Traumatic Brain Injury Results Clashing With Prevailing Dogmas About Brains

I have at this site written quite a bit about the preservation of mind and memory after surgeries that removed large portions of the brain, sometimes half of the brain. Examples were my posts "Preservation of Mind and Memories After Removal of Half a Brain" and "Cases of High Mental Function Despite Large Brain Damage." There is another way to look for evidence of how sensitive the mind is to brain damage: we can look for cases of cognitive effects of traumatic brain injury (often referred to as TBI).  Every year we have many cases of traumatic brain injury or TBI that result from events such as accidental falls, traffic accidents, car crashes or people being shot in the head. 

Before discussing such cases, I will need to discuss how there are several reasons why we should assume that the cognitive effects of traumatic brain injuries are probably not as high as typically reported in scientific studies.

Confounding factor #1: the incentive of many to perform poorly on cognitive tests after a brain injury.  There is strong reason to suspect that in many cases people given cognitive tests after a traumatic brain injury may not be trying as hard as they can on the tests. Some of the subjects (such as those injured in a car accident either inside or outside of a vehicle or those who fell in a work accident) may have pending law suits or pending benefit applications, and may think that good performance in cognitive tests may reduce their chance of being rewarded lots of money in a law suit or through a benefit application.  There are three ways in which a person might receive money after a traumatic brain injury:

(1) The person might engage in a law suit against a car driver that results in a large settlement such as an award of $100,000 or more.

(2) A person might apply for benefits under the Worker's Compensation program that provides monthly payments to workers injured on the job. 

(3) A person might apply for disability benefits that can be provided by the Social Security Administration if a worker has been judged to be disabled. 

Given all of these possibilities for potential financial gain after having a traumatic brain injury, it would not be surprising if many people who have had traumatic brain injury do not try as hard as they can on tests of their cognitive abilities. Many people who have traumatic brain injury may think that getting a high score on a cognitive test might damage their ability to get future benefits or future settlement money. 

Indeed, in the paper "Noncredible Explanations of Noncredible Performance on Symptom Validity Tests" we read quite a bit about reasons for thinking that some of those tested after traumatic brain injury might not have been trying as hard as they could.  Here are some excerpts:

"Invalid test results from poor effort or deliberate underachievement do not occur only in groups where there is an obvious external incentive to appear cognitively impaired, such as those seeking financial compensation for cognitive impairment. Even in groups previously assumed to be highly motivated to do well, effort may be poor, leading to invalid test results....Neuropsychologists now know that, in many different contexts, effort can be low to a degree that is sufficient to invalidate test results, especially if there is an incentive to appear impaired (e.g., Chafetz, 2008; Chafetz, Prentkowski, & Rao, 2011; Flaro, Green, & Robertson, 2007; Sullivan, May, & Galbally, 2007)....For people with an incentive to appear impaired and who fail effort tests, the observed test scores typically underestimate actual ability to a marked degree (Fox, 2011; Green, 2007; Meyers et al., 2011; Stevens et al., 2008). In groups of disability claimants or compensation claimants, including those who were already receiving financial disability benefits, it was found that about 30% of cases were not making enough effort to produce valid test results, and in the MTBI group, the figure was roughly 40% (Green et al., 2001)."

There are techniques that can be used to help weed out "memory malingering" in memory tests of those with traumatic brain injury. One technique is to include some easy tests that almost no one fails, and look for failure in such tests, which might be an indication of lack of effort. Another technique is to take the same tests at different intervals, taking the best result at any interval as being the more reliable indication of memory performance. 

Confounding factor #2: selection bias in picking subjects having traumatic brain injury. We must wonder whether the scientists selecting the subjects for papers on traumatic brain injury have a bias in looking for subjects with particularly bad memory problems, because they are hoping to get a result that fits in with the expectations of their colleagues and peer reviewers of their papers. We should look for any confession by the paper authors that they selected patients who had reported memory problems, rather than selecting random patients with traumatic brain injury, regardless of how good their memory was. Any such confession means that the paper may not be telling us about what percentage of traumatic brain injury patients suffer from similar problems. Similarly, if scientists select for some study only people who are gay alcoholics, they may report a high alcoholism rate among gay people; but we won't learn from such a method what percentage of gay people are alcoholic. 

Confounding factor #3: the group of those with traumatic brain injury may be less intelligent and more forgetful than an average group of non-injured people of the same size. While traumatic brain injury often occurs for reasons beyond any person's control, very often such injury happen because of some causal factor that might have been avoided by someone of excellent intelligence and memory. For example, many traumatic brain injury cases occur to reckless or intoxicated drivers, to people who failed to use seat belts, or people who were walking in some dangerous way, to people who were not wearing helmets while bicycling or riding motorcycles, to people who recklessly jaywalked, and so forth. We therefore have a strong reason to suspect that the group of all people with traumatic brain injuries may have had a below-average intelligence or a below-average memory, or both. Accordingly, showing  a small difference in memory or intelligence between those with traumatic brain injury and those without injury does not necessarily show that brains make minds or that brains store memories. 

Confounding factor #4: traumatic brain injury may degrade perception, muscle skills, eyesight and hearing skills without decreasing core intelligence and memory, in a way that causes lower scores on cognitive tests.  Cognitive tests are rarely pure measures of memory and intelligence. For example, a person with a damaged brain may have a damaged vision ability that degrades his performance on paper-based cognitive tests.  Also, a person with a damaged brain may have a damaged muscular ability that degrades his performance on any test requiring muscle skills such as filling in the right little circles on a test sheet. 

Confounding factor #5: incidents producing traumatic brain injury may increase apathy, depression or pain, resulting in lower scores on memory tests that are not caused by lower cognitive ability.  It is has often been reported that following a traumatic brain injury someone may experience pain, depression or an increased level of apathy. Such factors might tend to cause a person to perform more poorly on cognitive tests, for reasons other than cognitive deficits. 

