The Press Often Gives Us Fake News About Brains

A significant fraction of the neuroscience news these days contains exaggerations, extremely dubious interpretations or downright falsehoods. Sometimes these falsehoods are so brazen that they must be branded as fake news. An outrageous example of fake news was a recent story in the British new source The Independent, a story with the phony headline, "Brain scan reveals patient’s ‘last thoughts’ just before they died in landmark study." Below are some of the reasons the headline and the story are as phony as a three-dollar bill: 

• The scientific study made no claim to have revealed the thoughts of the dying 87-year-old patient, nor did it even make any guess about such a thing. 
• No one is quoted in the article referring to last thoughts.
• The headline uses the phrase "just before they died," suggesting there were multiple patients involved in the new study; but there was only one patient. 
• The patient did not actually have his brain scanned as he died. Brain scans are done with MRI machines, and the patient was not being scanned in an MRI machine or any similar machine when he died.  Instead, there was a merely a reading of electrical activity by means of EEG electrodes. 
• There was nothing "landmark" about the study, as there have been electrode readings of the brain activity of numerous previous patients as they died.  The subtitle of the story makes the untrue claim that there were "first-of-a-kind brain scans," when nothing "first-of-a-kind" was done, and no brain scan was done.  
• As discussed below, there are very strong reasons for assuming that the patient in question was unconscious in the moments before death, and that he therefore was not thinking about anything just before dying. 

We don't need to read very far to find out how phony the story is. The headline claims "brain scan reveals patients 'last thoughts,'" but the subtitle states this: "First-of-a-kind brain scans of dying person indicate they may have been making ‘last recall of life’, scientists say." So the headline and the subtitle contradict each other. If scientists were merely speculating that the patient may have been recalling his life, then nothing has been actually revealed about what the patient was thinking.  Of course, the idea that you can figure out  someone's thoughts by looking at EEG readings is as nonsensical as the claim that you can find out someone's future life events by reading lines on his palms.  EEG readings are mere squiggly lines without any semantic content. 

The untrue "first-of-a-kind" claim is partially the fault of the Frontiers press release, which made this untrue claim: "This unexpected event allowed the scientists to record the activity of a dying human brain for the first time ever." You can very easily find out how untrue this claim is by using a Google search phrase of "EEG reading of dying patient," and using the Tools option to restrict the search results to be from 1/1/1990 to 1/1/2021.  In your search results you will get papers such as the 2017 paper "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death," and this 2017 press article about the study (which shows some of the EEG readings from four dying patients). 

Besides making the untrue claim above, the Frontiers press release is guilty of getting the ball rolling on this fake news story, by suggesting the utterly groundless idea that the EEG readings from a seizure-wracked dying patient in a coma did something to suggest the patient was recalling events in his life.  Here is a quote from the press release:

" 'We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating,' said Dr Ajmal Zemmar, a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville, US, who organised the study. 'Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.' Brain oscillations (more commonly known as ‘brain waves’) are patterns of rhythmic brain activity normally present in living human brains. The different types of oscillations, including gamma, are involved in high-cognitive functions, such as concentrating, dreaming, meditation, memory retrieval, information processing, and conscious perception, just like those associated with memory flashbacks. 'Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences,'  Zemmar speculated. "

Notice the nonsense reasoning here. It's basically this:

(1) People have different types of brain waves, which occur when they do various things like thinking, recalling, meditating (which does not involve recall), and perceiving. 

(2) Some brain waves were measured in a person who died. 

(3) So maybe he was recalling important life events. 

This is nonsensical logic. The study has not provided the slightest reason for thinking that the dying person was remembering past events in his life. To the contrary, we can think of the strongest reason why a person would not be recalling important life events after having a sudden heart attack. The sudden heart attack would produce great pain and great distress, and under such conditions if you were conscious you would be no more likely to be recalling past life events than you would be if someone suddenly stabbed you in the chest. In fact, sudden fatal heart attacks instantly produce unconsciousness which should prevent anyone from engaging in thinking about past events.  

The scientific paper describes the patient's condition before death, and we learn of a state so dire that any speculation about the patient reliving past memories seems supremely absurd. We are told the patient was a 87-year-old who had suffered a fall, and who was in a coma (rating 10 on the Glascow Coma Scale, meaning a moderate coma). Here is how the paper describes the patient's death. 

