Why a Brain Should Be Unable to Reliably Transmit Any Memory or Thought Signal

When neuroscientists attempt to describe electrochemical effects moving around in the brain, they describe it in terms of what is called an action potential.  An action potential is an electrical change in a neuron which can be transmitted to other nearby neurons.  Now, there is a related question very relevant to the issue of whether the brain can actually be the storage place of human memory or the source of human thought. This question is: can these action potentials make up reliable memory signals or thought signals that travel around in the brain?  For example:

1. Could a brain retrieve some memory information stored in one part of a brain, and send that information reliably (as a kind of coherent signal) from one part of the brain to another part of the brain (perhaps from one part storing the information to another part more involved in attention or current thought)? 
2. Could a brain send some information arising from thinking from one part of a brain to another part (something that would presumably be necessary for a brain to have complex thoughts combining simpler ideas)?

In previous posts on this site I have discussed a major reason for thinking that the answer to the first question must be: no. The reason is that information does not reliably transfer across the synapses that separate neurons. It has been established that action potentials only travel across synapses with a likelihood of about 50% or less (some estimates are as low as 10% or 20%).  So if the brain tried to retrieve detailed information (such as a sentence of text) from one part of the brain to another, and each synapse transmitted an action potential with a likelihood of less than 50%, than the information would not be reliably transmitted.  

A 2020 paper states this:

"Neurons communicate primarily through chemical synapses, and that communication is critical for proper brain function. However, chemical synaptic transmission appears unreliable: for most synapses, when an action potential arrives at an axon terminal, about half the time, no neurotransmitter is released and so no communication happens... Furthermore, when neurotransmitter is released at an individual synaptic release site, the size of the local postsynaptic membrane conductance change is also variable. Given the importance of synapses, the energetic cost of generating action potentials, and the evolutionary timescales over which the brain has been optimized, the high level of synaptic noise seems surprising."

Such a result (a very serious brain physical shortfall) is surprising only to those who believe that your brain stores your memories and that your brain makes your mind.  Those who disbelieve such a thing may expect exactly such shortfalls to be repeatedly found. 

In the brain, information would need to travel though very many synapses for even a short trip in the brain. What analogy can we give for such a setup, if each trip across a synapse occurs with low reliability? An analogy would be if I send an email from New York to Los Angeles, with the email passing through seven different computer servers, each of which transmits each particular character  with a reliability of less than 50%.  Under such a setup, it would be a lucky if a single word of my email got from New York to Los Angeles.  There would be such message garbling and loss of characters that it would be a kind of like trying to read a pen-written message on a piece of paper that had gone through a washing machine seven different times. 

There is another major reason for thinking that a brain should be unable to transmit any memory or thought signals. The reason is that most neurons have so many connections that there would be a signal overload preventing the reliable transmission of information. 

Let us consider three different devices that effectively transmit information: a computer with a simple web browser,  a radio and a television.  There is one very important thing common to each of these inventions: each is arranged so that signals are received from only one source at a time.  For example:

• A television set is arranged so that it can display TV signals from only one TV channel at a time.
• A radio is set up so that it can receive signals from only one radio station at a time.
• A computer with a simple web browser can display information from only one URL or web site at a time (let's ignore the not-so-simple web browsers that allow you to display different web sites in different tabs, and ignore the possibility of bringing up multiple instances of a web browser on the same computer). 

Now, let's imagine what chaos would result if these things were not arranged in such a way:

• If a television set were arranged so that it displayed TV signals from five or ten TV channels at the same time, you would see and hear such a confusion of pixels and sounds that you would not be able to understand or enjoy any of the channels.
• If a radio were set up so that it received signals from five or ten different radio stations at a time, you would probably get such a confusion of sounds you would not be able to understand or enjoy anything coming from the radio.
• If a computer used a web browser that displayed five or ten web pages all at the same time, the browser's screen would show such a confusion of pixels that you would not be able to understand anything. 

For example, if your TV set displayed five stations at the same time, you might see something like the jumble below, which would not be coherent, intelligible information. 

What we know about the physical arrangement of the brain tells us that the brain should suffer from the same type of problem described above. Since each neuron is bombarded with signals from many other neurons, most of which fire randomly, it should be impossible for neurons to accurately transmit thought or memory signals.  It has been estimated that the average neuron has 7000 connections to other neurons. Every neuron should be like some malfunctioning TV set that picks up simultaneously 100 different TV stations at the same time, resulting in an incomprehensible jumble like the jumble shown above. 