Confounding factor #6: memory tests often involve subjective scores by analysts who may be biased towards giving negative scores to those with traumatic brain injury.  Some memory tests can be performed without any subjective analysis by an analyst. For example,  with the Famous Faces Test, a person either does or does not name the person shown in a photograph.  But in other widely used memory tests, there is a strong possibility of biased analysis. For example, there is an Autobiographical Memory Interview test in which an analyst rates how well a subject has performed when asked to recall incidents at various parts of his life.   But if an analyst knows that a subject has had traumatic brain injury, the analyst may be more prone to rate the subject's response poorly.  To avoid such a bias, a robust blinding protocol would be needed, so that the analyst cannot tell whether the subject had a brain injury.  But neuroscience experiments typically fail to use blinding protocols, and when they are used they are typically not robust protocols.  A robust blinding protocol for a memory test would be one in which analysts could not even see the people giving answers, as such people would often have physical signs of their injury. 

In light of these six confounding factors, under the hypothesis that the brain does not make the mind and does not store memories, we might still expect to see some modest differences in cognitive test scores between those with traumatic brain injuries and those without such differences.  But we should expect that the differences will usually not be terribly dramatic, and that differences might tend to show up sometimes and be absent in other cases.  Let us look at some scientific papers to see whether such an expectation is met. 

• The paper "Cognitive Impairment 3 Months After Moderate and Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Prospective Follow-Up Study" gives us the result of cognitive tests on people who had brain injuries as the result of events such as falls and traffic accidents.  In the Discussion section we read that after moderate Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), "most patients had a normal neuropsychological assessment," with no more than 1 score much below normal (or, to put it more technically, no more than 1 score below 1.5 standard deviations below the norm).  We read that "even after severe [brain] injury, normal performances were found in one third of patients." The authors say, "This was unexpected." We are told that the average total IQ score of 35 subjects with moderate traumatic brain injury was an above-average score of 109, and the average total IQ score of 26 subjects with severe traumatic brain injury was an above-average score of 103. 
• The paper "Neuropsychological functioning during the year
  following severe traumatic brain injury" studied cognitive functioning in 65 subjects who had severe brain damage, mostly after road traffic crashes. The patients were rated with a level of impairment of "mild" or "severe" on various measures, based on tests 6 months after the injury and 1 year after. Fewer than half of the subjects were rated as having "severe" impairment in memory performance tests taken at the 1-year mark. Only 9% of the subjects were rated as having "severe" impairment in one test of executive function at the 1-year mark, with a minority rated as having "severe" impairment in another test executive function at the 1-year mark. One test of attention at the 1-year mark result showed only 8% with a severe impairment, and another test of attention at the 1-year mark result showed only 28% with a severe impairment.  The average IQ of the brain-damaged subjects was 93, and we don't know whether this below-average result was caused by brain injury.  There is reason to suspect that the set of average people suffering from traffic accident brain damage may be slightly below average in IQ, given that those with higher IQ might tend to avoid such accidents. 
• The paper "Association of Traumatic Brain Injury With Dementia and Memory Decline in Older Adults in the United States" used a very large sample of 9,794 patients who had an assessment of traumatic brain injury.  The study says, "There was no significant relation between history of TBI [traumatic brain injury] with LOC [loss of consciousness] and memory score or memory decline." We read this: "In a nationally representative prospective cohort of older adults free of dementia at baseline, we did not find evidence for any long-term associations between history of TBI [traumatic brain injury] with LOC [loss of consciousness]  (of unknown frequency and severity) and risk of dementia over 14 years of follow-up. " We read that "similarly, decline in memory performance did not differ between participants with or without history of TBI with LOC." The authors state, "Our findings showing no association between TBI history with LOC and dementia are consistent with the results of several other recent studies looking at dementia, AD [Alzheimer's Disease], or AD biomarkers or neuropathology." 
•  The paper "Working memory after severe traumatic brain injury" tested 30 subjects who had almost all suffered brain damage due to high-velocity motor vehicle accidents. All of the patients had a post-traumatic amnesia (typically an inability to remember what happened a certain number of days before the accident). We are told that this post-traumatic amnesia lasted for at least seven days in all patients, and thar for 14 of 21 patients the post-traumatic amnesia lasted 30 days or more, "suggesting that the majority of patients sustained an extremely severe TBI [traumatic brain injury]." The paper has nice easy-to-read graphs comparing the difference in performance between these brain-injured patients and control subjects. For a "digit span" working memory test (Figure 1) and a "word span" working memory test (Figure 3), we see no major difference between the brain-damaged patients and control subjects. There is also no difference in a "Brown-Peterson task" test, when conducted with "no interference."  On some other tasks there is a substantial difference.  
• The paper "Working Memory after Traumatic Brain
  Injury in Children" tested working memory in eighty children with mild or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). The paper has nice easy-to-read graphs comparing the performance of the brain-injured with controls, and the first two of the graphs show no appreciable difference in performance in two working memory tests, even when comparing the severe cases with control (uninjured cases).  
• The paper "Central executive system impairment in traumatic brain injury" is one that does not give us a random sample of patients with traumatic brain injury, because the paper tells us this about its 64 patients: "Patients were selected for participating in the study if they complained of lack of attention, poor
  memory or loss of efficiency in everyday life." Despite such a selection bias, Table III of the paper tells us that the majority of the subjects had "normal performance" in long-term memory acquisition, long-term memory storage, long-term memory delayed recall, sustained attention and short-term memory, with an average of about 60% of the subjects being normal in such areas.  
• The paper "Working memory outcomes following traumatic
  brain injury in children: A systematic review with
  meta-analysis" presents no new experiments, but reviews existing papers on the topic. Using the acronym CE to mean "central executive," the paper says, "Further analyses revealed significant, moderate effect sizes for studies that utilized verbal CE tasks (k = 19, d = −0.56, 95% CI −0.71, −0.41, p < .001), but non-significant and small effect sizes for studies that utilized visuo-spatial CE tasks (k = 7, d = −0.26, 95% CI −0.60, 0.08, p = .13)." The paper notes that "Several studies, however, did not find deficits in CE [executive functions] in children and adolescents who had sustained TBI [traumatic brain injury]." The paper says, "The results of our meta-analysis, however,
  indicate that children with TBI do exhibit deficits, albeit small-to-moderate ones, in the PL[phonological loop] relative to controls, but not in the VSSP [visual-spatial sketchpad]." We read that "no relation was found between TBI severity and the two storage components," and that "In contrast to findings relating to the impact of TBI severity and to our expectations based on literature suggesting that the frontal lobes play a critical role in WM [working memory], no relationship was found between frontal injuries and WM [working memory] outcomes." 