"An electroencephalography (EEG) was obtained, which showed non-convulsive status epilepticus in the left hemisphere. There were at least 12 identified electrographic seizures, after which a burst suppression pattern spontaneously developed over the left hemisphere (Figure 2A).  Shortly thereafter, electrographic activity over both hemispheres demonstrated a burst suppression pattern, which was followed by development of ventricular tachycardia with apneustic respirations and clinical cardiorespiratory arrest. After discussion with the patient’s family and in consideration of the 'Do-Not-Resiscitate (DNR)' status of the patient, no further treatment was administered and the patient passed away."

Given such a patient state, it is obvious folly to be speculating  that such a patient was reliving past memories just before death. Status epilepticus is a life-threatening seizure of particularly long length. Apneustic respirations are a kind of gasping suggesting death is very near.  Twelve seizures would have produced a "witch's brew" of brain signals showing up on EEG readings, and from such a thunderstorm of brain signals nothing reliable can be inferred about what a patient was thinking or recalling. Since the patient was in a coma and plagued by a dozen seizures that disrupt mental processes such as recollection if it is occurring, it makes no sense at all to speculate that the patient was thinking about or recollecting anything.

Giving us a headline as phony as the headline quoted above from the Independent, the Daily Mail gives us this fake news headline about this patient: "Our lives really DO flash before us: Scientists record the brain activity of an 87-year-old man at the moment he died, revealing a rapid 'memory retrieval' process."  This headline is as phony as a three-dollar bill.  Zero evidence has been provided in the scientific paper of any memory retrieval around the time of death,  and the patient's condition gives the strongest reason for disbelieving that any such thing was occurring. A similar fake news headline occurs on www.bbc.com, showing that once an expert lights a fake news match, the fake news fire will spread even to sources the average person regards as having high journalistic standards. 

There is an abundance of reliable evidence that people have extraordinary near-death experiences after their hearts have stopped.  Such experiences often include what are called life-review experiences, in which a person may recall important moments from his life.  Neuroscience has done nothing to explain such near-death experiences. 

The fact of such experiences is a major reason for rejecting all claims that human consciousness is a product of the brain, and that memories are stored in brains.  According to such claims, no one should have any mental experiences at all  other than unconsciousness after his heart stops. Within a few seconds after a heart stops, a brain shuts down its electrical activity. This was shown by the 2017 paper I previously mentioned, "Electroencephalographic Recordings During Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy Until 30 Minutes After Declaration of Death," Figure 1 of that paper shows EEG readings of four patients for thirty minutes after their hearts stopped.  The readings are flat lines, except for three or four little blips that can be compared to momentary muscle twitches of a corpse a few minutes after death.  The Zemmar study does nothing to challenge ideas that brains promptly shut down as soon as a heart stops. 

On the same day that we had the fake news headlines quoted above,  we had another fake news headline, one that declared, "New project creates digital clones of human brains to help treat neurological disorders." No one has created any such thing as a digital clone of the human brain. We can also be quite confident that no one ever will do such a thing, because the act of measuring all of the synapse states and neuron states of a brain would inevitably kill a person, or require the cutting away of so much tissue that you would never be left with a clone of the person's original brain state.  In the text of the story we read that the work being done is merely the creation of some "virtual model," something not at all a clone of the brain. 

Postscript: Vice.com tries to squeeze some more juice out of the fake news story about the dying 87-year-old. It gives us an article with the misleading title "The Search for Meaning in a Mysterious Brain Signal at Death." There was nothing mysterious about the brains signals recorded.  There are some good aspects of the Vice.com story. The story quotes a doctor named Chalwa:

“ 'They have no idea what that guy is experiencing,' Chawla said. It’d be different if the man survived, and reported that he experienced a recall of memories. But since he died, we have no idea what happened. To say otherwise, 'is frankly appalling,' Chawla said."

Correct  -- the behavior of so many people in this matter is truly appalling and unprofessional.  