Below we see a diagram of a neuron. The yellow part is a myelinated axon, and the orange parts are dendrites.  

For anyone who thinks that a neuron receives an "action potential" (AP)  nerve signal only from an axon, the article here tells us the following:

"In fact, dendrites can be the site of AP initiation and propagation, and even neurotransmitter release. In several interneuron types, all functions are carried out by dendrites as these neurons are devoid of a canonical axon."

The wikipedia.org article on dendritic spikes tells us the following:

"In neurophysiology, a dendritic spike refers to an action potential generated in the dendrite of a neuron. Dendrites are branched extensions of a neuron. They receive electrical signals emitted from projecting neurons and transfer these signals to the cell body, or soma. Dendritic signaling has traditionally been viewed as a passive mode of electrical signaling. Unlike its axon counterpart which can generate signals through action potentials, dendrites were believed to only have the ability to propagate electrical signals by physical means: changes in conductance, length, cross sectional area, etc. However, the existence of dendritic spikes was proposed and demonstrated by W. Alden Spencer, Eric Kandel, Rodolfo Llinás and coworkers in the 1960s[1][2] and a large body of evidence now makes it clear that dendrites are active neuronal structures. Dendrites contain voltage-gated ion channels giving them the ability to generate action potentials."

Given such realities, we can describe a neuron as being subject to the most severe signal overload, like some TV set that is getting 100 channels at once, or some radio picking up 100 stations at once. Given the physical arrangement of neurons in brains, there is no chance that memory signals or thought signals could be reliably transmitted by neurons. Given many signal-slowing factors discussed at length here, it should be impossible for signals to travel through the human cortex at much faster than a snail's pace.  Yet humans can think and recall with the greatest speed and accuracy. This is shown by cases such as actors playing the role of Hamlet, who recall more than 4000 lines with perfect accuracy, and at high speed. It is also shown by calculation savants who do extremely complicated mathematical calculations in their mind very quickly with perfect accuracy. 

There are many historical cases of math prodigies that could calculate with incredible speed and accuracy.  The passage below describes the blazing fast and very accurate calculation powers of Zerah Colburn:

"This child undertook, and completely succeeded in, raising the number 8 progressively up to the sixteenth power. And in naming the last result, viz.: 281, 474, 976, 710, 656, he was right in every figure. He was then tried as to other numbers consisting of one figure, all of which he raised (by actual multiplication, and not by memory) as high as the tenth power, with so much facility and dispatch that the person appointed to take down the results was obliged to enjoin him not to be so rapid. With respect to numbers consisting of two figures, he would raise some of them to the sixth, seventh and eighth power....He was asked the square root of I06,929, and before the number could be written, he immediately answered, 327. He was then required to name the cube root of 268,336,125, and with equal facility and promptness he replied, 645. Various other questions of a similar nature, respecting the the roots and powers of very high numbers, were proposed by several of the gentlemen present, to all of which he answered in a similar manner. One of the party requested him to name the factors which produced the number 247,483: this he immediately did by mentioning the numbers 941 and 263 — which, indeed, are the only two numbers that will produce it...One of the gentlemen asked him how many minutes there were in forty-eight years; and before the question could be written down, he replied 25,228,800; and instantly added that the number of seconds in the same period was 1,513,728,000."

The passage below tells us about the incredibly fast and accurate calculation speed of  Jacques Inaudi, born in 1867:

"In his exercises of mental calculation, Mr. Inaudi is remarkable in two particulars, the complexity of his work and the rapidity with which he completes it. The greater number of questions given to him contain many figures. He will add in his head two numbers consisting of twelve figures each ; he will multiply two numbers composed of eight figures ; he will tell how many seconds there are in any promiscuously chosen number of years, months, days, and hours. These operations demand that he shall hold in his memory the exact problem and the partial solutions up to the time when the complete result is found. For such a considerable work as this, Mr. Inaudi gives an extremely short time, so short, indeed, as sometimes to produce the illusion of instantaneity. The following paragraph has been published concerning him. 'He adds in a few seconds seven numbers of eight or ten figures each; he subtracts one number from another each composed of twenty-one figures in less than a minute; he finds as rapidly the square root or the cube root of numbers consisting of from eight to twelve figures, if these numbers are perfect squares or cubes; it takes a little longer for the last-named work if there is a remainder necessitating a fractional part to the answer. He finds with incredible celerity the sixth or the seventh root of large numbers. He will multiply or divide in less time than it takes him to announce the results. As an example of what has been said, we give the following: He was asked the number of seconds in 18 years, 7 months, 21 days and 3 hours. The response was given in thirteen seconds.' "

The gap between the physical shortcomings of the brain and the realities of the most impressive human mental performance is like the gap between Earth and Jupiter. It is therefore foolish to continue the speech custom of saying that thinking and recall comes from brains, a custom that is an example of hollow hubris.  It would be far wiser for us to say, "Humans have magnificent mental powers, and we don't know where they come from."

