Neuroscientists Claim "Drifting Representations," But It's Mainly Just Their Pareidolia

Claims by neuroscientists that they have found "representations" in the brain (other than genetic representations) are examples of what very abundantly exists in biology: groundless achievement legends. There is no robust evidence for any such representations. 

Excluding the genetic information stored in DNA and its genes, there are simply no physical signs of learned information stored in a brain in any kind of organized format that resembles some kind of system of representation. If learned information were stored in a brain, it would tend to have an easily detected hallmark: the hallmark of token repetition.  There would be some system of tokens, each of which would represent something, perhaps a sound or a color pixel or a letter. There would be very many repetitions of different types of symbolic tokens.   Some examples of tokens are given below. Other examples of tokens include nucleotide base pairs (which in particular combinations of 3 base pairs represent particular amino acids), and also coins and bills (some particular combination of coins and bills can represent some particular amount of wealth). 

Other than the nucleotide base pair triple combinations that represent mere low-level chemical information such as amino acids, something found in neurons and many other types of cells outside of the brain, there is no sign at all of any repetition of symbolic tokens in the brain. Except for genetic information which is merely low-level chemical information, we can find none of the hallmarks of symbolic information (the repetition of symbolic tokens) inside the brain. No one has ever found anything that looks like traces or remnants of learned information by studying brain tissue. If you cut off some piece of brain tissue when someone dies, and place it under the most powerful electron microscope, you will never find any evidence that such tissue stored information learned during a lifetime, and you will never be able to figure out what a person learned from studying such tissue.  This is one reason why scientists and law enforcement officials never bother to preserve the brains of dead people in hopes of learning something about what such people experienced during their lives, or what they thought or believed, or what deeds they committed.    

But despite their complete failure to find any robust evidence of non-genetic representations in the brain, neuroscientists often make groundless boasts of having discovered representations. What is going on is pareidolia, people reporting seeing something that is not there, after wishfully analyzing large amounts of ambiguous and hazy data. It's like someone eagerly analyzing his toast every day for years, looking for something that looks like the face of Jesus, and eventually reporting he saw something that looked to him like the face of Jesus.  It's also like someone walking in many different forests, eagerly looking for faces on trees, and occasionally reporting a success. 

Claims that there are non-genetic representations in the brain often appeal to the existence of "place cells." Nature does not tell us that there is any such thing as "place cells."  We merely know that there are cells, and that neuroscientists started to use the term "place cells" to try to spread ideas that cells help to represent some place where an organism has been in. 

John O' Keefe published papers in the 1970's and after claiming to have detected "place units" in the hippocampus of rats. The papers also used the term "place cells."  The claim was that certain cells were more active when a rat was in a certain spatial position.  Greater activity during some type of observation is not representation. My eyes may widen if I see a naked woman walking down the street, but that is not a case of my eyes representing the naked woman. It has always been a case of misleading language when neuroscientists attempt to pass off claimed higher activation in some neurons as an example of representation. Real representation involves the use of symbolic tokens. Neuroscientists cannot find any symbolic tokens in the brain, other than the symbolic tokens in DNA that represent amino acids. 

The "place cells" papers of John O'Keefe that I have examined are papers that do not meet standards of good experimental science. An example of such a paper was the paper "Hippocampal Place Units in the Freely Moving Rat: Why They Fire Where They Fire."  For one thing, the study group size used (consisting of only four rats) was way too small for robust evidence to have been produced. 15 animals per study group is the minimum for a moderately convincing result in animal studies looking for correlations.  For another thing no blinding protocol was used. And the study was not a pre-registered study, but was apparently one of those studies in which an analyst is free to fish for whatever effect he may feel like finding after data has been collected, using any of innumerable possible analysis pipelines. 

The visuals in the "place cell" studies done by O' Keefe compared wavy EEG signal lines collected while a rat was in different areas of an enclosed unit. You can see what I'm talking about by looking at page 1334 of the document here. The wavy signal lines look pretty much the same no matter which area the rats were in. But O'Keefe claims to have found differences.  No one should be persuaded that papers using analysis so subjective show robust evidence for an important real effect.  We should suspect that the analyst has looked for stretches of wavy lines that looked different when the rat was in different areas, and chosen stretches of wavy lines that best-supported his claim that some cells were more active when the rats were in different areas. 

When I looked for later "place cell" papers by O'Keefe, I saw papers that seemed to just continue the same Questionable Research Practices. Specifically:

• A 1993 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "Phase Relationship Between Hippocampal Place Units and the EEG Theta Rhythm." The paper used way-too-small study group sizes of only three rats and two rats.  No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study. We have some wavy-line analysis that seems extremely subjective and arbitrary.
• A 2008 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "The boundary vector cell model of place cell firing and spatial memory." The paper used a way-too-small study group size of only two rats. For example, we read "Twenty five place cells were recorded from the two rats."  No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study. We should chuckle when the paper says that "we followed 11 cells for time courses varying from a day to the duration of the experiment" and confesses ungrammatically that " it is difficult to draw firm conclusions from such as small data set."  There are millions of cells in the brain of a rat. Paying attention to only a handful of such cells seems like ridiculous cherry picking. 
• A 2012 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "How vision and movement combine in the hippocampal place code." The paper used a way-too-small study group sizes of only six mice.  No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study. We have some data analysis that seems extremely subjective and arbitrary. 
• A 2014 paper co-authored by O'Keefe was entitled "Long-term plasticity in hippocampal place-cell representation of environmental geometry." The paper used a way-too-small study group sizes of only three animals.  No blinding protocol was used, and the paper was not a pre-registered study.

