The Latest Evidence That Scientists Trying to Explain Memory Creation Are Lost in the Woods

In the English language "lost in the woods" is a phrase meaning "to be confused, bewildered or helpless." Neuroscientists trying to explain how human beings create memories have always been very much lost in the woods. Such scientists have no credible tale to tell on this topic. The problem is that nothing in the brain bears the slightest resemblance to some apparatus for storing learned information. Humans create various types of devices for writing information, things such as pens, pencils, paint brushes, typewriters, laser jet printers, offset printers, and the read/write heads used by a computer hard drive. Nothing in the brain bears any resemblance to such things. 

So what do you if you are a neuroscientist trying to fool people into thinking that neuroscientists like yourself have some kind of understanding of how a human could form a memory? What such people normally merely do is to senselessly repeat the same old clueless charade that neuroscientists have been doing for about fifty years: they zap a tiny bit of brain tissue, creating some tiny change that lasts about as long as a suntan or the morning dew, and they try and pass off that little change as something like information storage, even though no information was stored. This is the witless nonsense of LTP experiments. 

What is misleadingly called “long-term potentiation” or LTP is a not-very-long-lasting effect by which certain types of high-frequency stimulation performed by scientists (such as stimulation by electrodes) produces a fleeting increase in the strength of synapses. The main part of synapses are gaps between nerve cells, gaps which neurotransmitters can jump over. The evidence that LTP even occurs when people remember things is not very strong, and in 1999 a scientist stated (after decades of research on LTP) the following:

"[Scientists] have never been able to see it and actually correlate it with learning and memory. In other words, they've never been able to train an animal, look inside the brain, and see evidence that LTP occurred."

In 2007 a scientist said on page 120 of her PhD thesis, "While LTP is assumed to be the neural correlate of learning and memory, no conclusive evidence has been produced to substantiate that when an organism learns LTP occurs in that organism’s brain or brain correlate."

So-called long-term potentiation is actually a very short-term phenomenon. Speaking of long-term potentiation (LTP), and using the term “decays to baseline levels” (which means “disappears”), a scientific paper says, "potentiation almost always decays to baseline levels within a week," while noting that even after considering LTP "we would be at a loss for a brain mechanism for the storage of a long-term memory."

Another scientific paper says something similar, although it tells us even more strongly that so-called long-term potentiation (LTP) is really a very short-term affair. For it tells us that “in general LTP decays back to baseline within a few hours.” “Decays back to baseline” means the same as “vanishes.” 

Neuroscientists have long been guilty of profoundly misleading behavior in trying to persuade people that so-called so-called long-term potentiation (LTP) is a "mechanism for memory." Inducing LTP requires artificial electrode stimulation which synapses do not naturally receive.  Also, human memories can last for sixty years, but LTP is a very short-lived thing.  So why do neuroscientists keep doing LTP experiments, and why do they keep mentioning LTP as if it had something to do with memory? There are two reasons:

(1) It always sounds better if you have some sound bite or catchphrase you can mutter when someone asks how something occurs, rather than saying, "I haven't the slightest idea how it occurs." When scientists can mutter the phrase "LTP" when asked about how memories are created, it makes them sound more knowledgeable, rather than sounding like people who have no understanding of a topic. 

(2) LTP research is an easy-to-conduct "no way to fail" line of research that provides an easy way for a neuroscientist to add to his total of published papers. Scientists love these kind of "no way to fail" research opportunities. Similarly, theoretical physicists keep grinding out speculative papers about string theory or primordial cosmic inflation.  If you have learned how to write such a papers, doing another such paper is a relatively easy and safe way to get another published paper. 

The latest article on LTP (sounding very "lost in the woods") is an article in The Conversation entitled "Memories May Be Stored in the Membranes of Your Neurons."  The article fails to discuss any research supporting such an idea. What the article discusses is a paper with the doubly misleading title "Evidence for long-term potentiation in phospholipid membranes." The Conversation article states this:

"We found that exposing a model of a simple lipid bilayer to electrical stimulation – not unlike the stimulation used in studies of the brain – can trigger long-term changes. What made this result unique was that we were able to generate changes in our simple membrane model without the neuronal proteins typically associated with it. Furthermore, long-term plasticity persisted in our model for almost 24 hours without any further electrical stimulation. This suggests that the neuronal membrane may be responsible for memory storage."

