TV Medical Dramas Give Us Wrong Ideas About Minds and Death

Very many people never bothered to study scientific matters after their most recent school studies. Such people may largely get their impressions about scientific matters from social media, news stories and fictional TV shows. This leads to incorrect ideas. News stories nowadays are filled with clickbait misleading hype, much of it coming from university press offices, which these days are notorious for their exaggerations and misstatements. And a person whose ideas about the human mind and body are largely coming from medical TV shows may often get the wrong idea. 

I watched many episodes of the New Amsterdam medical drama series, and got a general impression of a hostility towards spirituality. One episode seemed to have an anti-Catholic tendency. Representatives of the pope were depicted as demanding a presidential suite in a hospital, just in case a visiting pope got sick. In the same episode, a son of a couple was depicted as telling his parents that they would go to hell if they got divorced. 

In another episode of New Amsterdam, a patient having spiritual visions is revealed to have had such visions because of epilepsy. There is little or no evidence that epilepsy produces spiritual visions. People having full "grand mal" seizures (called tonic-clonic seizures) do not remember anything that occurred during the seizures. There are other types of seizures called (simple partial seizures and complex partial seizures) that a person can remember happening. Such seizures do not produce visions or complex hallucinations (such as seeing a deceased loved one). 

It is sometimes claimed that temporal lobe epilepsy can produce mystical experiences. A scientific study had 86 patients with epilepsy fill out a questionnaire seeking evidence of mystical experience. The paper states, "none of the patients’ descriptions met the criteria for mystical experience." The quote below from the paper discusses the gap between ivory tower teachings on this topic and observational reality:

"Religious experience, though sometimes seen in seizures, is not a common feature: prior studies among patients with epilepsy have cited frequencies of 1% (Kanemoto & Kawai, 1994) and 0.4% (Ogata & Miyakawa, 1998). Mystical experiences have been linked theoretically to the temporal lobes (Saver & Rabin, 1997), and that association has been widely accepted. According to Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998, p. 1975), for example, 'every medical student is taught that patients with epileptic seizures originating in this part of the brain can have intense, spiritual experiences during the seizures.' However, a survey of patients in an epilepsy clinic found no mystical experiences (Sensky, 1983)." 

A much eariler 1990 survey of 234 epileptic patients said that only 1% of them reported something like a religious experience during a seizure.  Referring to another larger study, the paper states, "According to Kanemoto et al's study, religious experiences have been recognized in six out of 606 temporal lobe epilepsy cases; an incidence of 1.0%." This is negligible evidence for epilepsy causing spiritual visions. A survey of spiritual experiences in non-epileptics would probably produce numbers as high.  

Another fictional medical series is the long-running series Grey's Anatomy, which has run for 19 seasons. In Episode 7 of the first season, a doctor recommended a hemispherectomy for a child suffering from very bad seziures. Hemispherectomy involves surgical removal of half of the brain. The doctor assures the parents that the child would be able to live a relatively normal life after the operation. Indeed, the results discussed here suggest that removing half of the brain has little effect on the intelligence of children.  But the explanation for this anomaly by the doctor was erroneous. The doctor stated, "The remaining neurons will compensate for the loss." Physically there is no evidence for any such compensating effect. The liver has a remarkable ability to grow new cells when damaged. The brain has no such ability. If someone has half of his brain removed in a hemispherectomy operation, the remaining neurons don't "compensate" by doubling themselves. 

What happens here is extremely important to the topic of the relation between the mind and the brain. If removing half of his brain reduces someone's neurons by 50% without damaging his intelligence, that is strong evidence against claims that minds are made by brains. We should note we are being misinformed on this very important topic whenever any neuroscientist makes untrue claims about a remaining brain half "compensating" for the loss of the other brain half. 

In one appalling part of the Grey's Anatomy show ("Can't Fight Biology," Season 7, Episode 4,  8:23 mark) a narrator incorrectly says, "Biology says that we are who we are from birth, that our DNA is set in stone." DNA (consisting of only low-level chemical information) does not make us who we are. DNA accounts for neither the anatomy of a human (which is not specified in DNA), nor the mind of a human, which is not explained by neurons. And even the structure of neurons is not specified by DNA, which does not specify how to build any of the roughly 200 types of cells in the human body. 

At the 21:33 mark of Episode 13 of Season 11 of Grey's Anatomy, we have a doctor lecturing a hall filled with other doctors. The doctor gives us some phony baloney talk that no one should believe, stating this:

"Now arguably the most important part of the brain is the part that makes us hope, dream, imagine. One singular almost immeasurable part is what makes you you and me me and everyone everyone. It's technically called the fornix, but I call it the dream box."

Brains don't make you you or me me. No neuroscientist has any credible explanation of how dreams or hopes or imagination can arise from neural activity.  When neuroscientists try to say something along these lines, they typically claim that thought comes from the cortex of the brain, located on the outer edges of the brain, not the fornix located in the center of the brain. The claim that thought comes from the cortex is not justified, for reasons discussed here. 

The Grey's Anatomy show does rarely have some shows that sound as if they were written by someone who has studied paranormal phenomena. In Episode 8 of Season 1, there is a psychic who seems to have some clairvoyant knowledge of things he should not know, and his case is never explained away.  In the "Some Kind of Miracle" episode in Season 3, there is a very good depiction of a near-death experience. With her heart stopped at the hospital as doctor's struggle to revive her, Meredith has a near-death experience in which she encounters a patient who previously died. She also encounters her mother. After going in one direction down a hall to hug her mother, she races back in the other direction. She then finds herself back at the hospital. She is then told her mother has died. Meredith acts as if she already knew this, having learned it through her near-death experience. 

This "Some Kind of Miracle" episode was a fine depiction of a certain kind of near-death experience sometimes called a veridical near-death experience: one in which someone having the experience seems to observe or learn something he should have been unable to have learned or observed through normal means.  You can find other examples in the post here.  In this case Meredith seems to have learned something during her near-death experience that she did not yet know through normal means: that her mother was dead. Around episodes 3 and 4 of Season 17 Meredith had similar near-death experiences.  

