Shady Tricks Used by Writers About the Brain

When people are trying to write about the brain and the mind, they have the very big problem that neuroscientists lack credible theories to support some of their most important claims, and also lack solid evidence to back up such claims. How do writers get past such a roadblock when they are trying to write a book, article or scientific paper that parrots conventional ideas about the brain and the mind? They tend to resort to a set of widely used speech tricks. I will list some of them.

Trick #1: When They Don't Have a "How," They Try to Use a "Where"

Neuroscientist lack very many things. For example, they lack:

• Any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could convert experience into brain states or synapse states when a memory is created;
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could convert brain states or synapse states into thoughts or recollections when a memory is recalled;
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could instantly create new memories, something that humans routinely do; 
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could instantly retrieve a memory, such as getting instantly getting just the right answer when someone is asked to identify some person or object or technical term or historical event;
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could create an abstract idea such as the idea of a child or the idea of a dog.  
• any coherent or credible theory of how a brain could imagine something such as some invention no one ever built yet. 

A standard approach of the writers about the brain is to use the trick that can be described as: when you don't have a how, try using a where. For the typical writer about brains, this involves making claims of localization of brain activity.  For example:

• When they don't have a "how" in regard to the brain and abstract thought, they try using a "where" by claiming that abstract thought comes from the frontal cortex. This claim is very dubious because of evidence I discuss in my post "Reasons for Doubting Thought Comes from the Frontal Lobes or Prefrontal Cortex" you can read here.
• When they don't have a "how" in regard to the brain and memory, they try using a "where" by claiming that the hippocampus drives the wonders of memory. This claim is very dubious because of evidence I discuss in my post here.

Trick #2: They Appeal (Almost Always Incorrectly) to Claims of "Superior Activation"

To back up some claim that some particular part of the brain causes some particular mental activity, it is common for writers to appeal to claims of "superior activation," appealing to fMRI scans. Typically such claims are poorly founded. For example, brain imaging fails to find solid evidence for superior activation of any part of the brain during memory activity, as I discuss in my post here.  There are two severe problems with brain imaging studies:

(1) Studies typically show only very minor activity differences such as 1 part in 200. We have no way of knowing whether such differences are merely due to chance fluctuations.  Don't be fooled by those "lying with color" brain images which show certain regions of the brain in bright red or bright yellow.  If the coloring represented the actual data, the whole brain would be depicted in the same color, with a color shade so subtle you wouldn't be able to notice it. 

(2) Brain imaging studies typically involve way-too-small study group sizes. As discussed here, a study found that thousands of participants are needed for reliable brain imaging studies trying to find correlations between brain activity and mental activity. But the typical brain imaging study involves only about 20 participants.  

A headline from New Scientist

Trick #3: They Stay "Studies Have Shown" Without Citing a Particular Study, Sometimes When There Are No Such Studies

This is an extremely common tactic, and occurs all over the place. A writer will simply say "studies have shown" and then mention some dubious claim about the brain, without mentioning or linking to any particular study. Sometimes there are studies that show the opposite of what the writer claims "studies have shown."  A variation is to say "there is extensive evidence" in favor of some claim about the brain, without specifically citing the evidence. Often, the claim is completely groundless, and there is no evidence at all for the thing claimed to be supported by "extensive evidence."

Trick #4: They Cite a Specific Study, Claiming It Showed Something, When It Never Did Show Such a Thing

This is an extremely common tactic, and occurs all over the place. Often the guilty party is some writer who claims that a paper not written by him showed something it did not show. Nowadays university press offices are notorious for making unfounded boastful claims about research they are announcing. In other cases, the title or abstract of a paper may simply make some claim that something was shown, when no such thing was shown, typically because of a poor design or the use of Questionable Research Practices in the paper.  Scientific papers often commit what are called citation errors, in which they incorrectly claim or insinuate that some paper showed something. Read my post here to see examples. 