These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the brain is not the storage place of memories, and that the mind is not the product of the brain. We see some differences in the cognitive scores of those who had traumatic brain injury and those who did not. But the differences are not very dramatic; they have a kind of "sometimes you see them and sometimes you don't" nature; and the differences seem to be largely absent in a large fraction of the people with traumatic brain injury.  The reported differences can be mostly explained by the six confounding factors listed at the beginning of this post.

As for evidence of damage of episodic memories or learned information after traumatic brain injury, the evidence for it seems to be scant and anecdotal. In general, school-learned knowledge and knowledge of personal experiences seems to survive well after traumatic brain injury. It is sometimes reported that after a traumatic brain injury a person may forget what happened on the day of the injury or for a few days beforehand. It is often said in the literature that people have difficulty recalling only memories acquired a short time before the injury, not older memories. A 2018 paper ("Retrograde Autobiographical Memory From PTA Emergence to Six-Month Follow-Up in Moderate to Severe Traumatic Brain Injury")

says this::

 "There is evidence to suggest that retrograde autobiographical memory deficits exist after severe TBI, although there have been no prospective studies of autobiographical memory in a representative sample of moderate to severe cases recruited from hospital admissions...The overwhelming focus on memory following TBI [traumatic brain injury] has been on anterograde amnesia, and there has been very little research on retrograde amnesia [people losing memories acquired before the injury]... A deficit in retrograde autobiographical memory performance among individuals with TBI has been found in a handful of studies." 

Judging from such lack of study, and such weak evidence, it would seem that people losing memories or knowledge after traumatic brain injury is not a very big problem.  The study quoted above tries to show evidence of memory difficulties in patients with traumatic brain injury, but finds only minor score differences between such patients and control subjects. The minor differences can easily be explained by referring to the six confounding factors listed at the top of this post. In this case the traumatic brain injury patients studied were all patients who had already been diagnosed as having post-traumatic amnesia of at least seven days, before they were tested. So the study tells us that patients with memory difficulties may have memory difficulties, but it does not tell us about what percentage of people with traumatic brain injuries have serious memory difficulties. Also, the study failed to use a robust blinding protocol. We are told that there were two analysts doing the memory tests (apparently only one blind to whether the subjects had brain injury), and that the scores given were based on a discussion between the two analysts.  That is not a robust blinding protocol, and knowledge of whether the subjects had a brain injury may have affected the ratings given in the memory tests. 

Claims that minds are produced by brains and claims that brains store memories are examples of belief traditions passed on from one generation to the next. The latest generation of college students to adopt such beliefs does not adopt them from a long unbiased independent study of the facts, but as an act of social conformity in which people believe as they are told to believe, like some Sunday school student trustingly accepting whatever belief tenets are taught to him. 

She Has Photographic Memory and Severe Unmanageable Epilepsy

The normal facts of human memory performance are sufficient to discredit claims that memory formation and memory recall are brain activities. There is not a neuroscientist who can credibly explain how a brain can store a detailed memory.  Nothing known to neuroscientists can explain how learned information or experiences could be translated into brain states or synapse states. Neuroscientists claim that memories are stored in synapses, but we know that the proteins in synapses have average lifetimes of only a few weeks, 1000 times shorter than the maximum length of time that humans can remember things (more than 50 years).  We know the kind of things  (in products that humans manufacture) that make possible an instant retrieval of stored information: things such as sorting, addressing, indexing, and read/write heads.  The human brain has no such things.  Humans such as actors playing the role of Hamlet can recall large bodies of text with 100% accuracy, but such recall should be impossible using a brain in which each chemical synapses only transmits a signal with 50% accuracy or less.  Brains are too slow, too noisy and too unstable to be the source of human memory recall which can occur at blazing fast speeds with 100% accuracy. 

I discuss many cases of exceptional human memory in my posts here and here, cases of people with memory far beyond that of the average person. Every additional piece of evidence establishing extraordinary human memory abilities is an additional nail in the coffin of the doctrine that brains store memories. Given all the reasons for thinking the brain is too slow, noisy and unstable to account for human memory performance which can be very fast and very accurate, the credibility of the claim that brains store memories is inversely proportional to the highest observed speed, accuracy and depth of human memory performance. 

Therefore we should note well a case reported last year of a young woman with a very sick brain but memory so accurate it can be justly called photographic or near-photographic. The case is reported in the paper "The Possibility of Eidetic Memory in a Patient Report of Epileptogenic Zone in Right Temporo-Parietal-Occipital Cortex," authored by Brent M. Berry, Laura R. Miller, Meaghan Berns and  Michal Kucewicz.  Neuroscientists seem to like to make it as hard as possible for people to find out about cases of extraordinary human memory; and so they like to use the term "eidetic" (a word few people understand) rather than use easily-understandable terms such as "photographic" or "superhuman-seeming."  I will use the more easily-intelligible term "photographic memory" for this case, which, as we will see, is memory performance so good it is like having a photograph of 300 word pairs in your "mind's eye."

We read in the paper about a young woman once plagued by seizures:

"The patient did have a history of a fall from a bicycle at age 11 with a head injury without loss of consciousness but had about ten minutes of amnesia. The patient also had a history of depression, anxiety (for which patient was treated with citalopram and sertraline due to minimal interaction with anti-seizure medications), and bulimia, as well as osteoporosis. The patient began having events at age 6. These involved staring and inability to respond for 15 to 20 s, although she thought that she did not entirely lose awareness. These occurred about five to six times per day. She had an MRI head scan which was reportedly normal, but an EEG was reportedly abnormal. Based on an abnormal EEG and the description of her events, she was started on carbamazepine, and she stopped having these events which were diagnosed by a primary care physician to be focal seizures with impaired awareness."

We read that the seizure medicine had some limited success, although eventually the seizures returned.  We read, "At age 15, the patient had recurrent seizures with staring, sometimes with inability to respond and other times with preserved responsiveness."  Over the next eight years doctors switched her seizure medicine a few times, but the woman "continued to have events,"  We read that "At age 23, her seizures of the same type (staring with or without loss of awareness and with or without epigastric sensation lasting 10–60 s) started occurring much more frequently (up to every day or multiple per day)."  Seizures are like electrical storms in the brain. We read that around this age the young woman "continued to have seizures from a few times per week up to a few times per day."

