Goofs of the Site Brainfacts.org

When scientists of a particular type speak, they are often speaking to advance what may be called guild interests. Guild interests are the vested interests of a particular class of professionals. When we read neuroscience claims, we are often reading claims made to advance the guild interests of neuroscientists.  There is a guild of neuroscientists in the United States, an organization called the Society for Neuroscience. It has a worldwide membership of about 37,000 members. 

We should not at all regard such an organization as being purely devoted to the objective and unbiased analysis and study of nature. The web site of the Society for Neuroscience makes very clear that the organization exists largely to advance the vested interests of neuroscientists.  On the top of the site's home page we see a tab that includes an "Advocacy" link. When you click on that link, you go to the page below, which is all filled with "Advocacy" links.

When you click on these links, you will go to pages such as:

•  a page giving you tips on how to lobby the US Congress for more funding; 
• a page encouraging you to get involved in politics by doing things such as writing op-eds and writing letters to the editor;
• a page urging you to send emails to US congressmen, to offer lab tours to US congress members, and to show up at the town halls of US congress members. 
• various pages giving you tips on getting government funding.

Elsewhere on the site we learn that the Society for Neuroscience has helped fund a site called www.brainfacts.org. It is a site that seems dedicated to propagating the belief dogmas cherished by neuroscientists. Upon visiting this site, I find quite a few errors.  

On a page entitled "Decision Making" we do not get what we should get, which is a candid confession of the truth that no one has the slightest understanding of how neurons could ever do any such thing as making a decision. No theory or speculation of how a brain could make a decision is offered. We have a few statements claiming that particular parts of the brain are more active during decision making. None of these statements is supported by a reference or a link to a particular paper. 

Another page on www.brainfacts.org is entitled "Constructing Memory Representations." We read this:

"Recordings of individual brain cells’ electrical activity show that specific, single cells may fire when presented photographs of a particular person, but remain quiet when viewing photographs of other people, animals, or objects. So-called 'concept cells' work together in assemblies. For example, the cells encoding the concepts of needle, thread, sewing, and button may be interconnected. Such cells, and their connections, form the basis of our semantic memory."

There is no robust evidence for these claims, and the author fails to provide any links or references to support them. No one has found any evidence that there are cells encoding any concepts whatsoever, and neuroscientists don't even present theories as to how a concept could be represented in a brain. According to the source here, neurons fire at a rate between once every tenth of a second and once every two seconds.  If you are tracking the firing in 1000 neurons that fire randomly while people are shown photos for an instant, anyone looking hard enough could find some neurons that fired when some photos were seen and did not fire when other photos were seen. That would probably be a pure chance result of no significance.  The result would disappear upon further study.  Similarly, study 10 days data and you might find that it rains in Cincinnati when the Boston Red Sox win; but check enough days and the effect would disappear. 

The page also repeats a false claim often made in neuroscience literature, stating that patient H.M. "could not form new memories" after having some experimental surgery in 1953.  That is not correct.

A 14-year follow-up study of patient H.M. (whose memory problems started in 1953) actually tells us that H.M. was able to form some new memories. The study says this on page 217:

"In February 1968, when shown the head on a Kennedy half-dollar, he said, correctly, that the person portrayed on the coin was President Kennedy. When asked him whether President Kennedy was dead or alive, and he answered, without hesitation, that Kennedy had been assassinated...In a similar way, he recalled various other public events, such as the death of Pope John (soon after the event), and recognized the name of one of the astronauts, but his performance in these respects was quite variable."

Another paper ("Evidence for Semantic Learning in Profound Amnesia: An Investigation With Patient H.M.") tells us this about patient H.M., clearly providing evidence that patient HM could form many new memories:

"We used cued recall and forced-choice recognition tasks to investigate whether the patient H.M. had acquired knowledge of people who became famous after the onset of his amnesia. Results revealed that, with first names provided as cues, he was able to recall the corresponding famous last name for 12 of 35 postoperatively famous personalities. This number nearly doubled when semantic cues were added, suggesting that his knowledge of the names was not limited to perceptual information, but was incorporated in a semantic network capable of supporting explicit recall. In forced-choice recognition, H.M. discriminated 87% of postmorbid famous names from foils. Critically, he was able to provide uniquely identifying semantic facts for one-third of these recognized names, describing John Glenn, for example, as 'the first rocketeer' and Lee Harvey Oswald as a man who 'assassinated the president.' Although H.M.’s semantic learning was clearly impaired, the results provide robust, unambiguous evidence that some new semantic learning can be supported by structures beyond the hippocampus proper."

Alas, our www.brainfacts.org site has not given us the facts on this matter, but made an important untrue claim that patient HM "could not form new memories." The same false claim is made on another page on www.brainfacts.org, where we are told the untrue claim that patient HM "was no longer able to form new memories." The same false claim is made on another page on www.brainfacts.org, where we are told the untrue claim that patient HM "was unable to form new memories."

On another page entitled "Regional Specialization and Organization," we have an example of what so-often occurs in neuroscience literature: groundless claims of representation in the brain. We read, "Regions that encode words include the posterior parietal cortex, parts of the temporal lobe, and regions in the prefrontal cortex (PFC)." There is no evidence that any region of the brain encodes words. No one has ever found a single word of any language by microscopically examining brain tissue.  The evidence the author supplies to back up these claims are appeals to brain scan studies claiming to show superior activation during certain speech activities. Such studies provide no robust evidence that the brain is encoding words. The page  makes claims such as these:

"Likewise, there are specific brain areas that represent numbers and their meaning. These concepts are represented in the parietal cortex with input from the occipitotemporal cortex, a region that participates in visual recognition and reading."

The page provides no links or references on this page to back up such claims. Other than the fact that humans can remember and use numbers, there is zero evidence that the brain represents numbers. No one has found any human-learned numbers by examining brain tissue under a microscope. Referring to the leading theory of memory storage in the brain, the theory of synaptic memory storage, a scientist has stated, "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts/’ about quantities like space, time, and number)."

A page on "Synapses and Neurotransmission" is written by Diane A. Kelley, who is described as someone who "studies neuroscience" at UMass. The page tells us it is "Adapted from the 8th edition of  Brain Facts by Diane A. Kelly."  We have a link to a 71-page book in PDF format called "Brain Facts." The file lists no author. On other pages such as this one, we read, "Adapted from the 8th edition of Brain Facts by Marissa Fessenden." On another page we read "This article was adapted from the 8th edition of Brain Facts by Alexis Wnuk."  It seems that the www.brainfacts.org is telling us conflicting claims about who is the author of its "Brain Facts" companion book. 