Studies like this are generally not good evidence unless a very stringent blinding protocol is used, and studies like this almost invariably fail to follow any kind of blinding protocol. It's easy to find the failure: just search for the word "blind" or "blinding" in the text of the paper, and note well when it fails to occur. 

In general, there is nothing scientific about using nicknames such as "place cells" to describe cells. The justification given for the use of such a term is based not on observations of permanent features of any cells, but on subjective judgments of how the cells behaved at particular moments. That's as unscientific and subjective as saying that certain people have "fear eyes" or "sorrow eyes," based on subjective judgments of how their eyes looked at particular moments.  

Although O'Keefe's "place cell" papers were not at all a robust demonstration of any important effect, the myth that "place cells" had been discovered started to spread around among neuroscience professors, aided by the use of a catchy memorable catchphrase: "place cells."  O'Keefe even got a Nobel Prize in 2014. The Nobel Prize committee is normally pretty good about awarding prizes only when an important discovery has been made for which there was very good evidence. Awarding O'Keefe a Nobel Prize for his unconvincing work on supposed "place cells" was a very bad flub of the normally trusty Nobel Prize committee. Even if certain cells are more active when rats are in certain positions (something we would always expect to observe from chance variations), that does nothing to show that there is anything like a map of spatial locations in the brain of rats or mice. 

The Nobel Prize committee's flub in awarding a Nobel Prize to O'Keefe was not the only case of a Nobel Prize awarded for very weak experimental evidence. The same thing occurred when a Nobel Prize was awarded to Christian B. Anfinsen, who failed to ever produce robust experiments backing up his claim known as Anfinsen's Dogma. As discussed in my post here, subsequent research has failed to confirm Anfinsen's Dogma, and has given reason for doubting that Anfinsen ever deserved to get a Nobel Prize. We must remember that when scientists really, really want to believe something, they may tend to award some prize for experimental or observational activity that claimed to back up the cherished belief.  The awarding of the Nobel Prize to O'Keefe was part of the social construction of the groundless triumphal legend that neuroscientists had found non-genetic representations in the brain, a legend that neuroscientists fervently wanted to believe.  

What I think goes on during such failures of the Nobel Prize committee is that the committee members make the great mistake of judging based on quantity of papers rather than the quality of the experimental methods and observations. The committee members  may think something like, "There are now many papers published about Effect X, so I guess the first people reporting Effect X must have made a discovery."  No, that's not necessarily so, because there can occur bandwagon effects within scientist belief communities, in which dubious fashionable ideas are embraced in a kind of groupthink herd effect.  So, for example:

• Endless papers were produced on the topic of supersymmetry theory, which was never well-established.
• Endless papers were produced on the topic of string theory, which was never well-established.
• Endless papers were produced on the topic of Grand Unification Theories, which were never well-established.
• Endless papers were produced on the topic of cosmic inflation  theory, which was never well-established.
• Many papers were produced claiming to provide evidence for memory engrams, none of them providing convincing evidence for such a thing. 
• Many papers were produced claiming to provide evidence for morphogen gradients transmitting positional information, none of them providing convincing evidence for such a thing.

What would a convincing experiment showing representations in a brain look like? It might work like this.  You might have some "blinded" analysts who had no idea of what claims were being made about representations, and no idea of what the goals, procedures or suspicions of the neuroscientists were. Such analysts might be shown some data such as EEG data or brain scan data, and the analysts might be told, "We think that in this data may be representations of something an organism observed or experienced -- can you guess what that was?"  If most of the analysts gave the same answer (such as describing the layout of a particular type of maze that a rat ran through), that might be good evidence that neural representations had been found; for there would be very many thousands of possible answers, so we would not expect most of the answers to coincidentally agree.  Nothing like that has occurred in any of these experiments claiming evidence for brain representations.  Instead, we typically have some procedure vastly less convincing, in which  a scientist who knows that some rodents observed some particular thing attempts to sift through lots of data, looking for something that he can claim is evidence for a representation of that thing, rather like some person walking through a forest of 1000 trees, eagerly looking for some tree that has a face shape on it. 

There is no robust evidence for any spatial representations in the brain. "Place cells" are a social construct of neuroscientists, not something with an objective reality in nature.  What would we expect to find if such claims of representations in the brain are not well-founded? One thing we might expect to find is that there would be great inconsistency in the descriptions of such claimed representations, with little replication of the same results. That is just what seems to have happened. Neuroscientists have invented an inaccurate phrase to describe such inconsistencies. The phrase they are now using is "representational drift." The phrase is an inaccurate one, because there are no actual representations that are drifting. It is simply claims of such representations that are varying.  