As part of being thoroughly evaluated at age 24, the young woman had a variety of cognitive tests. The paper tells us that at age 19 the woman had her verbal IQ measured as 162, which is way, way higher than the average of 100.  We are told that the patient achieved superhuman-seeming performance on a memory test:

" This research protocol instead of using short word lists used 300 paired associates. Interestingly, the patient’s recall was at 99% (298 out of 300). The task itself involved being asked to study a list of word pairs and then were later cued with one word from each pair, selected at random. The patient was then instructed to vocalize the partner of each cue word."

You may realize how impressive this is by considering the result below involving 28 subjects doing a similar test:

"Twenty-eight participants with intracranial electrodes for seizure monitoring participated in a verbal paired-associates task (Fig.1A,B). Participants studied 216... word pairs and successfully recalled 34.8...words with a mean response time of 1908...ms."

Recalling 298 out of 300 words (99%) in a word-pair recall test is obviously memory performance very radically higher than recalling a mere 34 words out of 216 (which is merely 16%). 

We read this discussion of the most extraordinary memory performance by this female subject under a variety of tests:

"What was more interesting was that the patient was able to recite the paired words without the cue prompts (this was true for the vast majority of word pairs which the patient was able to recall with prompt). This was not a temporary or short-term memory phenomenon, as the patient was tested with similar length lists across the next 3 days and 7 days, obtaining results no less than 97% (Table 1, Scheme 2). The lists were randomly generated for each session using words from the same pool as the previous lists so that the memorization of default lists was not an issue. Extended testing beyond any of her neuropsychological clinical testing included PAL testing sessions four times (each made up of 12 word pairs encoded and then given a chance for retrieval repeated 25 times in what amounts to approximately a 45 min session). So, in total, the patient had four assessments of 300 word pairs each for 1200 word pairs on a single day. Researchers, after noticing remarkable performance, went off protocol and went beyond immediate short-term assessment to two more sessions of longer-term memory, asking the patient to simply write out the word pairs that she could remember from the immediate PAL session #1 (the first 300 word pairs). The patient was tested in this fashion 24 h later and then 168 h later. She was able to write out greater than 95% of the words in each session (see Table 1, Scheme 2). Given that this occurred inside the context of acute stress (surgery planning), the patient was also re-tested in a very similar fashion several months later after equilibration to her neurostimulator and had similar results (achieving greater than 97% on immediate assessment of massive word pair sets and greater than 95% on longer-term assessments involving writing out 300 words from one of the sessions on day 0)."

The paper gives us this chart of near-perfect performance in several types of memory tests:

The patient had her brain scanned during some of these tasks. Contrary to the neuroscience dogma that the left brain is more actively involved in language use, the brain scan showed that "No appreciable left cerebral language-related activation was seen with three of the four tasks."

Apparently the doctors were never able to get the young woman's seizures under control, because the abstract refers to her as someone with "medically refractory epilepsy."  That means epilepsy when you have seizures doctors cannot stop. A case such as this helps to discredit the dogma that the brain is the cause of human memory. If this dogma were true, there is only one  thing we should expect to occur in a patient with a very sick brain plagued by the "electrical storms" of seizures, and that is below normal or greatly inferior memory performance, not vastly superior memory performance. 

A story as interesting as this should have been the lead item on one day's Science News.  For many years I have studied the daily "Science News" feeds every day, and I never heard a word about this case, which I only discovered through a Google Scholar search using the phrase "eidetic memory." It seems that when scientists do studies that they claim support their dogmas, we hear all about such stories in our daily Science News feeds and in science magazines such as Quanta. But when scientists produce evidence that defies the prevailing dogmas of scientists, then we are unlikely to hear about such a study.

When neuroscientists want you to remember a case, they give some type of nickname or tag that allows a case name to be conveniently discussed.  So, for example,  if neuroscientists want you to remember a patient with initials of BT, they may refer repeatedly in their paper to "patient BT." But in this paper I have quoted, we have no identification that allows us to conveniently refer to the astonishing subject.  Since the main paper authors are from Minneapolis, Minnesota (in the United States),  we may presume the patient lives in Minnesota.  For lack of a letter phrase to describe this woman, let's call this woman the Minnesota Marvel.  Like the case of Mollie Fancher and the case of the French civil servant with almost no brain and other cases discussed here, the case of this Minnesota Marvel should be studied by  every neuroscientist. 

Wishing to portray the human mind as having powers that are only weak, some materialists deny the reality of photographic memory (also called eidetic memory), despite a wealth of evidence that it exists. 

The paper here documents an extraordinary "page at a glance" reading ability in two "super reader" subjects, an ability that may be related to photographic memory. We read this:

"In the test situation, the 15-year-old girl read a 6,000 word essay from Brown's 'Efficient Reading' at a rate of 80,000 words per minute with 100 percent comprehension. The 12-year-old girl attained a rate of 54,825 words per minute with 90 percent comprehension on a more difficult essay."

In the paper here we read this: "Gifted rapid readers (who can maintain 70 per cent or above comprehension at rates above 20,000 w.p.m. [words per minute] on Browns workbook Efficient Reading ) appear in her classes at a rate of 1 out of 100 or 1 per cent of the trained population."  Later we read this conclusion after tests were done: "The three subjects in this study did achieve at least the above rates of 20,000 w.p.m. with 70 per cent or better comprehension on an article from Brown’s Efficient Reading before impartial reading experts."

Page 158 of the document here quotes a 19th century newspaper report told of a young girl (Ethel Carroll) with such exceptional memory for speech and music that it was like photographic memory : 

"The first time that the child showed her phenomenal gift was at the age of eleven months. At that time she was taken to see one of Hoyt's plays at the Macdonough Theatre. Upon returning to her home she surprised every one by repeating, word for word, one of the popular songs. From that time until now little Ethel has been a regular playgoer. Now, at the age of four, her memory has developed so remarkably that it is a common thing for her after seeing a new play to sing, without a mistake or the least sign of hesitation, song after song that she had never heard before. She can also repeat the lines of the play with wonderful correctness. The child has a retentive memory for names and dates. In spite of the fact that large numbers of people see her daily, drawn by curiosity, she never forgets the name of any one who is introduced to her, and can tell even the exact day when she first met them, though it may be months after. Recently her wonderful memory was put to a severe test at a concert recital in Oakland. After the performance she was asked if she remembered a certain recitation on the programme, remarkable alike for its length and peculiar phrasing. She had never heard it before, but with a confident smile and a certain enchanting carelessness of manner she recited the entire piece without a break."