Trick #5: They Say "It Is Widely Believed" to Refer to Some Claim That Is Not Well-Supported by Evidence 

We can classify several different types of scientific truth claims, along with some tips on how to recognize the different types.

Type of truth claim	How to recognize it
Citation of established fact	Typically occurs with a discussion of the observational facts that proved the claim.
Citation of a claim that is not yet established fact	Typically occurs with phrases such as “scientists believe” or “it is generally believed” or an appeal to a “scientific consensus.” The claim of a “scientific consensus” is often unfounded, and there may be many scientists who do not accept the claim.
Citation of a claim that has little basis in observations, and that there may be good reasons for doubting	Often occurs with a phrase such as “it is widely believed,” or maybe a more confident-sounding phrase like “it is becoming increasingly clear” or “there is growing evidence.”

Writers about the brain make heavy use of the term "it is widely believed" to refer to claims that have little or no support in observations. In my post here, I gave links to 26 writers who made the claim that "it is widely believed" that changes in synapses are a physical basis or foundation of memory.  There is no robust evidence for such an idea, and the reasons for rejecting it are many (discussed here).  You should tend to regard it as a red flag or warning sign when someone claims that something is "widely believed." When people have good evidence for something, they tend to cite such evidence, rather than claiming the thing is "widely believed." 

Trick #6: They Make Empty and Unverifiable Appeals to "Brain Wiring" or "Circuit Dynamics" or "Neural Pathway Dynamics"

Neurons in the brain are connected by long synapses that are not unbroken wires but which can be roughly compared to wires or circuits. Pretty much any claim about the mind and the brain can be made through some vague appeal to "brain wiring" or "circuit dynamics" or "connection pathways" or "neural pathways." Such claims are almost always vacuous, never being backed up by specific details. It kind of reminds me of someone faking things during a technical interview, as in the example below:

Interviewer: So what exactly goes on when you look up something using a search engine?

Candidate: Well, that just involves some particular software dynamics.

Trick #7: They Appeal to Psychology Observations That Are Just Observations of What People Do, Not What Happened in a Brain

There is only so far you can go trying to refer to brains while discussing something that scientists have completely failed to explain by any theory or observations of brain activity. So a writer trying to make his writing sound like a neuroscience article will often just start listing results of psychology experiments.  For example, a person writing about memory retrieval may discuss experiments that had nothing to do with the brain, but which simply tested how well people recalled something under different conditions. Or a person writing about memory formation may discuss experiments that had nothing to do with the brain, but which simply tested how well people learned something under different conditions. 

Often an article will combine psychology results and neuroscience results, to try and "beef up" things so that the reader does not notice how miserably weak the neuroscience is relating to some particular topic of the mind. For example, there is hardly any "neuroscience of imagination." But a writer can combine a little discussion of scant neuroscience experiments dealing with imagination with a discussion of psychology experiments dealing with imagination, and try to pass that off as a discussion of "how your brain imagines."

Trick #8: They Use Inappropriate Language Claiming Your Brain Does Something When They Should Be Saying That People Did Something

A bad form of expression is to make superfluous causal claims.  Examples:

Evolution gave giraffes very long necks and lots of brown spots. 

God gave us some good weather today. 

There is no need to make such debatable causal claims. The first statement is better stated as "Giraffes have very long necks and lots of brown spots." And the second statement is better stated as "Today the weather is good." 

Superfluous causal claims are frequently made by people writing about the brain.  So we may hear that "brains can think very quickly" or "brains can remember things for half a century or longer" or "brains can recognize many faces." In each such statement the writer should simply be referring to people or humans rather than brains. We do not know that brains think, and no one has any understanding of how a brain could calculate something or have any idea. We merely know that people think and calculate and imagine.

Trick #9: Trying to Make Us Think a Particular Thing About Human Brains, They Cite Poorly Designed Studies Involving Mice, Often Burying the Fact That the Experiment Involved Mice

Something like this goes on all the time:

(1) Some headline announces that something important has been discovered about the brain or memory.

