In the posts of this blog I have given very many reasons for thinking that the statements of neuroscientists about a brain storage of memories are just plain false. Contrary to the constant claims of neuroscientists that brains store memories, the brain bears no resemblance to a device for storing memories. There is nothing in the brain that resembles some component for storing learned information, and nothing in the brain the resembles some component for reading stored memory information. The place that neuroscientists usually claim as a storage place for memories (synapses) are places of great instability and turnover that cannot possibly be a storage place for human memories that can last for 50 years or longer.
Humans are able to recall detailed memories instantly, upon hearing a name or seeing an image. The brain has no features that can account for such instant recall. Humans know from their work with computers the type of things a device needs to have to be able to instantly recall stored information: things such as an addressing system or a position notation system, and things such as indexes. The brain has no such thing. Retrieving a memory from a brain would be like trying to get just the right index card (the one and only card storing some data) from a large swimming pool filled with index cards. Moreover, the low reliability of synaptic transmission and the very high noise levels in brains should make it impossible for anyone to accurately retrieve large bodies of information from a brain. Conversely, we know that humans can flawlessly retrieve very large bodies of information, such as when Hamlet actors or Wagnerian tenors accurately perform very long roles without an error, and when certain Muslim scholars recite their whole holy book without error.
Besides such reasons, we have an entirely different reason for thinking that neuroscientists are in their own little fantasy world when it comes to human memory. This is the reason that neuroscientists again and again misdescribe human memory performance and also make very poor predictions about human memory performance.
We have an example of such misdescribing in a recent article on the online Nautilus magazine, written by the neuroscientist Anil Seth. Entitled "We Are Beast Machines," we have some dehumanizing nonsense talk in which almost everything is an oracular dogmatic proclamation provided without any supporting evidence. Before stating very absurd drivel telling us "all of our perceptions and experiences, whether of the self or of the world, are inside-out controlled and controlling hallucinations," Seth recalls some early memory and states, "I must have been about 8 or 9 years old, and like all early memories this one too is unreliable." Here we have a claim that early memories are unreliable. But the claim has been refuted by studies.
For example, in the paper "Early childhood memories: accuracy and effect," we read that very early childhood memories tend to be accurate:
"Subjects were asked to report the earliest memories of their lives. Where possible, the memory protocols were submitted to adults present at the time of the original episode for possible confirmation. The majority of memories were characterized by distinct emotion, with a higher count of negative than of positive emotion. The majority of memories proved accurate, with confirmation operating at as high a level in the case of positive or emotionally neutral memories as of negative memories. General memory content showed no differential patterns across negative and positive memories. Thus claims that infantile memories are powered uniquely by trauma, and/or routinely include distortions, were not supported."
In Scientific American we read that neuroscientists were not even in the right ballpark when asked to estimate how reliably people would remember things:
"Even memory experts can struggle to predict how accurate our recollections are. In a recent study at the University of Toronto, such experts were asked to predict the accuracy of memories of events that happened two days earlier. 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."
So our neuroscientists have a false idea that humans can't remember things well after two days, an idea totally contrary to human memory performance reality. It's easy to understand why they would make errors of this type. All the low-level facts we have learned about the brain defy the idea of very good and fast memory performance by neural means. So neuroscientists tend to (1) ignore or deny cases of very high-performance memory; (2) portray human memory as much slower and less reliable than it is.
Another way in which neuroscientists misdescribe human memory performance is their continued teaching of an utterly false doctrine that humans take quite a while to form new memories, many minutes or even hours. The reality is that humans are constantly forming new memories instantly.
There are a hundred ways to prove the reality of instant human memory creation. The following thought experiment will suffice. Imagine you are watching a movie at home and you see on your TV screen the words "The End." Now suppose a friend with you then immediately asks: "How did the movie end?" You will be able to correctly answer the question, because you have instantly formed a new memory of the movie's ending. You will not need to tell your friend, "Give me twenty minutes for my memory of the ending to finish forming, and I will tell you the ending."
Why do neuroscientists keep teaching this very silly idea that memories take many minutes or hours to form, an idea so gigantically contrary to human experience? It has to do with the incorrect idea they have about how memories form. Most neuroscientists claim that memories form from a strengthening of synapses. It's an idea that makes no sense. We have no known case of information ever being stored through some act of strengthening. The imagined strengthening is something that would take many minutes, because of a need for protein synthesis that occurs at a sluggish pace. Having wed themselves to this extremely silly idea, neuroscientists are forced to deny one of the most obvious facts of human existence, that people can form new memories instantly.
Neuroscientists also misdescribe human memory performance when they try to insinuate that permanent new memories required repeated exposures to a sensory stimulus. This is certainly false. Let's go back to the example of watching the movie. What happens if the movie is shown again on TV six months from now? Unless you particularly enjoyed the movie, you will probably decide not to watch it again. Why? Because you remember what happened in the movie, after seeing it only once. A large fraction of the things that you remember are things that you saw or heard or were taught only a single time.
Another way in which neuroscientists misdescribe human memory performance is by sometimes denying types of exceptional memory skills. For example, like many articles written by neuroscientists, a New Scientist article states this:
"Photographic memory is the ability to recall a past scene in detail with great accuracy – just like a photograph. Although many people claim that they have it, we still don’t have proof that it actually exists."
Oh really? So why does a very technical 2019 scientific paper matter-of-factly refer to "a 13-year-old autistic boy with a photographic memory and speech-language deficit"? And how come Stephen Wiltshire has repeatedly shown the ability to accurately draw skylines he has only seen once? Many children have photographic memory, and neuroscientists are splitting hairs when they try to distinguish between photographic memory and what they call "eidetic" memory, which means basically the same thing.
In his book Thought and Choice in Chess, Adriaan D. de Groot presented data showing photographic memory in adult grand masters. For example, one of them was able to perfectly reproduce from memory the chess position shown below (page 326), after being shown the board for less than 15 seconds (page 322-323):
In the paper here, we read that in 1894 Binet sent out questionnaires to chess masters, asking them how they remembered chess positions. The masters "almost invariably reported having the chess board stored as a visual image, like a photograph."
A scientific paper reports the following, which contradicts the typical neuroscientist talk about the weakness of memory:
"Overall our results demonstrate the impressive nature of visual long-term memory fidelity, which we find is even higher fidelity than previously indicated in situations involving repetitions. Furthermore, our results suggest that there is no distinction between the fidelity of visual working memory and visual long-term memory, but instead both memory systems are capable of storing similar incredibly high fidelity memories under the right circumstances."
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