A scientific paper makes claims about such claimed "representational drift." The paper makes an unjustified use of the term "PPC representation" referring to some alleged representation in the posterior parietal cortex, a representation that has not actually been shown to exist

"Crucially, Driscoll and colleagues found that the PPC representation was not stable over multiple days and weeks. As shown in each row of Figure 1b, the same neurons exhibited markedly different activation patterns on different days....Similar types of drift have been reported in a number of brain areas, including the hippocampus and sensory and motor parts of neocortex. In addition, there is widespread evidence for surprising degrees of structural plasticity in dendritic spines. For example, in the hippocampus, all dendritic spines are expected to turn over in the period of several weeks. Such dramatic synapse turnover suggests that circuits are continually rewiring even though animals can maintain stable task performance and memories...The finding of representational drift raises profound questions about how behavior is learned and controlled in neural circuits, and what constitutes a memory of such learned behavior."

Another paper on so-called "representational drift" states this:

"Cells whose activity was previously correlated with environmental and behavioral variables are most frequently no longer active in response to the same variables weeks later. At the same time, a mostly new pool of neurons develops activity patterns correlated with these variables. Less commonly, cells previously correlated with certain variables become correlated with new variables. In one example of these findings, as mice move through an environment, a subpopulation of hippocampal place cells are informative about the animal's spatial position. Over time, the pool of place cells that make up this spatial code changes, despite the environment staying the same."

There is a simple and plausible explanation for such results:

(1) Brains do  not actually contain representations of anything learned by humans or animals, and no neuroscientist has ever produced a credible theory of how learned information could be stored as brain states or neural states. 

(2) Experimental claims that the brain contains such representation were never robust science, but involved experiments guilty of Questionable Research Practices such as way-too-small study group sizes, a lack of a blinding protocol, a lack of pre-registration, and subjective "see whatever you want to see" cherry-picking analysis. 

(3) The reported "representational drift" is the kind of random variation and vanishing of reported correlations we would expect given a scientific result that was never robust, but was always based on dubious subjective analysis of randomly varying ambiguous data. and mere pareidolia (people seeing patterns in random data that they were hoping to see).  

Neuroscientists are using extremely misleading language when they claim to see something they call "superior activations" or "higher activations" or "activation patterns" and then pass off such claimed observations as evidence for representations. The concept of a "cell activation" is not even a solid one, and the term "higher cell activation" or "activation pattern" has no precise  meaning. Letting us know exactly when they are active, light switches have an "on" position and an "off" position, but cells have no such things. Representations involve symbols in which one thing stands for another.  If there were to exist some mere "higher activation" of a cell,  that would not be a representation.  If I see a naked woman on the street, there may be some higher activation of my eyes, with my eyes widening. Such a thing is not a representation of a naked woman.  

When the genetic code was discovered in DNA, that was not some  thing merely involving "higher cellular activations." That was a discovery of a massive storehouse of symbolic tokens in DNA -- particular combinations of nucleotide base pairs which represented particular amino acids.  Other than such a genetic code, there simply is no evidence of representations in the brain. There is zero robust evidence that brains store representations of any learned knowledge or any place where an organism has visited. Trying to use some catchphrase of "place cells" to pass off claims of higher cell activations as evidence of neural representations is an example of professorial pareidolia. 

Claims that are "place cells" in the hippocampus that represent places are discredited by experiments involving tests of navigation memory in monkeys who had been given severe lesions of the hippocampus. The paper "Object Recognition and Location Memory in Monkeys with Excitotoxic Lesions of the Amygdala and Hippocampus" did tests on 11 monkeys who were given severe hippocampus lesions and also lesions of the amygdala. According to Table 1, seven of the monkeys had an average of 73% of the left and right hippocampus damaged.  We read this:

"Postoperatively, monkeys with the combined amygdala and hippocampal lesions performed as well as intact controls at every stage of testing. The same monkeys also were unimpaired relative to controls on an analogous test of spatial memory, delayed nonmatching-to location. It is unlikely that unintended sparing of target structures can account for the lack of impairment; there was a significant positive correlation between the percentage of damage to the hippocampus and scores on portions of the recognition performance test, suggesting that, paradoxically, the greater the hippocampal damage, the better the recognition."

How to Interview an Overconfident Biologist

These days biologists routinely display enormous overconfidence. They routinely claim to understand very deep things they do not understand, and that are a hundred miles over their heads. Biologists also have the very bad habit of repeating groundless triumphal legends claiming that scientists have developed explanations for wonders of biology that are actually vastly beyond the understanding of our biologists. 

Science journalists should act as a check inhibiting the extreme overconfidence of biologists, just as speed bumps are checks that limit the speeding of reckless drivers. But alas, today's science journalists act like cheerleaders. Science journalists act like they are afraid to ask scientists the tough questions such scientists should be asked. This is only one of many very bad failures or very poor habits of today's science journalists. 

But we may hope that one day we see more science journalists acting like real journalists rather than North Korean journalists who reverently accept everything told them by authorities. Below is a sketch of how a science journalist could interview an overconfident biologist.  The interview follows a general strategy:

(1) First, the journalist asks a few "softball questions" that will typically result in the overconfident biologist making his most overconfident claims. 

(2) Instead of immediately disputing the overconfident answers, the journalist asks about very many smaller issues related to the overconfident claims. 

(3) Finally, the journalist points out the discrepancy between the overconfident claims made by the scientist at the beginning of the interview, and the answers given in the main part of the interview, pointing out the contradiction between the two.  

