"Microelectrode Rape": Experimenters Penetrating Sickest Epilepsy Patients Too Dazed to Provide Real Informed Consent

There is a very serious scandal that has been long covered on this blog, a scandal that the mainstream press has ignored. This is the scandal of very sick epilepsy patients being recklessly endangered by experiment-performing brain experts implanting medically unnecessary microelectrodes deep into the brains of such patients.

Epilepsy patients suffer from seizures, which have been described as electrical storms in the brain. When people have epilepsy, the first line of treatment is drugs such as levetiracetam. Such drugs work to prevent seizures for the great majority of epilepsy patients. But for a  small fraction of epilepsy patients, such drugs do not work. Such patients are called drug-resistant epilepsy patients.

The sickest type of epilepsy patient is one suffering from frequent seizures that cannot be controlled by drugs, seizures so bad and so frequent that brain surgery is needed, to stop seizures that may be occurring in the patient as often as 15 times a day. Such surgery typically involves extracting a portion of the brain, for the sake of preventing the seizures. It's a drastic approach, but it can be surprisingly effective. And the cognitive effects are typically relatively minor -- just as we would expect if the brain is not the source of your mind, and not the storage place of your memories. Amazingly, there has often occurred the removal of an entire half of the brain in operations to prevent epileptic seizures.  My post here discusses how such operations have often involved little damage to either memory or mental capacity, contrary to the dogma that brains store memories and that brains produce thinking. 

Usually the surgical operation to try to prevent seizures involves some excision of brain tissue less than the removal of a full half of a brain. To try to help determine where to extract brain tissue without causing cognitive damage or functional damage, medical professionals will typically use electrodes to try to determine which brain areas seizures are coming from. So the skull of a sick epilepsy patient may be opened up, and electrodes may be placed on particular spots of the brain.

At this point there may enter an experimental neuroscientist.  The experimental neuroscientist may say something like this to a doctor: 

"So, you're already opening up this guy's skull to implant electrodes on his brain. How about implanting some additional electrodes -- some more deeply implanted microelectrodes that will monitor the firing of individual neurons? I would like to do a particular type of experiment that requires data on the firing of individual neurons, and this is a great opportunity for such an experiment." 

At this point a good doctor properly guarding the best interests of his patients should always give the same answer, saying something like this:

 "Get the f*** out of here, you parasite! The last thing in the world my horribly suffering patient needs is to be involved in is some damn experiment that may endanger him unnecessarily! I am trying to HEAL this sick-as-hell person, goddammit!"

But very sadly, many doctors are failing to act in such a way. Instead many doctors are giving a green light to neuroscientists wanting to use very sick epilepsy patients for neuroscience experiments involving microelectrode implantation. The goal of the neuroscientist may be to monitor the exact firing rate of individual neurons. Such a thing has no use in evaluating what parts of the brain should be removed to stop seizures. And no reliable science results, because what goes on is typically pareidolia "noise mining" correlation fishing using study group sizes way too small to provide robust evidence of anything. 

While the implanting of regular electrodes may be necessary for surgical evaluation of epilepsy patients, the implanting of microelectrodes is not necessary for surgical evaluation. A scientific paper tells us, "Sixty-five years after single units were first recorded in the human brain, there remain no established clinical indications [i.e. medical justifications] for microelectrode recordings in the presurgical evaluation of patients with epilepsy (Cash and Hochberg, 2015)."

Implanting microelectrodes in the brain of very sick epilepsy patients about to undergo surgery is a sickening case of the abuse of the weakest for the sake of the powerful, the powerful being the scientists conducting such experiments. The medically unnecessary implantation of microelectrodes has very serious risks. 

A paper tells us this:

"A recent meta-analysis reviewed complication rates and types of complications in patients undergoing subdural grid implantation for seizure mapping [41]. The most common complication which was reported was intracranial haemorrhage with a mean rate of 4% closely followed by other complications such as neurologic infections, superficial infections and elevated intracranial pressure. They also found that an increased number of electrodes (>67 electrodes) was independently associated with complications."

