occurred something very much like what I have described above. What happened is that they established in colleges and universities Departments of Neuroscience dedicated to the propagation of the belief that minds are produced by brains, and that brains are the storage place of human memories. Such claims were very much explanatory snake oil. Although countless billions of dollars have been spent trying to prove such claims, they have never been established by robust evidence. To the contrary, research on brains has produced innumerable reasons for rejecting the claim that minds are produced by brains, and that brains are the storage place of human memories. Such reasons are discussed in the posts of this blog site. 

So how is it that our Departments of Neuroscience have stayed in business and had such high influence? How have Professors of Neuroscience got so many people to believe the unbelievable dogmas they teach? This occurred because such professors used techniques just like I described above. Some of the techniques that such professors have used are listed below:

• Quick and dirty" experimental designs
• Way-too-small study group sizes
• Cherry-picked data subsets
• Ignoring two hundred years of well-documented psychical research presenting evidence contrary to neuroscientist dogmas
• Unreliable claims about fear or recall in rodents, produced by bad measurement methods such as "freezing behavior" estimations 
• Citations of poor-quality papers
• "Keep torturing the data until it confesses" tactics
• Constant reiterations of dogmas disproven or discredited by the facts observed by neuroscientists themselves
• Ignoring unusual case histories that conflict with "brains make minds" claims or "brains store memories" claims
• "Lying with colors" fMRI studies containing misleading visuals
• Lack of pre-registration
• Weird programming loop contortions of data, in which investigators senselessly think they have the right to programmatically perform arbitrary convolutions on the original data and still claim their twisted output is "what the brain is telling us"
• Professor pareidolia resembling "Jesus in my toast" claims
• Ignoring physical shortfalls of all brains that contradict or discredit some hypothesis being tested
• Unreliable and convoluted "spaghetti code" analysis
• Lack of detailed blinding protocols
• Ignoring observation failures
• Poor reproducibility
• HARKing 
• Not publishing null results
• P-hacking
• Title or abstract claims not matching results
• Lack of control subjects, or too few of them
• Blending real data and artificial (fake) data, with the fake data called "simulated" as if something "simulated" was better than something fake
• Unwarranted use of cell names and cell nicknames
• Unwarranted assumptions of causal effects, with a massive failure to consider reasonable alternative explanations of causes
• By a constant use of the passive voice rather than the active voice, a failure to document in most scientific papers the most basic facts needed to help police fraud, facts such as exactly who made an observation, the exact date when the observation was made, and where the observation was made. 

Today's professors of neuroscience do not get payments from snake oil manufacturers. But they often receive (directly or indirectly) very big financial benefits from pharmaceutical manufacturers and the manufacturers of biomedical devices, who may fund research or offer lucrative consulting fees for professors making claims that enhance the stock prices of such manufacturers.  

Just as I imagined Professors of Snake Oil Medicine creating some taboo against research challenging the effectiveness of snake oil, with such professors using techniques of gaslighting and slander to marginalize researchers producing such research, professors of neuroscience have used similar techniques to try to create some taboo against research challenging the "brains make minds" dogma. We have two hundred years of published research documenting the reality of spooky mental phenomena that cannot be explained by brains,  things such as ESP, clairvoyance, paranormal phenomena, apparition sightings, out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences. The professors of neuroscience have declared such research topics to be taboo, and have ignored all of the psychical research that defies their "brains make minds" dogma. Such professors have tried to gaslight, slander and marginalize respectable researchers producing such results that defy brains make minds" dogma.

The "smoke and mirrors" world of modern neuroscience resembles the "smoke and mirrors" shenanigans that would have gone on within Departments of Snake Oil Medicine if they had ever been established.  For a look at a recent example of some of this foolishness, read the recent "Mad in America" article here.  We read of a patient who would not give "informed consent" to a treatment risking her life, who was electrically shocked until she relented, with this being hailed as "restoring decision-making capacity," in some twisted mess of neurobabble. 

A recent article in The Atlantic is entitled "Science Is Drowning In AI Slop." We read that soon after the popular ChatGPT AI program was introduced a few years ago, there was a huge spike in submissions to science journals and science preprint servers. We can imagine how that worked:  scientists stuffing their papers with lots of AI-generated paragraphs and AI-generated charts. We read that some researchers who would rarely submit a paper to a journal are now submitting dozens per year. We read that scientists are running machine-learning algorithms on data, claiming to have produced some interesting outcome. The article calls this "a fraud template for AI researchers," noting "as long as the outcome isn't too interesting, few people, if any, will bother to vet it." 