Beware of Neuroscientists Using Cell Nicknames

Today is a typical day in the science news, because we see what we so  often see: a press report claiming that neuroscientists have discovered something they have not actually discovered.  The  report is a press release from the University of Bonn with this headline: "'Math neurons' identified in the brain."  Below this we have a subtitle reading, "When performing calculations, some neurons are active when adding, others when subtracting."  While we know that humans can perform math calculations, there is no evidence that either brains or neurons perform math calculations.  Guilty of serious methodological flaws, the scientific study in question has not found any good evidence that some neurons are more active than other neurons during math calculations. 

The study (entitled "Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain") can be read in full here.  Nine epilepsy patients had electrodes attached to areas of their brains for medical reasons to determine the source of seizures they were having. Using such subjects, scientists attempted to find signs of greater activity in certain areas of the brain while the subjects performed a math task. Such a sample size of nine subjects was too small for a robust result.  Fifteen subjects per study group is the minimum for a moderately persuasive result. When you use fewer than 15 subjects in a study group, there is a too high a chance of a false alarm. 

The scientists recorded the electrical activity of about 600 neurons in each subject.  They claim that a small percentage (about 5%) fired at a greater rate during addition or subtraction.  But we would expect to get such a result by chance.  Similarly, if I track for twenty minutes the minute-to-minute ups and downs of 600 stocks being traded on the New York Stock Exchange,  and look for stocks that rise in price while I am thinking about cute puppies, I will probably be able to find that about 5% of the stocks seemed to have higher prices when I am thinking about cute puppies.  This does nothing whatsoever to show that my thoughts about cute puppies have any influence on stock prices.  I would in such a case have merely found a chance correlation that I would expect to get when comparing two unrelated things that fluctuate (stock prices and the objects of my attention).  In all likelihood this is all that has turned up in the new "Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain" study.  The authors have merely found the type of chance correlation in electrical activity that we would expect to see in some small percentage of neurons (maybe 5% or so) when comparing the ups and downs of that electrical activity to something else that does not affect such electrical activity.  No robust evidence has been provided of any causal effect. 

Figure 2 of the paper is a line graph showing the ups and downs of the firing rate of four neurons, with two of the neurons showing increased activity during math calculation. The caption of the graph says it is showing activity for "four example neurons." When we remember that the electrical activity of about 600 neurons was tracked, we should not regard Figure 2 as being evidence for any causal effect. The authors probably cherry-picked some neurons out of their set of about 600, looking for a few with an electrical activity that seemed to rise during math calculation. 

Similarly, if I did my experiment tracking the minute-to-minute price fluctuations of 600 stocks, while I was thinking about cute puppies, I could cherry-pick one stock with the strongest chance correlation, and produce a graph like the one below, similar to the graphs in Figure 2 of the paper. 

How is it that we can judge whether a study like this has given robust evidence of anything (as opposed to showing only variations we would expect to get by chance)?  We can look for 4 different things:

(1) Pre-registration.  When pre-registration is used, scientists publicly pledge beforehand how data will be gathered and analyzed, reducing the chance the authors will be doing a kind of a "fishing expedition" in which they feel free to keep "slicing and dicing" the data dozens of ways until it seems to show the desired result: an approach that may be described as "keep torturing the data until it confesses." 

(2) A blinding protocol.  A blinding protocol is used to reduce the chance of experimental bias, an effect in which experimenters tend to see or find whatever result they hope to see. 

(3) Control groups. When control groups are used, there are a group of subjects who do not receive the stimulus being applied to the main experimental group.  The reaction of the group receiving the stimulus can be compared to a group that did not receive the stimulus. 

(4) Adequate sample sizes. An experiment should include a sample size calculation to determine the minimum number of subjects needed to provide robust evidence of a real effect.  If such a calculation is not done, we should expect 15 subjects per study group as a minimum. 

The new "Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain" study fails on all these quality measures.  The study was not a pre-registered study. The study failed to use any blinding protocol, and the paper does not use the word "blind" or "blinding."  The sample size used (nine) is smaller than the minimum of 15 needed for a robust experimental result, and no mention is made of a sample size calculation.  Although the paper uses the word "control" multiple times, the study did not use control groups.  The use of a control group would have clarified that the main result reported is meaningless.  In the control group we would have seen about 5% of neurons with increased activity when the subjects were not asked to do any math work.  This would have helped make clear that the reported variations are merely chance variations, not actually evidence of "math neurons."