The main defect of the page on "Synapses and Neurotransmission" is that it fails to tell us the supremely important fact that neurotransmission across chemical synapses (by far the main type of synapses in the brain) does not occur reliably. Estimates of the success rate of neurotransmission across chemical synapses (based on experimental studies) range between 10% and 50%. A 2020 scientific paper states this: " Chemical synaptic transmission appears unreliable: for most synapses, when an action potential arrives at an axon terminal, about half the time, no neurotransmitter is released and so no communication happens." The implications of this low reliability are gigantic, but have been ignored by neuroscientists, who have a very bad tendency to ignore facts conflicting with their cherished dogmas.  If chemical synapses do not transmit information reliably, this implies that the brain cannot be the source of memory recall which can occur massively with 100%  reliability. Such reliability occurs every time an actor playing Hamlet correctly recalls all of his more than 1000 lines. 

Another page on www.brainfacts.org is entitled "Introduction to Common Mental Disorders" and is written by a pharmacology PhD. We read the claim that "Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) raise serotonin levels, which are known to be deficient in many psychiatric conditions."  But a scientific paper states this:

"Contemporary neuroscience research has failed to confirm any serotonergic lesion in any mental disorder, and has in fact provided significant counterevidence to the explanation of a simple neurotransmitter deficiency. Modern neuroscience has instead shown that the brain is vastly complex and poorly understood. While neuroscience is a rapidly advancing field, to propose that researchers can objectively identify a 'chemical imbalance' at the molecular level is not compatible with the extant science. In fact, there is no scientifically established ideal 'chemical balance' of serotonin, let alone an identifiable pathological imbalance....With direct proof of serotonin deficiency in any mental disorder lacking, the claimed efficacy of SSRIs is often cited as indirect support for the serotonin hypothesis. Yet, this ex juvantibus line of reasoning (i.e., reasoning “backwards” to make assumptions about disease causation based on the response of the disease to a treatment) is logically problematic—the fact that aspirin cures headaches does not prove that headaches are due to low levels of aspirin in the brain.." 

On a page entitled "The Neuroscience of Decision Making," we have an interview with some neuroscientists who make unfounded claims.

We have this statement by two neuroscientists:

SALZMAN: Researchers can now study how neurons represent rewards, and how information on rewards may be integrated over time in order to reach a decision. 

WANG: It’s quite fascinating that what we are seeing now in single-neuron recordings is not coding for what we see or do—sensory and motor coding—but for the processes involved in how we value and make choices. That’s an important advance in neuroscience."

These claims are not correct. No one has found any robust evidence of neurons representing rewards. And no has found any evidence from single-neuron recordings that such neurons are encoding "the processes involved in how we value and make choices." The page has no link to any scientific studies. 

I looked up papers of one of these neuroscientists on Google Scholar to see whether I could find any research done backing up these statements. Salzman's most cited article is a paper co-authored by Salzman entitled "The primate amygdala represents the positive and negative value of visual stimuli during learning." It seems like a bad example of Questionable Research Practices. The paper uses a study size of only two monkeys. The study used no blinding protocol, no pre-registration, and no sample size calculation. Most of the results are  unimpressive "p < .05" results. The paper provides no robust evidence of representations in a primate brain.  

Another page on www.brainfacts.org tells us, "We now know neurogenesis — the birth of new cells — occurs throughout life, but only in certain parts of the brain, including an area involved in learning and memory called the hippocampus." But a 2018 paper states, "Our recent observations suggest that newborn neurons in the adult human hippocampus (HP) are absent or very rare (Sorrells et al., 2018)." A 2022 paper was entitled "Mounting evidence suggests human adult neurogenesis is unlikely."  A 2022 paper states, "In this review, we will assess critically the claim of significant adult neurogenesis in humans and show how current evidence strongly indicates that humans lack this trait." The paper states that "In summary, a thorough review of the literature shows that there is no scientific convincing evidence of the generation and incorporation of new neurons into the circuitry of the adult human brain, including the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus." 

Another page on www.brainfacts.org is entitled "The Search for the Engram: Where Memory Lives in the Brain." The author is Mirjam Guesgen, who has a PhD in zoology.  Guesgen begins by repeating an unfounded legend. We read this about a sea slug:

"That knowledge — the memories of lived experience — came from a neighbor in the tank next door. The memories were transferred the day before when a member of David Glanzman’s lab injected tiny snippets of genetic material from another sea slug that had been trained with mild shocks to take a defensive posture."

There was never any robust evidence to back up this claim. The 2018 paper claiming to have done this ("RNA from Trained Aplysia Can Induce an Epigenetic Engram for Long-Term Sensitization in Untrained Aplysia") is the paper here, and a reading of that paper will reveal some bad examples of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes (such as only 7 organisms), a lack of pre-registration, a failure to do any sample size calculation, and dubious assumptions about an animal's recall based on unreliable subjective judgments about only 30 seconds of an animal's movements. The paper's claim heavily depends on subjective judgments about  30 seconds of alleged "siphon withdrawal reflex" occurring in sea slugs. Sea slugs have a size ranging from an eighth of an inch to 1.5 inches. Any judgments about whether they showed such a reflex is subjective and unreliable. We read that in a crucial part of the experiment "The siphon was lightly stimulated with a soft, flexible probe and the duration of the resulting SWR was timed." Variations in this manual stimulation could easily account for any differences reported in the animal's response, as could mere chance variations. 

I am unable to find any replication of this research. Glanzman got a big grant ($600,000) for further research along the same lines, with a project start of February, 2022, but the grant page so far shows no results indicating a replication of such a memory transfer effect.  Looking on Google Scholar for papers written by Glanzman in the last four years, I can find no papers by Glanzman claiming a replication. 

Later in Guesgen's article we have a reference to another paper by Glanzman, a 2017 paper which seems to be guilty of Questionable Research Practices just as bad as the paper just mentioned. It's more work with sea slugs, using study group sizes way-too-small such as only 7. There is no mention of any blinding protocol or pre-registration and no mention of a sample size calculation. The whole thing hinges upon someone's subjective judgment on whether about 30 seconds of behavior in tiny sea slugs were or were not examples of a "siphon withdrawal reflex." No robust evidence about memory has been provided. We are then told about Glanzman's "heretical" theory of memory, inconsistent with what the vast majority of neuroscientists have been telling us for decades. We read this: "The experiment led Glanzman and his colleagues to their latest theory: memory is found in the neuron’s nucleus, in bits of genetic material called non-coding RNA helping to switch genes on and off." The theory makes no sense, because RNA only has a very short lifetime of a few hours.  Also, believing memory is stored in a cell nucleus worsens the problem of explaining instant human recall, because it takes substantial time for complex molecules to cross the outer cell barrier and the nucleus outer barrier.  The page here tells us that the time needed for diffusion across a cell membrane depends exponentially on the size of the molecule passing through such a barrier, which mean complex molecules such as RNA would travel across such a barrier relatively slowly. 