A Biologist Calls "Orthodox Science" a "Religion" and "Belief System"

A recent Substack post by cell/molecular biologist Mike Klymkowsky is entitled "Orthodox Science as a (mostly good) religion." He states this:

"As it turns out, I found myself moving to another religion - science, particularly the scientific tradition that emerged in Europe, a tradition open to, and built upon the contributions of many peoples around the globe. The orthodox scientific gospel has been widely embraced and has served as the driver of technological advancement, including dramatic effects on many aspects of human well-being. 'Orthodox Science' embraces a belief system based on the assumption that we can understand the universe exclusively in naturalistic terms, there is no magic, no supernatural forces involved."

What Klymkowsky has called "Orthodox Science" is better described as Darwinist materialism.  It is a creed that is very popular among scientists (particularly biologists), but the creed is not actually science in the sense of facts established by observation.  The creed of Darwinist materialism can be stated like this:

1. "Earthly biology can be explained entirely by naturalistic explanations such as natural selection and random mutations."
2. "The human mind can be explained entirely by brain activity."
3. "Charles Darwin provided some brilliant insight that eliminated the need to postulate any design or purpose in nature."
4. "Life appeared on our planet purely because of lucky random combinations of chemicals."
5. "Everything is pretty-well explained by science professors who assume there is just matter and energy; so there's no need to believe in anything like souls, spirits, or the paranormal."

Although constantly marketed and branded simply as “science,” Darwinist materialism seems to involve a very large element of faith. In particular, it has never been proven that any one complex visible organism or any of its organs or appendages or cell types has ever appeared mainly because of so-called natural selection, or natural selection and random mutations. We can imagine no mathematically credible scenario under which so-called natural selection could produce the fine-tuned protein molecules upon which life depends. An average human protein molecule has a length of about 470 amino acids, and getting an arrangement of such amino acids by chance to produce the functionality of the protein molecule requires an arrangement with a chance likelihood of less than 1 in 10 to the two-hundredth power (even if you assume only half of the amino acid sequence has to match the actual sequence of amino acids in the protein). It would seem that such "crippled by small changes" molecules cannot appear through any gradually rewarded "each step yields a benefit" kind of process, because half-versions or quarter-versions of such molecules are useless. Yet Darwinist materialism wishes us to accept natural selection as an explanation for most or almost all biology. Since there seems to be a very large article of faith here, it would seem that we should at least be calling Darwinist materialism a kind of faith-based ideology.

But would it be correct to go even farther, and brand Darwinist materialism as a kind of religion? A supporter of such a belief system would immediately dismiss such an idea as an absurdity. He would vigorously argue: religion is some belief in God, and Darwinist materialism does not entail that.

But such a definition of “religion” is too narrow. Let's consider Eastern religions. These include Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. There are certainly major forms of each of these religions that do not require any belief in a deity. One can be either an atheist or a theist, and still follow either Taoism, Confucianism, or Buddhism. In a religion such as Buddhism, there are some sects that pray to some entity that might be called a deity or the equivalent of a deity, but there are other sects that do not do that. Consider also a modern American religion such as Scientology. Again we have a religion which does not have any belief in a deity at the core of its teachings. As a Scientologist, you can be either an atheist or a theist.

It seems, therefore, that defining religion as some belief in a deity or some system of worship is too narrow a definition of the word “religion.” Scholars have offered many conflicting definitions of “religion,” some of which are too narrow to cover some of the known religions such as Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. We need a definition that seems to cover almost all cases of religious belief.  One such definition was given by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. He 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. This definition covers Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Scientology, religions which stem from authority figures such as Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, the writers of the Bible, Lao-Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Confucius, and L. Ron Hubbard. Interestingly, using the same definition of religion, it seems we should also classify Darwinist materialism as a religion. It is a fundamental way of looking at the nature of life, stemming from the teachings of an authority figure (Charles Darwin).

The idea that Darwinist materialism may be a religion should not seem unreasonable when we consider the activities of two young men, Rod and Bill. Rod decides to become a minister in a church. He is indoctrinated for years in a regimented minister-schooling environment in which complete allegiance to the belief system of his teachers is demanded. He then spends lots of time standing before assemblies of other people (parishioners), preaching the teachings of his belief system. Using lots of specialized jargon, Rod may also spend a lot of time in scholarly writing to advance the beliefs of his church, contributing to things such as religion journals and theological books. If a heretic arises in his church to dispute the accepted teachings, Rod may chasten such a person by criticizing his belief deviance.

Bill, however, decides to become a professor of evolutionary biology. He is indoctrinated for years in a regimented professor-schooling environment in which complete allegiance to the belief system of his teachers is demanded. He then spends lots of time standing before assemblies of other people (university students), preaching the teachings of his belief system. Using lots of specialized jargon, Bill may also spend a lot of time in scholarly writing to advance the beliefs of his scholastic tribe, contributing to things such as science journals and science books. If a heretic arises to dispute the accepted teachings, such as someone suggesting there may be purposeful design in living things, Bill may chasten such a person by criticizing his belief deviance.  Just as Rod has his miracle stories to tell, Bill has quite a few stories to tell that we might call "miracle stories," stories involving miracles of chance.

Given all these similarities, it seems both Bill and Rod are kind of spear-carriers for a particular belief tribe, products of a sociological structure that encourages regimentation of belief and strongly sanctions deviations from its orthodoxy of belief norms. In this light, the idea that Darwinist materialism may actually be a religion does not seem too far-fetched. Darwinist materialism has a sociological and authoritarian structure strongly resembling the sociological and authoritarian structure of a religion, with evolutionary biology professors and neuroscientists acting like some new priesthood, and members of the National Academy of Sciences or Nobel laureates having a higher authority (just as bishops or cardinals have a higher authority than priests).  The many similarities between scientific academia and the Roman Catholic church are discussed in my post "Why Scientific Academia Is Like an Organized Religion."