Being guilty of several methodological defects, the  new "Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain" study fails to provide any good evidence that there are "math neurons" in the brain, and fails to provide any good evidence of any such thing as "neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing."  Similar problems will be found in studies claiming to provide evidence for "time cells" and "place cells" in the brain, as discussed here and here.  

The same type of methodological defects are found in another memory study released this week. Its press release groundlessly claims, "In a scientific first, researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered fundamental mechanisms by which the hippocampus region of the brain organizes memories into sequences and how this can be used to plan future behavior." A look at the Nature paper shows that a way-too-small sample size was used (only five rats),  that no blinding protocol was used, that no control group was used, and that the scientists used some incredibly complicated "keep torturing the data until it confesses" approach that they presumably  made up as they went along (since the paper makes no mention of pre-registering an exact hypothesis and pre-registering data collection and analytic methods). 

A brain scan study looked for neural correlates of math calculation in adults and children, using a much better sample size of 20 adults and 80 children. As shown in Figure 2, the study found brain activity variations of only about 1 part in 200 or smaller, which is about what we would expect to have got purely by chance, even if the brain is not involved in calculating. The bar chart below puts such results in perspective. 

New Study Confesses "Relationship Between Brain Structure and Function and Cognitive Function Is Still Largely Underexplored"

For decades neuroscientists have taught or attempted to suggest the unwarranted claim that brain scans suggest the human brain is the source of human cognition. Given the great numbers of such claims that have been made over the past several decades, a reader may be surprised to read that a new scientific paper states, "We report the first systematic review that assesses how information from structural and functional neuroimaging methods can be integrated to investigate the brain substrates of cognition." This should raise our suspicions that brain imaging can help establish that cognition is produced by brains. If such a claim is true, why is it only now (in the year 2022) that we would be seeing "the first systematic review that assesses how information from structural and functional neuroimaging methods can be integrated to investigate the brain substrates of cognition"? Such reviews should have been done before any claims were made that brain imaging helps show the brain is the source of human cognition, not after such claims had been made for decades. 

We seem to have here in such "jumping the gun" behavior another example of what biologists have very long been guilty of: claiming some triumph has been achieved before they have achieved necessary prerequisites of such a claim, like some mother claiming that her small baby can run before the baby has even learned how to crawl or walk.  Something similar went on in discussing human origins, with biologists boasting for many decades that they had successfully explained the origin of the human race, when they had not achieved some of the most important prerequisites that should have been achieved before making such a claim (such as understanding the molecular nature and organization of protein molecules, the structural organization of cells, and the still not-understood riddles of the origin of language and the morphogenesis origin of an immensely organized adult human body from the million-times simpler simplicity of a single fertilized ovum). 

After its abstract the new paper ("Relating cognition to both brain structure and function: A systematic review of methods") starts out by giving us a classic example of what occurs so very often in neuroscience papers: an invalid citation in which some dubious claim is followed by a reference to a paper that did not establish such a claim.  We read, "Cognitive function and adaptive behaviour rely on structure and dynamics of largescale neural networks (Friston, 2002)."  The citation is to a paper that merely states, "We try to show that learning can be implemented in a biologically plausible way." 

After getting 1923 papers from database searches, and removing 251 duplicates, the new study had 1673 papers. An assessment "for eligibility" reduced this total to only 159 papers, and a further application of quality criteria reduced this number to only 102.  Such extremely high rates of exclusion should raise our suspicions. Why did only 102 out of 1923 papers meet the study's eligibility and quality criteria standards? This is what we might expect if the vast majority of experimental neuroscience papers are using faulty methods or making invalid claims. 

It seems that the number of papers that should have been excluded would have much higher.  The new paper lists four reasons why it excluded papers. None of the reasons listed are one of the top problems with experimental neuroscience papers these days. Such reasons include the following:

(1) A failure to do a sample size calculation needed to determine the number of subjects needed for a robust result. 

(2) The use of too-small study group sizes, in which the number of subjects is less than the minimum (about 15) needed for a moderately persuasive result. 