Another paper tells us this:

"There are definite medical risks associated with the use of intracranial electrodes. The complication rate of subdural electrodes has been reported to range between 6% and 26%.19–23) Relatively common adverse events associated with subdural electrodes are fever, headache, and nausea.24) Another group reported transient cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leakage (13–31%), infection (6–8%), intracranial bleeding (8%), and cerebral edema in addition to an intracranial mass effect.25) Nair et al. reported that complications included (in the order of their frequency) infection, transient neurological deficit, epidural hematoma, increased intracranial pressure, and infarction.2) An increase in the complication rate was associated with (a) a greater number of grids/electrodes, (b) longer duration of monitoring, (c) older age of the patient, (d) left-sided grid insertion, (e) the use of burr holes in addition to craniotomy, and (f) an earlier year of monitoring (most likely a reflection of the aforementioned surgeon’s experience)."

But, you may say, the scientists doing these experiments say that they got "informed consent" from the epilepsy patients who they penetrated with microelectrodes. But did they really do that? There is the serious question of whether it is really possible to get any meaningful or adequate degree of "informed consent" from some patient suffering from very bad or very frequent seizures, seizures so bad that doctors are about to cut out a sizable part of the person's brain. 

What do you call it when someone penetrates another person, a person who is not mentally fit to be providing full meaningful consent? Typically such actions fall under categories called second-degree rape or third-degree rape. 

When people think of rape, they think of first-degree rape, when someone rapes another person who is actively resisting or screaming her non-consent. But under the law there are other categories of rape, what are called second-degree rape or third-degree rape. In some of the 50 states of the United States, a person is guilty of third-degree rape if he commits sexual penetration into someone lacking the mental capacity to give consent.  That lack of mental capacity may be for various reasons including intoxication or other factors that may affect normal mental functioning. In Louisiana, for example, you can be found guilty of third-degree rape if you had sex with a person who was intoxicated. 

But, we may ask, is there any big difference between the mental incapacitation of someone intoxicated and someone suffering up to 15 seizures a day? Are not both of these in the same class of mental incapacitation?

What is it called in Louisiana if you unnecessarily penetrate the vagina of some woman who is drunk? That is called third-degree rape. But what should we call it when a neuroscientist unnecessarily penetrates with microelectrodes the brain of some epilepsy patient suffering many seizures a day, some patient too dazed and debilitated and confused to be giving any "informed consent" worthy of the name? Perhaps that should be called "microelectrode rape."

In the conversation below, an authority is setting up a rape.

Authority: So you have those horrible seizures 15 times a day -- I want to help. So can I open up your brain to evaluate you for surgery?

Groaning, dazed epilepsy patient: Sure, Doc, whatever you want, just stop these damn seizures that are driving me crazy!

Authority: And my colleague wants to insert his penis into your vagina. 

Groaning, dazed epilepsy patient: Sure, Doc, whatever you want, just stop these damn seizures that are knocking me out 15 times a day! 

No very meaningful degree of "informed consent" is going on here, so there would probably be a crime of third-degree rape if this proceeds. And what goes on in the conversation below seems just as bad. 

Authority: So you have those horrible seizures 15 times a day -- I want to help. So can I open up your brain to evaluate you for surgery, and hook up some electrodes?

Groaning, dazed epilepsy patient: Sure, Doc, whatever you want, just stop these damn seizures that are driving me crazy!

Authority: And I also want to insert into your brain another type of electrode called microelectrodes, for the sake of an experiment I want to perform.   

Groaning, dazed epilepsy patient: Sure, Doc, whatever you want, just stop these damn seizures that are knocking me out 15 times a day! 

No very meaningful degree of "informed consent" is going on here, and the authority doing such penetration is probably guilty of a crime of abuse and endangerment, something as bad as third-degree rape. We might reasonably use the term "microelectrode rape" to describe such crimes of abuse and endangerment, which take place against people so sick and so dazed and mentally disabled that they probably are not giving any meaningful or sufficient degree of informed consent. 

The fact that the authorities doing such sinister penetrations get a signed document from those they abuse and endanger means very little. Is there any meaning when you get a "hurry up and sign" signature under conditions such as these? 