In the visual below, we see an authority figure. Is it a minister, a priest, or a scientist?  It's hard to guess, because they act in a such a similar way. 

It is true that the adherents of Darwinist materialism constantly try to brand their belief system as "science," and deny that such a system is a religion.  A religion which positions itself as "science" can be called a stealth religion or a surreptitious religion. 

In his article Mike Klymkowsky tries to "have it both ways." Not candid enough to simply confess that what people such as himself are preaching is a religion and not science,   Klymkowsky tries to get you to believe that it is both science and a religion.  In his article Klymkowsky makes some generalizations about contemporary science that are not correct.  For example, he states this:  "A key component of Scientific Orthodoxy is that its adherents are constrained to talk about observable objects and effects, and to produce models that generate unambiguous and numerically defined and verifiable predictions."  

No, there is no such tendency or constraint within mainstream scientific academia.  Physicists and cosmologists spend endless hours writing about dark matter, dark energy and primordial cosmic inflation, none of which have ever been observed.  Biologists spend endless hours writing about things such as Darwinian macroevolution and a neural storage of memories, which have not been observed. Small-scale changes in gene pools called microevolution have been observed, but no one has observed Darwinian macroevolution.  And no one has ever found a memory stored in a brain by microscopically examining brain tissue.  Theories such as dark matter, dark energy, Darwinism and the theory that brains make minds do not "generate unambiguous and numerically defined and verifiable predictions."   What Klymkowsky calls "Orthodox Science" is a mixture of well-established theories such as the kinetic theory of gases and the theory of gravitation (which do yield precise numerical predictions that match reality) and also quite a few other theories and beliefs that do not yield precise numerical predictions that have been verified, and have not been well-established by observations.  

Klymkowsky makes clear that his religion (which he calls "Orthodox Science") includes no moral component. He states this:

"The principles of Orthodox Science are also abandoned when its disciples start holding forth on moral or ethical issues. Ethics and morals are not part of the Orthodox Science system."

Darwinist materialism is a moral disaster. To properly understand how great a moral disaster it has been,  read my post "The Poisonous Effects of the 'Struggle for Life' Ideology." Darwinism helped pave the way for bloodshed, cruelty and oppression in a variety of ways:

(1) Creating the myth that human origins had been scientifically explained, Darwinism helped paved the way for totalitarian atheism, which in Russia, China and Cambodia proved to be history's most enormous engine of mass murder and oppression, cropping up many tens of millions of dead bodies at the hands of people like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, along with millions of others who were put in the living hell of places such as the Soviet gulag prison camps. 

(2) Creating the very absurd myth that humans did not fundamentally differ from animals, a ludicrous claim taught by Darwin himself, Darwinism paved the way for people to slaughter their fellow men while thinking they were doing something not much worse than killing animals. 

(3) Centered around phrases such as "struggle for existence," "the preservation of favored races," and "survival of the fittest," Darwinism provided an ideological underpinning for systems such as Hitlerism, Leninism and Maoism that were based on the cruelest exploitation and oppression of the weak by the strong. 

(4) Darwinist materialism has often been taught by free-will denialists teaching the poisonous nonsense of determinism,  a doctrine that offered wrongdoers the idea that they were not to blame for their crimes. 

All of this was so unnecessary, because a proper analysis of biology would have been centered upon things such as cooperation and harmony and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence, which are all necessary in mountainous amounts for organisms and ecosystems to exist. A careful study of such things will tend to lead you in the opposite direction of some emphasis on a brutal "struggle for existence," and also lead you away from all boasts of understanding how we got such marvels. But rather than studying the gigantic levels of cooperation and harmony and coordination and organization and component teamwork and mutual interdependence within nature, which were things defying his boasts, Darwin shunned a study of such key facets of nature, focusing on only things that fitted in with his explanatory boasts.  

If you do something that biology specialists such as  Klymkowsky almost always fail to do, which is to make a long and very diligent study of brain physical shortfalls, extraordinary medical case histories, human minds, human mental capabilities,  and human mental experiences ( in all their strange variety), you will find such a study tends to lead you towards the belief that mentally humans are a reality utterly beyond the explanations of biologists.  Reading the posts of this blog (and reading the long series of posts here while continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right) are a good way to get started on such a study. The person making such a study (and studies of additional topics such as cosmic fine-tuning) will tend to end up thinking that every human is a soul to be respected, a soul with some transcendent source.  The person failing to make such a study may be left trapped in the conformist enclaves  of Klymkowsky's morality-absent religion, where he may keep telling himself silly morally destructive claims such as that humans are "animals" as Klymkowsky claims, or that humans are mere aggregations of atoms.  We should not be surprised to learn about massive levels of dishonesty all over the place within the religion that Klymkowsky suggests has no place for morality.  You should not expect rigorous honesty from those saying that ethics and morality are not part of their religion. 

Klymkowsky tells us that "Orthodox Science holds, rather dogmatically, to a simple set of Popperian principles to guide the behavior of its acolytes...It presumes that its disciples are being honest when describing their observations, experiments, and interpretation...."  Conversely, in an interview  this week a physicist suggests such a presumption may be naive and unrealistic. He says this:

"We, as a community of scientists, are so obsessed with publishing papers — there is this mantra 'publish or perish,' and it is the number one thing that is taught to you, as a young scientist, that you must publish a lot in very high profile journals. And that is your number one goal in life. And what this is causing is an environment where scientific fraud can flourish unchecked. Because we are not doing our job, as scientists. We don’t have time to cross-check each other, we don’t have time to take our time, we don’t have time to be very slow and patient with our own research, because we are so focused with publishing as many papers as possible. So we have seen, over the past few years, an explosion in the rise of fraud. And different kinds of fraud. There is the outright fabrication — the creating of data out of whole cloth. And then there’s also what I call 'soft fraud' — lazy science, poorly done science. Massaging your results a little bit just so you can achieve a publishable result. That leads to a flooding of just junk, poorly done science."

In this site's posts you will find very many examples of such junk science, mainly produced by neuroscientists, who these days tend to have very poor research habits. 

