Neuroscientists Keep Using Misleading Coloring in Brain Visuals

In my July 2018 post "The Brain Shows No Sign of Working Harder During Thinking or Recall," I looked at quite a few brain scan studies looking for neural correlates of thinking or recall, and showed how such studies show no evidence that brains work harder when you are thinking or remembering anything. Below I will discuss some other studies not listed in that post, studies looking for signs of increased activity when a person is engaging in some kind of recall, recognition or heavy thinking. 

• A study published in November 2018 was entitled "BOLD Activity During Correct-Answer Feedback in Cued Recall Predicts Subsequent Retrieval Performance: An fMRI Investigation Using a Partial Trial Design." Some fMRI scans were made of dozens of subjects during a verbal recall task. Figure 4 of the paper shows a graph displaying signal changes of no greater than about .3 percent. This is about 1 part in 1000, no greater than we would expect to see by chance. The results are quite consistent with the claim that memories are not stored in brains.  No significant sign has been found that brains act differently during recall. 
• An August 2020 paper was entitled "Aging alters neural activity at event boundaries in the hippocampus and Posterior Medial network."  Hundreds of subjects were shown a movie and had their brain scanned. Ignoring Figure 1, which doesn't deal with recall, and looking at Figure 2, which does deal with recall, we see that the average signal change was only about 1 part in 1000, and that the greatest reported signal change (in the highest outliers) was only about 1 part in 300. No significant sign has been found that brains act differently during recall. 
• A 2010 study not mentioned in my July 2018 post is the study "Age-related effects on the neural correlates of autobiographical memory retrieval."  The study did brain scans of 14 young and 14 old people during recall of things that had happened in their lives. None of the results reported in the paper's graphs (such as Figure 1) show a percent signal change greater than 1 part in 1000. The results are quite consistent with the claim that memories are not stored in brains.  No significant sign has been found that brains act differently during autobiographical recall. 
• A January 2021 study was entitled "Neural correlates of recursive thinking during interpersonal strategic interactions." Figure 3 of the study shows no percent signal change greater than about 1 part in 300.  The results are consistent with the idea that thinking is not produced by the brain, and no significant sign has been found that brains act differently during thinking. 
• A 2018 study not mentioned in my July 2018 post is the study "Neural correlates of free recall of 'famous events' in a 'hypermnestic' individual as compared to an age- and education-matched reference group."  The study scanned the brains of 11 people while recalling famous events. Figure 3 shows that the percent signal change was no greater than about 1 part in 500. The results are consistent with the claim that memories are not stored in brains.  No significant sign has been found that brains act differently during recall of famous events. 
• A 2015 study not mentioned in my July 2018 post is the study "Amygdala Activity During Autobiographical Memory Recall in Depressed and Vulnerable Individuals: Association With Symptom Severity and Autobiographical Overgenerality."  We are told, "Sixty healthy control subjects, 45 unmedicated currently depressed individuals, 25 unmedicated remitted depressed individuals, and 30 individuals at high familial risk of developing depression underwent functional MRI while recalling autobiographical memories in response to emotionally valenced cue words."  Figure 1 of the paper has a graph showing that the percent signal change was less than .2 percent, less than 1 part in 500. The results are consistent with the claim that memories are not stored in brains.  No significant sign has been found that brains act differently during recall.
• A 2014 study not mentioned in my July 2018 post is the study "Mean signal and response time influences on multivoxel signals of contextual retrieval in the medial temporal lobe." Brain scans were done "while participants retrieved pair, spatial, and temporal source memories." 17 subjects had their brains scanned during such recall.  Figure 3 shows that the percent signal change was less than .1 percent, less than 1 part in 1000. The results are consistent with the claim that memories are not stored in brains.  No significant sign has been found that brains act differently during recall.
• A 2019 study not mentioned in my July 2018 post is the study "Common and Distinct Functional Brain Networks for Intuitive and Deliberate Decision Making." The study is unable to show brain imaging evidence for brains causing thinking, because its graphs (Figures 4, 5  and 6) show no percent signal change greater than 1 part in 300. 

As we can see from examples like the ones above and the more numerous examples ones in my earlier post, brains look the same when you are doing nothing as they do when people are thinking hard, learning and remembering. So how is it that neuroscientists manage to create the impression that particular parts of the brain are more active during particular mental activities? They use two main tricks:

(1) The trick of wrongly using the words "activated" or "activation" when referring to differences in activity that are only about 1 part in 1000, the kind of difference you would expect to occur by chance. Such language is profoundly misleading.  All parts of the brain are active at all times, and there is no appreciable effect of certain brain regions "turning on" during particular mental activities. 