(2) Below the headline the only research mentioned is some poorly designed study involving mice, usually a study guilty of multiple types of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes, a lack of pre-registration, and a lack of a blinding protocol. 

(3) The story below the headline may take a long time before it reveals that the research only involved mice.  The first paragraph or two may refer only to "brains," and the reader may get the idea human brains are being talked about. Only readers who read to the end of the story will find out that the research involved only mice. 90% of causal readers (who skim the story) will go away with the false idea that something has been learned about human brains or human memory.

Trick #10: They Make Dubious Claims Such As "Neuroscientists Believe" or "All Neuroscientists Believe" or Dubious Claims of a Belief Consensus Among Neuroscientists

Appeals to alleged beliefs of scientists of some type about some matter are rarely made when there is good evidence telling us about the nature of something.  For example, people don't say "scientists believe that there are many different types of proteins in the human body." Instead people say things like "scientists have identified more than 20,000 types of proteins in the human body." When someone appeals to some alleged belief tendency of scientists, it is a reason for suspecting there is a lack of clear proof about such a matter.  

We should distrust almost all appeals to what scientists of some type believe, because scientists are very bad at reliably measuring the beliefs of scientists in particular scientist communities.  The only way to get a reliable measure of the opinion of a scientist is to do a secret ballot poll, one that includes a variety of belief options including "I don't know" or "I'm not sure." However, such polls are virtually never done. When opinion polls of scientists are done, they typically fail to be secret ballots, and also fail to offer a full spectrum of answers including options such as  "I don't know" or "I'm not sure."  

Trick #11: They Claim That Scientists Have Imaged Mental Things When Merely Physical Things Were Imaged 

An example of this is found on page 119 of the document here. A previous Chief Scientist of Australia states this:

"Now differential tractography MRI shows us the white matter – the connections across the brain – and it’s revolutionised our understanding of cerebral networks. To start, we just imaged structure. Then, we imaged the functional areas of the brain. Now, we’re imaging thinking. And we couldn’t imagine neuroscience without it."

The claim about "we're imaging thinking" is a misstatement. No one has been able to do any such thing as "imaging thinking," nor has anyone been able to find any robust evidence of neural correlates of thinking.  Brains don't look any different or act any different when someone is thinking, as I discuss in my post "The Brain Shows No Sign of Working Harder During Thinking or Recall."

Trick #12: They Insinuate That If You Distrust Them It's Your Fault Not Theirs

The previously quoted  "pope of Australian science" (having the official title of Chief Scientist) has been replaced with a new one.  The latest "papal encyclical" of this Chief Scientist (which you can read here) is a document that seems to have a theme of "scientists must not be distrusted."  We read, "Questioning is healthy for good science and good government, but distrust is not." No, whenever scientists don't follow good procedures or act way too overconfident or speak in an inaccurate or misleading manner, then distrust is a very healthy response. The document laments that trust in scientists is declining. We hear nothing about the main factors causing such a decline, which include:

• The ever-increasing tendency of university press releases to make false boastful claims about the research they are announcing.
• The ever-increasing tendency of scientists to produce papers with titles making claims that are not justified by anything discussed in the paper.
• The runaway epidemic of clickbait "science news" stories containing false or misleading headlines that lure you to click and read "science news" accounts often much different from the headline. 
• The ever-increasing tendency of scientists to produce hype and unfounded boastful language in their scientific papers and public statements (see here for a prominent recent example).
• The very persistent tendency of many scientists to make untrue claims that dozens of other scientists have renounced, such as the entirely false claim that the DNA in our bodies is some blueprint or recipe or program for constructing our bodies. 
• The prevalence of very bad research practices in some fields of science, such as the use of way-too-small study group sizes in most experimental neuroscience papers.
• The low reproducibility of studies in many fields of science such as psychology and neuroscience.
• The substantial existence of fraud in some branches of science such as neuroscience (discussed here).