Astray Authorities #3

 Below is the latest in a series of short videos I am making. 

No One Is Actually Doing Thought-Reading by Scanning Brains or Reading Brain Signals

Elon Musk's company Neuralink has recently announced that it has implanted a chip in a human brain. The press has many an untrue headline about this, such as headlines talking about mind-reading brain chips. No one has done any such thing as reading thoughts by scanning brains. 

You might expect to get the real scoop on this topic by reading an article on it in the prestigious journal Nature. But a recent article in that journal misinforms us on this topic. The article is entitled  "Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip: what scientists think of first human trial." We read this:

"Neuroscientists have long argued that data from individual neurons are needed for sophisticated thought-decoding. But research indicates that averaged signals can allow decoding of complex cognitive processes, such as inner speech."

No, that isn't true. It is impossible to figure out what a person is thinking by scanning his brain signals or brain states.  The quote above has a link to the paper "A high-performance neuroprosthesis for speech decoding and avatar control." The paper describes a device that helps decode what a paralyzed woman is trying to say. But that paper states this:

"For speech decoding, the participant was presented with a sentence as a text prompt on a screen and was instructed to silently attempt to say the sentence after a visual go cue. Specifically, she attempted to silently speak the sentence without vocalizing any sounds. This differs from imagined or inner speech because she was trying to engage her articulators to the best of her ability, although substantial orofacial weakness prevents her from naturally mouthing words."

The paper describes a woman paralyzed so badly that she is unable to make intelligible speech. What the device was doing was responding to muscle signals that occur when a person is trying to speak. Picking up such signals is not an example of reading thoughts from brain signals. As the quote above confesses, it is not an example of "inner speech."

The Nature article has misled us by claiming that some decoding of brain signals can "allow decoding of complex cognitive processes, such as inner speech." The first paper it cites in support of this claim denies that claim, as the quote above shows. 

Besides having a link to the paper above, the Nature quote above also had a reference to the paper "Generalizable spelling using a speech neuroprosthesis in an individual with severe limb and vocal paralysis." That paper is also a paper that relies on attempted speech in a severely paralyzed person, rather than pure thought that makes no attempt at muscle movement. We read this in the paper: 

"Here, we demonstrate that real-time decoding of silent attempts to say 26 alphabetic code words from the NATO phonetic alphabet can enable highly accurate and rapid spelling in a clinical-trial participant (ClinicalTrials.gov; NCT03698149) with paralysis and anarthria. During training sessions, we cued the participant to attempt to produce individual code words and a hand-motor movement, and we used the simultaneously recorded cortical activity from an implanted 128-channel electrocorticography (ECoG) array to train classification and detection models. After training, the participant performed spelling tasks in which he spelled out sentences in real time with a 1152-word vocabulary using attempts to silently say the corresponding alphabetic code words. A beam-search algorithm used predicted code-word probabilities from a classification model to find the most likely sentence given the neural activity while automatically inserting spaces between decoded words. To initiate spelling, the participant silently attempted to speak, and a speech-detection model identified this start signal directly from ECoG activity.".

The second paper cited by the Nature article also gives no support for the article's claim that some decoding of brain signals can "allow decoding of complex cognitive processes, such as inner speech." To the contrary, what we have is another case of picking up attempted muscle movements. 

The ideologically neutral diagram below may help you understand the situation better:

What the two papers above are doing are picking up brain signals from the motor cortex. Such papers do nothing to show that the Mind Core (thought, recall, will, imagination, self-hood, etc.) comes from the brain. Virtually no one disputes that there can be increased activity in the motor cortex area of the brain when someone is engaging in muscle activity or attempting to move his muscles. 

Real thought-reading using neural devices would require picking up something when no one was attempting to move their muscles. Such a thing has never been done. There have been some misleading "mashup"-technique studies that have included attempts to read brain signals and also the use of computer databases and AI (artificial intelligence). Such a mixture can be an extremely confusing "smoke and mirrors" affair in which results coming not from thought-reading by brain scans are mixed up with some brain scanning activity, with the results misleadingly passed off as some breakthrough in "neural mind reading." For a discussion of some of the resulting misleading studies see my two posts below:  

Misleading Tricks of the Latest Claim of Mind-Reading by Brain Scans

Suspect Shenanigans When You Hear Claims of "Mind Reading" Technology

Elon Musk's company Neuralink may produce something of benefit to paralyzed people, but brain implants will never produce any great benefit to the general public. The brain is not the source of your thoughts or your imagination, and is not the storage place of your memories. The idea that people will be able to enhance their intelligence or learn more quickly by brain implants is an idea based on the incorrect idea that your brain is the source of your mind, and the incorrect idea that the brain is the storage place of human memories. To discover the reasons why those ideas cannot be correct, read the posts on this blog. 

I read that Neuralink is now claiming that a human with a Neuralink chip implant is controlling a mouse "by thoughts alone." To the contrary, all that is occurring is such a chip picking up intended muscle movements, which are not thoughts. Previously we got from Neuralink or one of its chief investors the inaccurate claim that no monkey had died from one of Neuralink's chip implants. A story in Wired showed that the claim was not correct, and details the specifics of how monkeys had died from Neuralink implants. In November the Reuters news agency reported that "Four U.S. lawmakers have asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Elon Musk committed securities fraud by allegedly misleading investors about the safety of a brain implant being developed by the billionaire’s firm Neuralink, according to a letter to the regulator."