Almost always the brain experts we might suspect of being guilty of these "microelectrode rapes" (similar to third-degree rapes) fail to publish any informed consent document signed by the subjects horribly endangered by these experiments. Such studies almost always fail to give us specific information on the small number of patients that had microelectrodes implanted.  So we are left unable to judge just how dazed, confused, disabled and mentally damaged the victimized experimental subjects were. We never seem to get something such as MMSE test results allowing us to know how mentally competent the experimental subjects were, or links to videos demonstrating that the patients were mentally fit to be giving a sufficient amount of informed consent. We also never get follow-up information informing us about whether or not there were medical complications arising from such unnecessary implantation of microelectrodes. When analyzing these microelectrode implant experiments, our rule of thumb should be: whenever a paper fails to document mental competency in its experimental subjects, and fails to document them signing completely candid documents that people in their state would be able to understand, then we should assume a lack of any real informed consent, with the result being something we might rightfully call  "microelectrode rape" resembling third-degree rape.

I was able to find one example of an informed consent form for one of these microelectrode implant experimental studies. It was a 4-page form looking about as long as the form in my visual above. The form was so badly filled with jargon and confusing text that there would seem to be little chance that it would be adequately understood by anyone suffering from many seizures every day. This informed consent document falsely described the risks involved, claiming that microelectrodes do not involve risks beyond those posed by regular electrodes implanted in the brain. The reality is that the risk is proportional to the number of electrodes implanted, and that implanting microelectrodes (in addition to regular electrodes) always does involve very much additional risk to the patient, risk that does him no good. 

When neuroscience experiments are being done on humans, the very idea of following a mere "informed consent" is a profoundly defective one. A more stringent standard would have to be followed in order for good morality to be practiced in neuroscience experiments on humans. You might call such a standard the standard of "risk-cognizant consent."

The idea of risk-cognizant consent would be to verify that a subject understood all of the risks involved in an experiment, not merely that he had been informed of such risks in a way that might well have failed to cause a good understanding of the risks. Here is how such a protocol of risk-cognizant consent might work. 

(1)  Consent documents would be crystal-clear documents carefully written according to a "plain English" standard.

(2) All risks would be candidly discussed, including known risks, and unknown risks that it might be reasonable to suspect the subject was incurring. 

(3) Before any subject was asked to sign such a document, his or her reading skills would be verified (for example, he might be asked to read the first paragraph aloud). 

(4) Anyone lacking very good reading skills would be offered the consent document in an audio form or video form, or would have the consent document read to him.

(5) It would be made clear that a test would be given on the content of the consent document, and that therefore it should be studied very carefully. 

(6) It would always be verified that the person had spent adequate time studying the written consent document or listening to the audio form of the document, without any of the nonsense going on in emergency rooms, where people are routinely given long documents and pressured to quickly sign them, with medical personnel routinely accepting signatures when people obviously had not taken adequate time to sign what they had read. 

(7) All persons signing such a document would then be given a ten-question multiple-choice test trying to determine how well they understood the information in the consent document. 

(8) Any persons failing to score very highly on such a test (such as scoring 9 out of 10 or higher) would be excluded from participation in the experimental study.

It is not practical to follow this type of protocol in a rushed hurry-up environment such as a hospital emergency room in which someone's life may depend on speedy action  But neuroscience experiments never have so tight a time factor. With neuroscience experiments, there is abundant available time to follow a morally responsible protocol such as the risk-cognizant standard I have described. A mere "informed consent" protocol is not an adequate standard for neuroscience experiments. 

I advise anyone involved in any type of neuroscience experiments to save a copy of any consent document signed,  to gather the names of any persons involved in the experiment, and to carefully document any health problems that may conceivably have been caused by participation in the experiment. Such data may be useful if the person wants to later file a lawsuit seeking damages. 