Below is a sketch of how this might occur. 

Reporter: I am here with the distinguished biologist Professor Doe. Thanks for giving us some time, Professor. 

Scientist: It's a pleasure to be here. 

Reporter: So I know that authorities such as you are very big on the insights of Charles Darwin, and the idea of natural selection and evolution, isn't that right?

Scientist: It certainly is. In fact, we're fond of quoting the geneticist who said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. 

Reporter: So does Darwinism and evolutionary theory explain the history of life on Earth?

Scientist: Yes, absolutely. Darwin rules! As someone once said, "In the final analysis, the answer must always be Darwin."

Reporter: I'm sure it's great to have that kind of sweeping insight. And speaking of simple ideas that explain a huge amount of things, would you say that the human mind and human behavior can all be explained as aspects of brain activity or results caused by brain activity? 

Scientist: Yes, everything that we call the mind is really just the brain, or effects produced by the brain. 

Reporter: I know that neuroscientists like to say things such as,  "We're all just brains and the brain's activity." 

Scientist: Yes, exactly. That is correct. 

Reporter: So everything that goes on in the mind can be explained by something happening in the brain, correct?

Scientist: Yes, exactly. The brain explains everything in psychology. 

Reporter: So can you list some unsolved problems of biology?

Scientist: Well, there's the origin of life. We don't understand that.

Reporter: You mean the origin of prokaryotic cells. But what about the origin of the vastly more complex eukaryotic cells?

Scientist: We have a theory that covers that, a theory of a huge leap in organization by endosymbiosis, kind of like a house suddenly converting into a high office tower.

Reporter: Is that a Darwinian theory, involving nothing but very gradual steps over a very long time, a "nature makes no leaps" kind of thing?

Scientist: No, it actually involves a gigantic sudden leap.

Reporter: And so what about the Cambrian Explosion, when all or almost all the animal phyla seemed to have originated rather suddenly within maybe something like ten million years or twenty million years? What caused that?

Scientist:  That's quite a mystery. We're still working on trying to explain how that happened. Some say it had something to do with a change in the oxygen levels on planet Earth. 

Reporter: Oxygen? So can oxygen design incredibly complicated new blueprints for making many new types of organisms, unlike any that have existed?

Scientist: No, I didn't say that. But oxygen is very important. We couldn't live without it.  

Reporter:  Each of us has more than 20,000 types of protein molecules in our bodies, and almost all of these types contain hundreds or thousands of well-arranged amino acid parts. How did Darwin explain the origin of all those molecule types?

Scientist: Well, that kind of complexity was not discovered until the 20th century, so it's not fair to expect he explained that. 

Reporter: Do you understand the origin of language?

Scientist: Little progress has been made on that.

Reporter: What about morphogenesis, the problem how a speck-sized zygote progresses to become the vast organization of an adult human body?

Scientist: That's one of the biggest unsolved problems of biology. The people called developmental biologists are working on that. 

Reporter: Do you understand how a single human cell is able to reproduce?

Scientist: Well, we can describe the stages. But the "how" is very puzzling. We don't really understand the how. 

Reporter: And how does a human being instantly remember a complex answer upon hearing a single name or short question?

Scientist: I don't know. That's a puzzle the neuroscientists are working on. 

Reporter: How can people remember things for fifty years, when the proteins that make up neurons and synapses have lifetimes of only a few weeks?

Scientist:  Memory is quite the mystery. 

Reporter: People can remember very many types of things, can't they? They can remember images, school lessons, music, facts, emotions they've experienced, life experiences they have had, and how to do physical things such as ride a bike or type or play an instrument.  How could all of those different types of learning and memory be stored as brain states?

Scientist:  Well, when you learn something called encoding goes on. That means translating your experiences and learning into brain states. Then when you remember such things, there's an opposite process called decoding. 

Reporter:  Does anyone understand how such encoding could occur? Has anyone ever found a "brain code" that works in some very specific way, kind of like how the genetic code works?

Scientist:  Not actually. But we're looking for that. Give us time. Rome wasn't built in a day. 

Reporter:  But microscopes today are very many thousands of times more powerful than when the genetic code was discovered in the 1950's, so wouldn't scientists have found such a "brain code" for storing memories if it existed? 

Scientist:  We haven't found it yet, so I guess the answer must be "no."

Reporter:  Has anyone ever read a memory from a dead person, so that you could tell what they learned? Has anyone ever done something like looking at some brain tissue using a microscope, and then said, "I know this dead guy must have learned about Spanish medieval history, because I see facts of Spanish medieval history stored in his brain?" 

Scientist:  No, I've never heard of that happening. But you know science is moving so fast, we may see that some day. 

Reporter:  But given the power of today's microscopes, wouldn't you have found such memories in the brains of dead people, if brains store memories?

Scientist:  Apparently not, because no one has ever done that. 

Reporter:  So how could some brain chemical reactions ever add up so that you get the reality of a person with a unified sense of a single self having experiences?

Scientist:  They sometimes call that "the hard problem of consciousness." It is generally thought that it hasn't been solved yet. But there are some interesting theories I could discuss, such as the integrated information theory and the global workspace theory. 

