Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Have No Understanding of How a Brain Could Imagine Anything

Let us imagine you are a biologist trying to convince someone that the circulation of the blood within a human body can be explained by what we know about the human body.  You could explain that without going outside a discussion of human anatomy. You could explain anatomical and molecular details of the human circulatory system that would back up very well your claim that the circulation of the blood is well-explained by known biology facts. These would include details such as these: 

• how the human body has a network of arteries capable of distributing throughout the body blood from a pumping heart ;
• how the human body has a network of veins capable of carrying blood  from parts of the body back to the pumping heart;
• how the human heart has a physical structure that is just the structure we might expect it to have if it served as a pump to distribute blood throughout the body;
• how the human heart is regularly witnessed to be undergoing a rhythmic pumping action when the heart is observed by doctors during heart surgery;
• how scientists have developed instruments that can measure the pressure of blood pumped the heart;
• how the blood pumped by the heart contains a hemoglobin molecule that has just the right arrangement allowing blood to carry oxygen needed by cells;
• how the blood of the human body is constantly refreshed with oxygen obtained by the lungs that take in air from outside a person;
• how anyone can get evidence of their own heart beat simply by placing one hand on their wrist, and feeling the heart beats that typically occur at a rate of about one beat per second.

But let us imagine you are a biologist attempting to convince someone that the brain is the source of the human mind, and that memories are stored in brains. The situation would be completely different. There would be no details of human anatomy that you could cite to support this claim. 

You could not cite the measurement of electrical waves in the brain as proof that the brain produces the human mind, because we know all kinds of things that involve electricity but presumably have nothing to do with mind or memory. For example, lightning storms show very powerful manifestations of electricity, but no one thinks that lightning storms involve any kind of memory or mentality. You could not cite some arrangement of matter in a brain as being evidence that brains produce self-hood or consciousness, because no one knows of any way to arrange matter that would tend to produce self-hood or consciousness; and no device manufactured by humans has any real self-hood or consciousness. 

Speaking honestly, you could not claim that the brain must be computing because it resembles human devices that do computing.  Human computers have characteristics such as silicon chips, operating systems such as Unix or Microsoft Windows, application programs, and information transfer protocols such as ASCII. No such things exist in the human brain. No one has ever found anything in the human brain like an operating system or an application program or a silicon CPU chip. 

Speaking honestly, you could not claim that the brain must be storing memories and retrieving memories because it has anatomical characteristics resembling the physical structure of human devices capable of storing and retrieving information. Such devices have seven things not found in the human brain, as I discuss in my post "The Brain Has Nothing Like 7 Things a Computer Uses to Store and Retrieve Information."  

Speaking honestly, you cannot claim that there is some molecule traveling around in the brain and functioning as an information carrier,  in a way rather like the hemoglobin molecule in blood carries around oxygen. This is because no such molecule has ever been discovered. 

So what do you do if you are a biologist trying to convince people that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of memories? You have no convincing anatomical details you can cite. You are pretty much empty-handed. In such a situation what you will probably do is to mainly fill up your post, article or essay with not very relevant discursions, speculations and digressions, hoping to use enough words to give someone an impression that you have something a little bit like an explanation.  That's what goes on in a recent essay by neuroscientist Andrey Vyshedskiy, one entitled "Imagination makes us human – this unique ability to envision what doesn’t exist has a long evolutionary history."  Vyshedskiy attempts to persuade us that he has some idea of where human imagination comes from, but fails very badly. 

After identifying himself as a neuroscientist who "studies how children acquire imagination," someone "especially interested in the neurological mechanisms of imagination," Vyshedskiy starts his explanation attempt by giving us a section entitled "From bacteria to mammals" which consists of six paragraphs that parrot Darwinist dogmas about the evolution of life on Earth. Nothing he says in the section does anything to explain how humans are able to imagine anything. Below is an example of the utterly irrelevant "just so" stories  Vyshedskiy tells in one of his paragraphs of this section:

"Not much food, though, grows underground. To eat, mammals had to travel above the ground – but the safest time to forage was at night, when dinosaurs were less of a threat. Evolving to be warm-blooded meant mammals could move at night. That solution came with a trade-off, though: Mammals had to eat a lot more food than dinosaurs per unit of weight in order to maintain their high metabolism and to support their constant inner body temperature around 99 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius)."  

The section ends with Vyshedskiy making unfounded claims about memories being stored using the cortex and the hippocampus. That's what neuroscientists do to try and make it sound as if they have some understanding of how humans could store and retrieve memories, something no neuroscientist can credibly explain. When someone lacks a "how" they will try using a "where" and hope you don't notice that they failed to give you a "how." For example:

Joe: "You built a time machine? You expect me to believe that?"

