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.