I was for a long time a software developer, and I know how to read programming code. When I look at the programming code used for some of the low-quality "keep torturing the data until it confesses" neuroscience papers that I read, I will often see code that makes me think something along the lines of "no human would ever write junk this unreadable."  My guess is that neuroscientists are sometimes using AI-generated computer code to do black-box "analytics" on brain scan data and EEG data. I suspect that often both the code and the description of the code in the paper is AI-generated, and that often the author or authors do not even understand very well what the code is doing. The obscure output from such a thing is correctly described as AI slop. But a human peer reviewer may be unlikely to catch the nonsense, partially because (according to the article) much of peer review is now done by AI rather than humans. Another article about a popular scientific preprint server states, "Starting in early 2025, he says, the number of 'AI slop' submissions went up exponentially."

We read this, referring to the LLM algorithms used by AI programs:

"Other preprint servers have also seen a rise in poor, AI-generated content, Nosek says—including the generalist preprint service hosted by OSF, which stopped accepting any new submissions in August 2025 'because a majority of submissions were very low quality.'  PsyArXiv, a community-run psychology preprint server within OSF, swapped from moderating submissions after posting to moderating them in advance for the same reason.  Wijers says the new safeguard is needed in part because LLMs will improve, making it harder or impossible for moderators to distinguish fake AI-generated papers from legitimate work."

Evolutionary Psychologist Tooby Kept Teaching Falsehoods About Brain Programs

For twenty years the Edge Foundation seemed to exist mainly to publish an annual survey in which a group of people (mainly scientists) were asked some Annual Question, and wrote their answers at length.  These annual surveys were published in book form between 1998 and 2018, and you can read most of them for free on this page of the Edge Foundation's site.  For years most of the financial contributions that funded the foundation came from Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire who committed suicide in jail after being charged with the sex trafficking of minors.  Epstein was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution in 2008, but he continued for quite a few years before and after that conviction to mingle with scientists and high-tech luminaries at exclusive social events such as dinner parties and cocktail parties, as his sex crimes continued.

What we usually got in the yearly books answering the Annual Question were a group of people advancing an Epstein-friendly view of the world, by which I mean any viewpoint which would not trouble Jeffrey too much as he continued his predatory sex crimes (which seemed to have started long before 2008).  Typically humans would be depicted as accidental piles of chemicals rather than souls or bodies that are mysteriously arising marvels of biological organization. It was as if each of the 100+ essays in each book had been carefully chosen to avoid anything that might make Jeffrey Epstein uncomfortable.  Although occupation-wise the authors were a fairly diverse group, the books were a very monochrome affair, with almost no writers deviating from the Official Party Line of modern academia.  One of the worst examples of the Epstein-compatible viewpoints was the following appalling statement by biologist Richard Dawkins for the 2006 Annual Question:

"But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment."

During the twenty years in which the Annual Question books were being published, we seemed to have heard scarcely a peep from any professor along the lines of "I don't want to participate in some book series mainly financed by a child-abusing sex criminal."  During the same period, the contributors to the Annual Questions were marketed as some kind of brilliant elite.  

At the Edge.org site we had many a writer teaching the most morally appalling nonsense. At the site one well-known Darwinist biologist in America taught the morally destructive doctrine of determinism, the nonsensical claim that humans lack free will. I can imagine Jeffrey Epstein reading such writing with a smile on his face, thinking that he is not really to blame, no matter how many kids he rapes, on the grounds that his atoms made him do it. 

Now the Edge.org site has apparently run out of funding, and has no more annual survey questions. Its 2018 Annual Question survey was the last of its series of questions.  At the site we have no mention of how it was funded most notably by a man now universally regarded as a notorious sex criminal. There's an About page on the site, which makes no mention of Jeffrey  Epstein. There is a grand bit of hogwash in which the often immoral and often nonsensical writings of those at Edge.org are hailed as some type of sublime wisdom. It's some "the scientists will take over philosophy" rubbish. We read this: "The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. "   But we have scant evidence at Edge.org that the scientists contributing were suited for such a task.  The page boasts that its writers "create their own reality."  But isn't it better for a scientist to study reality as it exists, rather than making up some reality that you invented?

