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.