John: "Well let me give you the exact details. I built it in my garage."

I won't bother to dispute here Vyshedskiy's claims about the hippocampus (inconsistent with data discussed here), because they have no relevance to the main question I am discussing here, which is whether Vyshedskiy has done anything to explain human imagination.  After the end of his "From bacteria to mammals" section that says nothing relevant to explaining human imagination, Vyshedskiy's next section is entitled "Involuntary made-up 'memories.' " In this section he discusses dreaming. I suppose dreaming can be considered a form of imagination.  But Vyshedskiy  does nothing to explain any neural basis for dreaming. He makes the irrelevant insinuation that dreaming evolved 140 million years ago (a speculation no could ever substantiate), and the unfounded claim that scientists have "demonstrated that animals can 'dream' of going places they’ve never visited before." He supports this claim only by a reference to a poor quality study using the way-too-small study group size of only four rats. 

The rest of the section Vyshedskiy fills up with anecdotes about people who supposedly had important ideas inspired by dreams. Such stories do nothing to explain how a brain could produce ideas either through dreaming or conscious imagination.  We have no understanding of how a brain could produce dreaming, so mentioning dreaming does nothing to explain imagination. The very important "Dream Catcher" study showed that scientists could not even predict whether someone was dreaming by analyzing their brain waves. I discuss that study in my post here. 

Vyshedskiy's final section is entitled "Imagining on purpose."  The first six sentences are some filler material consisting of obvious truths that don't tell us anything we didn't already know long ago, sentences such as "When asked to mentally combine two identical right triangles along their long edges, or hypotenuses, you envision a square." Then Vyshedskiy tries giving us not a "how" but a "where," as neuroscientists tend to do when they lack any credible "how." He says this:

"This deliberate, responsive and reliable capacity to combine and recombine mental objects is called prefrontal synthesis. It relies on the ability of the prefrontal cortex located at the very front of the brain to control the rest of the neocortex."

We hear nothing backing up these claims, which are not well-founded. See my post "Reasons for Doubting Thought Comes from the Frontal Lobes or Prefrontal Cortex" for neuroscience evidence that contradicts such a claim.  The scientific paper here tells us that patients with prefrontal damage "often have a remarkable absence of intellectual impairment, as measured by conventional IQ tests." The authors of the scientific paper tried an alternate approach, using a test of so-called "fluid" intelligence on 80 patients with prefrontal damage. They concluded "our findings do not support a connection between fluid intelligence and the frontal lobes." Table 7 of this study reveals that the average intelligence of the 80 patients with prefrontal cortex damage was 99.5 – only a tiny bit lower than the average IQ of 100. Table 8 tells us that two of the  patients with prefrontal cortex damage had genius IQs of higher than 140. In a similar vein, the paper here tested IQ for 156 Vietnam veterans who had undergone frontal lobe brain injury during combat. If you do the math using Figure 5 in this paper, you get an average IQ of 98, only two points lower than average. You could plausibly explain that 2 point difference purely by assuming that those who got injured had a very slightly lower average intelligence (a plausible assumption given that smarter people would be more likely to have smart behavior reducing their chance of injury). Similarly, this study checked the IQ of 7 patients with prefrontal cortex damage, and found that they had an average IQ of 101.

The term "prefrontal synthesis" used by Vyshedskiy is not a standard term used by neuroscientists, and a search for uses of the term "prefrontal synthesis" on Google scholar will show that pretty much no one other than Vyshedskiy (or people referring to his work) are using such a term. After making the paragraph quoted above, Vyshedskiy offers no evidence to support it. Instead he gives us two paragraphs discussing the earliest archaeological evidence for imaginative or symbolic thinking by humans, which he dates to be about 70,000 years old. He calls this  an "abrupt change in imagination." Yes, we suddenly see in the archaeological record about 70,000 years ago evidence that imaginative and symbol-using humans first existed. But why would such an "abrupt change in imagination" have occurred if imagination came from the brain? It could not have. There was no noticeable change in human brains around that time. In the university press release here, we get this quote from  anthropologist Brian Villmoare: "We re-examined the dataset from DeSilva et al. and found that human brain size has not changed in 30,000 years, and probably not in 300,000 years.” 