Now as the first article on the front page of Edge.org I see a tribute to the late John Tooby, who the site calls the founder of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is a  cesspool of junk science that someone like Jeffrey Epstein probably was a big fan of. The idea behind evolutionary psychology is that you try to explain the human mind and human behavior by claiming that evolution made us act such and such a way so that we would survive better and reproduce more in the state that humans existed before civilization.  

Evolutionary psychology is one of the worst junkyards of unscientific and unfounded speculation in academia. Sitting on their armchairs, evolutionary psychologists spend endless hours making cheesy impossible-to-test speculations such as "you have such and such a mental trait because cavemen needed such and such a trait for such and such a reason," or "people still act in such and such a way because evolution made cavemen act in such and such a way for such and such a reason."

In the document "Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology" we get some examples of the falsehoods and nonsense taught by John Tooby. He taught the fictitious idea that the human mind consists of "programs" that govern our behavior. No such programs have ever been discovered. On and on Tooby goes, misspeaking over and over again, claiming programs in the brain. In the 63-page document, he uses the word "program" 193 times. An example of his deceit comes on page 13, when he states, "These causal relations between information and behavior are created by neural circuits in the brain, which function as programs that process information." The claim has no basis in fact. No one has ever discovered the slightest trace of anything like a computer program by examining brain tissue or neural circuits.  Below are some more similar falsehoods told by Tooby:

• Page 17: "The programs that comprise the human brain were sculpted over evolutionary time by the ancestral environments and selection pressures experienced by the hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended (Advances 2 and 4)." The claim is completely fictional. The human brain consists of elements such as neurons, dendrites and synapses. No one has ever found anything like a program in a human brain. Like almost all human cells, neurons contain DNA. But DNA and its genes are not any type of program. A gene merely tells what amino acids make up a protein, and it is false to claim that DNA is any program for behavior. 
• Page 19: "The brain is fantastically complex, packed with programs, most of which are currently unknown to science." No one has ever discovered any type of program in a human brain. 
• Page 20: "When an organism reproduces, genes that cause the development of its design features are introduced into its offspring." Genes do not explain how there occurs the progression from a one-celled zygote (existing just after impregnation) to the vast organization of a human body. Genes merely specify low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. Neither DNA nor its genes "cause the development" of a human body or a human mind. Saying genes "cause the development" of a human body is as false as saying that bricks and pipes and wood beams cause the construction of a large apartment building. 
• Page 21: "Genes are the means by which functional design features replicate themselves from parent to offspring. They can be thought of as particles of design."  This was a fiction. Genes do not specify the design of any human body or any organ or any cell or any organelle of any cell. 
• Page 25: "The human neural architecture is a complex functional system, composed of programs whose design was engineered by natural selection to solve specific adaptive problems." No one has ever discovered any type of program in a human brain. Brains consist of neurons, dendrites and synapses, not programs. The phrase "engineered by natural selection" is a doubly deceptive phrase. The mere "survival of the fittest" effect of so-called natural selection is not actually selection, and is not any engineering effect. The bodies of organisms are replete with abundant engineering effects, which are not explained by any unguided chance processes such as so-called natural selection. As the botanist Hugo de Vries stated,  "Natural selection is a sieve. It creates nothing, as is so often assumed; it only sifts." ( "The Mutation Theory. Volume II, page 609. )
• Page 26: "The neural programs that allow humans to acquire and use spoken language are adaptations, specialized by selection for that task (Pinker, 1994; Pinker & Bloom, 1990)."  A brain has no programs. No one understands the origin of language.  It is false to claim that the ability to speak a language is an adaption. 
• Page 34: "Genes are regulatory elements that use environments to construct organisms." Another glaring falsehood. Genes do not construct organisms or any of their organ systems or any of their organs or any of the cells of such organs or any of the organelles of such cells. Genes do not have any specification of such things. 
• Page 36: "Some neural programs were designed by natural selection to take in substantial amounts of environmental input (e.g., the language acquisition device) whereas others were designed to take in less information (e.g., the reflex that causes the eye to blink in response to a looming figure)." Here we have a triple abuse of language befitting a deceiver like Tooby. First there is a false claim that there are neural programs. Then we have a use of the misleading term "natural selection" which does not refer to any actual selection ("selection" being a term meaning a choice by a conscious agent). Then there is a reference to an imagined blind, unconscious effect (so-called "natural selection") which is described as designing things, as if a blind, unconscious effect had planning and imagination abilities. 
• Page 52:  "Again, a superordinate program is needed that coordinates these components, snapping each into the right configuration at the right time. We have proposed that emotions are such programs (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000b; Tooby, 1985; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990a)."  Utter nonsense. Emotions are not programs.  The nonsense in the quote is repeated endlessly by Tooby. 

