They Wrote As They Would Have Written If Brains Don't Store Memories

Recently www.gizmodo.com asked a set of brain experts and technologists the question "Will it be possible to upload information to my brain?" The answer that should be given is: no, it never will be, because brains do not store memories and do not store learned information.  None of the respondents gives us this answer. But the answers we get are just the type of answers we would expect to get if (a) brains do not store memories and do not store learned information, and (b) there was an  unwarranted dogma popular among neuroscientists that brains store memories and learned information. 

Under such a case, we would expect the experts to kind of go around in circles, and fail to mention any specific way in which information could be uploaded to the brain; and we would expect the experts to say things such as "we need to learn much more before we can do this," just as if they had no real idea how someone could upload information to the brain.  We might also expect the experts to give us "red herring" distractions, by referring to little things that have been done relating to the brain and technology, which are not at all uploading information or memories into brains. That is just what happens. 

The first brain expert (Michael Beyeler) answers, "I think the prospect of augmenting our senses and our intellect with a brain device is certainly within our reach." But that was not the question he was asked, that question being whether information could be uploaded into the brain.  He then states the following, making a misleading statement often made by neuroscientists:

"However, the biggest challenge I see is that our understanding of the brain is simply not good enough to make brain uploads viable. We need to better understand how information is stored and accessed in the brain." 

The second sentence is misleading because it implies that there is some current understanding of how learned information is stored and accessed in the brain.  There is no such understanding at all.  No one has any detailed credible theory of how a brain could store and retrieve learned information.  What we have learned about the brain suggests that it is totally unsuitable for such a task.  There is no sign of any write mechanism in the brain, and no sign of any read mechanism in the brain.  The synapses of the brain are places of constant molecular turnover, with the proteins that make up synapses having averge lifetimes of less than two weeks. No scientist has ever read infomation from a dead brain or some tissue extracted from a living organism, other than the genetic information that exists in all cells in the body. Therefore, statements such as "we need to better understand how information is stored and accessed in the brain" are misleading, because they imply that we have a partial knowledge of such a thing, when no such partial understanding exists. Such statements are like someone saying, "We need a better understanding of how extraterrestrials killed John Kennedy." 

Next we hear from Rajesh P. N. Rao, who claims that there has already been some sending information into brains, but what he is talking about is not at all uploading information to brains, but merely sending signals into a brain.  Then, committing an error just like the one described in the previous paragraph, Rao says that "uploading more complex information into a brain will require advances in at least three areas" including "a deeper understanding of how abstract information is processed and stored in the brain." Since there does not currently exist any understanding at all of how abstract information is stored or could be stored in the brain, it is misleading to say that we need a "deeper understanding" of such a thing, a statement incorrectly implying that there is currently some understanding of such a thing.  Again, we have a statement that is like saying, "We need a better understanding of how extraterrestrials killed John Kennedy."

We then hear from Spencer LaVere Smith, who gives us the same confession that we don't know what to do to upload information into brains. Smith at least avoids the previously discussed error, by saying this: 

"Uploading expertise in a new language or a detailed memory—that won’t be possible anytime soon, for two reasons: (1) our technologies for manipulating neural circuitry are too crude, and (2) our understanding of what to manipulate and how is too primitive."

Smith rather gives away that neuroscientists have not the slightest idea of how to upload information into the brain by referring to a million-year timeframe for the accomplishment of such a task. 

We next hear from Andrew Maynard, who speaks as if uploading into your brain is not something that will occur in the lifetime of anyone living, and says that "we almost certainly shouldn't" do such a thing.  Then Kevin Warnick states, "As for downloading things like memories (which you haven’t actually had) into the brain, I can’t see any reason why this will not be possible in the future, but to do that we need to learn a lot more about how memories are stored and the process of recall."  Again, we have a misleading insinuation that something is now known about memory storage in a brain.  We have no such understanding at all.

We then hear from Dong Song, who states the following:

"First, I think this is definitely something theoretically possible. The common understanding in the scientific community is that information is stored in the brain in the form of synaptic weights and/or neural activities, and that these can be altered externally in many different ways, including via brain-machine interface. If they are altered in the right way, information will then be uploaded into the brain."