The authors electrically zapped some fatty layer thing, but they did not zap any brain or any neuron or any synapse. They merely zapped some fatty material in a laboratory. The "simple lipid bilayer" they zapped was not like the membrane of a neuron, because the membranes of neurons and other cells are known to be enormously complex systems that act like intelligent gatekeepers. At the beginning of the paragraph the authors have falsely claimed "long-term changes," and then at the end of the paragraph have confessed these changes lasted less than a day. 

The word "potentiation" is defined as "the increase in strength of nerve impulses along pathways which have been used previously, either short-term or long-term." The authors have not produced any such thing. Therefore, the title of their paper ("Evidence for long-term potentiation in phospholipid membranes") is doubly misleading. Nothing long-term was produced, and there was not even any potentiation produced.  No "increase in strength of nerve impulses along pathways which have been used previously" was produced.  This kind of thing goes on constantly in the world of neuroscience, where papers very often have misleading titles that do not match anything reported in the bodies of the papers. 

What we see here in the latest example of what has long gone in research on LTP. Originally electrically zapping brains by artificial means produced a very short-term effect that was misleadingly called "long-term potentiation." Frustrated by their failure to observe the effect lasting for more than a very short time, neuroscientists began to start using the term "LTP" ("long-term potentiation") for various things that were not actually potentiation. When you hear scientists such as the authors of the Conversation article referring to "long-term potentiation" for some fat-zapping they did that is neither long-term nor potentiation, you may be tempted to say this about experimental neuroscientists: "I can't trust these guys as far as I can throw them."  

The book "Neuronal Mechanisms of Memory Formation" on page 451 says this:

"Definitive empirical support for synaptic plasticity modeled by LTP being a mechanism of memory processing is still lacking. For each piece of evidence that lends some support to the theory, there is likely to be equally strong evidence to suggest the contrary. The field of research reached a veritable stalemate some years ago when so-called cornerstones of research that supported the hypothesis were unable to be replicated...and the outcome was an increasing skepticism about whether LTP can be considered a neural substrate for learning and memory."

Referring to this scientific paper, another paper suggests that "LTP as a memory mechanism" may be more of a dogma than something well established by observations:

"Shors and Matzel,,.concluded that LTP did not meet the criteria for providing a causal mechanism of memory. To make a long argument very short, they documented instances where changes in memory occur without LTP and where LTP occurs without changes in memory.....They report that between 1974 and 1997, more than 1300 articles occurred with 'LTP' in the title. Of these, fewer than 80 described any behavioral manipulation relevant to assessing changes in memory. Furthermore, the articles that contained behavioral manipulations tended to provide evidence against the hypothesis that LTP is a memory mechanism. Thus, the claim that LTP is a molecular mechanism for learning and memory may be more of a dogma of neuroscientific memory research than a hypothesis that is being rigorously tested."  

A 2014 book stated, "Although LTP is considered to be the primary model for how learning and memory storage occur at the synapse level, the evidence supporting this claim is still inconclusive and speculative." A 1995 scientific paper found. "There is a striking negative correlation of spatial learning ability with LTP." This is the exact opposite of what we should expect if LTP was some type of memory mechanism. 

In the 2021 paper "Grand Challenge at the Frontiers of Synaptic Neuroscience" we get the truth about this topic:

" It actually remains to be demonstrated that LTP = memory in most mammalian learning models. In fact, most studies of long-term plasticity do not explore beyond an hour or two; clearly not enough to establish a direct link with long-term memory formation (Stevens, 1998)."

You may realize that "there's no there there" about LTP experiments after you ponder that not a single piece of information has ever been stored in brain tissue by means of LTP manipulations.  Scientists have not been able to store so simple a thing as the phrase "my dogs has fleas" by zapping brain tissue with electrodes to produce LTP. Claims that LTP explains human memory creation are as senseless as claims that you can tell someone your name and life story by zapping them with a taser device. 

Like "long-term potentiation"?