This 63-page document suggests Tooby was no real scholar of the brain. In the document he makes no mention of synapses, only one mention of the word "neuron," and only one mention of DNA. What Tooby mainly does is just make stuff up, acting like an armchair reasoner too lazy to get up and read up on the things he is pontificating about.  To read 40 quotations by scientists and doctors disputing claims about genes made like the ones Tooby made above, see my post here. Tooby's document has 45 uses of the words "genes," 10 uses of the word "gene," and 91 uses of the word "genetic." But nowhere does it refer to amino acids, suggesting Tooby had no understanding of the correct nature of a gene, which is a list of the amino acids used by a protein. In the document his misstatements about genes are as huge and frequent as his misstatements about brains. 

Showing a complete failure to understand the lack of any real intelligence in computers, Tooby laughably states, "The greater the number of functionally specialized programs (or subroutines) your computer has installed, the more intelligent your computer is." No, actually your computer has no real intelligence, and your computer does not become more intelligent when you download more software. 

What is it that a brain would need to have to be actually running something like a computer program? It would need all of these things:

(1) Something like a CPU and a system capable of transmitting information as reliably as in a computer. The brain has no such things. Synapses do not reliably transmit information, with a signal being transmitted with less than 50% likelihood over each synaptic gap of a chemical synapse. 

(2) Something like an operating system, something like UNIX or Windows or MS-DOS. The brain has no such thing. 

(3) Something like a programming language, required for program to be written. The brain has no such thing. 

(4) Something like application programs, written in such a programming language. The brain has no such thing. 

What are the outputs of computer programs? Effects such as the rearrangement of pixels on a computer screen. Such effects do not resemble the outputs and main aspects of a human mind, which are things like understanding, consciousness, experience, aspirations, beliefs and emotions, things which do not match any outputs of a computer program. Computers and their programs are not conscious, have no real understanding, and do not have mental experiences or beliefs. 

So saying the mind does what it does because the brain has programs is like saying your toaster can fly to the moon because your toaster is a moon rocket. Your toaster has none of the things it would have to have to be able to fly to the moon. 

Tooby's false teachings are shown not just by the fact that brains have none of the programs that Tooby claimed that brains have. The false nature of his teachings is shown by the fact that humans do not behave as if they were under the control of a program or programs. A computer program typically offers a limited set of responses that can occur given some inputs. For example, an "if/else" statement typically divides responses into two possibilities. What is called a "switch" statement can offer a wider variety of possible responses, but it is only a limited set of possible responses; and any one input always produces the same output. Humans, on the other hand, may respond in an unlimited variety of ways, in some particular situation or facing some particular stimulus. And human responses are not predictable, unlike what you typically have in a computer program, where the output is completely predictable from an input. Brains do not store programs, and people do not act in a way suggesting control by some program or set of programs. 

For more on the sordid nature of evolutionary psychology, see the long article "Why Jeffrey Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology." To read about Jeffrey Epstein's entanglement with a racist-sounding eugenics-peddling "cognitive scientist" and a bungling philosopher followed by some materialists, read the article here.  The article is a revealing look at the kind of moral degeneration seen in the thinking of some "brains make minds" pitchmen. 

They Also Mentally Calculated Faster Than a Brain Could Ever Do

The credibility of claims that mathematical calculation comes from brains is inversely proportional to the speed and capacity and reliability at which things can be mentally calculated. 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 only about a centimeter per second (about half an inch per second).  Ordinary everyday evidence of very fast and accurate math calculation is therefore evidence against claims that unaided human math calculation 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 calculation occurred by humans unaided by any devices,  the stronger is the evidence against the claim that human math calculation occurs from brain activity. 