Reporter: Can you describe what goes on in a brain when a person starts to have a belief or an opinion? Do you know of some  kind of chemical reaction that corresponds to that, or some neural restructuring?

Scientist:  No, but it's not really fair to ask that, because most of experimental neuroscience has been done on mice and rats, and they don't really have opinions or beliefs. 

Reporter:  I can't help noticing that what you said at the beginning of this interview very much seems to contradict what you've been saying after the beginning of the interview.  

Scientist:  What do you mean?

Reporter: At the beginning of the interview, you said that  evolutionary theory explains the history of life. But based on your answers after that, it seems like evolution theory and Darwin's ideas do not explain most of the biggest things that occurred in that history.  It seems that you don't have evolutionary explanations for most of the biggest things happening in the history of life. And it sounds like you don't really have much of any explanation for some of the biggest things happening in the history of life, such as the Cambrian Explosion, the origin of protein molecules, the reproduction of cells, the origin of language, the origin of consciousness and the origin of creatures that can remember for as long and as quickly as humans remember. 

Scientist:  Not so. I was taught in graduate school that in biology "ultimately the answer is always Darwin."

Reporter: Also I can't help noticing how your statement at the beginning of this interview (saying that the brain completely explains the mind) is contradicted by your statements after the beginning of this interview. For you have repeatedly confessed that you don't have an explanation for most of the things going on in the mind, things like consciousness and self-hood and instant recall and memory storage and remembering things for fifty years. Based on your statements after the beginning of the interview, it sounds like you don't have any detailed or credible brain explanation for such things that constitute the core of what goes on in the mind. 

Scientist:  Not so. I was taught in school many times that everything in the mind is explained by the brain. 

Reporter: Would  it make sense to claim that you understand the physical origin of some species when you don't understand the origin of any of the adult organisms of that species? 

Scientist:  No, that would probably be kind of like saying you were very rich when you couldn't even pay your modest rent. 

Reporter: So why do you claim that you understand the origin of the human species when you don't seem to understand the origin of any adult human, because you don't understand morphogenesis (how a speck-sized zygote progresses to become a full adult human), and you don't understand how minds like ours and memories like ours arise? 

Scientist:  So why are you casting such doubt about what people like me say? Don't be so "anti-science."  

Reporter: I'm not "anti-science" at all. I'm pro-science. I just want better science, in which scientists don't claim so often to know things they don't know. 

Scientist:  In my department we all agree: whenever someone doubts certain things, that means they're enemies of science.

Reporter: Thank you for your time, Professor Doe.

Were we to get an interview like this with a biologist, it would really help to "pull back the wizard's curtain" and show how groundless are the biggest explanatory boasts of biologists. But you should not expect any science journalist to ask questions this challenging when interviewing a biologist.  Science journalists act like rock star fans when dealing with scientists, and they treat scientists as reverently as North Korean journalists treat North Korean officials.  The rule of the science journalist doing an interview seems to be, "Only gently pitch softballs that are easy to hit." 

Asking the right questions and getting confessions about lack of knowledge about smaller matters is one way to help show that overconfident biologists do not actually know many of the grand things they claim to know. Another technique is to diligently collect statements by scientists in which they confess they do not know the type of smaller things they would know if their claims about knowing larger things were true. A very large collection of such statements is found in my long post "Candid Confessions of the Scientists" which you can read here. 

Why Scientific Academia Is Like an Organized Religion

Today's scientific academia is centered around four unproven dogmas:  the dogma of the accidental origin of life, the dogma of the  accidental origin of species by “natural selection,” the dogma that  brains are the source of minds or that mind activity is the same thing as brain activity, and the dogma that brains are the storage places of human memories. The average person has heard these claims so many times that he may think of one or more of them as "facts of science," but none of them are facts. There are actually strong reasons for doubting each one of these dogmas. In particular:

• Scientists discovered the genetic information in all cells around 1950, but it is now the year 2023, and no has ever used a microscope to discover any stored memory information in a brain of a human being, even through brain tissue has been examined at resolutions vastly greater than the resolutions sufficient to discover DNA in cells. 
• Many humans (both children and adults) have had half of their brains removed to stop very bad and frequent epileptic seizures, but when such surgery is done, it has little effect on intelligence or memory, with learned knowledge being well preserved. 
• Many humans can remember very well things they learned or experienced 50 years ago, but the average lifetime of the proteins in synapses (claimed to be the storage place of memories) is 1000 times shorter than 50 years (less than two weeks). 
• Humans are able to form new memories instantly, in contradiction to all theories of brain memory storage, which typically postulate "synapse strengthening" that would take minutes.
• Even though the brain has no physical characteristics that might help allow any such thing as instant memory retrieval (something like an indexing system or a position notation system or coordinate system that might allow stored information to be quickly found), humans are able to retrieve learned information instantly upon hearing some person name or event name or place name, even if they haven't heard such a name in many years.
• Very many humans (as many as 10 percent or 20 percent of the population) report floating out of their bodies, and observing their bodies from above them in space. 
• Inside brains there is very severe noise of several different types that should prevent humans from being able to reliably recall large bodies of information stored in a brain, but it is a fact that many people (such as actors playing the role of Hamlet) can recall very large bodies of textual information with perfect accuracy. 
• There are hundreds of documented cases of people who saw an apparition of someone who died, but who they did not know was dead, only to soon learn that the person had died about the time when the apparition was seen. 
• There are also very many cases of apparitions seen by more than one person at the same time, something we should expect to never or virtually happen if a mere brain hallucination was causing the sighting of the apparition. 
• Instead of having some vastly greater brain connectivity that might help explain the superiority of the human mind, a study found that brain connectivity is about the same in all mammals; so we have the brain connectivity of mice. 
• As discussed here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here, there is two hundred years of written evidence (often written by very weighty figures such as scientists and doctors) for the reality of clairvoyance, an ability that is not explicable under any theory that minds are created by brains. 
• Quite a few people who have lost  half of their brains due to disease or epilepsy surgery have average or above average intelligence; and the physician John Lorber showed that some people have above-average intelligence despite having the great majority of their brain tissue destroyed by disease. 
• Besides a wealth of narrative evidence that some humans can have ESP (an ability inexplicable as a brain effect), there is abundant robust laboratory experimental evidence for ESP (discussed here, here and here). 
• No one has any credible detailed theory of how a brain could ever store learned information (such as academic information) or episodic memories as neuron states or synapse states; and if such a thing were happening, it would require a whole host of very specialized memory-encoding proteins, which have never been discovered (along with some not-yet-discovered encoding scheme millions of times more complicated than the genetic code discovered around 1950). 
• Brains show no signs of working harder during heavy thinking or memory recall, and brain scan attempts to find signs of such greater activity merely report variations such as half of one per cent, the kind of variations we would expect to get by chance, even if brains don't produce thinking or recall. 
• Because of numerous severe slowing factors such as the cumulative slowing effect of synaptic delays and dendrites, signal transmission in the brain should be way too slow to account for the blazing fast thinking speed of some people able to do mathematical calculations at incredible speeds, and also the instant memory recall humans routinely show. 
• People with dramatically higher recall of episodic memories or learned information seem to have no larger brains or brain superiority that could explain this.
• Contrary to the dogma that brains produce minds, ravens with tiny brains can do as well on quite a few mental tasks as apes with large brains; and also tiny mouse lemurs do just as well on quite a few cognitive tests as mammals with brains 200 times larger. 
• As discussed here and here, scientists have very well documented inexplicable physical effects occurring around some people, suggesting they either have powers that cannot be explained in terms of brains and bodies, or are somehow in contact with others who have such powers. 
• There are numerous reasons for suspecting some source of a human soul or spirit outside of the human body, including the sudden unexplained origin of the universe with just the right expansion rate to allow eventual planet formation, the very precise fine-tuning of fundamental physical constants and laws of nature needed for biological habitability, the origin of life so hard to credibly explain as an accidental chemical event, the extremely hierarchical organization of biological organisms, the great abundance of complex fine-tuned protein molecules in organisms (each seeming to involve a vast mathematical improbability), the great abundance of immensely organized biological forms that are not explained by genomes that merely specify low-level chemical information, and abundant photographic evidence for paranormal effects that seem to suggest some unfathomable intelligence beyond any human understanding (see here and here for examples). 
• People (sometimes called autistic savants) with very serious brain defects sometimes have astonishing powers of memory almost no one else has. 
• Dying people commonly report seeing apparitions of the dead (usually their relatives), as reported here, here, and here; people having near-death experiences very frequently report encountering their deceased relatives; and widows and widowers frequently report voices or apparitions corresponding to their deceased spouses -- all just exactly as we would expect if we have souls that survive death. 
• Many decades ago Leonora Piper was studied at great length for many years by scientists and scholars, and for many years she reported information about deceased people that should have been unknown to her. 
• Human beings have many subtle and refined mental abilities (such as philosophical imagination, artistic creativity, musical ability, and subtle spirituality) that are inexplicable as results of brain evolution, such things having no value in increasing survival or reproduction. 
• Despite more than seventy years of experiments trying to reproduce a natural origin of life from non-life, all such experiments have failed to produce anything living, and have also failed to produce any of the main components of microscopic living things (functional protein molecules). In fact, all experiments realistically simulating the early Earth have produced neither the "building blocks" of microscopic life (functional protein molecules, things vastly more organized than mere building blocks) nor the building blocks of the building blocks of microscopic life (amino acids). There are multiple reasons why the famed Miller-Urey experiment (producing amino acids) was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions.  
• Claims that we have an explanation for the physical origin of species tend to be made by those who have not paid adequate attention to two supremely important considerations: the matter of functional thresholds and the matter of interdependent components, as I discuss here. 

Once we understand that the four main teachings of today's scientific  academia are belief dogmas rather than scientific facts, we can start to understand how scientific academia acts today largely as a kind of stealth religion, pretty much as a kind of church-in-all-but-name. The table below gives some reasons why scientific academia is like Roman Catholicism.