His Poor Strategy for Examining the Mind-Body Problem

John Horgan (long-time columnist for Scientific American) has a new book on the mind-body problem. You can conveniently read it for free at www.mindbodyproblems.com.  Horgan has produced many words, but offers very little original insight on questions of mind and body. 

I can think of some general approaches that might be fruitful in gaining some insight on the problem of mind and body.  A good approach would be as follows:

First, make a very thorough study of long-made claims about the brain, to try to determine how solid such claims are.  This would involve trying to figure out whether there is really any robust evidence for the claims that are so often made about brains, such as the claim that brains store memories, and claims that brains produce ideas and understanding.  Such a study would be extremely involved, and would need to involve an in-depth examination of whether the typical research practices of modern neuroscientists are sound, or whether they are faulty. 

Second, make a very thorough study of whether the brain actually has the type of physical characteristics that it would need to have if the claims typically made about brains are correct. Such a study would need to ask questions such as this:

• Does the brain actually have any mechanism for writing learned information?
• Does the brain actually have any mechanism for reading learned information?
• Does the brain actually have any characteristics allowing an instant retrieval of learned information?
• Does the brain have the type of stablity needed to store information for many decades, or does it have the kind of high molecular turnover that would prevent such a thing?
• Does the brain actually have the kind of speed it would need to be the cause of instant human recall and fast thinking?
• Has anyone ever found any sign of stored learned information in brains?
• Does anyone actually understand any system by which a brain could translate learned information or episodic memories into brain states?

Third, make a very thorough study of whether the brain actually appears like some organ that is storing memories or producing thoughts. Such a study would need to ask questions such as this:

• Do brains really look different or act different when people are engaging in actions such as thinking or recalling memories, or are the differences in its appearances at such time merely the kind of differences we would expect to see by chance variations?
• How much of their memories do people lose when you remove half their brain?
• Can people with only half a brain (or much less) still think well and understand well?
• Are some people able to think and remember well with much smaller than half a brain?

Fourth, make a very thorough study of claims of paranormal phenomena, which would involve studying very many long volumes discussing people who have reported such experiences.   Such a study would need to ask questions such as this:

• Is there real evidence for ESP and clairvoyance, human mental abilities that cannot be explained by brain activity?
• Is there real evidence that human consciousness can exist outside of the brain (something which, if true, would in itself disprove claims that minds are made by brains)?
• Is there evidence for apparition sightings that cannot be credibly explained as hallucinations?
• Is there evidence from things such as near-death experiences and mediumistic phenomena that a soul can survive death?

After doing all of this work, you may gain some insight about whether conventional claims about the mind and body (claims that the mind is purely the product of the brain) are credible, or whether they are merely speech customs that are contrary to the evidence.  But it seems that John Horgan's new book fails to do any of this work. 

Horgan show no real signs of having made any serious and thorough study of cognitive neuroscience and whether its claims are warranted. Horgan has apparently made no serious study of evidence for paranormal phenomena.  Horgan's approach is to merely have a set of main chapters, each of which deals with what one particular living person thinks on questions of mind and body, each a person who Horgan has chatted with. So Chapter One is devoted to describing what Cristof Koch thinks about mind-body questions; Chapter Two is devoted to describing what Douglas Hofstadter thinks about mind-body questions; Chapter Three is devoted to describing what Alison Gopnik thinks about mind-body questions; and so forth.  Strangely, Chapter Five is devoted to describing what a Freudian lawyer thinks about mind-body questions; Chapter Seven is devoted to describing what a novelist thinks about mind-body questions; and Chapter Nine is devoted to describing what an economist thinks about mind-body problems.  This is not at all an algorithm with much of a chance of shedding any interesting new light on questions about mind and body.  Consequently Horgan's book is not worth reading. We get lots of "personality sketch" and "biographical background" material, but little evidence that Horgan has asked the questions he should have asked when writing on the topic of the body and mind.  The quotes we get from the stars of Horgan's book rather seem to be all little sound bites rather than long illuminating paragraph quotes. It seems Horgan hasn't given the people he interviewed the type of tough questioning he should have given them, and he says, "When I’m interviewing someone, I have an extra incentive to be nice," and "I want subjects to like me," which may suggest he has been tossing softball questions to the people he has interviewed. 