AI Slop Worsens the Degenerative Spiral of Biology Research

 My long 2021 post "'The Degenerative Spiral of 'Grand Explanation' Academia" was one that painted a troubling portrait of malfunction and deceit in the world of academic researchers purporting to have grand explanations for great mysteries of nature. Has there been improvement since that time? To the contrary, things seems to be getting worse. As Exhibit A to back up the claim that the generative spiral of "grand explanation" academia is worsening, I may offer a recent article by Ross Andersen in The Atlantic, one entitled, "Science Is Drowning in AI Slop." We read this, referring to the "large-language models" used by so-called artificial intelligence or AI:

"Almost immediately after large language models went mainstream, manuscripts started pouring into [scientific] journal inboxes in unprecedented numbers. Some portion of this effect can be chalked up to AI’s ability to juice productivity, especially among non-English-speaking scientists who need help presenting their research. But ChatGPT and its ilk are also being used to give fraudulent or shoddy work a new veneer of plausibility, according to Mandy Hill, the managing director of academic publishing at Cambridge University Press & Assessment. That makes the task of sorting wheat from chaff much more time-consuming for editors and referees, and also more technically difficult."

We read about companies called paper mills that help scientists produce papers, either by generating from scratch a fake paper, or by generating dubious or fake paragraphs or dubious or fake images that a scientist can use in his paper. AI makes it much easier for such science fakery to occur. These paper mill companies don't have advertisements with phrases such as "We'll Help You Fake Things!" Instead, they claim to offer "editorial services" or maybe "creative consulting" or "literary facilitation" or some other euphemism.

It seems that many scientists use such "paper mills" to speed up the job of producing a scientific paper, in a shady way similar to a football player taking banned steroids to boost his performance. But with all the AI tools out there, such as ChatGPT, it seems that a scientist does not even have to become involved with external paper mills. Similar results can be achieved from a scientist's desktop, when he uses some AI tool such as ChatGPT. 

We read that AI tools are also being used to write peer reviews. The article says, "Pangram Labs recently analyzed thousands of peer reviews that were submitted to ICLR, and found that more than half of them were written with help from an LLM, and about a fifth of them were wholly AI-generated."  We read this: "AI science slop has spread beyond the journals now, and is also overrunning other venues for disseminating research."

Preprint servers are sites such as the Cornell physics paper server and the biology preprint server Biorxiv.  Andersen states this:

"But in the months after ChatGPT was released, preprint servers experienced the same spike in submissions that journals did. Ginsparg, who is now a professor of information science at Cornell, told me he hoped that this would be a short-lived trend, but the rate of submissions continues to rise. .. A similar influx of AI-assisted submissions has hit bioRxiv and medRxiv, the preprint servers for biology and medicine. Richard Sever, the chief science and strategy officer at the nonprofit organization that runs them, told me that in 2024 and 2025, he saw examples of researchers who had never once submitted a paper sending in 50 in a year."

Andersen ends on this gloomy note, describing the most severe degenerative spiral of the scientific literature:

"When I called A. J. Boston, a professor at Murray State University who has written about this issue, he asked me if I’d heard of the dead-internet conspiracy theory. Its adherents believe that on social media and in other online spaces, only a few real people create posts, comments, and images. The rest are generated and amplified by competing networks of bots. Boston said that in the worst-case scenario, the scientific literature might come to look something like that. AIs would write most papers, and review most of them, too. This empty back-and-forth would be used to train newer AI models. Fraudulent images and phantom citations would embed themselves deeper and deeper in our systems of knowledge. They’d become a permanent epistemological pollution that could never be filtered out." 

Synapse Strengthening is Way, Way Too Slow to Explain Instant Learning

The Kavli Foundation is a foundation founded by millions of dollars in grants from the late Fred Kavli. The foundation issues science prizes and science grants. One of its semi-annual prizes is in neuroscience. An earlier post on this blog described the bunk and misleading information that occurred when the 1 million dollar Kavli Prize in neuroscience was announced in 2024.  Recently the Kavli Prize was awarded to neuroscientists involved in work on protein synthesis in dendrites: Oswald Steward, Christine Holt, Kelsey Martin and Erin Schuman. The announcement of the prize award makes no mention of learning or memory, merely stating this: "THE KAVLI PRIZE IN NEUROSCIENCE IS AWARDED TO: Christine Holt, Kelsey Martin, Erin Schuman and Oswald Steward for the discovery of local protein translation in neurons and establishing its importance for brain development and plasticity."  