Instead our Chief Scientist attempts to tell us a story trying to blame those who are reporting on faulty scientist behavior rather than the scientists who are engaging in such behavior.  The Chief Scientist's "Trust in Science" article fails to provide any recommendations to scientists to improve their behavior and get more reproducible results. We hear not a word about the huge replication crisis in science. 

Trick #13: They Make Impossible-to-Verify Sweeping Generalizations About the Brain

Rather like how the Catholic Church officially declares some of its former members as saints to be venerated, Australia's Chief Scientist has listed certain living scientists as "science superheroes" who she may regard as worthy of special adulation.  Alas, some of these "superheroes" are teaching people things that just aren't true. For example, at the Chief Scientist's web site, one Lila Landowski states, "Everything you do, whether you’re thinking about it or not, is controlled by the brain." There is no robust evidence that thinking, imagination or remembering are controlled by the brain, and neuroscientists have no understanding of how a brain could produce any such effects. 

Trick #14: They Vaguely Appeal to Brain Reorganization and Brain Rewiring

It often happens that people with shockingly large parts of their brain seem to have little damage to their mental faculties. Examples are discussed in my posts here and here. How do our mainstream writers on the brain explain such cases? They often make a vague appeal to "brain reorganization" or "brain rewiring." Typically we have no specifics. There is no evidence that brains that lose brain cells grow more brain cells to replace them, and claims of adult neurogenesis are very widely disputed by neuroscientists themselves. The liver is an organ with an astonishing capacity to regenerate itself. You can remove up to 90% of the liver, and it will regenerate to its full size. But the brain has no such power.  Remove 50% of the brain's neurons and you will be stuck with a brain that has only about 50% of its neurons. We never get much specifics on this supposed "brain reorganization" or "brain rewiring" that is claimed to occur upon brain injury. We never see photographs documenting such a thing. Often the "proof" given for such a thing is simply that mental function was not damaged. But that is proof for mind resiliency, not brain reorganization. 

Trick #15: They Claim That Evolution Has Wired You to Do This or That Mental Thing

In the United States the neuroscientist belief community is an academia tribe consisting of only about 25,000 members, a tribe with its own distinctive folklore. In the US the academia tribe of evolutionary biologists is a similar-sized tribe that pushes another type of folklore. It can have a powerful-sounding mythic resonance when the folklore of these two tribes is combined, and such combinations often occur. Below we see an example of this, along with a correction that tells us the truth about DNA. 

Jane: How is it that a brain could possibly do such things as create abstract ideas or imagine or plan?

John: That's easy! You were wired by evolution to think and imagine and plan. 

Jane: So how did evolution do that?

John:  It was just random mutations. So ages ago, there was a lucky copying error that accidentally caused a "think" random mutation, that was preserved by natural selection because it was useful. Something similar explains how we got imagination and planning abilities.

Jane:  So it was just accidental DNA mutations that caused some particular kind of brain wiring?

John: Exactly!

Jane: So humans got an ability to think from a single DNA mutation -- a change in just one of the amino acids in a protein with hundreds of amino acids, only one of the more than 20,000 proteins used by humans?

John: Uh...yes. Isn't evolution amazing?

Jane: So there was just a one part in 10,000,000 change in the human genome, and then, poof, suddenly humans suddenly had the ability to imagine?

John: It's amazing what a tiny chemical change can do. 

Jane: No, John, your story is nonsense, and I'll tell you why. Brain wiring isn't specified in DNA. DNA does not specify the structure of cells or neurons or axons or synapses or brain wiring. DNA does not even specify how to make up the organelles and protein complexes that are the building components of cells. DNA only specifies very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein.  So there are no conceivable genetic mutations that could have caused a brain to have some particular wiring or neural arrangement. And there is no conceivable arrangement of cells or neurons or axons or synapses or brain wiring that could ever explain how a mind is able to think and imagine and plan and yearn.  Evolution does not explain DNA; DNA does not explain bodies; and bodies don't explain minds. 

The truth about DNA differs from the myth often taught