In Chapter Four, Horgan pretty much suggests that he has done nothing to seriously study evidence for the paranormal (so very relevant to questions of mind and body), and that his failure to do so is based on fear of such scholarship being a bad career move for him:

"After I became a professional science journalist, my interest in the paranormal, or psi, faded as I delved into more scientifically acceptable mysteries. I decided that ghosts, telepathy and telekinesis are woo. My skepticism is not strictly rational—that is, based entirely on objective, empirical analysis. Like, say, sexual faithfulness, skepticism has become a fundamental part of my identity, personal and professional. A choice. I’m proud of my skepticism, but a little ambivalent, too, because it is based in part on cowardice (again, like sexual faithfulness). I fear if I become too open-minded toward the paranormal, I might harm my image as a science writer, such as it is, and my self-image.  I might forget who I really am."

We have every reason to believe after such a frank confession that Horgan has deliberately avoided studying the paranormal, not because of any sound intellectual reason, but because he fears that learning about such a topic might lead him to be disapproved by his peers. What he describes as his "skepticism" may better be described as an obstinate refusal to examine evidence that might shake prior opinions. Apparently such cowered-by-the-herd behavior is very common. Horgan quotes biologist Rupert Sheldrake as saying "that scientists constantly confess, privately, that they keep their belief in the paranormal secret for fear of damaging their reputations." It is unwise to suggest that by studying evidence for the paranormal, someone will "forget who he really is," and such an investigation may instead help you discover something about who you really are (something much more than the mere ephemeral apelike neural epiphenomenon depicted by many who haven't studied the paranormal).

Horgan fails to discuss in much of any substantive way any of the main problems that plague contemporary neuroscience, and says very little about the details of the brain. He incorrectly defines the mind-body question as "how matter generates mind" rather than some more appropriate definition such as "the problem of what is the relation between mind and body." He ends up with a kind of shoulder-shrugging chapter that seems to say or insinuate that we can't get much of anywhere understanding much of anything about mind-body questions. This is not at all correct. By very carefully and thoroughly studying a large set of things that Horgan has not paid attention to (such as anomalous medical cases, out-of-body experiences, the slowness, high noise levels, high protein turnover and many very serious physical limitations and functional shortfalls of all brains, the explanatory failures and defective procedures of neuroscientists, and the abundant evidence of paranormal mental phenomena that cannot be explained as brain activity), we can gain very solid reasons for reaching the extremely important mind-body realization that our minds must have some source other than our physical bodies.

Brain Bluffs at One Web Site

The web site "The Conversation" is a site that has a byline of "Academic rigor, journalistic flare." But looking through the site's articles on the topic of the brain, I found quite a few articles that were lacking in academic rigor. 

One recent article was entitled "Your brain thinks -- but how?" The article provided zero evidence that brains are capable of any such thing as thinking. The author was given a question of "How does a brain understand things?" The author failed to give the only candid answer someone could give to such a question, which is something "No one understands how a brain could ever understand anything."  

Instead, we have an answer that is purely psychological, without referencing any specific thing in the brain. There is no mention of neurons or synapses or connections.  There is a reference to the psychology term "schemas," which is not a neuroscience term, but merely a term meaning something like a model or a concept of how something works.  You don't explain understanding by using a word that presumes understanding.  All in all, the article is compatible with the assumption that the modern biologist has no idea at all how a brain could produce thinking or understanding. 

Another article on the site is entitled "How brains do what they do is more complex than what anatomy on its own suggests."  The article is a strange inconsistent mixture of the usual brain-related dogmatic posturing along with some epistemic humility that is utterly inconsistent with such dogmatism. The author claims the brain's jobs include learning and reasoning, and he also states this groundless claim: "the frontal cortex of the brain makes optimal choices by computing many quantities, or variables – calculating the potential payoff, the probability of success and the cost in terms of time and effort."  But the author also states this:

"How the brain works remains a puzzle with only a few pieces in place...no one seems much closer to figuring out how we really see. Neuroscience has only a rudimentary understanding of how it all fits together."