	Scientific Academia	Roman Catholic Church
Physical Bases	University buildings, high schools, natural history museums	Churches, monasteries, convents, seminaries, Catholic schools
Old Revered Texts	Books of Charles Darwin	The Bible and works of the Church Fathers (Augustine, Aquinas, etc.)
Sacred Dogmas	Accidental origin of life, accidental origin of species by “natural selection,” brains as the source of minds, brains as storage places of memories	The Trinity, the resurrection of Jesus, the divine inspiration of the Bible, papal infallibility, dogmas about Mary, mother of Jesus
Lower Prestige Workers	High school biology teachers, experimental subjects, paid lab workers	Nuns, deacons
Middle Prestige Workers	PhD candidates, college instructors, assistant professors	Priests
High Prestige Workers	Professors	Bishops
Highest Prestige Persons	National Academy of Science members, Nobel Prize winners	Cardinals, the Pope
Arcane Speech	Jargon-filled scientific papers	Jargon-filled theology papers, Holy Mass language
Indoctrination Meetings	Biology classes, psychology classes	Sunday sermons, Sunday school
Financial Base	Countless billions in old university endowments, tuition, government funding, with $800 billion in US university endowments alone	Billions in old endowments, church property,  Sunday donations, tithes
Rituals	PhD dissertations, experiments (often poorly designed and implemented), science conferences, rituals of science paper writing, countless legend and dogma recitations	Sunday Mass, baptisms, weddings, First Communion, funerals
Speculations	Abundant	Abundant
Persecution or Libeling of Heretics	Frequent (currently non-physical, including gaslighting, slander, libel, accusatory insinuations,  stereotyping and discrimination)	Frequent in the past
Censorship	Massive “soft” censorship and repression of undesired observations such as witnessing of paranormal phenomena and successful ESP experiments (see postscript below for more examples)	Once very frequent, such as Legion of Decency
Speech Taboos	Very many (including fair discussion of the paranormal or evidence for design in nature)	Very many
Miracle Stories	Accidental origin of life, and accidental origin of billions of types of protein molecules in the animal kingdom, most having hundreds of well-arranged parts, requiring many miracles of accidental organization, like hundreds of falling logs forming into extensive log cabin hotels or a row of fifty tall sand castles forming from random wind and waves	Miracle stories involving Jesus, Catholic saints and the Virgin Mary (Fatima, Lourdes, etc.)
Officials in Fancy Robes?	Yes (professors during graduation ceremonies)	Yes
Despised Deviants	Witnesses of the paranormal, Darwinism critics, teleology theorists, those having spiritual experiences	In previous years, Protestants and gays
Chanting?	Very much, such as “blind evolution explains it all” chant and “it's all just brain activity” chant	Very much, such as Hail Mary prayers and the chants of monks
Art Forms	Materialist science fiction	Sculpture, painting, sacred music, sacred architecture
Saints	Many science figures whose work is described reverently	Many canonized saints
Catechisms	College textbooks and biased Wikipedia articles	Official catechisms teaching Catholic dogma
Legends	Many “just so” legends such as the legend of trans-Atlantic rafting monkeys, and many achievement legends such as the legend Darwin explained biological origins	Many legends about saints and their miracles or legends about miraculous healings or the Virgin Mary
Helper Workers	Unquestioning conformist science journalists	Laymen volunteers
Iconography	Sparse iconography including endlessly repeated side-profile “Evolution of man” diagram with four or five figures facing right	Vast iconography

You do not successfully rebut such comparisons by referring us to the atheistic tendencies of scientific academia, because it is not true that a belief in God is a hallmark of all religions. World religions include various forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, Scientology and numerous other creeds, which have an extremely diverse set of beliefs, which may or may not involve a belief in a single deity. Definitions of the word "religion" vary greatly. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz defined a religion as " a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic." Here is another rather similar definition: we can define a religion as  a set of beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and life, or a recommended way of living, typically stemming from the teachings of an authority, along with norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs.  Under such a definition scientific academia may well qualify as a religion, seeing that it is centered around a set of beliefs handed down by authorities such as Darwin and biology professors, and seeing that it involves a set of norms, ethics, rituals, roles or social organizations that may arise from such beliefs.

The enormous current success of scientific academia in getting people to believe in its main dogmas comes from a failure of people to perceive that scientific academia is pretty much a kind of stealth religion, basically a kind of church-in-all-but-name that has infiltrated the halls and rooms of our universities.  Once you recognize the strong similarities between scientific academia and an organized religion such as the Roman Catholic Church, there is a kind of "Toto pulling back the Wizard's curtain" effect in which we can suddenly see how much bluffing and bluster is going on when unproven belief community dogmas are marketed as scientific facts.

The research communities of scientific academia and the clergy of religions both are what can be called ideological enclaves. An ideological enclave is some small subset of the population in which some particular belief system is required. The diagram below illustrates how ideological enclaves get new members and keep the enclave committed to its ideology:

An expert existing in some "echo chamber" ideological enclave may be filled with dogmatic overconfidence about some opinion that is popular within his little ideological enclave. He may think something along the lines of: “No doubt it is true, because almost all my peers and teachers agree that it is true.” But the idea may seem senseless to someone who has not been long-conditioned inside this ideological enclave, this sheltered thought bubble. 

Do you want to read some of the "ignored conflicting evidence" depicted at the left of the visual above? Read the posts of this blog. To read more about the resemblance of biologists to clergy, read my post "Scientists and Clergy Have Much in Common."  