The same page has a video announcement, where someone very incorrectly makes the utterly groundless claim at the 16:32 mark that this research "came to transform our understanding of how the brain develops, adapts, and stores information." Neuroscientists have no real understanding of how a brain can store learned information, and the vague hand-waving simple-slogan "theory" of synapse strengthening is no such understanding. The same authority makes the groundless boast at the 18:15 mark that the work of Kelsey Martin "helps explain how learning and memory are stored in the brain," a boast that has no basis in truth. Neuroscientists do not have any understanding of how any learning or memory could be stored in the brain, and microscopic examination of brain tissue has never produced the slightest trace of anything learned or experienced or memorized. 

A Simons Foundation page incorrectly claims this was a reward for memory research, stating, "This year’s Kavli Prize in Neuroscience celebrates research on how neurons form and modify neural connections to enable processes such as learning and memory." That goes beyond any claim made in the written prize announcement statement, and we certainly do not know that "neural connections...enable processes such as learning and memory," which is a mere groundless dogma of neuroscientists. 

A press release by the University of California announcing this prize gives us bunk and misleading information related to this topic. We have a press release with this paragraph, preceded by the bogus header of "Transformative discoveries." The paragraph veers into falsehood at its end:

"For decades, scientists believed that proteins needed by neurons were produced primarily in the cell body. Steward’s groundbreaking electron microscopy studies revealed protein-producing machinery located near synapses, which is where cells make connections with each other, demonstrating that neurons can manufacture proteins locally where they’re needed. His subsequent research defined the mechanisms of messenger RNA transport from the nucleus and selective localization at active synapses, creating a new understanding of brain plasticity, learning and memory." 

The described research produced no actual progress in understanding learning or memory. Neuroscientists claim that protein synthesis is required for learning and memory, but their claims about this do not hold up to scrutiny, because of two reasons:

(1) All brain proteins have short lifetimes, typically less than two weeks. The proteins in the brain and its synapses are constantly being replaced. There is no credibility in attempts to explain memory formation by referring to "synapse strengthening" occurring by protein synthesis. Old humans can remember well things that happened 50 years ago, and the span of 50 years is a length of time 1000 times greater than the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses. Individual synapses cannot last for years, partially because they are connected to dendritic spines that do not last for years, and typically last for less than a few months. 

(2) Humans can learn things instantly, much faster than the time required for synapse strengthening by protein synthesis, which is at least several minutes. When someone is informed of the death of their child or parent, that person instantly forms a new memory that lasts for the rest of his life. 

It seems, therefore, that mere research into protein synthesis can never correctly be described as research that helps understand how memories form. A press release at the University of Cambridge has a paragraph that describes the research awarded the Kavli prize in neuroscience, and attempts to create some impression that a little progress has occurred related to understanding memory. But the narrative it tells is a false one, and the paragraph starts out with a misleading first sentence. The paragraph is below:

"Scientists long struggled to explain how the human brain can be so efficient – we can ultimately learn things in mere minutes. The proteins needed to enable the process in brain cells simply take too long to travel from the body of the brain cell, the neuron, to where the synapses – tiny junctions between neurons that allow them to communicate with each other or other cells – actually happen. But research spanning decades by this year’s laureates – Oswald Steward, Erin Schuman, Kelsey Martin and Christine Holt – has solved the mystery. Rather than the proteins being created in the cell body, as was previously thought, they can be produced directly on site close to where the all-important synapses happen; in the branches of the neurons appendages, called dendrites and axons. The discovery has led to a new understanding of how the brain works – and offers insights into how this process goes wrong in a range of brain disorders."

The narrative is bogus. It begins with the very misleading insinuation that human memory creation requires minutes. To the contrary, humans can form new memories instantly. So there was never a "problem of explaining how memories can be created in mere minutes." The problem was a much more difficult one: the problem of explaining how humans can create complex new memories instantly. 

The real problem (the problem of how humans can create complex new memories instantly) is not at all solved (or even appreciably reduced) by postulating that proteins are synthesized in the dendrites of cells, and are then used to bulk up synapses. The diagram below may help you understand why:

What difference would it make (under the theory that memories are stored in synapses) if some proteins are synthesized in dendrites  (the rather finger-like projections you see in the diagram above) rather than in the cell body of a neuron (surrounding the largest yellow circle in the diagram above)? Very little difference indeed. There might be a very slight decrease in the amount of time it would take newly synthesized proteins to travel to a synapse. But the difference would be small. 