Near-death experiences often produce attitude changes in the person having them, but we saw not much of an attitude change in the Meredith character in episodes following the "Some Kind of Miracle" episode in Season 3. But not much later in the series we have what at first looks like a paranormal experience for one of the characters. In Season 4 we have the Izzie character start to repeatedly see and talk to an apparition of one of her patients (Denny), who she had romantic feelings for before he died.  We get several episodes in which lengthy conversations occur between Izzie and the apparition of Denny. 

Soon it turns out on the series that Izzie has a brain tumor. The series suggests that all of the appearances of Denny's apparition were just symptoms of a brain tumor Izzie had. In a Season 5 episode Denny says to Izzie, "I am you. I'm your tumor, you're talking to yourself." Izzie then has brain surgery to remove the tumor, and the appearnce of Denny's apparition no longer occur. 

The idea that brain tumors can produce visual hallucinations of the dead (with matching auditory hallucinations) is unfounded fantasy. A review of the symptoms of 200 children with brain tumors finds no hallucinations other than two primitive "flashing light" hallucinations. It is very common for dying people to report seeing deceased love ones. Such occurrences are called deathbed visions.  But there is no evidence that brain tumors are the cause of such visions, and they appear very frequently in the last days of people who do not have brain tumors. 

Some examples of deathbed visions can be found here and here and here.   A survey of family members of deceased Japanese found that 21% reported deathbed visions. A study of 103 subjects in India reports this: "Thirty of these dying persons displayed behavior consistent with deathbed visions-interacting or speaking with deceased relatives, mostly their dead parents." A study of 102 families in the Republic of Moldava found that "37 cases demonstrated classic features of deathbed visions--reports of seeing dead relatives or friends communicating to the dying person." In the classic work on deathbed visions (At the Hour of Death by Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson) we read on pages 71-72 that only about 12 percent of those having such visions died from diseases that can be associated with hallucinations. 

There is a deplorable failure of fictional medical TV shows to depict this important aspect of human experience. We have all seen on doctor drama TV shows innumerable depictions of terminally ill patients in their last days or hours. But we never see the dying patient saying something like, "My goodness, doctor, there's my mother right there near the edge of my bed!" Why do TV medical dreams never show a depiction of such deathbed vision experiences when they happen so often?

There is a huge body of evidence suggesting that mental states can have very large effects on health outcomes in ways we cannot understand. Part of this evidence involves evidence for the power of the placebo effect, and another part of this evidence is data suggesting mental attitudes can greatly affect life expectancy.  But on medical TV dramas we almost never hear about the importance of the mind in medical outcomes. 

An extremely important point regarding the mind and the body is that the mere knowledge of negative medical information can have a very harmful effect on a patient. Tell a patient that he has some  "ticking time bomb" medical issue, or tell him about some bodily issue that may inflict him years down the road, and the mere announcement of such a thing may be a kind of psychological torpedo blast causing incalculable damage to the person's state of mind, plunging him into some dark "world of worry" that may last for years. We almost never hear about such an important consideration in medical TV dramas. The idea is almost always "run ever test that might find trouble, and tell the patient about all the troubling results found."  

On TV's doctor dramas the doctors are depicted pretty much as people with all the answers about biological questions. But doctors are no such things. They don't understand how a human is able to form a memory or how a human is able to retrieve a memory. And when a person becomes depressed, they typically don't understand why that happens. 

Almost always on such shows a dying patient is depicted as terrified of dying. Almost always the dying patient is depicted as someone who wants for every measure to be taken to maximize his chance of living as long as possible. But many people who near the end of their lives are not afraid of death, and don't want to "pull out all the stops" to try to get every month out of a failing body. Many people are not afraid of death because of things they have learned and things they have experienced or seen with their own eyes which convinced them they are part of some spiritual reality never mentioned in medical textbooks. We almost never see such things depicted on TV doctor dramas.

A DNR order is an order that no attempt be made to use methods of resuscitation if a person's heart stops. Asking for a DNR order can be a quite reasonable choice for someone who is very old or in very poor health, such as someone with advanced cancer. Such a person may think in his state a cardiac resuscitation may be "buying himself months more of pain," and may prefer to let nature take its course, particularly if he believes in life after death. But typically in medical TV shows a person asking for a DNR is depicted as someone who doctors need to scold into changing his decision.  Why can't our medical TV doctors respect a reasonable patient choice when it is made?

In the fictional world of TV medical dramas, cardiac resuscitation is depicted as being more prone to success than it is.  A scientific paper tells us this:

"The public has unrealistic views regarding the success of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and one potential source of misinformation is medical dramas. Prior research has shown that depictions of resuscitation on television are skewed towards younger patients with acute injuries, while most cardiac arrests occur in older patients as a result of medical comorbidities. Additionally, the success rate of televised resuscitations on older shows has vastly exceeded good outcomes in the real world....In this study, characters with medical causes of cardiac arrest were 4.6 times more likely to survive with good neurologic outcomes than patients in the real world while characters with traumatic cardiac arrest were nine times more likely. Medical dramas continue to misrepresent the demographics, etiologies, and outcomes of cardiac arrest." 

Seizures are often inaccurately depicted on TV medical shows. A web page tells us this:

"In the name of science, researchers at Dalhousie University watched every episode of 'Grey's Anatomy,' 'House,' 'Private Practice' and the final five seasons of 'ER' — and they found that in those 327 episodes, 59 patients experienced a seizure. In those 59 cases, doctors and nurses incorrectly performed first aid treatments to seizing patients 46 percent of the time (including putting an object, such as a tongue depressor, in the seizing patient's mouth)."

In general in TV medical shows psychiatrists are depicted as people who understand how to fix whatever mental issues a patient has. We have endlessly repeated TV stories involving patients who have some mental problem, but who refuse to acknowledge that they need a psychiatrist. Virtually never do we have realistic depictions of the severe limitations, explanatory failures and uncertainties of psychiatry. It's almost always a story line of "just find out the problem, and get the guy to take the right pills or have the right operation." The truth is that psychiatrists have for the past thirty years "bet the farm" on brain chemistry theories of mental disease, theories that have been a spectacular failure. 

In a Wired interview a former director of the National Institute for Mental Health (Tom Insel) made this confession: "I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs---I think $20 billion---I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.” 