So with his left hand the writer is writing as if things are nicely figured out, and with his right hand he is writing as if nothing much is understood, not even how people see things. 

Another article on the site has the very silly title "Brains manage neurons like air traffic controllers manage airplane movements." Besides the fact that there is no evidence that brains manage anything (merely evidence that minds manage things), there is the fact that neurons do not move around in the brain, in contrast to airplanes that do move very quickly.  In this article we have this misleading statement: "It is important to note that neuron activity — a series of Morse code-like impulses — is not random." Neurons do indeed fire at random intervals, and if you do a Google search using the exact search phrase of "neurons fire randomly" enclosed in quotes, you will find many matches for that phrase. Also, no one has ever discovered anything like a Morse code used by neurons.  The Morse code is a code in which particular combinations of dots and dashes stand for particular letters in the alphabet. No one has ever discovered any code in the brain, under which particular combinations of neuron firing and non-firing stand for particular letters, or stand for anything else. 

Another article has the very untrue title "How memories are formed and retrieved by the brain revealed in a new study." The article is boasting about some study done by its authors. The study didn't reveal anything about how memories are formed or retrieved; it merely analyzed brain waves during memory formation and retrieval, looking for some correlations between activity in different brain regions. The study has the same old Questionable Research Practices predominant in cognitive neuroscience studies done these days. These include:

• The study was not a pre-registered study describing a particular hypothesis to test and a protocol to follow, meaning that the authors were free to keep analyzing data in innumerable different ways, slicing and dicing the data until some correlation was found. 
• The study does not mention any blinding protocol, an absolute essential for a study of this type to be taken seriously.
• The study used study group sizes as small as 5 and 7, which are much smaller than the 15 subjects per study group needed for a modestly persuasive result. 
• The study makes no mention of using control readings, in which subjects had their brain signals read when not engaging in any memory activity. 

Studies like this should persuade no one. You can get a thousand-and-one false alarm effects using tiny study group sizes such as 5 and 7, effects that would be very unlikely to show up using decent study group sizes such as 20 or 40.  

Each region of the brain is constantly active, from an electrical standpoint, with the average neuron firing between about one to several or many times per second, regardless of whether you are doing anything related to memory. So any neuroscientist can measure brain activity during memory action, and state that two brain regions are "working together" on the grounds that both are active during memory action.  You would get the same amount of activity (the same "working together") if no memory activity was involved.  If the experiments of this paper had been properly designed, with the use of controls in which brain signals were read when no memory activity was going on, the experimenters would probably have seen no greater activity (or correlation between brain areas) during memory activity than during mind activity when there was no memory action. 

The study in question is based on dubious claims of "coupling" and "synchronization" between wave oscillations in different brain areas. The approach of this paper is similar to the type of silliness that would be going on if you simultaneoulsy tracked in real time the heart beats of ten women in the same room as you, and then claimed that there was some great significance in one of the heart pulses being "coupled" or "synchronized" with yours (ignoring the fact that you would expect one such case of "synchronization" purely by chance).  

Then there is an article entitled "How the brain makes choices: the sinuous path from decision to action." The article gives us no explanation as to how a brain could do any such thing as make a decision or a choice.  The article says, "how we deliberate and commit is a complex process that we only partially understand," but has no discussion of such alleged partial understanding. The very title of the article tells us that the article isn't really about "how the brain makes choices" but about something going on after a decision. 

The there is a clickbait article with the title "Deciphering how memory works in the brain – at the level of individual cells."  The article merely discusses a speculative model presented in a paper entitled "A neural-level model of spatial memory and imagery."

Then there is an article entitled "How your brain retrieves a memory when you sense something familiar."  But it's another "how your brain does something" that does nothing to show how a brain could do something. All we get is a claim that some particular region of the brain is "involved" in memory processing.  Such claims are made on the basis of mere readings of activity during memory action, but such readings mean nothing because all regions of the brain are constantly active. We get no insight of how it is that a brain could instantly recall facts about a person after seeing that person or merely hearing his name, a feat of retrieval that should be absolutely impossible given the brain's lack of any indexing system or addressing system that might allow very fast information retrieval. 

Using an expression popular in Texas, you might say that the people who call themselves cognitive neuroscientists are pretty much "all hat and no cattle" when they try to provide evidence for their dogmas about cognitive abilities of brains. We know that minds think and believe and imagine and remember detailed information, but we do not know (or have any good basis for supposing) that brains do any such things.