A particular type of protein molecule is created by this process:

(1) Somehow the right position is found in human DNA, allowing a reading to occur from a small fraction of the DNA (called a gene), with the information being transferred into a messenger RNA molecule. How that messenger RNA is ever able to find the right gene is a mystery. The gene stores symbolic information describing the amino acid sequence of some particular protein molecule. This reading is called transcription, and occurs at a rate between 10 and 50 nucleotides per second. Since an average protein requires between 1200 and 1500 nucleotides to be read from a gene for the transcription required by the protein to occur, the transcription of a protein requires somewhere between 25 seconds and several minutes.  

(2) Somehow the messenger RNA molecule is translated into a chain of amino acids. This process is called translation, and is thought to occur at a rate of about 5 amino acids per second. Because the average protein used in synapses has about 450 amino acids, this translation must take an average of roughly 90 seconds. 

(3) Somehow (in a way that is not understood at all) that amino acid sequence quickly converts into a three-dimensional protein molecule that is folded.  This process is called protein folding. How it occurs is a mystery called the protein folding problem, which has not yet been solved. A year 2026 paper states, "The protein folding problem remains unsolved."

The Google Gemini infographic below illustrates this process:

To calculate the time required for a new protein to be created and then travel to a synapse as part of some synapse strengthening imagined to be part of a theoretical storage of memory in synapses, assuming protein synthesis in the main body of a neuron, you would need to calculate all of these different factors:

(1) The time needed for some sensory signal to travel to some neuron so that protein synthesis is somehow triggered (no one has any understanding of how sensory information could have any relation to when or where protein synthesis occurs). 

(2) The time required for a cell or messenger RNA molecule to find the right position in DNA  from which to read the amino acid sequence needed to make the new protein molecule of a particular type. Given that DNA stores the amino acid sequences of more than 20,000 different proteins, without any kind of indexing system or sorting system,  this is kind of a "finding a needle in a haystack" situation. The mere "finding the right location to read" part should take very significant time.

(3) The time needed for the reading to occur once the right location had been found, resulting in a messenger RNA molecule matching the gene read. This is the speed of transcription.  Transcription occurs at a rate between 10 and 50 nucleotides per second. Since an average protein requires between 1200 and 1500 nucleotides to be read from a gene for the transcription required for that protein to occur, the transcription of a protein requires somewhere between 25 seconds and several minutes.  

(4) The time required for protein translation, by which the messenger RNA molecule is converted into an amino acid sequence, a specific chain of hundreds of amino acids. Translation in humans is thought to occur at a rate of about 5 amino acids per second. Because the average protein used in synapses has about 450 amino acids, this translation must take an average of roughly 90 seconds.

(5) The time required for there to occur the mysterious process of protein folding, by which a chain of amino acids forms into the 3D shape needed for a functional protein molecule.  

(6) The time needed for a newly synthesized protein molecule to travel from the neuron to the synapse. 

(7) The time needed for this newly synthesized protein molecule to somehow be integrated into the synapse, so that the synapse ends up being strengthened.

The total length of time required for this series of events would be at least three minutes, and very probably many minutes. You only slightly reduce the total length of time required for the totality of all of these things if you assume some protein synthesis going on in dendrites. That reduces the time required for only one of the items in the list above, leaving all of the other factors being just as slow as before.  

Because synapse strengthening requires a series of events that would require a total time of at least three minutes, the synaptic theory of memory (that memories are stored by synaptic strengthening) totally fails to account for the indisputable reality that humans can form permanent new memories instantly. Very rich organizations such as the Kavli Foundation can issue all of the triumphal million-dollar prize announcements that they wish. But the fact is that scientists do not have any credible explanation for how there could occur in a brain human learning which occurs instantly. The most reasonable alternative here is to discard the dogma that memory formation is a brain process. 

Synapses have not the slightest resemblance to a memory storage device. The idea that human memory can be explained by some mere idea of synapse strengthening is one that future scientists will look back on with scorn, the way today's scientists look back scornfully at 18th-century claims that health could be improved by attaching leeches to the arm. Strengthening isn't storage. 