There is no such "common understanding" about synapses being the storage place of memories, and the use of "synaptic weights and/or neural activities" itself tells us about the lack of any such understanding (you would not use "and/or" followed by a vague phrase if there was an understanding of synapses storing memories). There is merely a senseless speech custom of claiming that memories are stored in synapses. Such a custom makes no sense because:

(1) no one has any credible detailed theory of how information could be stored through an alteration of weights, and we know of no one who has ever stored any complex information by altering weights;  

(2) we know that humans can instantly form permanent new memories, something that would not be possible if memory storage involved an alteration of weights that would take at least several minutes;

(3) we know that the average lifetimes of proteins in synapses are only a few weeks or less, which is only about a thousandth of the length of time (50 years or more) that humans can remember things; 

(4) we know that synapses typically last for relatively short times, because synapses are physically associated with dendritic spines that almost all last for a much shorter time than a year. 

Song's claim that "information is stored in the brain in the form of synaptic weights and/or neural activities" suggests a lack of any real knowledge on this topic, just as you would reveal a lack of any clear knowledge of who killed John Kennedy by saying that he was killed by "Oswald and/or some murky conspiracy."

"Synaptic strengthening" is the kind of jargon droplet that neuroscientists spit out when asked about neural memory storage, to try to make us think they have some understanding of such a topic. There is no detailed theory behind such an empty phrase, and the phrase is as empty as the vague empty phrase "cellular reconfiguration."  When asked about how a brain could instantly recall a memory, neuroscientists don't even have any jargon droplets to spit out.  The brain has no sign of repeated tokens used for memory storage, no sign of any stored images, no sign of a coordinate system or position notation system, and no sign of any indexes. So the brain is like some book with no letters, no characters, no photos and no pictures, without any page numbers, and without any index. Just as such a book would have no resemblance to an object for instantly retrieving information on a topic, the brain bears no resemblance to a device for instantly retrieving a memory such as humans are able to do. 

We then hear from Gopala Krishna Anumanchipalli, who says this: "It is not inconceivable that one day, we could 'upload' more complex information like a new skill or delete a traumatic episode from memory." But he says nothing to suggest any idea of how such a thing could be done.

We then hear from William Eugene Bishop, who makes the same misleading insinuation of others by saying, "Our knowledge about the code for representing information and how that code is persistently stored in the brain—things that will come down to the level of individual neurons and how they are connected—is very limited." Again, the insinuation that some knowledge exists of such a thing. No such knowledge actually exists.  After incorrectly referring to "our knowledge of how information is represented and stored in the brain," something that does not actually exist to any degree (except for the genetic information common to all cells),  Bishop states, "while we are surely many years, likely decades, away from systems that could be routinely used to upload information to our brain, it seems likely that one day this will be possible," without doing anything to justify such a claim.  The fact that such a job is predicted to occur only decades in the future gives away that the speaker has no understanding of how it could be done.

Finally Joshua R. Smith states, "I find it much harder to imagine that one could ever successfully generate in the brain higher level cognitive input in the brain, such as words or thoughts, or even sophisticated visual information at the level of readable text." 

The answers the experts gave are just what we would expect to get if  (a) brains do not store memories and do not store learned information, and (b) there was a groundless dogma popular among neuroscientists that brains store memories and learned information. Just as expected under such a case, we hear the experts  go around in circles, and fail to mention any specific way in which information could be uploaded to the brain; and we mainly hear the experts say things such as "we need to learn much more before we can do this," just as if they had no real idea how someone could upload information to the brain. 

The type of responses given are like the responses you might get if there were some experts calling themselves "cognitive podiatrists" who believed that memories are stored in the feet, and you asked them, "When will we be able to upload memories to people's feet?"  Such experts might talk about this or that little experiment done with feet to try to create the impression that they are on the right track, and then they might say things like "we need to know a lot more about how feet store your memories before memories can be uploaded into feet."