Talking about changes in the brain, a professor of psychiatry Kingdon states this: "No such clear causative changes exist in severe mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia." After noting "25 years of research frustration," Kingdon quotes a neuroscientist who advocates that we keep at this not-getting-much-of-anywhere research approach. Kingdon then states this:

"But does this not seem, after more than 30 years of failure, more akin to a religious or, albeit culturally influenced, persistent strong belief than one based on scientific grounds? Just where is the rational justification for ploughing the same furrow again and again?"

We may wonder: how much better results would psychiatrists get if they followed a strategy not of "fiddle with their brain chemistry" but instead "try to heal their souls?" 

Postscript: It is reported in the science news today (September 29) that those taking pills to fight depression are subject to much higher rates of heart disease. We read this:

"People taking antidepressants were compared with those not on the drugs.

Following up after 10 years, those on SSRIs had a 34 per cent increased risk of heart disease, an almost doubled risk of cardiovascular death. They also had a 73 per cent higher chance of death from any cause. For the other antidepressants, all the risks were around double."

Is this greater risk caused by the pills, or by the depression itself? The people cited in the article sound like they don't know. We are given the impression of psychiatrists messing around with people's brains, without understanding whether there are deadly effects of the pills they are prescribing. 

Of course, we never ever hear about such uncertainties on medical TV shows. You'll never hear a TV doctor say, "I prescribed him some pill, but I don't know whether it will help cure him or help kill him." 

At this page we read of a psychiatry professor who has been trying to stop using SSRIs, through a very gradual reduction lasting years. We get the impression of some great hazard in suddenly stopping their use. But in the TV shows we never hear a psychiatrist say, "I'm going to put you on this pill, but it's pretty addictive." 

Post-postscript: I have just finished watching (as a background activity) all episodes of six seasons of the medical TV series The Resident. The series seems to always fail to depict the type of spiritual experiences that occur so often in relation to death and close brushes with death.  The show has endless depictions of medical close brushes with death, but no one ever reports a near-death experience (even though significant fractions of those having close brushes with death do report near-death experiences).  None of the dying people on the show ever report seeing apparitions, even though sightings are very common in dying people. 

It seems like anything having to do with life after death is never mentioned on the show. The show seems to depict every sick person as being terrified of death. We seem to never have an episode in which someone says that he does not want to have some elaborate expensive treatment (such as an organ transplant), on the grounds that he believes in life after death and is not afraid of dying.  

As I discuss in my post here, there are quite a few reasonable reasons why an old person might wish to turn down a doctor suggesting something such as a pacemaker, a heart valve operation, an ICD device implantation, or a medical test that might discover some previously unknown risk:  

• An old person might want to avoid the endless complications and hassles of long medical treatment, and might want to keep things as simple a possible. 
• An old person might be wary of causing great medical expenditures that he or his family might have to pay very much for. 
• An old person might want to stay away from hospitals and nursing homes for fear of catching an infectious disease in a hospital or nursing home, as very many people did (with lethal results) during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. 
• An old person might wish to avoid the side effects that can occur from some type of medical treatments such as pacemakers or ICD devices. 
• An old person may be afraid that some fancy medical treatment path that extends his life may actually have the indirect side effect of increasing the number of years he has to spend in a state of pain, confusion or disability.
• An old person might wish to minimize his own medical expenses and use of the time and equipment of medical personnel, on the grounds that such time, resources and effort should be focused on younger people.
• Knowing how often very old people suffer from pain, and knowing that he lives in a country such as the United States that does not currently make it easy for very old people to get the pain medication that they need, particularly people with low mobility, an old person might think that medical procedures maximizing his lifespan may have the effect of buying him years of unnecessary pain. 
• An old person might hate spending time in hospital rooms, and may want to adhere to a policy minimizing his time in hospitals.
• An old person may feel disgusted by treatments that may make him feel like a man/machine hybrid or a man/animal hybrid (treatments such as heart valve replacements that often use parts from cows or pigs).  
• An old person might be skeptical of claims of medical benefits of some complicated procedure, and be worried about the small percentage of times in which such procedures go wrong, and result in death or injury to the patient, or cases in which people catch infectious diseases from being in hospitals. 
• Believing in life after death, an old person may have little interest in very complicated and expensive medical procedure programs that may give him no more than a few years more of earthly life. 
• An old person may not want to have tests which reveal risks to his health or happiness that he does not wish to worry about. He may realize that very great psychological harm can be done if he receives worrying medical information that he did not need to be told about. 
• An old person might be worried that some treatment that reduces his chance of dying one way will in effect be a treatment that increases his chance of dying in some other way that is even worse, such as death by Alzheimer's disease or a slow painful death by cancer. 
• An old person might very greatly prefer to quietly die at the familiar locale of his home, surrounded by his family members, pets, or personal possessions, rather than spending his last days or weeks in some noisy, unnatural and utterly unfamiliar hi-tech environment, hooked up to machines such as heart rate monitors.  
• An old person might wish to have nothing to do with the kind of futile care that a nurse describes in this article. 

We seem to never hear about such issues on shows like The Resident. Instead we are given a kind of brainwashing in the dubious idea that every person should follow a simplistic "spend every dollar to give me every possible day of  earthly life" approach in making medical decisions. 

For Insight About Your Brain and Mind, Ponder the Never-Founds

Let us imagine an extraterrestrial planet named Covossca where science and technology are very advanced. The scientists know all about their bodies, except for what is inside their skulls. We can imagine that a social restriction prevented scientists on Covossca from ever studying what is inside the skulls of organisms such as themselves. We can imagine that on planet Covossca an all-powerful church in charge of everything prevented all scientists from ever opening up a skull, on the grounds that skulls contained a sacred soul that it was blasphemy to disturb. So the scientists on Covossca knew all about the exact details of their bodily organs underneath their necks, but knew nothing at all about what was inside their skulls. 

Let us imagine that upon getting tired of endless pleas from scientists and doctors to allow the examination of the contents of skulls, the all-powerful church finally relented, and finally gave permission for the scientists to examine what was in the skulls of newly deceased people. After such permission was granted, there might be a conversation like this between two scientists:

Aldorus: This is fantastic! We're finally going to get to study what is inside the skull. What types of things will we find?

Beyonus:  We will find all of the secrets of mind and memory inside the skull, of course.

Aldorus:  How can you know that?

Beyonus:  Where else could they be, but inside the skull? We haven't found them anywhere else in the body. 

Aldorus: So what type of things should we expect to find? What type of things should we be looking for?

Beyonus:  We can expect to find memories. When you open the skull of a dead person, you will find all the knowledge he ever learned, and his memories of all the important experiences he had. 

Aldorus: How will those look when we see them?

Beyonus:  Maybe they will be tiny little pictures that we will be able to see when examining the matter inside the skull with sufficient magnification. Or maybe there will be tiny text we can read. Or maybe the information will be encoded. In that case it may take quite a while the crack the code. But at least we can be sure we have discovered encoded information as soon as we see it. 

Aldorus: Why is that?

Beyonus:  Because when information is encoded, there is always a great repetition of a small number of tokens. It's like the letters of an alphabet. The same limited set of letters keeps being repeated over and over again. Whenever you find something like that, you know you have found encoded information.

Aldorus: What other things should we expect to find?

Beyonus:  We should expect to find sorting, addressing and indexing. If such things didn't exist inside the skull, we couldn't be able to remember things so quickly.  You name some person from history, and I can instantly tell you all about him. That can only occur if there is sorting, addressing and indexing inside the skull which can allow exactly the right information to be found so fast. 

Aldorus: Should we expect to find some kind of little widget that reads the right memory?

Beyonus:  No doubt! There must be some kind of little thing inside the skull that reads the memories stored there. Maybe like some tiny roving eyeball. Plus there must be some kind of little thing that writes memories, or how else could memories be stored. Maybe it will kind of like a little moving pencil.

Aldorus: But will a man's memories fade between the time he dies and the time we open his skull?

Beyonus:  Not at all. People like us can remember what we learned decades ago. So we'll find some stable writing surface where memories persist for decades, like writing chiseled into stone. 

Now, let us imagine that the scientists on planet Covossca finally were given permission to open up some skulls of people who recently died. Imagine if they were shocked to find that inside the skulls of everyone they checked, there was nothing at all except a heap of very fine powder, something like the heap shown below:

Would the scientists of Covossca modify their opinions in an appropriate way after such a discovery? They might. But it is as likely as not that they would just cling to the dogmas they had long taught, unswayed by the facts they had discovered. We can imagine a conversation like this:

Aldorus: So now we've finally found what is inside skulls, and it's nothing but a disorganized powder! We must have been all wrong about memories being stored in skulls, and minds coming from inside the skull. 

Beyonus:  No, no! We just need to study the tiny powder specks more carefully! Maybe there is something about these tiny powder specks that causes them to produce the fruits of our minds: thinking and insight and self-hood and imagination. Maybe there is something very special about the way the tiny powder specks are arranged, that allows them to store memories, and makes possible the instant retrieval of memories. 

What has occurred on planet Earth is actually very similar to what occurred in this story about the planet Covossca. Earth scientists have examined very carefully what is inside skulls. They didn't find mere powder. But they did find inside skulls something just as discouraging to all claims that brains store memories and make minds: just a lump of meat with the consistency of jello. 

We should ponder very carefully all of the "never-founds" of the brain. These are things that we either should expect or might expect to be found in the brain if it is the storage place of memories, but which never have been found in the brain.

Never-Found #1:  Tiny Images in Brains

One way you can imagine memory being stored in brains is by the preservation of tiny images. We can imagine a brain taking periodic "snapshots" of what you see, and then saving such "snapshots." No such thing has ever been found in a brain. No one has ever found anything like photos. No one has ever found anything even as crude as a few dots representing a shape seen. For example, no one has even found in a brain an image as crude as the one below:

Never-Found #2:  Tiny Text in Brains

Another way we can imagine memory being stored is by a writing of tiny text. For example, you can imagine someone looking at some brain tissue in an electron microscope, and finding tiny little letters smaller than cells. No such thing has ever been found. 

Never-Found #3:  Tiny Numbers in Brains

Another way we can imagine memory being stored is by a writing of tiny numbers. For example, you can imagine someone looking at some brain tissue in an electron microscope, and finding tiny little numbers smaller than cells. Such things might exist as numbers such as 83922. Or they could exist through some dot-symbol representation. For example, we can imagine someone looking through an electron microscope to see something like this in the brain, which could be a neural storage of the telephone number 231-4315:

No such thing has ever been found in the brain. No one has ever found anything like a neural storage of learned numbers.

Never-Found #4:  Non-genetic Token Repetition in Brains

Tokens are used in a repetitive manner when information is stored. In digital storage systems the tokens are electronic marks that are the equivalent of 1 and 0. In books the repeated tokens are letters. In photos the repeated tokens are pixels, tiny dots of color. There are many possible ways to represent things, using different systems of tokens.

The only token repetition ever discovered in brains is the token repetition occurring in DNA, found in almost all cells in the body. That is genetic token repetition, in which (following the coding scheme of the genetic code) certain combinations of nucleotide base pairs represent particular amino acids. 

Except for this genetic token repetition which occurs in almost all cells (such as cells in the fingers and the feet), no token repetition has ever been discovered in the brain. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. It suggests very strongly that learned information is not stored in the brain. 

There are all kinds of "secret codes" that we can imagine a brain using to store information. But such codes all require massive amounts of token repetition. For example, the Morse Code is a way to transmit information by using a series of dots and dashes. The Morse Code can also be used to store information. But whenever such a code is used, there is always massive amounts of token repetition. For example, three dots means "S" in the Morse Code, and three dashes means "O" in the Morse Code. When you cannot find any token repetition despite the most careful examination, you can be pretty sure information is not being stored.   

Never-Found #5:  Addressing in Brains

Addressing is some system whereby unique spatial positions have unique identifiers. We are all familiar with one type of addressing: the unique addresses of houses in a city. Addressing is also used in books, where each page has a unique address (its page number). Addressing is also used by the Internet. The URL of a web page is a unique address allowing browsers to quickly find one particular page among all the pages of the internet. Addressing is also used on digital devices such as smartphones and computers. On my computer a file name combined with a full path name makes up a unique address for a file. For example, on my computer a particular file has the unique address of c:\windows\write.exe.

No one has ever discovered any type of addressing system used by the brain to identify particular cells or synapses. Neurons do not have neuron numbers or neuron names or neuron addresses, and synapses do not have synapse numbers, synapse names or synapse addresses. This is troubling, because it means that although humans are able to retrieve obscure little-remembered information instantly, the brain does not use one of the three things that enable rapid information of physically stored information: addressing, sorting and indexing. But what about the other two? They are discussed next. 

Never-Found #6:  Sorting in Brains

Sorting is something that can help allow fast information retrieval. An example is found in books. Books have unique page numbers, but you would not be able to use the index of the book to find information quickly if the pages of the book were not sorted in numerical order. Another type of sorting that facilitates fast information retrieval is alphabetical sorting. An example of such sorting can be found in a one-volume encyclopedia. It is easy to find information quickly on any topic, because there is an alphabetical sorting of the articles. Similarly, if you have a large file cabinet filled with 100 or more manilla folders, you can find some desired information quickly if the folders are arranged in alphabetical order. 

No one has ever discovered any type of physical sorting in a brain. The physical arrangement of the brain makes a sorting of neurons impossible and a sorting of synapses impossible. Once a neuron exists, it is attached to so many synapses that it cannot move around in the brain. Synapses are also stuck in their current position, and cannot move or be moved around in any way that would allow sorting.  In this sense both neurons and synapses differ from blood cells, which can move around from place to place in the body. 

Never-Found #7:  Indexing in Brains

Indexing is something that can facilitate the fast retrieval of information. Indexing is used at the back of books. Indexing is also a crucial part of database systems that allow a fast retrieval of information.  For indexing to be used effectively, a system must have both addressing and sorting. For example, you can index a book to allow fast retrieval of subject matter, but the book must have page numbers, and the page numbers must be in numerical order. 

There is no sign of any indexing in the brain. This should as no surprise, given that effective indexing requires both sorting and addressing, neither of which exist in the brain. 

Never-Found #8: A Place in the Brain for Permanently Storing Memories for Decades

For information to be permanently stored, there must be a stable medium to write to, a place where writing can last for many years. Some of the earliest stable media to write to were clay (used in writing cuneiform), parchment, and paper. Nowadays computers use a stable medium such as magnetic disks.

Does the brain have anything like this – some medium allowing a permanent, stable storage of information? It would seem not, at least nothing that could be used by the brain to store memories that last for many years. The main assumption about neural memory storage during the past decades has been that memories are stored in synapses. But synapses are an unstable “shifting sands” type of medium subject to high molecular turnover and structural turnover. Rapid molecular turnover and structural turnover in synapses should make them unsuitable for storing memories that last longer than a year. But humans are able to remember many memories for 50 years or longer. 

You could in theory use DNA as a permanent storage mechanism, given some fantastically complicated and never-discovered system for translating human conceptual information and episodic memories into the nucleotide base pairs that make up DNA. But DNA has been exhaustively studied by multi-year highly-funded projects such as the Human Genome Project and the ENCODE project, and no one has ever found any learned knowledge or episodic memories in DNA. We know what kind of information is in DNA (low-level chemical information), and it isn't human memory information. 

Never-Found #9:  A Position Focus Mechanism in the Brain

When we consider all of the different ways in which information is retrieved from a physical location, we find there is a common characteristic. Almost always there is some mechanism of position focus. Position focus occurs when some particular part of the information is highlighted as kind of “the current position” within that information.

I can some give examples of this kind of “current position” effect:

1. A physical book can be opened to only one pair of pages. When a reader reads that book, his eyes can focus on only one line at a time. When the reader focuses on a particular line, position focus is achieved.
2. When a film is run through a film projector, only one frame at a time can be in front of the light that passes through the film. In such a way, position focus is achieved.
3. In the disk of a computer hard-drive, there is a read-write head that moves around to read particular parts of the disk. At any time, the head is above one particular spot of the disk, and position focus is achieved.
4. The needle of a phonograph can only be resting on on one little spot on the phonograph record. Whenever that needle rests on one particular spot on the record, position focus is achieved.
5. The current tab of a web browser will always be on one particular web page, with a URL displayed at the top of that tab. With such a rule, position focus is achieved, with the URL being a particular position within the vastness of the Internet.

Position focus requires moving parts. For example, the pages of a book move, the eyes move as you read, a phonograph record spins, a movie projector moves the film continuously, and a read-write head moves about on a hard disk. But there is no macroscopic part of the brain that moves about when you retrieve a memory. Other than chemicals and electricity and blood, which are constantly flowing about in the brain, there is no movement that goes on in the brain when you retrieve a memory. It would seem, therefore, that there is no possible way in which a brain could achieve any type of position focus that would be necessary for it read from one particular spot to retrieve one and only one memory.

Never-Found #10:  A Writing Component in the Brain

In the brain there is nothing that bears any resemblance to a writing component. There is no special molecule or special cell that moves around to some particular writing spot, to dump information at that spot, like a pencil writing on a piece of paper. There is no little moving widget or cellular gizmo in the brain that moves around in the brain to dump information at some particular spot, like some little moving laser that can make marks at some particular place.  

Never-Found #11:  A Reading Component in the Brain

In the brain there is nothing that bears any resemblance to a reading component. Neurons or synapses are static, and do not move around in response to memory retrieval. If a reading component were to exist in a brain, for the sake of retrieving memories, it would have to be some mobile component or gizmo that could move around from one brain spot to another. There is no sign of any such thing in the brain. When the brains of people retrieving memories are scanned, scans reveal no sign at all of any component moving around to read memories or do anything else. Other than chemicals and blood cells that move around, brains do not have moving components. 

Never-Found #12: High Levels of Cellular or Synaptic Organization in Brains

The knowledge in a person's mind is highly organized, often with a hierarchical kind of structure. For example, consider this:

• You can name a variety of planets, such as Earth, Venus and Mars.
• Pondering one of those planets (Earth), you can name a variety of continents existing on that planet.
• Pondering one of those continents,  you can name a variety of countries on that continent.
• Pondering one of those countries (the United States), you might be able to name a variety of the 50 states that make up that country.
• Considering one of those 50 states (New York state), you might be able to name particular cities in that state (such as Albany and New York City).
• Thinking of New York City, you might be able to name the five boroughs of that city. 
• Pondering one of those five boroughs (Manhattan), you might be able to name a variety of streets in that borough. 
• Pondering one of those streets (such as Broadway), you might be able to name a variety of buildings on the selected street.
• Pondering one of those buildings (such as a particular Broadway theater), you might be able to name actors that are starring in some play now running in such a building. 
• Pondering such an actor, you will be able to name particular parts of his body such as legs, brain, heart, pancreas, kidneys, arms and so forth.
• Pondering one of those parts of the body (such as an eye), you might be able to name particular parts that make up that part, such as the lens, retina and cornea that make up an eye.  

So the knowledge in a mind can be very highly organized. Is there any evidence of structural organization in a brain that correpsonds to such high levels of organization in human minds? Not really.  Cells are very organized things. But the billions of neurons in your brain do not exist in any very organized structure. And synapses have no impressive organization that anyone can detect.  The matter in the brain does not seem to be any more organized than the matter in your buttocks.  Examining the arrangement of neurons and synapses in the brain, no one sees some very impressive organization that causes him to say this: "Now this MUST be where memories are stored -- it's all so organized!" Brain tissue looks rather like the visual below, which is something no more organized than a pot of wet pasta:

Never-Found #13:  Synapses That Reliably Transmit Signals

Humans can remember things with astonishing accuracy. For example, when an actor plays the role of Hamlet, he accurately repeats about 1480 lines. But synapses do not transmit signals reliably. A paper tells us, "Several recent studies have documented the unreliability of central nervous system synapses: typically, a postsynaptic response is produced less than half of the time when a presynaptic nerve impulse arrives at a synapse." Another scientific paper says, "In the cortex, individual synapses seem to be extremely unreliable: the probability of transmitter release in response to a single action potential can be as low as 0.1 or lower."  The idea that memory information is being passed around in your brain is therefore inconsistent with what we know about synapses. For some memory information to travel from one part of the brain to another part of the brain only a few millimeters away, the information would have to pass through very many synapses. With a low chance of success during each transmission of the signal across a synapse, you would never be able to remember anything accurately if your memory recall depended on synaptic transmission. 

Never-Found #14:  A Readable Memory in a Dead Person's Brain

If memories were stored in human brains, there would have to be some setup allowing memories to be preserved for decades. In such a case it would be possible to read a memory from a dead man, by opening up someone's skull just after he died, extracting some tissue, and studying it with a microscope. No one has ever read any type of memory from a dead person. You can read the DNA of a dead person, extracting all kinds of information about the person's genes. But it is impossible to ever find anything about what a person learned or thought by studying his brain after he died. 

Scientists have no reasonable prospect of ever being able to read a memory from a dead person. This is shown by the fact that no attempt is being made to preserve the brains of dead people in hopes of learning information about something they did, thought or learned. There are not even currently funded research projects in which scientists are experimenting with trying to read memories from dead people. There are some rich people who have paid to have their brains frozen when they die. But you never hear scientists saying something like, "Let us freeze the brain of that president when he dies, because we might find some memories that help us understand history better." 

What These Never-Founds Suggest

Collectively the never-founds above discussed above suggest that your brain is not the storage place of your memories. But neuroscientists tell us differently. Do their opinions derive from facts they have discovered about the brain? No. Their opinions derive from speech customs of the belief community neuroscientists belong to. Neuroscientists never independently reached the conclusions they teach about brains and minds. Such conclusions are beliefs they were taught when they trained to be neuroscientists. It was made very clear during such training that such beliefs are sacred cows that must not be challenged, part of a belief tradition that must be parroted for someone to move down the neuroscientist career path. The education of such neuroscientists did not include reading any of 1000 important volumes with evidence conflicting with such dogmas, such as books filled with accounts of people floating out of their bodies and viewing them from above. Like religious seminaries yielding identical-speaking dogmatic disciples, the neuroscientist graduate programs churn out conformist disciples who believe the same. It's kind of like some pastry chef using a cookie cutter to churn out identical-looking cookies. 

The interesting Netflix series "100 Humans" repeats some of the most groundless dogmas of neuroscientists, but at one point the show teaches us about the kind of herd behavior going on in neuroscientist belief communities.  Early in Episode 8, we see 100 humans outside, 97 of whom have been told to smash a pie in their face after doing a dance. Three other humans are the test subjects. All 100 are holding cream pies. The 97 do the same dance they have been taught, and the 3 test subjects imitate that dance. Then the 97 all smash their cream pies into their faces, despite no one telling them to do that (merely 3 leaders giving a gesture suggesting such an action).  Two out of the three test subjects also smash their cream pies into their faces, even though no one verbally commanded them to do so. The results are not surprising. People will say unwise things and do unwise things and make unwarranted claims, just to fit into some group they are part of.  

Some of the Weak Papers Neuroscientists Cite As Evidence for Their Chief Claims

 An extremely common phenomenon in science papers is the practice of faulty citations. It commonly works like this:

• A scientific paper will claim that some dubious assertion is "well-established" or supported by "overwhelming evidence," immediately following such claims by citations.
• A very careful examination of the papers discussed will find either that the authors of the papers did not make the assertion, or that the papers were poorly-designed studies that failed to provide robust evidence to back up the assertion. 

Let us look at some examples of such faulty citations. The paper "Learning causes synaptogenesis, whereas motor activity causes angiogenesis, in cerebellar cortex of adult rats" has been cited  1490 times in the neuroscience literature. That's very strange, because the paper describes a poorly designed experiment guilty of quite a few Questionable Research Practices.  The paper tells us it used 38 rats in four study groups, stating: "Thirty-eight adult Long-Evans hooded female rats, kept in small groups until 10 months old, were housed individually for 30 days in one of four experimental groups." We are also told that five of the rats had to be "dropped out." This means there were fewer than 10 animals per study group. In experimental studies  15 subjects per study group is the minimum for a modestly reliable experimental result. The authors could have found out that they were using way too few subjects if they had followed good experimental practice by doing a sample size calculation, but they failed to do such a calculation. 

The authors also made a very bad violation of good scientific practice by failing to tell us the exact number of subjects in each study group. We see some graph comparing the study groups, and one of the graphs shows one of the study groups (one that did learning) having more "Synapses per Purkinje cell" (although not a higher synaptic density). But exactly how many rats were in this study group? Was it 9, 5, or only 2? We have no idea, because the authors did not tell us how many research subjects (how many rats) were in each of the study groups. This is a glaring violation of good scientific practices. Also, the study fails to follow a blinding protocol. The scientists measuring the synapse numbers should have been blind to which study group the animals were in, but they apparently were not. For such reasons, this study provides zero robust evidence to support the claim in its title that learning causes synaptogenesis (the formation of new synapses).  

Let us look at another paper that has been cited more than 4000 times by neuroscientists. The paper is "The Molecular Biology of Memory Storage: A Dialogue Between Genes and Synapses" by Eric R. Kandel. This is not an experimental paper, but a review article. There are red flags near the beginning. The author writes in an autobiographical way, as if he was telling his life story. That is not the standard way in which a scientific review article is written. A review article is supposed to be a dispassionate examination of evidence, without wading into personal matters such as the author's life quest. The  article contains 39 uses of "I" and countless other uses of "we." For example, we read, "A decade ago, when I reached my 60th birthday, I gathered up my courage and returned to the hippocampus." 

There are some diagrams, but none of them are supported by specific numbers mentioning the exact size of any study group or the number of research subjects used. There are no specific mentions of exact research results that mention how many subjects were researched.  This is the exact opposite of how a good scientific review article should be written. A good scientific review should let us know exactly how many subjects were used in all of the experiments it is citing. The article is littered with groundless achievement legends, unsupported claims that some researcher showed X, Y or Z without any specific numerical evidence showing that any such thing was shown. Near the end of the article, the author asks so many questions that it is clear that the title of the paper is inappropriate, and that there is no such thing as a known "molecular biology of memory storage." 

What we have here is mainly an autobiographical essay that fails to meet  the standards of a good scientific review article. But this essay has been cited more than 4000 times by researchers, just as if were a regular scientific paper. 

Another highly cited neuroscience paper is the paper "A specific amyloid-β protein assembly in the brain impairs memory," which has been cited more than 2000 times. A long article in the leading journal Science claims that this paper and some similar papers may have "signs of fabrication." Below is a quote from that article about the protein described in the paper:

"Given those findings, the scarcity of independent confirmation of the Aβ*56 claims seems telling, Selkoe says. 'In science, once you publish your data, if it’s not readily replicated, then there is real concern that it’s not correct or true. There’s precious little clearcut evidence that Aβ*56 exists, or if it exists, correlates in a reproducible fashion with features of Alzheimer’s—even in animal models.' ”

Another highly cited neuroscience paper is "The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception." The paper (which has been cited more than 8000 times) claims to find higher signal activation in some tiny part of the brain when subjects were shown faces. At first glance Figure 3 of the paper looks a little impressive. We see a graph showing observations of faces involving about a 2% signal change, compared to 18 observations of non-faces involving only about a 1% signal change.  Unfortunately the number of subjects used to produce these graphs was too small for a reliable result to be claimed -- only six subjects. Also, the paper makes no mention of any blinding protocol. So the people estimating the signal changes apparently knew whether a face had been observed or not, which could have biased their estimations. A paper like this should not be taken seriously unless the paper mentions how a blinding protocol was followed. 

The paper "Place navigation impaired in rats with hippocampal lesions" has been cited more than 7000 times. The paper did not deserve such citation, because it failed to follow good research practices. The study group sizes were too small. The study group sizes consisted of 10, 13, 4 and 4 subjects. Each of the study group sizes should have been at least 15 for a somewhat persuasive result.  It is very easy to get false alarm results using study group sizes smaller than 15. 

The 2002 review article "Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain" has been cited 12,792 times.  Such a level of citation is very strange, because the article provides no strong evidence of neural correlates of goal-directed attention. The paper makes use of the very misleading visual representation technique so favored by neuroscientists, in which regions of the brain showing very slightly greater activation (such as 1 part in 200 or 1 part in 500) are shown in bright red or bright yellow, with all other brain regions looking grey. Such visuals tend to create the idea of a much higher activation difference than the data actually indicates.  

A very misleading part of the article is Figure 3. We see a line graph in which the left side is labeled "fMRI signal," and we see variations from "0.05" to ".25," which a reader will typically interpret as being a 500% variation. The authors forgot to label this as a mere "percent signal change" variation. Instead of it being a 500% signal variation, it is a mere variation between .0005 and .0025, a fluctuation of less than 1 part in 300. Tracking down the source paper cited ("Neural systems for visual orienting and their relationships to spatial working memory," Figure 3), shows the correct labeling that used "percent signal change" to show that the reported variation was extremely slight. Why has a very slight variation been visually represented (in the "Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain" paper) to make it look like some huge variation?  

The 1998 paper "Neurogenesis in the adult human hippocampus" has got more than 8000 citations, according to Google Scholar. But a 2019 paper says this about adult neurogenesis (the formation of new neurons):

"Here we examine the evidence for adult human neurogenesis and note important limitations of the methodologies used to study it. A balanced review of the literature and evaluation of the data indicate that adult neurogenesis in human brain is improbable. In fact, in several high quality recent studies in adult human brain, unlike in adult brains of other species, neurogenesis was not detectable."

A year 2022 paper had a title of "Mounting evidence suggests human adult neurogenesis is unlikely."

Recently the interesting web site www.madinamerica.com (which specializes in a critique of psychiatry dogmas) had a post that mentioned an interesting case of a weak neuroscience paper that got very many citations:

"A highly publicized MD-candidate-gene link was put forward in a widely cited 2003 study by Avshalom Caspi and colleagues (according to Google Scholar, cited over 10,400 times as of August, 2022, or about 550 citations per year over 19 years), who concluded that people experiencing 'stressful life events' are more likely to be diagnosed with depression if they carried 5-HTTLPR, a variant genetic sequence within the SLC6A4 gene that encodes a protein that transports serotonin within neuronal cells. For many people, the Caspi study provided a sensible explanation for the causes of depression, where life events and genetic predisposition combined to explain why some people become depressed, while others do not. However, despite the publication of at least 450 research papers about this genetic variant, by 2018 or so it was clear that the 5-HTTLPR depression theory did not hold up. The rise and fall of the 5-HTTLPR-depression link was described in psychiatric drug researcher Derek Lowe’s aptly-titled 2019 Science article, “There Is No ‘Depression Gene.’” The depression candidate gene literature, he wrote, turned out to be 'all noise, all false positives, all junk.' ” 

A psychiatrist commented on the mythology of 5-HTTLPR that arose:

"First, what bothers me isn’t just that people said 5-HTTLPR mattered and it didn’t. It’s that we built whole imaginary edifices, whole castles in the air on top of this idea of 5-HTTLPR mattering. We 'figured out' how 5-HTTLPR exerted its effects, what parts of the brain it was active in, what sorts of things it interacted with, how its effects were enhanced or suppressed by the effects of other imaginary depression genes. This isn’t just an explorer coming back from the Orient and claiming there are unicorns there. It’s the explorer describing the life cycle of unicorns, what unicorns eat, all the different subspecies of unicorn, which cuts of unicorn meat are tastiest, and a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling match between unicorns and Bigfoot."

A 2018 paper analyzing more than 1000 highly cited brain imaging papers found that they had a median sample size of only 12. In general, experimental studies that use study group sizes so small do not provide reliable evidence for anything. Study group sizes of at least 15 are needed for even a modestly persuasive result. 

There is a standard way for a scientist to determine whether the study group sizes used in an experiment are sufficient to provide adequate statistical power. That way is to do what is called a sample size calculation (also called a power calculation or statistical power calculation). The 2018 paper mentioned above found that "only 4 of 131 papers in 2017 and 5 of 142 papers in 2018 had pre-study power calculations, most for single t-tests and correlations." This is a dismal finding suggesting that poor research habits in experimental neuroscience are more the rule than the exception. 

Besides a massive level of citation of weak and shoddy papers and papers describing studies using Questionable Research Practices, a gigantic problem in neuroscience literature is faulty citation. This is when a paper makes some statement, and includes a reference to some other paper to back up its claim. Very often when you track down the cited papers you will find that they did not make the claim being made in the paper making the citation, or failed to provide any robust evidence for such a claim. For example, you may see some science paper have a line like this:

"Research shows that Moravians are more likely to suffer memory problems.¹⁷"

But when you track down Reference # 17 listed at the end of the paper, you may find some paper that either does not make any such claim, or provides some research that comes nowhere close to showing such a claim. 

A scientific paper entitled "Quotation errors in general science journals" tried to figure out how common such misleading citations are in science papers.  It found that such erroneous citations are not at all rare. Examining 250 randomly selected citations, the paper found an error rate of 25%.  We read the following:

"Throughout all the journals, 75% of the citations were Fully Substantiated. The remaining 25% of the citations contained errors. The least common type of error was Partial Substantiation, making up 14.5% of all errors. Citations that were completely Unsubstantiated made up a more substantial 33.9% of the total errors. However, most of the errors fell into the Impossible to Substantiate category."

When we multiply the 25% figure by 33.9%, we find that according to the study, 8% of citations in science papers are completely unsubstantiated. That is a stunning degree of error. We would perhaps expect such an error rate from careless high-school students, but not from careful scientists. 

This 25% citation error rate found by the study is consistent with other studies on this topic. In the study we read this:

"In a sampling of 21 similar studies across many fields, total quotation error rates varied from 7.8% to 38.2% (with a mean of 22.4%) ...Furthermore, a meta-analysis of 28 quotation error studies in medical literature found an overall quotation error rate of 25.4% [1]. Therefore, the 25% overall quotation error rate of this study is consistent with the other studies."

In the paper we also read the following: "It has been argued through analysis of misprints that only about 20% of authors citing a paper have actually read the original."  If this is true, we can get a better understanding of why so much misinformation is floating around in neuroscience papers.  We repeatedly have paper authors spreading legends of scientific achievement, which are abetted by incorrect paper citations often made by authors who have not even read the papers they are citing.  

An article at Vox.com suggests that scientists are just as likely to make citations to bad research that can't be replicated as they are to make citations to good research. We read the following:

"The researchers find that studies have about the same number of citations regardless of whether they replicated. If scientists are pretty good at predicting whether a paper replicates, how can it be the case that they are as likely to cite a bad paper as a good one? Menard theorizes that many scientists don’t thoroughly check — or even read — papers once published, expecting that if they’re peer-reviewed, they’re fine. Bad papers are published by a peer-review process that is not adequate to catch them — and once they’re published, they are not penalized for being bad papers."  

The above suggests a good rule of thumb: when you read a science paper citing some other science paper, assume that it is as likely as not that the authors of the paper citing the other paper did not even read the other paper. Another good rule of thumb: be very skeptical of any claims you read in a neuroscience paper claiming that something is "well established" or "not controversial." Such claims are routinely made about things that have not been well established by observations.  

What goes on in the highly diseased world of neuroscience research is: (1) when neuroscientists produce shoddy poorly-designed research that seems to back up the dogmas of neuroscientists, such research gets cited endless times; (2) when neuroscientists produce solid well-designed research that seems to defy the dogmas of neuroscientists, such research may be almost never cited. 

An example of (2) is the very important "Dream Catcher" study entitled "The Dream Catcher experiment: blinded analyses failed to detect markers of dreaming consciousness in EEG spectral power." In the study the brain waves of people were measured as they were woken up at random times during sleep. The people were asked whether they were dreaming when they were woken.  Analysts were given brain waves of the woken people, without being told which ones said they were dreaming when awoken (the brain waves being those that occurred when they were awoken, and slightly beforehand). The analysts were asked to predict which people were dreaming when awoken. The results were not different from chance. Whether people were dreaming could not be predicted from brain waves. This very important result suggests that dreaming is not produced by brains. But such a result defies the dogmas of neuroscientists, so the study has almost never been cited by neuroscientists. The study has been cited only 15 times.