(3) A failure to declare and implement a thorough blinding protocol to prevent experimental bias in which the experimenters tend to find whatever result they were hoping to find. 

(4) A failure to pre-register a detailed plan for gathering and analyzing data, leaving researchers with freedom to run a "fishing expedition" kind of study in which they can "slice and dice" data in countless different ways until they find a result they were hoping to get. 

How many of the 102 papers would have survived a quality check excluding papers with such methodology flaws? Probably very few, because the prevalence of poor methodology is epidemic in neuroscience these days, with most experimental studies being guility of two or more of these failures.  Then there is the fact that according to a pie chart in the new paper, only about one quarter of the 102 papers used "direct inference," with about half using some "indirect inference" method that is less reliable than direct inference. 

In the new paper's summary we have this confession, which should raise further doubt in anyone thinking brain scans have supported claims that brains make minds. We read this:

"First, it became apparent that fMRI protocols have taken clear dominance over other functional imaging techniques in this research field. As mentioned in the introduction of this review, fMRI method suffers from low temporal resolution and is not a direct measure of neural activity."

You should never expect to get in a neuroscience paper a really candid discussion of how the boasts of neuroscience do not match experimental results.  Neuroscientists are members of a conformist belief community, and within such a community there are taboos that cannot be violated and speech customs which scientists are pressured into following. But in the last paragraph of the new paper we do get a kind of watered-down confession about the shortfall of neuroscientists in proving their belief dogmas.  We read this: "This review demonstrated that the relationship between brain structure and function and cognitive function is still largely underexplored."  A more candid statement would have stated, "The relationship between brain structure and function and cognitive function has not yet been established."

The study here gives a rather interesting poll of neuroscientists. There are some surprising answers. Based on their standard claims about brains and minds, we would expect close to 100% of neuroscientists would agree with this statement: "If it were possible to transplant our brain to another body we would still be ourselves, albeit in a new body."  The actual percentage of polled neuroscientists who agreed with this statement was only 51%. Could this be because deep down inside a large fraction of our neuroscientists don't really believe some of the things they teach?  I don't know. 

Also interesting was the fact that only 6% of the polled neuroscientists agreed with the statement that "memory is stored in the brain much like in a computer, that is, each remembrance goes in a tiny piece of the brain."  82% of them disagreed, with 12% saying they did not know.  I can understand why so few neuroscientists would have agreed with such a statement. If a neuroscientist claims that each memory is stored in one tiny spot of the brain, this raises the problem of how a brain could be able to instantly read from just the right tiny spot when an instantaneous recollection occurs.  For example, if I suddenly hear the phrase "death of Abraham Lincoln" and instantly remember "assassination by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theater, April 14, 1965," how was I able to find the exact tiny spot where that information was stored, in a brain without any coordinate system or indexing system or position notation system? 

Neuroscientists try to get around this problem by imagining that a memory is stored in not just one tiny spot in the brain but multiple spots in the brain. Unfortunately, this does not make things better for the theory that we retrieve memories from brains; it makes things worse. If, for example, my memory of how Abraham Lincoln died was scattered among several different tiny spots in the brain, then my instant retrieval of that memory from a brain without any coordinate system or addressing system or indexing system would be even more inexplicable than if I were to get the information all from a single spot. I would now have the additional difficulty of explaining how this spatially scattered information was all instantly retrieved from just the right places and also pieced together to make a single seamless integrated memory.  No neuroscientist has even given a credible explanation of instant memory recall, and the only credible explanation of such a thing would one abandoning the notion of a neural storage of memories. We do not recall at the speed of brains; we recall at the speed of souls. 