It is therefore very important to collect and study all cases of exceptional human mathematics performance. The more such cases we find, and the more dramatic such cases are, the stronger is the case against the claim that unaided human math calculation is a neural phenomenon. Or to put it another way, the credibility of claims that math calculation is a brain phenomenon is inversely proportional to the speed and reliability of the best cases of human math  performance.  The more cases that can be found of humans that seem to calculate too quickly and too accurately for a noisy address-free brain to ever do,  the stronger is the case that human thinking is not a neural phenomenon but instead a spiritual or psychic or metaphysical phenomenon.  My previous post "They Mentally Calculated Faster Than a Brain Could Ever Do" described many such cases, as did my post "They Too Mentally Calculated Faster Than a Brain Could Ever Do." Now let us look at some more cases of this type. 

Some cases of exceptional math performance can be found in the book The Great Mental Calculators by Steven B. Smith. Below from page 179 are the results of very hard math calculations by Arthur Griffith (born 1880):

We see above a record of blazing-fast speed in very hard math calculations.  The "extraction of cube root" referred to is solving the problem: what number multiplied by itself three times gives the supplied number?  The "extraction of a square root" referred to is solving the problem: what number multiplied by itself twice times gives the supplied number? 

A long newspaper article on Arthur Griffith can be read here. We read this:

"While engaged in working a series of tests Griffith multiplied 142,857,143 by 465,891,443 and obtained the product 66,555,920,495,127,349, in ten seconds. He multiplied 999,999,999 by 327,841,277, and had completed the writing of the product, 327,841,276,672,188,723, in nine and a half seconds. Other numbers required a longer time, but in no case was the time needed to complete the multiplication more than thirty seconds. Factors of numbers were called out as quickly as the number was submitted. The fifth power of 996, which equals 980,159,361,278,976, was obtained in thirty-seven seconds. Cubes of large numbers were given without hesitation, and in case the number was not a perfect cube the number which is the nearest perfect cube was given at once."

Using the web site here, I verified that the first  multiplication result is correct. The second multiplication result, 327,841,276,672,188,723, is incorrect only in the fifth-to-last digit, all other digits being correct. We can't tell whether it was a calculation error by Griffith, or an error by whoever wrote down his answer or who typeset the newspaper article. 

On page 297 the author says he was asked by Wim Klein to give two five-digit numbers. The author gave 57,825 and 13,489. In 44 seconds Klein multiplied the two numbers together mentally. On the same page we are told Klein extracted the 19th root of a 133-digit number in under two minutes. 

On page 301 we read this about lightning-fast calculations by Maurice Dagbert:

The same page refers to astounding multitasking and number memorization capabilities of Dagbert:

We read on the next page that Dagbert does not write any intermediate results, but simply announces the number calculated. On page 58 of the book Mental Prodigies by Fred Barton, we have the comment below, which may explain some of Dagbert's abilities. It is a description of something like a photographic memory for numbers:

On page 60 of the same book we read about these "instantaneous" mental calculation feats of Dagbert:

On page 63 of the same book we are told that Dagbert would do performances in which he faced away from a blackboard, and audience members would call out 2-digit numbers that were placed in a grid like the one below. Without  ever viewing the blackboard, Dagbert would correctly name all numbers and their positions in the grid, as well as telling the sum of each of the columns. 

On page 306 of The Great Mental Calculators we read of the astonishing calculation ability of Shakuntala Devi:

In the 1952 newspaper story here, we read of rave reviews of Devi's calculation abilities. A reporter attempts to stump her:

"Your reporter, at this point, slyly glanced at a piece of paper he had laboriously prepared, and asked: 'What is the cube root of 3,375 multiplied by the cube root of 117,649 divided by 5?'

'147,' said Shakuntala, stifling a yawn, and adding, almost apologetically: 'I am usually given problems that present difficulties of one sort or another.' ”

 The answer of 147 is correct. You can get the intermediate numbers in this calculation by using the cube root calculator here, but no such tools existed in 1952. 

On page 311 of The Great Mental Calculators, we learn of the astonishing short-term memory of Hans Eberstark, who could memorize 40 digits after hearing them spoken only once: