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.