Why ESP Discredits the "Brains Make Minds" Claim

The evidence for ESP is overwhelming. You can read about some of that evidence by reading my posts below:

• The post here discusses abundant ESP evidence gathered by Soviet scientists, including evidence of "telepathic knockouts," in which a person could be made unconscious at the command of a distant person, who might be as much as a thousand miles away. 
• The post here discusses a New York Times article reporting how a court case was won by an amazing demonstration of telepathy by the person who had been arrested. 
• The post here discusses many impressive feats of telepathy, including several very dramatic cases witnessed and documented by a physician. 
• The post here discusses cases of people very noticeably feeling a strange worry or distress at the time of a distant disaster involving one of their friends or loved ones. 
• The post here discusses a phenomenon of eyeless sight abundantly documented by an early twentieth century observer (and corroborated by many subsequent observations). 
• The post here discusses many cases of dramatic ESP performed by hypnotized subjects. 
• The post here describes an extremely well-documented subject performing ESP, the blind or nearly-blind invalid Mollie Fancher who while blindfolded passed endless tests of paranormal perception, and who routinely would correctly describe unseen visitors arriving at her door, outside of her field of view. 
• The post here discusses abundant evidence of ESP gathered by a chemistry professor at a very prestigious university. 
• The post here discusses compelling evidence of ESP gathered by a doctor. 
• The post here discusses a summary of compelling experimental evidence for ESP, published on the mainstream Cornell physics paper server. For example, a summary of ESP tests using the ganzfeld protocol reveals that that over 46 years of tests, there were 4841 trials, producing 1520 successes, a hit rate of 31.5%, far over the expected-by-chance hit rate of 25%. 
• The post here describes astonishing ESP results produced by the blind or nearly-blind Loraina Brackett. 
• The post here describes extremely dramatic ESP results produced by a Mrs. Morel studied by Eugene Osty. 
• The post here discusses extremely dramatic ESP results listed in a government document. 
• The post here discusses some dramatic cases of clairvoyance. 
• The post here discusses the very well-documented case of Alexis Didier, who demonstrated clairvoyance countless times in public exhibitions.
• The post here discusses a six-year investigation of the French Royal Academy of medicine, one which resoundingly found in favor of the reality of clairvoyance. 
• The post here discusses dramatic evidence for spontaneous ESP gathered in abundance by Louisa Rhine.
• Similar accounts (including a very dramatic one from my own experience) are provided in this post and in this post. 
• Dramatic evidence for ESP from the nineteenth century is discussed in this post and this post this post. 
• Some dramatic experimental results in favor of ESP are discussed here, along with computer experiments shedding light on the vast improbability of their occurrence by chance. 
• Compelling experimental results in favor of ESP are discussed here. 
• The dramatic success of remote viewing experiments long funded by the US government is discussed here. 
• Some dramatic accounts of ESP that I can personally testify to are included in my account here. 
• An enormously successful remote ESP test (with two persons in different locations) is described in this post. Guessing 1850 cards selected by chance by a professor at a remote  location,  a woman guessed an average of 18.24 cards correctly per 25 cards, achieving a phenomenal 73% accuracy rate (instead of the expected accuracy rate of 20%). We would never expect to get a result this good by chance if every person on a billion trillion inhabited planets was to be given such a test. 
• The enormously convincing experimental results produced by Joseph Rhine (particularly when testing with Hubert Pearce) are discussed here. 
• Very powerful evidence for ESP in autistic subjects is discussed here. 
• 21st-century evidence for ESP is discussed here. 

I have had experiences like this

Let us consider the question: is it possible to explain ESP by any hypothesis preserving the idea that brains generate minds? One possibility sometimes mentioned is the idea that ESP occurs when some kind of unknown radiation or wave travels from one brain to another. 

In the book The Personality of Man by G. N. M. Tryrrell we have a good explanation of why such a hypothesis does not work.  To understand the explanation fully, you need to understand what is called the inverse square law. This is a law that applies to known types of radiation such as light and radio waves. According to this law the strength of any radiation decreases by a factor of 4 whenever the distance between two objects is doubled.  So, for example, if you are 10 million kilometers from the sun, your spaceship will get a certain amount of radiation energy from the sun; but if you move your spaceship so that it is 20 million kilometers from the sun, your spaceship will get one quarter of that radiation. 