The LTP Zap Deceits Continue

 In the English language "lost in the woods" is a phrase meaning "to be confused, bewildered or helpless." Neuroscientists trying to explain how human beings create memories have always been very much lost in the woods. Such scientists have no credible tale to tell on this topic. The problem is that nothing in the brain bears the slightest resemblance to some apparatus or mechanism for storing learned information. Humans create various types of devices for writing information, things such as pens, pencils, paint brushes, typewriters, laser jet printers, offset printers, and the read/write heads used by a computer hard drive. Nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to such things. 

So what do you if you are a neuroscientist trying to fool people into thinking that neuroscientists like yourself have some kind of understanding of how a human could form a memory? What such people normally merely do is to senselessly repeat the same old clueless charade that neuroscientists have been doing for about fifty years: they zap a tiny bit of brain tissue, creating some tiny change that lasts about as long as a suntan or the morning dew, and they try and pass off that little change as something like information storage, even though no information was stored. This is the witless nonsense of LTP experiments. 

What is misleadingly called “long-term potentiation” or LTP is a not-very-long-lasting effect by which certain types of high-frequency stimulation performed by scientists (such as stimulation by electrodes) produces a fleeting increase in the strength of synapses. In 2007 a scientist said on page 120 of her PhD thesis, "While LTP is assumed to be the neural correlate of learning and memory, no conclusive evidence has been produced to substantiate that when an organism learns LTP occurs in that organism’s brain or brain correlate."

So-called long-term potentiation is actually a very short-term phenomenon. Speaking of long-term potentiation (LTP), and using the term “decays to baseline levels” (which means “disappears”), a scientific paper says, "potentiation almost always decays to baseline levels within a week," while noting that even after considering LTP "we would be at a loss for a brain mechanism for the storage of a long-term memory."

The visual below depicts the deceit that is going on in the less deceitful  (but still very deceitful) LTP experiments. In these in vivo experiments, scientists use artificial fiddling to zap the brains of living mice or living rats with electricity, and then wrongly claim or insinuate that this sheds light on what naturally occurs in the brain. The claims are bogus, because when people learn and recall, they do not have electrodes or wires attached to their heads. 

But there is a form of such LTP deceit even worse than the deceit depicted above: the in vitro form of LTP deceit. The phrase "in vitro" refers to observations or experiments involving only tissue outside of a living organism, such as tissue in a test tube or glass beaker.  The typical scientist doing the in vitro form of LTP deceit will zap some dead tissue extracted from the brain of a mouse or rat, and will then insinuate (or have his allies insinuate) that this tells us something about learning occurring in living humans who were not zapped. This kind of deceit is depicted below:

I can give the latest example of the LTP zap deceit. It is a recent press release published by the MedicalXPress site that is a frequent purveyor of misleading neuroscience press releases. We have a headline of "How the brain regulates learning on a cellular level: 3D maps reveal synapses reorganizing in real time." The headline is bogus, because the press release does not discuss a study that did anything to study natural learning in humans or natural learning in animals. All that went on was that tissue extracted from the brains of rats was artificially zapped, and a study was made of synapse changes after such artificial zapping. 

The paper being promoted is the recent paper "Transition of the presynaptic vesicle cluster from a compact to dispersed organization during long-term potentiation."  Contradicting itself, the paper tells us, "Long-term potentiation (LTP) is a lasting form of synaptic plasticity that can persist for hours or even days."  Of course, it makes no sense  to describe something as "lasting" if it only persists for "hours or even days." The long-standing use of the term "long-term potentiation" for this very short-lived effect produced by artificial electrode stimulation is one of the most dishonest speech customs of neuroscientists.  So-called "long-term potentiation" should be called something like "artificially-induced short-term potentiation." The paper incorrectly refers to this LTP as "a cellular mechanism of learning." The description contradicts the paper's previous claim describing LTP as something involving synapses (synapses are not cells). The description also contradicts what the same six authors say in the preprint I mention below, where the authors refer to LTP as a mere "cellular model of learning." A model is not a mechanism. 