(2) The trick of visuals that depict brain activity differences of only about 1 part in 1000 in bright red, thereby suggesting a very big difference when there is only an extremely slight difference.  You can read here about how such a trick is performed. 

We can imagine a racist using similar coloring tactics to mislead us. Getting data showing negligible temperature differences between races of only 1 part in 1000, the racist might show us a diagram of different races, depicting some particular race with bright red heads, in an attempt to persuade us that the members of that race are "hot-headed" and prone to get angry.  

Eye pupils vary by 500% under different light conditions, and heart rate differs by as much as 300% between resting and heavy exercise. That shows you that eye pupils are really involved in vision, and that hearts are really involved in supplying the body with blood.  The thousand-times weaker variation in brain activity between mind resting and heavy mind activity does nothing to establish claims that brains produce thinking or that brains store memories. 

The tricks and fallacies of those trying to prove that brains make minds are similar to the tricks and fallacies of the people who called themselves phrenologists in the nineteenth century. In that century, a system called phrenology was very popular.  It was all based on the idea that particular mind functions and personality traits were concentrated in particular areas of the brain, and that you could tell something about a person's mind or personality by feeling little bumps on his head. If you click on the link here, you can find many long works attempting to prove this extremely erroneous idea. In fact, following that link will show that in its vast archives of old books www.archive.org has more than 500 books devoted to teaching the bunk that is phrenology. Most of the writers of such books  thought they were teaching the "latest and greatest" neuroscience when they taught phrenology nonsense.   A wiser future age will look back on the main papers of today's self-described "cognitive neuroscientists" the way we look back now on the phrenology volumes of the nineteenth century. 

 

Memory Recall Reality Versus the "We Can't Remember Well" Bunk of Professors

 Nowadays it is as if many professors had an action principle of "degrade, debase, demean and dehumanize." In many ways, such professors attempt to portray human beings as so much less than they actually are.  Below is a list of some of these ways.

• Many professors describe human beings as animals, an opinion that has no scientific warrant, as humans have many unique intellectual characteristics possessed by no other organism. There is no merit in claims that humans must be called "animal" on the basis that they must be placed in either an "animal kingdom" or a "plant kingdom." Organism classification schemes are arbitrary social conventions, and if scientists were to classify organisms in the most reasonable way, they should use three kingdoms for large organisms: a plant kingdom, an animal kingdom and a human kingdom. 
• Many professors try to describe human beings as being "apes" or "ape-like." Such descriptions have no warrant in anything ever discovered. There is an ocean-sized gulf between the minds and behaviors of men and apes, so there is no reasonable basis for calling humans "apes" or "ape-like." 
• Some professors teach the evil nonsense of free-will denial, thereby attempting to depict human beings as not possessing one of the most fundamental characteristics that they do possess. 
• Very many professors deny evidence for paranormal phenomena, ignoring a vast mountain of evidence that humans can exhibit extrasensory perception and have neurally inexplicable spiritual experiences.  This is another attempt to depict human beings as not possessing some of the fundamental characteristics that they do possess. 
• Contrary to the reality that physically human beings are examples of gigantically organized systems more impressive from an engineering standpoint than anything humans have ever constructed, many professors will ignore such a reality, and describe a human body as something disorganized, perhaps calling a human body "some meat" or "a bag of chemicals" or "an accumulation of copying errors."
• Contrary to the reality that humans have a great diverse wealth of subtle intellectual powers such as imagination, insight, philosophical reasoning and esthetic appreciation, some professors may describe a human mentally as "just a stream of sensations" or "just a set of responses to stimuli." 
• Against all evidence, many professors try to depict humans as being very forgetful creatures who cannot remember very well.

Very oddly, many of the people mentioned above describe themselves as "humanists." It would be more accurate to refer to such people as dehumanists. A dehumanist may be described as anyone who attempts to dehumanize human beings by depicting them as being less they are. 

In all such cases, such dehumanizing professors speak like racists, but speak in a way worse than a racist speaks. A racist can be described as a person who attempts to degrade, debase, demean and dehumanize some particular group of humans, such as people with some particular ethnic background.  Those who do the things listed above are doing something similar, but rather than attempting to degrade, debase, demean and dehumanize some particular race, they are attempting to degrade, debase, demean and dehumanize all humans.  

The consequences of racism are the same as the consequences of dehumanization. When racists are in power, we may have things such as slavery or voting rights suppression or apartheid.  When those who practice dehumanization are in power, we may have things like the bloody horrors of Stalinism that killed millions in senseless purges or gulags or the bloody horrors of Maoism that killed too many millions to be counted, or the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia that slaughtered millions.  The man who believes that his fellow humans are "just animals" or "just apes" or "little more than apes" may happily slaughter such people, telling himself that his acts are little different from slaughtering animals for food. 

The reasons behind  most of the items on my list above are rather obvious.  Professors advancing theories of natural human origins have the problem that there is a gigantic gulf between the mind and behavior of animals and the mind and behavior of humans. Having no credible explanation for how this gulf could have been crossed, all that professors can do is to distort the truth by trying to make this gulf look small.  So their strategy is kind of "make the humans look like animals, and make the animals look like humans."  Such a strategy cannot be pursued honestly, but only through deceptive language. 

The reason behind the last item on my list above is not so obvious. Why would professors want to portray humans as creatures with weak memories who cannot remember well? We will find the answer when we consider the silly, featherweight ideas that professors advance to try to explain human memory. When asked to explain how a human is able to remember things, our professors will mutter phrases such as "synapse strengthening."  They never explain how it is that a strengthening could cause the formation of a memory. The very idea of storing information by strengthening something makes no sense. When humans or computers store information, they may do it by writing something, but they don't do it by strengthening something. 

The idea of memory formation by synapse strengthening involves a claim that a memory forms by repeated exposures, kind of the same way that a dent in your wall might form by you repeatedly punching the same spot over and over again.  A person believing in this groundless idea is forced to believe that a memory must first appear in a very weak and fragile form, and can only persist after repeated strengthenings.  

While new muscle skills may arrive in some way involving some type of strengthening,  human learned information and episodic memories do not arise in such a way. Humans can instantly form life-long memories of things they have experienced only one time. Humans can learn new facts after being told them only one time. You did not need to have your teacher tell you on three different school sessions that Abraham Lincoln was killed when an assassin shot him while he was at the theater. You probably learned that fact the first time you were told it, and retained that memory since the time you learned it.  Similarly, the first time you slipped on ice and fell flat on your face, you permanently learned that ice can cause humans to fall. You did not need three such experiences to learn that fact. 

If memories arrived by synapse strengthening, that would be a very inefficient type of thing,  resulting in poor or nonexistent memories of things you learned only once or long ago.  Since the proteins in synapses have lifetimes of only a few weeks, we would expect that no memories would survive for very long if our memories were stored in synapses.   Therefore, the professor advancing the dogma of memory formation by synapse strengthening is a person who will tend to believe that humans cannot remember things very well.  Such a belief is contrary to all human experience, which is that humans can instantly form permanent new memories, and reliably remember them for 50 years or more. 

An old man's remembrance of something that occurred 60 years ago

A recent experimental psychology paper illuminates how greatly  the fantasy world of the dogmatic cognitive neuroscientist differs from the reality of human memory. A group of 68 memory scientists were asked this question:

“Imagine the following scenario: A healthy 30 year-old adult attends an audio-guided museum tour as part of a memory experiment. Memory for the tour is tested using free recall (i.e., the person says everything they can remember about the event) 48 hours later. For the following questions, an 'encoded detail' is a discrete bit of information that the participant heard and/or saw (e.g., a painting of a yellow sailboat). It does not refer to incidental or irrelevant information that was not attended (e.g., the floor tile was  black). 'Accurate' refers to the factual correctness of recalled details (e.g., 'a painting of an orange sailboat' would be incorrect, if the sailboat was in fact yellow).

1) What proportion of encoded details would be freely recalled after 48 hours? 

2) What proportion of these freely recalled details would be accurate after 48 hours?"

The same scientists were also asked: "Now, imagine the same scenario, but memory for the tour is tested (again using free recall) two years later.” A Scientific American article discussing the study says this: "While recollections of these events were very good—more than 90 percent correct on average—the experts predicted they would be only 40 percent correct."  

What we have here is a most gigantic failure of neuroscience theory to predict reality correctly.  Based on silly, vacuous speculations about "synapse strengthening" being what causes memory retention, our neuroscientists have adopted the idea that human memory should be very weak and unstable. The reality is that human memory works vastly better than it would work if their theories are correct. 

Proven to us by a large variety of common mental phenomena utterly beyond the credible explanation of neuroscientists, and also a vast reality of paranormal experience that has been well documented by credible observers for centuries, the reality of human souls is a reality as weighty as an ocean. Whenever a professor tries to make that reality disappear by the use of dehumanization rhetoric, it is like some little boy trying to make the ocean disappear by repeatedly filling his little plastic bucket with ocean water, and dumping that water on to the beach.