Tyrrell states this:

"(1) In the first place, any such physical radiation would have to be generated by a material transmitter of some kind, which would presumably be located in the brain or body of the agent. Since telepathy is known to take place over long distances, such a transmitter would have to be powerful enough to send a message over some thousands of miles. It could scarcely, therefore, be of microscopic dimensions. No such transmitter has ever been found in any human brain or body. A corresponding receiver would also have to exist in the body of the percipient B. ; and that has never been discovered either. (2) All known physical radiation obeys the inverse square law connecting intensity with distance. There is no evidence that telepathy obeys this law. If it did, a person who could transmit a telepathic message across the ocean would produce an enormously more powerful effect across a table. This kind of thing has never been observed. (3) Physicists possess a variety of sensitive instruments for detecting different kinds of radiation; yet they have never detected telepathic radiation, which, if it were physical, would be unlikely to have escaped them. 

These are all very good objections that are rather perfectly stated. Item 4 on Tyrrell's list moves toward a very weighty objection, although he states it imperfectly. He states this:

(4) A much more serious objection, however, lies in the fact that in order to transmit ideas by any physical means whatever, use has to be made of a pre-arranged code. Unless such a code exists and is understood by both parties beforehand, no information can be transmitted by physical means. Spoken language is a code; written language is another. Unless the person spoken to or written to understands the language, he can receive no information. Even gestures and facial expressions are a code. Every code requires to be consciously applied and consciously interpreted; so that a physical theory of telepathy necessitates not only the existence of material transmitters and receivers but a conscious agent at each end to operate them and to code and decode the messages. Systems of dots and dashes, or audible words spoken into a microphone are, of course, the usual ways of encoding telegraphic, telephonic and radio messages. It would be utterly absurd to suppose that some unseen demon within us speaks words aloud into a telepathic transmitter situated in our brain or elsewhere in our body; yet without some such supposition a physical theory of telepathy will not work." 

The point that Tyrrell is getting at is a good one: that information can only be sent long distance through some biological process or physical process if the information is encoded according to some coding system, and the same system is used by the transmitter and the receiver.  For example, you can read information on the web only because both the publisher of the information (the web site you are on) and the receiver of the information (your web browser) are using exactly the same encoding protocols, which include things such as the ASCII protocol and the HTML protocol.  We now know  (contrary to what Tyrrell states) that there does not need to be "a conscious agent at each end," but there at least has to be at least a software or machinery or biology on both the transmitting and receiving ends, and both have to use the same protocol for successful communication to occur.   Such a requirement is just another reason why the idea of brain-to-brain ESP communication is untenable.  There would have to be some secret undiscovered brain biology by which thoughts were encoded for long-distance transmission, and also some secret undiscovered brain biology by which a brain could decode encoded thoughts that had been transmitted by some undiscovered form  of radiation.  

The overall requirements for brain-to-brain ESP would be something like this:

(1) Some undiscovered system in the brain capable of encoding thoughts for long-distance ESP transmission. 

(2) Some undiscovered antenna-like system in the brain capable of transmitting such encoded thoughts over vast distances.

(3) Some undiscovered form of radiation (never detected by physicists) by which thoughts can be transmitted long-distance from brain to brain, apparently without any inverse-square kind of signal diminution with distance (unlike light and radio signals). 

(4) Some undiscovered reception system in the brain capable of receiving such ESP thought signals (very hard to imagine, as a human body has nothing like an antenna for receiving signals). 

(5) Some undiscovered decoding system in the brain capable of decoding such encoded ESP thought signals, and causing them to produce corresponding ideas in the mind of the receiver. 

This list of requirements is so great and so far-fetched that it is clear that the idea of ESP being a brain-to-brain communication by means of radiation is one that must be rejected. 

There is a good reason why materialists tell us the lie that there is not good evidence for ESP.  They tell us this lie because it is one of quite a few lies that they very much need to tell. The existence of ESP is sufficient by itself to discredit all claims that human minds are merely the product of the brain. 

Just after describing an astonishingly exact account of telepathy (pages 23-25), Arthur W. Osborn states this in his very interesting book on precognition entitled The Future Is Now: 

"Many volumes have been filled with accounts of spontaneous telepathy and clairvoyance. As I have pointed out elsewhere, these facts destroy all mechanistic attempts to explain consciousness as being merely a product of neural functioning. If it is assumed that all our knowledge is derived only by means of the senses, then how can we know of events entirely beyond the reach of the senses?... Both spontaneous and experimental cases of paranormal cognition demonstrate that certain people do become aware of thoughts in other minds and of events at a distance under conditions of rigorous control which exclude the possibility of fraud and where it is impossible for any physical means of communication to operate....Clairvoyance and telepathy do indeed pose crucial problems for the classical theories of mind; and for those theories which postulate that consciousness is exclusively dependent on the physical organism they administer a coup de grace."