It not correct to call the idea of LTP or effects produced by LTP zapping a "model of learning," for the simple reason that in science a model is a detailed theory explaining how something happens, and LTP involves no such detailed theory, but merely the vague idea of "synapse strengthening" or its artificial elicitation, which is something vastly different from having an account of how human experiences and human learned knowledge could be naturally encoded into brain states or synapse states. Scientists have no credible detailed theories explaining how there could occur either memory encoding in brains or memory storage in brains. 

The paper is behind a paywall, but we can assume that the research corresponds to that described in a preprint with a very similar title, the title of "The presynaptic vesicle cluster transitions from a compact to loose organization during long-term potentiation," particularly since that preprint has exactly the same six authors, and mentions exactly the same very narrow topic, and also because I see the preprint repeats (using some nearly identical language) some of the language in the abstract of the published study.  Looking at that preprint, we get the details of what was going on. 

We read of "theta-burst stimulation (TBS) to produce long-term potentiation (LTP)." This is brain tissue zapping. Later we read of "2 hours of theta-burst stimulation (TBS) to produce LTP." So it wasn't just a single brain zap that was delivered, but two hours of brain zapping.  

And the experiment did not involve brain zaps of living rats. The experiment involved the in vitro zapping of brain tissue extracted from rat brains. We read this in the preprint:

"Brain slices from the middle of the rat hippocampus were prepared as previously described. Two concentric bipolar electrodes were lowered into the middle of stratum radiatum in area CA1 separated by 500 µm, stimulating independent axons. Control stimulation (one pulse every two minutes for 40 minutes) was delivered to one of the electrodes and TBS to the other one (8 trains of 10 bursts at 5 Hz of four pulses at 100 Hz delivered 30 sec apart). 2 hours following TBS, the slices were fixed, processed, and imaged."

So the scientists electrically zapped for two hours some dead tissue extracted from the brains of rats, rats who were not even trained to learn anything or remember anything. Can we learn from such an effort anything at all about how learning or memory occurs in living humans who were not electrically zapped?  Of course not. 

But how does the press release discuss this study having no relevance to learning or memory? With a bogus headline of "How the brain regulates learning on a cellular level: 3D maps reveal synapses reorganizing in real time." An honest headline would have been "What happened after they spent 2 hours zapping dead cells taken from rat brains."

LTP research is a cesspool of misleading junk science, and in vitro LTP experiments are the lowest nadir of that cesspool. An honest description of these experiments in news articles and science paper abstracts would have these characteristics:

(1) It would be made clear that artificial electrical stimulation was occurring, unlike anything that occurs in learning humans. 

(2) It would be made clear that the experiments involved rodents, not humans. 

(3) Whenever the experiments involved extracted brain tissue, it would be made clear that the experiments involved only zapping dead tissue stored in something like a test tube.  

(4) It would be made clear that no information storage resulted from this zapping, and that the zapped tissue did not end up storing any data or information  or knowledge transmitted by the electrical zapping. 

Just as sun-tanning from a tanning machine never results in information storage in skin, LTP experiments never produce data or information or knowledge stored in brains or brain tissue.

Part of the deceit involving the terms LTP and "long-term potentiation" involves using such terms to refer both to artificial zapping manipulations and also to natural variations in synapse strengths.  Through this technique writers try to create the impression of LTP as being something that naturally occurs. Erroneously claiming that LTP originally referred to a long-lasting increase, a science paper describes how the term LTP became fuzzy:

"Originally, LTP referred to a long-lasting increase in the synaptic response (potentiation) resulting from stimulation at high frequency (Bliss and Lomo, 1973). Over the years this term became fuzzy as it has been applied to pretty much any increase in synaptic strength regardless of the specific induction procedure."

Real science (as opposed to junk science) involves the precise communication of truth. When writers confuse things so badly that artificial electrical zapping is conflated and confused with natural events going on in brains, then we are in a realm of deceit or confusion much different from well-functioning truthful science. I don't know whether what I describe above as deceit is willful deceit or simply very bad misrepresentation by those who are confused or self-deceived or very careless or very clumsy. But since the first definition Merriam-Webster gives of deceit is "the act of causing someone to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid," I consider it fair to use the word "deceit" in describing these misrepresentations.