Postscript: In the table above I claim that censorship is common in scientific academia. This conclusion is backed up by a new paper "Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda."  We read this:

"A recent national survey of US faculty at four-year colleges and universities found the following: 1) 4 to 11% had been disciplined or threatened with discipline for teaching or research; 2) 6 to 36% supported soft punishment (condemnation, investigations) for peers who make controversial claims, with higher support among younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty; 3) 34% had been pressured by peers to avoid controversial research; 4) 25% reported being 'very' or 'extremely' likely to self-censor in academic publications; and 5) 91% reported being at least somewhat likely to self-censor in publications, meetings,...In a 2023 survey of academics in New Zealand, 53% reported that they were not free to state controversial or unpopular opinions, 48% reported that they were not free to raise differing perspectives or argue against the consensus among their colleagues, and 26% reported that they were not free to engage in the research of their choice."

The paper gives us a great visual, looking like the one below. We see how censorship and bias by peer reviewers and self-censorship by scientists can cause the scientific literature to present a false version of reality, leading us to think that something is true when it is not true. This is just what is happening in the world of neuroscience. Innumerable facts and observations defying the "brains make minds" dogma are excluded from scientific papers, particularly observations of the paranormal. 

Comparing the Dogmas of Cosmology and Biology

 Below is an interesting table comparing the dogmas of cosmology (the study of the universe and its origin) and some of the dogmas of biology.  The table is too wide for me to display it using this blog's regular font. 

First I'll give an image of the table:

Below is a text version that tablet device users will be able to see by finger-swiping to expand. 

	Abiogenesis	“Brains make minds” dogma	Dark energy	Dark matter	Cosmic Inflation	Darwinism
Claim of dogma	“Life originated from accidental chemical events.”	“Human mental phenomena, self-hood, thinking, insight, beliefs  memory, etc. can all be explained by brain activity.”	”Most of the universe's mass-energy is an invisible stuff called dark energy.”	”Most of the universe's matter is an invisible stuff called dark matter.”	“In its first instant the universe expanded at a super-fast exponential rate. Then it switched to its current linear expansion.”	“All life has a common ancestor, and all species originated because of lucky random mutations, with the luckier variations surviving better.”
How much luck required?	”Throw 9000 letter blocks to get an essay” kind of luck	?	None	None	”Throw 900 letter blocks to get an essay” kind of luck	Almost infinite luck required to get known genomes
Salesmen	Chemists	Neuroscientists	Cosmol-ogists	Cosmol-ogists	Cosmologists	Evolutionary biologists
Atheist analgesic?	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Consistent with what we see?	No (even earliest life way too complex)	No (excluded by many brain physical shortfalls)	Yes	Yes	Possibly	No (way too much organization in organisms)
Gigantic missing items	Experiments producing life or functional proteins under early Earth conditions	Neural explanations for cognition, memory storage, instant memory retrieval, self-hood	Direct scanning of dark energy, and knowing exact particle	Direct scanning of dark matter, and knowing dark matter particles	Evidence for primordial gravitational waves, and credible tale of how inflation begins/ends	Transitional fossils, explanation for protein evolution, explanation for morphogenesis

The theory of primordial cosmic inflation referred to in the sixth column is not the theory of the Big Bang (the idea that the universe suddenly arose in a super-dense and super-hot state about 13 billion years ago), but a theory about what happened in the first instant of the universe's existence. There are endless versions of this theory of primordial cosmic inflation.  This class of theories have been advanced to try to avoid a requirement of very precise fine-tuning in the universe's initial expansion rate. Typically theories of primordial cosmic inflation require very much fine-tuning of their own, meaning that we end up with  no net reduction in the amount of fine-tuning required in the early universe. 

Claims about the existence of dark matter and dark energy are typically advanced with great confidence, even though there is zero direct empirical support for either dark matter or dark energy, neither of which have been directly observed.  Neither dark matter nor dark energy has any place in the Standard Model of Physics. Speculations taught with great certainty are typically dogmas. 

An analgesic is a pain reliever. My "atheist analgesic" row refers to whether the dogma is a kind of pain reliever or irritation reliever for atheists. An atheist will tend to be irritated by a variety of things, including (1) any indications that our universe required very precise fine-tuning of a type we would never expect to occur by chance; (2) any indications that living things required design, and could not have arisen by blind unguided processes; (3) any indications that humans have minds or souls that cannot be explained by physical processes such as neural activity. Anything that may tend to lessen such irritation may be described as an atheistic analgesic. It is rather obvious why there is a "pain relief for atheists" effect in the dogmas of abiogenesis, Darwinism and the dogma that the brain makes the mind.  The origin of the first theory of primordial cosmic inflation clearly was an "atheist pain reliever" kind of effect. Around 1980 cosmologists were bothered that the early expansion rate of the universe seems to have been fine-tuned to 1 part in 10 to the fiftieth power, such as we could not reasonably explain as being due to chance. So they embraced a theory of primordial cosmic inflation to try to "sweep under the rug" such fine-tuning.  The attempt was futile, because theories of   primordial cosmic inflation require special conditions so precise and improbable that the total fine-tuning requirement is not reduced.  A scientist says this: "It actually requires much more fine-tuning for the Universe to have inflated than for it to have been placed in some low-entropy initial state (Carroll & Chen 2004)." He also refers to "the highly fine-tuned initial conditions required for inflation to work."