A coup de grace is a final blow given to a wounded person or animal to cause its death. 

In the quotes above, Tyrrell takes a wise approach. His approach is to start listing all of the things that would have to exist if brain-to-brain ESP was occurring. We should use the same approach when discussing other things attributed to the brain, such as memory formation and memory recall. 

Here is a list of the things that would have to exist in the brain for humans to be storing memories in the brain:

(1) Some system by which learned knowledge and human experiences are converted or encoded into neural states.  This is the most horrendous problem for anyone claiming brains store memories. You can't just "write learned knowledge" or "write experience" to a brain as effortlessly as one would pour water into a cup.  For knowledge or experience to be stored in a brain as neural states or synapse states, there would have to be some super-elaborate coding system capable of handling all of the countless different ways in which humans can acquire knowledge.  The coding system would have to be some "miracle of design" infinitely more complicated than the Morse Code, for it would have to store so many types of things: images, smells, sounds, music and text. We can't imagine any such system capable of storing English text arising before the year 1000 BC, because the English language and the English alphabet did not exist then.  So we would have to imagine this enormously elaborate encoding system arising in only the past few thousand years, contrary to the claims of Darwinists that evolution works slowly. 

(2) This encoding system would have to work enormously fast, to cover cases of instantaneous memory formation which routinely occur. 

(3) There would have to be some kind of write mechanism that would allow this encoded information to be stored in the brain as neural states or synapse states. 

(4) There would have to be some capability allowing this written information to be preserved for decades, despite all of the rapid structural turnover and rapid molecular turnover that occurs in the brain.  Proteins in the brain have an average lifetime of less than two weeks, and dendritic spines and synapses do not last for years.

(5) There would have to be some capability allowing a memory to be instantly found. So, for example, if you hear the name "Richard Nixon' and then instantly remember "US president elected in 1968 who resigned in 1974," there would have to be some neural mechanism by which you could instantly find a brain's stored information about Richard Nixon upon you hearing his name. 

(6) There would have to be some read capability by which a memory was read from some location in the brain where it was stored. 

(7) There would have to be some decoding capability by which this encoded information existing as neural states or synapse states was translated into conceptual information allowing the mind to experience a recollection. 

Just as there exists no evidence of the things mentioned by Tyrrell that would have to exist for brains to be responsible for ESP, there exists no evidence of the things mentioned above that would have to exist for brains to be responsible for memory storage and memory retrieval.  Specifically:

(1) Scientists have found no evidence of any encoding system by which a brain can translate learned knowledge or episodic experience into stored knowledge existing as neural states or synapse states. If such a system existed, it would have to have a large footprint in the genome, involving very many proteins dedicated to achieving such encoding; but no good evidence for such a thing has been found. 

(2) There is no evidence of any write capability in a brain that can store encoded information.

(3) No one has found any mechanism allowing a preservation over decades of memories stored in synapses or dendritic spines with such a high level of structural turnover and molecular turnover. 

(4) No one has found any mechanism in a brain that can explain the instant retrieval of memories. The brain has nothing like the type of things that would be required for such instant retrieval to work, things such as indexing or a coordinate system or a position notation system. So finding a memory stored in a brain would as slow as finding someone's house in New York City (at an unknown location in the city) if New York City had no street names and no house numbers. 

(5) No one has found any read capability in a brain that could read encoded learned information. A computer hard disk has a movable read-write head to write and read information from some particular spot on the disk, but nothing like that exists in the brain. The brain has nothing like the cursor that exists in a word processor program, something that keeps track of the current reading or writing position. 

(6) The brain has nothing like some decoding system that would allow learned information or episodic experience encoded in neural states or synapse states to be translated into a recollection occurring in the mind. 

Just as we must say that the brain is totally unsuitable for the job of extrasensory perception, we must say that the brain is totally unsuitable for the common chores of memory storage and memory retrieval.