Sounding like she failed to apply proper scrutiny to a faulty and not-replicated study with way-too-small study group sizes, Guesgen at first seems like she has uncritically accepted Glanzman's boasts which have no strong experimental foundation. But later she does her job better, by giving us an opposite viewpoint. She states this:

"Not everyone is convinced that epigenetic change is the final answer to the engram puzzle.  'I find [the nuclear model] to be completely implausible,' says Tomás Ryan, an associate neuroscience professor at Trinity College Dublin."

So now Guesgen in effect tears down the rogue Glanzman "nucleus memory" theory she spent the first half of her article building up. She now mentions a different theory of memory:

"Ryan and his colleagues believe memory is stored as a network or pathway of connections between neurons. It’s a subtle distinction from the idea that memory resides in synapses."

We hear a claim of some evidence for this idea, but the link is just to a paywalled study that mentions no experimental evidence in its abstract. And so the page "The Search for the Engram: Where Memory Lives in the Brain" at www.brainfacts.org ends. We have been given not the slightest bit of robust evidence that there exists any such thing as engrams, memories stored in brains. But at least Guesgen has in one respect done her job somewhat well, by leaving us with the idea that engram researchers (researchers into a neural basis for memory) are in disarray, and lack any consensus. Glanzman's theory does not agree with Ryan's, and Ryan's does not agree with the synaptic theory that neuroscientists have been pushing for decades. 

Another page on www.brainfacts.org discusses a fourth theory of neural memory, a theory involving perineuronal nets. But the page seems to contradict itself. First it says that such perineuronal nets "play a role in functions like learning and memory." But then the page tells us that "lab studies with rodents have suggested that removing these nets aid in the learning of new information." 

Another page on www.brainfacts.org (entitled "Storing Memories") makes the incorrect claim that "much evidence supports the idea that memory involves a persistent change in synapses, the connections between neurons."  There is no robust evidence in favor of such an idea, and synapses are unstable things, made up of proteins with average lifetimes of less than two weeks, and connected to dendritic spines that last only months or even a shorter length of time. Conversely, human memories can last 60 years. The page describes LTP as "a long-lasting increase in the strength of a synaptic response."  To the contrary, misnamed LTP (which stands for "long-term potentiation") is a very short-term change in synapses, usually lasting only hours. The www.brainfacts.org page tells us this:

"In addition, studies using genetically modified mice have shown that alterations in specific genes for NMDA receptors or CREB can dramatically affect the capacity for LTP in particular brain areas. What’s more, the same studies have shown that these molecules are critical to memory".

This is not true. A 1994 paper claimed to show that "CREB knockout" mice perform more poorly on memory tests, but it was not a well-designed study, using a way-too-small study group size of only 7. The study showed the "CREB knockout" mice performing almost as well on the Morris water maze test  as regular mice, defying that claim that CREB is "critical to memory." A 2010 study with a larger sample size (about 25) showed similar results, with the "CREB knockout" mice performing only a little worse than the control mice (and better under some measures).  This study tells us that there two separate CREB knockout" mice "cohorts" tested, one with an age of 2-3 months, and the other with an age of 8-10 months. The paper doesn't tell us whether the controls were age-matched to those cohorts, so we can't tell whether the small performance difference reported in the maze test was due to age rather than the CREB knockout.  Figure 4 of the paper here shows no difference in the performance of "CREB knockout" mice.  We read this:

"Mutant mice with a loss of Creb in the adulthood do not show disturbed learning during acquisition in the Morris water maze as represented by the distance moved to reach the platform...induced loss of Creb in the adulthood does not affect spatial reference memory in the Morris water maze...."

Regarding NMDA receptors which our www.brainfacts.org page has claimed to be "critical for memory," a 2014 study was entitled "Hippocampal NMDA receptors are important for behavioural inhibition but not for encoding associative spatial memories." And a 2011 study found this:

"We found that inducible knockout mice, lacking NMDA receptor in either forebrain or hippocampus CA1 region at the time of memory retrieval, exhibited normal recall of associative spatial reference memory regardless of whether retrievals took place under full-cue or partial-cue conditions. Moreover, systemic antagonism of NMDA receptor during retention tests also had no effect on full-cue or partial-cue recall of spatial water maze memories. Thus, both genetic and pharmacological experiments collectively demonstrate that pattern completion during spatial associative memory recall does not require the NMDA receptor in the hippocampus or forebrain."

Another page on www.brainfacts.org dealing with psychiatric disorders refers to the "the biological problems at the root of patients' symptoms."  A page on obsessive-compulsive disorder (classified as an anxiety disorder) seems to talk approvingly about fiddling with the brains of those having such a tendency. We read this:

"Electrodes implanted at specific brain locations emit high-frequency electrical pulses intended to reset abnormal neuronal firing. Scientists are beginning to explore the use of DBS [Deep Brain Stimulation] in the basal ganglia and several other brain regions to alleviate symptoms of OCD. Other types of brain surgeries are sometimes used as OCD interventions, namely anterior cingulotomies and anterior capsulotomies. These procedures involve drilling through the skull and using a heated probe to burn an area within a specific brain region for OCD symptom relief."

The idea that psychiatric disorders are mainly caused by biological problems (rather than things such as trauma, deprivation, life experience and social conditions) is a dubious dogma of neuroscientists and geneticists. Papers and articles lamenting the lack of neuroscience progress in helping mental disorders include the article here, the article "The Rise and Fall of Biological Psychiatry" and the 2020 paper "Why hasn't neuroscience delivered for psychiatry?" by David Kingdon, a professor of psychiatry. After noting some progress in medicine, Kingdon states the following:

"The major mental illnesses psychosis, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, anorexia nervosa and depression have proved remarkably resistant to similar developments. Unfortunately, it is still not possible to cite a single neuroscience or genetic finding that has been of use to the practicing psychiatrist in managing these illnesses despite attempts to suggest the contrary."

Another page on www.brainfacts.org is entitled "Is photographic memory real? If so, how does it work?" We are given a very misleading answer by a psychiatrist:

"Photographic memory is a term often used to describe a person who seems able to recall visual information in great detail. Just as a photograph freezes a moment in time, the implication for people thought to have photographic memory is that they can take mental snapshots and then recall these snapshots without error. However, photographic memory does not exist in this sense."

To the contrary, history has produced many cases of people with visual memory so strong it can reasonably be called photographic. Such memory (frequently reported in young children) is often called eidetic memory. Countless papers have been written on this topic (see here for a bibliography). Here are some examples:

Steven Wiltshire has repeatedly shown the ability to accurately draw an entire skyline after seeing it only one time. 

According to an article in the LA Times, Kim Peek could recall the contents of 12,000 books he had read, even though his brain was severely damaged, and he lacked most or all of the corpus callosum fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. 

Solomon Shereshevsky was called "S" in the book The Mind of a Mnemonist by Alexander Romanovitch Luria. A scientific paper says this about Shereshevsky: "According to Luria, Shereshevsky could' 'easily remember any number of words and digits' and 'equally easily he memorizes whole pages from books on any subject and in any language.'  He could accurately quote information from a decade earlier, including tables of numbers and strings of nonsense words....What Luria learned was that Shereshevsky’s memory differed from that of the vast majority of individuals; time did not erode his memories. Neither did a new stimulus affect his memory of an earlier one."

The artist Franco Magnani (famed as "the Memory Artist") was able to draw "photographically accurate" drawings of his hometown that he had not seen in more than 30 years. 

Encyclopedia.com refers to the "miraculous photographic memory" of Thomas Babington Macaulay.

These are only a few of many equally astounding cases of exceptional memory listed in my post here. What we have on this "Photographic Memory" page of www.brainfacts.org is a great example of what goes on so often in the literature of neuroscience: people withholding from us extremely important relevant facts they should be telling us when discussing a topic. There are many known cases of people with exceptional memory that seems to work in some respect vastly greatly than ordinary human memory. The topic of the page is exceptional human memory, and our psychiatrist author has not mentioned a single case of such a thing, leaving his reader with the misleading impression that the idea of exceptional human memory is a myth.  Once again www.brainfacts.org has not given us the relevant facts, but planted in our minds incorrect ideas. 

No one has a good theory of how memories could be stored in brains, and no such theory can explain how humans are able to instantly acquire new memories and instantly recall things and remember things for 50 years or longer.  Cases of exceptional human memory (which neuroscientists like to sweep under the rug) typically involve people with normal brains (and often heavily damaged brains) having memory performance vastly superior to that of the average person. Such cases further undermine the credibility of claims that memories are stored in brains. 

Stumbles of His Claimed Solution to the Mind-Body Problem

In recent decades there has been an extremely lamentable tendency to describe problems of explaining the mind as "a problem of consciousness."  This speech tendency is an example of what I call shrink-speaking, which is when someone uses diminutive language with the intention of making some extremely complex or impressive reality sound like something simple or unimpressive.  A human mind is something vastly more than mere awareness. A person who speaks as if a human is just consciousness is like someone who tries to reduce astronomy into a mere problem of explaining comets. Just as explaining comets is only a tiny sliver of the job of astronomy, explaining consciousness is only a tiny sliver of problem of explaining minds. 

The silliness of people who pose a mere "problem of consciousness" or "problem of experience"  rather than a problem of human mentality is illustrated in the visual below. The word cloud on the screen shows a vast diversity of mental things to be explained: imagination, selfhood, ideation, appreciation, memorization, morality, recognition, consciousness, emotions, speech, comprehension, creativity, recall, insight, beliefs, reminiscence, trances, introspection, pleasure, pain, reading, writing, awareness, perception, knowledge,  attention, personality, fascination, interest, visualization, ESP, dreaming, volition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences and apparition sightings.. But the person in front of the screen has foolishly ignored this great complexity and phenomenal diversity, and has wrongly stated that all that he needs to explain is consciousness.

Generically, we should be extremely suspicious of any philosopher who attempts to explain the human mind by using language centered around the term "consciousness." Let's look at one example of such a thing. In his 2017 paper "An Ontological Solution to the Mind-Body Problem," a paper with too boastful a title, independent scholar Bernardo Kastrup advances an offbeat theory of mind which he summarizes like this in the paper's abstract:

"It can be summarized as follows: spatially unbound consciousness is posited to be nature’s sole ontological primitive. We, as well as all other living organisms, are dissociated alters of this unbound consciousness. The universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenality surrounding—but dissociated from—our alter. The living organisms we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters. As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis."

Right off the bat, we should be extremely skeptical of such talk. The first reason is that we have right at the beginning a reference to "spatially unbound consciousness" as an "ontological primitive." What we need to explain are human minds, and human minds are a very complex and diverse reality, not at all anything like a "primitive." There is no reason to think that we could explain the extremely complex and diverse reality of the human mind by referencing some thing that is called a "primitive."  But if you made the huge mistake of using shrink-speaking language that wrongly describes the great complex and diverse reality of the human mind by using the diminutive term "consciousness," then you might think that you had got a good idea by postulating that such a reality can be explained by appealing to a "primitive."  Similarly, if you made the great mistake of using shrink-speaking language that wrongly describes the enormously organized and functionally complex and hierarchically organized human body as "carbon stuff," then you might think that you had a good idea of the origin of such a thing by merely postulating a "carbon stuff source." 

The last sentence of the paragraph quoted above is an extremely odd statement: "As such, the challenge to artificially create individualized consciousness becomes synonymous with the challenge to artificially induce abiogenesis." Abiogenesis is the creation of one-celled life from non-life, something that has never been achieved. It is very strange to equate that with creating an artificial consciousness. 

Kastrup's paper takes an approach in which he describes some things he calls the Basic Facts of Reality, and then attempts to deduce things from such facts. This approach goes wrong at the very beginning, for the first of these claimed "basic facts of reality" is no such thing. Kastrup lists as his first "basic fact of reality" the claim that "There are tight correlations between a person’s reported private experiences and the observed brain activity of the person."  This is not correct. Contrary to the unfounded boasts of neuroscientists  scanned brains don't look different when people are thinking, learning or remembering.  For a review of the failure of attempts to provide evidence for "neural correlates of consciousness," see my posts here and here.  The results typically reported in studies looking for "neural correlates of consciousness" are fluctuations of about 1 part in 200. We would expect to find fluctuations of that size even if the brain does not produce the mind, and memories are not stored in brains.  

The next four of Kastrup's "four basic facts of reality" are pretty uncontroversial. Kastrup then proceeds to make some metaphysical deductions, which he strangely lists as "five other facts." The first of these he states as " Fact 5: irrespective of the ontological status of what we call ‘a person’, there is that which experiences."  This is not a fact at all. Strangely, Kastrup attempts to justify this assertion by stating this, using "TWE" to mean "that which experiences":

"This is self-evident and, as colorfully put by Strawson [1] (p. 26), not even a sensible Buddhist rejects such a claim. For clarity, notice that I am not necessarily making an ontological distinction between experience and experiencer here; in fact, soon I will claim precisely that there isn’t such a distinction. I am simply recognizing that experience necessarily entails a subjective field of potential or actualized qualities. TWE is this field."

At this point Kastrup just leaps from a list of mostly truthful facts to some strange metaphysical assertion that is not at all self-evident, and is not justified by the claim that it is self-evident.  Alas, a thousand metaphysicians have appealed to things they called "self-evident" but which were not at all self-evident. A good rule is: never trust a metaphysician claiming something is self-evident. "Field" is a physics term, and seems out of place in the type of discussion here, since nothing physical is being talked about.  

Kastrup then lists another assertion as a "fact," by stating this: "Fact 6: A person has private experiences that can only be known by others if the person reports them, for other people do not have direct access to these private experiences."  This is not a fact at all.  We have very good evidence for extrasensory perception or telepathy. A first person may have a private experience of thinking about something, which a second person is able to identify even though the first person did not report it.  I have personally experienced this effect quite a few times in my life, and the effect has been reported by innumerable witnesses. Experiments attempting to reproduce such an ESP effect have been massively successful for decades. 

Also extremely dubious is what Kastrup claims as "Fact 9" which he states as "A brain has the same essential nature—that is, it belongs to the same ontological class—as the rest of the universe," a claim that he justifies by stating, "After all, brains are made of the same kind of ‘stuff’ that makes up the universe as a whole." All cellular matter in human bodies is matter in an extremely high state of organization, and therefore different from 99.9999999999% of the ordinary matter in the universe, which is no such high state of organization. 

After listing nine things claimed as facts, three of which are not actually facts, Kastrup attempts to derive what he calls "inferences." His first inference he states like this (using TWE to mean "that which experiences"):

"Inference 1: The most parsimonious and least problematic ontological underpinning for Fact 5 is that TWE and experience are of the same essential nature. More specifically, experience is a pattern of excitation of TWE."

This doesn't seem to actually be any inference, but simply an arbitrary and very dubious metaphysical assertion. We can only wonder: why is Kastrup claiming that experience is "a pattern of excitation"? When I'm calmly lying in bed with my eyes closed, that is an example of experience. But it seems to be nothing at all like some state of excitation. 

Kastrup's next inference states, "TWE is an ontological primitive, uncaused and irreducible." Something has gone very wrong here.  A leap has been made to a claim about some uncaused reality, without any argumentative justification. Soon after making this claim, Kastrup says, "Substantial literature supports this view," referring us to three books which sound like metaphysical books. 

Very strangely, Kastrup keeps using the words "dissociated" and "dissociation," using such terms 77 times in his article. He seems to imagine some "ontological primitive" he calls "universal consciousness," and seems to claim that you and I are "dissociated alters" of such universal consciousness. Constantly using the term "dissociated" to describe humans, he ends up sounding very strange. A central reality of a human mind is its unity. So it sounds very strange for Kastrup to keep talking about humans as being "dissociated."   Kastrup evokes the term "alter" saying that it means one of the personalities of a split personality. He then attempts to use claims about split-personalities as a metaphysical springboard, claiming that each of us is an "alter" of "universal consciousness," with each of us being like one of the personalities of a split personality. This leaves his "universal consciousness" as rather sounding like some psychiatric case, like Sally Field's Sybil character, but infinitely more mind-fragmented.  Such reasoning is bizarre, and it ends up making each human sound like a psychiatric symptom. 

At the conclusion of his paper, Kastrup states this:

"I have argued for a coherent idealist ontology that explains reality in a more parsimonious and empirically rigorous manner than mainstream physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism. This idealist ontology also offers more explanatory power than both physicalism and bottom-up panpsychism, in that it does not fall prey to either the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘subject combination problem’, respectively. It can be summarized as follows: there is only universal consciousness. We, as well as all other living organisms, are but dissociated alters of universal consciousness, surrounded like islands by the ocean of its thoughts. The inanimate universe we see around us is the extrinsic appearance of these thoughts. The living organisms that we share the world with are the extrinsic appearances of other dissociated alters of universal consciousness. As such, the quest for artificial consciousness boils down to the quest for abiogenesis. The currently prevailing concept of a physical world independent of consciousness is an unnecessary and problematic intellectual abstraction." 

This may sound somewhat impressive until we remember the very great folly of trying to reduce human minds and human mental experience to some bloodless abstraction called "consciousness." What we have to explain is not some mere abstraction called "consciousness" but the extremely complex and diverse reality of human minds, things such as imagination, selfhood, ideation, appreciation, memorization, morality, recognition, consciousness, emotions, speech, comprehension, creativity, recall, insight, beliefs, reminiscence, trances, introspection, pleasure, pain, reading, writing, awareness, perception, knowledge,  attention, personality, fascination, interest, visualization, ESP, dreaming, volition, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences and apparition sightings. 

Idealism is the philosophical position that matter has no independent existence outside of minds that perceive matter. An idealist is someone who believes that the universe is just a collection of minds. An idealist is someone who thinks that instead of our minds existing inside the solar system, it's the other way around: the solar system is merely something that exists as a perceptual regularity inside of minds such as ours.

To someone who is not used to thinking as an idealist, idealism may initially seem absurd. But the case for idealism was advanced in a surprisingly forceful way in the eighteenth century, by British philosopher George Berkeley. In his classic philosophical work The Principles of Human Knowledge (which can be read here), Berkeley argued for immaterialism, the idea that matter has no existence outside of minds that perceive matter. 

Being a person who denies the reality of matter, an idealist needs to have a credible answer  to the question of why people report identical experiences of observing physical things that don't really exist according to the idealist.  For example, why do you and me and all of our relatives always have the same experience seeing a bright yellow thing in the sky during the day, and a bright white thing in the sky during the night? For a materialist or a dualist the answer is easy: because the sun really physically exists, and the moon really physically exists. But for the idealist who does not believe in the physical existence of the sun or the moon, this uniformity of observations is a problem. 

Berkeley got around this problem by imagining a divine reality (God) that causes such uniformity of perceptual experiences. So, according to Berkeley, when we look up at the sky and see the sun fairly often, it is not because there exists a physical sun independent of minds; it is instead because a divine mind is causing such perceptual regularities in our mind.  We know that movie directors cause people to have certain uniform perceptual experiences. So, for example, all of the people who saw Saving Private Ryan in the movie theater had the same perceptual experience.  So it's not too implausible that a divine power could cause humans to have certain types of uniform perceptual experiences. 

But it would seem that thinkers such as Kastrup have no good answer to the question of why humans would have uniform perceptual experiences of matter if matter does not exist. It seems rather implausible that some mere "universal consciousness" would cause you and I to have identical experiences of perceiving the sun and the moon if the sun and the moon did not materially exist.  The problem is that Kastrup has hitched his wagon to the bloodless, abstract, shrink-speaking term "consciousness,"  and imagined some "universal consciousness" which he describes as a mere "ontological primitive." Having done that, he is left with a "primitive" bloodless abstract "universal consciousness" that seems to lack any will or intention, and would therefore be incapable of intentional effects such as making sure that you and I have uniform experiences of observing the sky.  So it seems the idealism of Kastrup is not as credible as the idealism of Berkeley. 

I must emphasize that we should be extremely suspicious of any philosopher who attempts to explain the human mind by using language centered around the diminutive and minimalist term "consciousness." Similarly, we should be extremely suspicious of any philosopher who attempts to explain the human mind by using language centered around the minimalist term "Being." You should doubt that the armchair reasoning of ontology will yield an explanation of humans. 

Postscript: In a Scientific American article, Kastrup made the incorrect claim below about "dissociative identity disorder" (DID):

"Modern neuroimaging techniques have demonstrated that DID is real: in a 2014 study, doctors performed functional brain scans on both DID patients and actors simulating DID. The scans of the actual patients displayed clear differences when compared to those of the actors, showing that dissociation has an identifiable neural activity fingerprint."

To the contrary, the 2014 study failed to show any such thing.  It was a Questionable Research Practices study that involved a far-too-small sample size of only 11 subjects identified as having "dissociative identity disorder."  The subject was not a pre-registered study, failed to follow any blinding protocol, and failed to do any sample size calculation. Anyone searching for differences in brain scans can always find differences in one random group of about a dozen people and some other random group of about a dozen people.  Study group sizes far greater than 11 are needed for robust results. 

The way to get a reliable result would have been to first state (before gathering data) a specific hypothesis to be tested (such as a description of some specific difference in brains), and then to test for that exact hypothesis using an adequate study group size (determined by a sample size calculation), in an analysis done by analysts blind as to whether the brain scans come from the control group or the study group. 

Contrary to Kastrup's claims, split-personality cases are of no value in helping to establish the credibility of some claim that humans are "but dissociated alters of universal consciousness" (to use a phrase of Kastrup I quoted above).   The "alters" of people diagnosed as split personalities are not personalities existing at the same time, but personalities that may appear sequentially. An analogy is the channel dial on an old TV of the 1960's, which would only allow you to choose one channel at a time. The "alters" of the person with split personality are like "personality channels," and only one appears at any instant. As suggested in the diagram below, someone with a split personality may switch from Personality 1 to some different Personality 2, but such personalities do not appear at the same time. Such cases do nothing to help establish the claim that some "universal consciousness" has split up into billions of human minds that simultaneously exist at the same instant.  

Schematic diagram of a split personality

A Brief Autobiographical Sketch

Although I assume that very few are interested in hearing background information about the author of this site's posts, let me give a few details for those handful. Since I'll leave out the "juiciest" part (my witnessing of what seemed like paranormal phenomena, which I tell elsewhere), this little autobiographical sketch will be quite dull. 

I grew up in the Washington D. C. area, one of a family of ten. My father had a job that utilized his Master's degree in foreign affairs, one involving lots of interaction with foreign visitors. In my teenage years I became extremely interested in philosophical topics, and thought up some philosophical theory that I thought was brilliant, although I now look back on it as folly. Luckily I was smart enough to keep my dumb teenage philosophical thoughts to myself. 

After a year of college, an extended period of unemployment and a year spent on a failed business, I got  a job as a night watchman security guard, one that I held through most of my twenties. I took the job because it gave me tons of time to work on various literary projects. Throughout this time I was working on various literary projects that were mostly unsuccessful, although I did have one important success that resulted in substantial readership. In the middle of this period, I managed to earn three years of college credits through self-study, and ended up with a bachelor's degree, earning almost two years of credits in philosophy and the natural sciences. I scored at the 97th percentile in the three-hour GRE test for philosophy. 

In my early thirties I realized my literary efforts were producing only meager financial success, and I decided to prepare myself for a new career, choosing computer programming. This turned out to be a good choice, and I ended up working as a software developer over a period of about 25 years, often for Fortune 500 companies such as investment banks. I was high up in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but luckily escaped its destruction on that day. 

In 1993 I got married, and I still live with my wife of 30 years. The last seven years of the nineties was a great period for me, which included the birth of my twin daughters.  I am still very close to my daughters, who are now successful professionals. Since 2013 my time has been spent mainly on blogging, writing for the sites here, here and here.  A lifelong nondrinker, I have had no experiences with mind-altering or mood-altering substances, but have had some astonishing luck in photographing the anomalous, as you can see here, here and here. My proudest accomplishment in life is not anything I have written or programmed, but my success in raising two wonderful daughters who are my greatest blessing in life. 

I have no skeletons in my closet, and have never been involved in any kind of scandal. If you ever read anything to the contrary, you should disbelieve it. For centuries people reporting paranormal phenomena have been subject to libels and slander by people trying to discredit reports of paranormal phenomena; and I would not be surprised to be the target of such defamation at some time in the future. I have also heard that nowadays people are churning out fake stories about people, in an automated AI-assisted fashion, to help get page views for pages that generate revenue from advertising. Even some people who are not famous are complaining about being victimized by such "click mining" profiteers. 

Exhibit A That Scientists Have No Understanding of a Physical Basis of Human Memory

 On this site I have published several posts with titles beginning with "Exhibit A" or "Exhibit B." Each such post examined an article or paper which prevented prima facie evidence that neuroscientists are lacking in one of the basic things they often claim to possess. The posts are these:

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

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

Now let's look at another article or paper that offers this type of "Exhibit A": a 2021 paper by neuroscientist C. R. Gallistel entitled "The Physical Basis of Memory." The paper tells a "getting nowhere" story, and offers an excuse for the lack of progress: the extremely lame excuse that neuroscientists are too big fans of the 17th-century philosopher John Locke. The author states this: 

"The unbreakable embrace of Locke’s theory by neuroscientists explains why we have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures. Researchers searching for the physical basis of memory are looking for the wrong thing (the associative bond) in the wrong place (the synaptic junction), guided by an erroneous conception of what memory is and the role it plays in computation. That is the hole we have dug for ourselves."

No, actually you can usually get a neuroscience PhD without even taking an introductory course in philosophy, and neuroscientists have not tended to be either big followers of any philosopher or people very interested in philosophy. Referring to "the engram" (an imagined neural or synaptic storage place of memory), the author then makes tells us that " the role of memory as the transmission medium for the acquired facts that guide future behavior goes unmentioned in neurobiological reviews of the search for the engram (Poo et al., 2016; Tomonori, Duszkiewicz, & Morris, 2013)." Oops, it sounds like our neuroscientist memory theorists are dropping the ball. The author then claims that the neuroscience literature "documents beyond reasonable argument that brains contain facts." No, that is not true; we merely know that humans and animals learn facts, not that brains contain facts. 

The author offers this evidence for the claim that "the brain contains facts": the fact that the average English speaker knows 40,000 words and that "the cognitive science literature shows that we can remember thousands of drawings of objects and thousands of boring vacation slides and the even more boring target and distractor items in visual search experiments—objects and scenes and drawn objects that we have seen or felt or smelled only once for a few seconds or less seconds or less (Brady, Konkle, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2008; Hutmacher & Kuhbandner, 2018; Konkle, Brady, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2010; McGann, 2017; Shepard, 1967; Standing, 1973)."  That is merely evidence that humans can remember things, not that brains store what we remember. 

What some of these experiments show is that humans can form long-term memories of things seen for only a few seconds, things seen only a single time (something we need no experiments to prove, since this ability is a common fact of everyone's experience). Far from supporting claims that memories are stored in brains, such studies conflict with or clash with such claims. The ability of humans to instantly form new memories is something that no neuroscientist can credibly explain. Existing hand-waving speculation about "synapse strengthening" as a cause of memory formation are inconsistent with the ability of humans to instantly form new memories, because such synapse strengthening would require new protein synthesis taking many minutes. That's why you often hear neuroscientists make the ridiculous claim (contrary to every person's experience) that humans take minutes to create a new memory. 

The author then gives us a long paragraph discussing how humans and animals compute things. Why mention that in a paper entitled "The physical basis of memory"?  Maybe because no such physical basis is known, so if the "physical basis of memory" is your topic, you have to fill up your pages saying something.  On and on the author goes, talking at length about topics such as dead reckoning (a distance estimation ability) and other topics that have nothing to do with a physical storage of memory. 

After wandering around for several long paragraphs about mostly irrelevant topics, the author then fires another broadside against his fellow neuroscientists:

"In order to pass into and through a channel of communication, a message must be encoded (Shannon, 1948). Therefore, those of us pursuing the material basis of memory must ponder what the code might be and how it could be physically realized (Gallistel, 2017a, 2017b) This question about the memory code makes neuroscientists deeply uncomfortable, for which reason, it is never posed in the vast literature on the neurobiology of memory."

That's pretty much correct, although it might have been more fair to have said "almost never posed" than "never posed." It is easy to understand why neuroscientists virtually never make any attempt to suggest a possible encoding scheme by which a brain might physically store memories. The reason is that humans learn and remember so many different types of things that any such encoding scheme would have to be almost infinitely more complicated than the one known coding scheme used by the body (the genetic code by which triplets of nucleotide base pairs stand for particular amino acids).  If such an encoding scheme existed it would have to be some miracle of design more complex than any coding scheme humans have ever invented. It would be impossible to explain how such a coding scheme (capable of storing text using alphabets and musical notation schemes only a few thousand years old) could have naturally arisen by evolution. So neuroscientists pretty much ignore the whole problem of neural encoding. 

Our author rambles on and on, mostly on digressions that have nothing to do with how a brain could physically store a memory. In his second to last paragraph he claims that "polynucleotides" are "the only biological structures that are known to function as transmitters of information." But haven't we been told a thousand times that axons transmit sensory information to the brain from the eyes? Axons are not polynucleotides, but wire-like structures. In his last sentence the author dismisses the leading claim of neuroscientists about how a brain stores memories (the very vague idea of "synapse strengthening") and offers only the equally vague catchphrase of "information-bearing molecules" as an alternative. He states as his last sentence, "The material realization of the engram is probably not to be found in the synapse, much less in multi-neuron cell assemblies (the neural equivalent of Locke’s dust-ball concepts); it is to be found in information-bearing molecules inside neurons, operated on by molecular level computational machinery (Akhlaghpour, 2020)."

We end up with the author having presented no theory as to how there could be any physical basis of memory. All he's done is to make a lame excuse involving the claim that neuroscientists were too influenced by John Locke, and given us a link to some paper by Akhlaghpour. An examination of the paper by Akhlaghpour will leave you disappointed. 

The paper by Akhlaghpour is entitled "An RNA-Based Theory of Natural Universal Computation." Akhlaghpour is not a professor, but merely a post-doctoral fellow. The paper starts out very badly in its first paragraph by stating, "Some examples of computation in biology include: using vision to guide wing movement in insect flight, language acquisition in humans, decision ­making in single­ celled ciliates  [1,2], and embryonic development, the decisional process of beginning with a single cell and coordinating across daughter cells to produce a complex finely ­detailed three ­dimensional structure." No, language acquisition is not an example of computation, nor is embryonic development. A baby does not form by computation. Morphogenesis is an example of extremely complex physical three-dimensional organization and construction, which is not mere computation. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines computation as "the action of mathematical calculation" or "the use of computers, especially as a subject of research or study."

At the end of page 7 Akhlaghpour says, "I propose the theory that the non­protein­ coding portion of genome and transcriptome contains the data and programming material of an undiscovered universal computation system in biology." So vague an idea is best described as a hypothesis rather than a theory.  We then have the presentation of some extremely far-fetched speculations imagining that DNA or RNA might have all kinds of marvelous properties that no one has ever discovered in them. On page 16 these speculations go astray by trying to convince us that nucleic acids could have an addressing system. We read this:

"The method of nesting terms through RNA stem loops presents an opportunity to implement addressable memory

and variable substitution. One such implementation is illustrated in Fig 6. In this model, each variable is assigned

an address (specified by a unique sequence of nucleotides)."

DNA has been exhaustively analyzed, and no such thing has been found. There is no evidence of any addresses or addressable memory anywhere in DNA, RNA, or anywhere in the brain.  

On page 22 Akhlaghpour discusses what seems like a fatal difficulty for his theory:

"Another challenge for a solely RNA based molecular engram theory is RNA stability. If a molecule were to serve as a   memory   engram  it  must  at  least  exhibit  stability   over  similar   time  periods   as   cognitive   memories.   RNA molecules have an average half ­life of around 7 hours."

Nothing that he says extracts himself from this problem. He mentions the possibility of RNA storing data back into DNA. But that would be like a giant steel ball chained to the leg that would slow things to a crawl, preventing the instant memory recall we know occurs. 

On the same page Akhlaghpour attempts to convince us that his RNA scheme could be fast enough, stating this:

"Can RNA modifications occur fast enough to potentially facilitate cognition? Two of the most well­ studied RNA

processes are transcription and translation. RNA Polymerase II transcribes RNA molecules at a rate of 18­-100 nt/s

equivalent to 36­-200 bits/s [bits per second].  And the ribosome translates RNA to protein at a speed of roughly 5­11

aa/s equivalent to 30­-66 bits/s [bits per second]. It is difficult to quantify how fast animals think but studies of different

languages show that the information rate of human speech is roughly on the order of 40 bits/s (languages that

are   spoken   faster   have   lower   bits   per   syllable   than   languages   that   are   spoken   slower)....This means that RNA operations can in principle be fast enough to encode/transmit

ideas communicated in speech as single RNA molecules."

There are several things wrong here. First, the rate at which RNA can be translated to protein is irrelevant here, if we are imagining a memory is read from DNA. The relevant rate is the rate of transcription, the rate at which DNA is read to produce RNA. Akhlaghpour has overstated the speed of RNA transcription (reading DNA to produce RNA). The recent paper here lists the speed of RNA Polymerase II transcription as less than 4 kilobytes per minute, which is less than 67 bytes per second. Also it is not true that humans recall at only 40 bits per second. A slow old man like me can clearly sing the first four lines of Gilbert and Sullivan's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" song at a rate of 204 bytes in 7.5 seconds, which is a rate of 218 bits per second. That means people can recall things at a speed three times faster than the speed of RNA transcription just quoted. Even without considering the problem of "finding the right spot to read at," it turns out reading from DNA would be three times too slow to account for fast human memory recall.  So it is not true that " RNA operations can in principle be fast enough to encode/transmit ideas communicated in speech as single RNA molecules," as Akhlaghpour claims. 

But you must also consider that there is no sorting, no addresses and no indexes anywhere in the brain or DNA or RNA (contrary to the chimerical imaginative speculations of Akhlaghpour). That means trying to recall the correct answer when asked a question or asked to recite something (using brain memory storage) would proceed at a rate very many thousands of times slower than a rate of 67 bits per second,  because there would be the enormous "finding the needle in the haystack" speed delay of having to find exactly the right spot where a memory was stored in the brain or its DNA, and a brain would never know where that exact right spot was. 

Akhlaghpour is trying to make use of some abstract computer science notions of "universal computation" and a "Turing machine" that is built upon the idea of some machine that takes a line-like one-dimensional paper feed of  characters and produces output that is also a one-dimensional paper feed of characters, rather like a stock ticker.  Computer science calculations about such a machine are not applicable to a mind. Rather than receiving a single line of characters, a human mind simultaneously receives inputs from lots of different sources:

• visual input that is vastly more complex than just a one-dimensional stream of characters;
• auditory input;
• touch input from the hands;
• smell input;
• taste input;
• memory recall input.

And similarly, rather than producing any one-dimensional output such as a line-like stream of characters, mental activity can produce three-dimensional output such as the simultaneous singing, expressions and dancing of a Broadway performer. 

On the next page (page 23) Akhlaghpour makes the little confession that under the byzantine speculative scheme he is imagining, the mere addition of one number to another would require something like 10,000 operations.  But then on the same page he brags that his scheme is not evoking "implausible molecular processes." Such a boast is untrue, and the molecular processes evoked are utterly implausible and unworkable as any explanation for human memory performance. He notes that "current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition." 

Akhlaghpour's theory ends up being nothing that can explain memory.  His paper has mainly been busy trying to create some "castle in the clouds" theory of universal RNA computation that has nothing to do with explaining memory. As kind of a sideshow, he says a little related to explaining memory, but it's a half-hearted affair that does not nudge the giant rock of this Everest-sized problem. 

Human DNA has been exhaustively studied in all parts of the brain. Contrary to Akhlaghpour's theory:

• No one has ever found any evidence of human conceptual information (such as school-learned information) by studying brain tissue or DNA from brains.  
• No one has ever found any evidence of human episodic memories (such as images seen or sounds heard) by studying brain tissue or DNA from brains.  
• No one has ever found any sign of any addresses, indexing or sorting (or anything else that could explain instant human recall) in human brain tissue or DNA from brains.  
• Computing as occurs in computers requires things such as an operating system (an incredibly complex coordinated body of low-level software routines) and lots of application software. There is not the slightest sign of any such thing in the human brain. 
• No one has ever found any sign of any coding system or encoding system in human brain tissue or DNA from brains, except for the genetic code used by every cell in the human body.

Summarizing the paper of C. R. Gallistel entitled "The Physical Basis of Memory." we can say that it does very little but complain that current theories offer no credible physical theory of memory, and then ends up by giving a link to some speculative paper that also completely fails to offer any credible physical theory of memory. The excuse Gallistel gives for why scientists have found no physical basis for memory (that brain scientists were too big fans of John Locke) is a ridiculous-sounding excuse. A much better explanation is that scientists have got nowhere on the quest for a brain physical basis of memory simply because brains do not store memories. 

Memory must be something like a spiritual reality rather than a neural reality. It isn't true, as many think, that we have souls or spirits that come into play only during unusual psychic experiences or religious experiences.  Instead, the most basic processes of our minds such as thinking and insight and remembering must utilize human non-physical capabilities and abilities. We don't form new memories or recall answers at the very sluggish speed of brains; we acquire new memories and recall answers at the speed of souls.