Vyshedskiy has failed to see how he is undermining his own claims of brain-caused imagination by citing such facts. If you first consider a sudden explosion of human imagination (with the first appearance of art and symbolism) about 70,000 years ago, and then consider that there was no change in brain size at that time, that is collectively a set of facts standing against the claim that imagination comes from the brain. All that he says to try to smooth over this discrepancy is this sentence: "Genetic analyses suggest that a few individuals acquired this prefrontal synthesis ability and then spread their genes far and wide by eliminating other contemporaneous males with the use of an imagination-enabled strategy and newly developed weapons." The reference is to a scientific paper that suggests no such thing. In fact, the paper ("Evidence that two main bottleneck events shaped modern human genetic diversity") does not mention brains, does not mention cortex tissue, does not mention the prefrontal cortex and does not mention intelligence, imagination, thinking or creativity. The paper has no relevance to such topics. 

This is the last assertion of any substance that Vyshedskiy says on this topic, and it's a groundless assertion lacking any credibility : the wild speculation that humans got imagination (which Vyshedskiy seems to like calling "prefrontal synthesis") because "a few individuals acquired this prefrontal synthesis ability" and then spread their genes around. But how could a few humans without bigger brains have suddenly become the first humans with the ability to imagine things?  Vyshedskiy has no credible tale to tell of how human beings are able to imagine things, and his essay (offering no substantive ideas on this topic) ends up with some vague silly speculation that maybe there was some genetic luck that suddenly gave humans the ability to imagine things. Such speculation is mere hand-waving. 

At the first link in the search results returned here, you can find a paper by Vyshedskiy that shows quite a speculative tendency on such topics. On page 20 of the paper with a very long title referring to a "Romulus and Remus hypothesis," he says this: 

"Furthermore, since only children can acquire PFS [prefrontal synthesis], it follows that around 70,000 years ago young children must have invented the first recursive language....Accordingly, we named our hypothesis after the celebrated twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. Similar to legendary Romulus and Remus whose caregiver was a wolf, the real children’s caregivers had an animal-like communication system with many words but no recursion."

The origin of human language is actually a mystery that our scientists have made no real progress in solving, and one that cannot be solved restricting yourself to materialist assumptions (as I explain here). You're hardly making progress on this intractable problem if you say, "A pair of little kids did it!"  I offer Vyshedskiy's recent essay on imagination as Exhibit A that neuroscientists have no credible tale to tell of how a brain could ever imagine anything. Similar examples can be found in my posts below:

• Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Store a Memory
• Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Don't Know How a Brain Could Retrieve a Memory
• Exhibit B Suggesting Scientists Don't Know How a Brain Could Retrieve a Memory
• More Indications Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Think or Remember

We have a very different state of affairs regarding memory and imagination. Humans do build devices that are capable of permanently storing and instantly retrieving information, devices such as computers. So in the case of memory, we can make a list of the set of things that computers have that allow them to permanently store and instantly retrieve information, and ask ourselves: does the brain have any such things? The correct answer is: the brain has no such things (as I explain in my post here).  For example, computers have an addressing system and a read/write unit for writing and reading from one particular address, but the brain has no such things.  

But in the case of imagination, it is a very different state of affairs. Humans have never built any devices that have imagination like humans have. Digital computers have no imagination. So we cannot make a list of the type of characteristics that a system would have if it could imagine things.  We can merely say: we can imagine no conceivable arrangement of matter that would cause some matter to acquire a power of imagination it did not have before such an arrangement.  Such an impossibility is a strong argument against all claims that imagination comes from the brain.  There is no conceivable arrangement of biological material that we should expect to produce an ability to imagine. 

Imaginative art by Gustave Dore

On this matter, don't be fooled by computer programs sold as examples of creativity. Such things are simply computer programming and data processing that involve no real imagination. One example is an "idea generator" program that works by simply making novel combinations of words. That involves no real imagination. Then there are programs such as ChatGPT that seem to have a story generation ability. I explain in my essay here how such supposed creativity is probably generated by web-crawling activity that slowly crawls the internet, finding millions of stories, and converting them (by use of replacing specific names with placeholders) into story templates that are each little types of story-generators. Such story generation "creativity" is fueled by grabbing countless cases of human creativity, and is not true machine creativity or machine imagination. 

The paper "Neural substrates of envisioning the future" describes a study looking for neural correlates of imagination. 21 subjects were brain scanned while they did three tasks: remembering an event in their past (such as a birthday in the past), imagining an event in their future (such as a future birthday they would have), or imagining an event in someone else future.  Figure 1 shows unimpressive results, with percent signal changes no greater than about 1 part in 200, which are the kind of differences one would expect to get from random fluctuations, even if people don't use their brains for imagining or remembering.  We read of a "statistically indistinguishable pattern of activity across time while subjects envisioned their personal future (SF) and recollected the past (SR) in response to a series of event cues (e.g., Birthday)."  The results when people were "imagining a future individual in similar scenarios" also fail to show any clear sign of neural involvement, with percent signal changes no greater than about 1 part in 200.