In the history of neuroscience there have been endless misstatements. They have included the following:

• The very massive current occurrence of misleading university press releases, very often announcing new research and making claims about such research not matching anything shown by the research (with the press release claims very often not matching anything even claimed in the corresponding scientific paper). 
• The extensive use of deceptive brain scan visuals, which "lie with colors" by using misleading coloring effects in which very tiny brain activity differences are depicted in bright colors, leading people to think that particular regions of the brain "light up" and are much more active during certain cognitive activities, when in reality the difference is only about 1 part in 200 (the type of difference we might expect from random fluctuations, even if brains do not produce minds and do not store memories). 
• The massive occurrence in scientific papers of inaccurate citations, claiming that some paper showed or supported some claim that it never showed or supported, typically made by scientists who never read the paper they are citing (a scientific paper estimated that only 20% of people citing a scientific paper actually read the paper they are citing). 
• Inaccurate descriptions of what was stated by people who were brain zapped to try to produce an out-of-body experience, in which the subjects hesitating and ambiguous responses (often in response to "leading" questions) are described as reports of an out-of-body experience, when such a report was not given by the subject. 
• Deceptive papers in which purely software implementations are passed off as things that help to explain human memory, by means of outrageous language abuses in which sections or layers of software code are improperly given anatomical names corresponding to parts of the human brain, and in which tricky equivocation occurs involving mixing up the human definition of memory (involving mental experiences) and the computer definition of memory (not involving mental experiences). 
• A very large number of misstatements and misrepresentations by psychiatrists, very carefully documented in Peter Gøtzsche’s "Critical Psychiatry Textbook" that can be read here, with the misstatements often occurring to try to bolster weakly supported or unfounded claims that various types of mental illness are caused by brain states rather than life histories or socioeconomic conditions or personal life conditions. 
• The massive current occurrence of both misleading titles in scientific papers and misleading claims in scientific paper abstracts, with paper titles very commonly making claims not matching anything established by the research in the main body of the paper, and abstracts also frequently claiming the research showed something it failed to show. 
• Extremely misleading statements about the quality of evidence for spiritual and psychical phenomena that tend to contradict neuroscientist dogmas, typically made by people who have never seriously studied such evidence, often claiming very large bodies of solid evidence gathered over decades or centuries are "no evidence," combined with misleading stereotypical, mudslinging or gaslighting characterizations of the people who have reported such phenomena.
• Many decades of poor research practices in neuroscience, such as the use of way-too-small sample sizes of fewer than ten subjects, failure to follow blinding protocols, lack of pre-registration, and the use of an unreliable "see-whatever-you-want-to-see" method for trying to measure animal recollection ("freezing behavior" estimation) rather than the reliable measurement techniques discussed here.  
• The repetition by neuroscientists of utterly absurd claims that it takes hours for a human to form a long-lasting memory, claims that are contrary to every person's experience, which is that permanent memories can form instantly, with the claims being made because the people making such claims want us to believe that memories are formed through synapse strengthening known to take at least hours.  
• The frequent appearance of highly speculative "brain functional map" charts suggesting some knowledge that particular parts of the brain produce cognitive functions, suggestions that are unwarranted (see here for evidence against one of the standard elements of such charts). 
• The extremely severe lie by materialists that a split-brain operation (severing the nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain) results in two separate human minds, contrary to the facts that no such thing occurs, and that such an operation leaves people with a single self.   
• The use in neuroscience experiments of tortuous extremely convoluted analysis pathways in which brain scan data or biological data is passed through a series of programming iterations, often involving poorly documented gobbledygook code that no one but the original programmer could have ever understood, with the effect of the rigmarole iterations being some "black box" manipulation that not even the original programmer can now understand, and the resulting mess (perhaps having some desired pattern) being passed off as some enhancement of the original data, even though there is every season to suspect the result is a corruption, distortion or contortion of the original data. 

In general, you should be suspicious about some neuroscientist trumpeting his own research, because that person is a vested interest who stands to gain financially and career-wise the more you believe his or her claims. And when corporations issue  neuroscience-related claims that are controlled by the desire of such corporations to maintain high stock prices and the desire to attract more investors, then perhaps you should be suspicious to the second power. 

The erring Nature article I quoted above is not the only erroneous article Nature has published making the false claim that minds are being read by brain devices.  A recent Nature article has the misleading title "Mind-reading devices are revealing the brain’s secrets," a claim it provides no evidence to support.  The article starts out like this:

"Moving a prosthetic arm. Controlling a speaking avatar. Typing at speed. These are all things that people with paralysis have learnt to do using brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) — implanted devices that are powered by thought alone."

No, none of these things is "powered by thought alone." They are all devices reading brain signals to detect muscle movement attempts rather than pure thoughts. 

We hear that the Broca's region supposedly involved in speech contains no actual information about words:

"They also found that Broca’s area, a brain region thought to have a role in speech production and articulation, contained little to no information about words, facial movements or units of sound called phonemes. 'It seems surprising that it’s not really involved in speech production per se,' says Willett."

The article makes this claim, which is not backed up any good research:

"His team developed a BCI implant capable of generating speech in real time when participants either whisper or imagine speaking without moving their lips or making a sound. The brain signals picked up by the BCI device in both whispered and imagined speech were similar to those for spoken speech. They share areas and patterns of activity, but are not the same, explains Herff."

In the quote above we have a reference to the paper here which has the misleading title "Real-time synthesis of imagined speech processes from minimally invasive recordings of neural activity." We have a study involving a single subject who was not paralyzed. The study has got brain wave readings of the subject while she was told to speak, whisper, and just imagine. From the combination of all three readings, some better-than-chance prediction is made about the words spoken or whispered or imagined.  But since data is being gathered in all three ways, no claim can be made to have read pure thoughts. And we don't know whether the subject kind of halfway-mouthed some of the words during the cases of supposedly "just imagining."  The authors refer to "the inherent difficulty of knowing how the participant internally performed imagined speaking,"  Exactly: we don't know whether the claimed "imagined speaking" really was pure thought.  

The Nature article's claim that the "BCI implant" was "capable of generating speech in real time when  participants either whisper or imagine speaking without moving their lips" is not correct. The study merely guessed about the words its single subject had spoken, whispered or imagined, and made guesses with a success rate slightly above chance,  a result we might expect to get by chance given 100 experiments trying such a thing.  You can plausibly explain the reported results easily without supposing any actual reading of thoughts, by simply imagining that the single subject faintly vocalized a few of the small number of words she was asked to imagine.  

Since the experiment was a rapid-fire affair, with very quick responses required, an experiment requiring responses to 100 random words in a period of only five minutes, it would have been very plausible that a subject might have done such a thing, despite being told to only imagine the displayed word. Reliable neuroscience experiments involving correlation effects require at least 15 subjects, and an experiment based on data from a single subject should not be taken very seriously. The authors claim that their one-subject experiment "demonstrates real-time speech synthesis from imagined neural activity" is unfounded.

What kind of design would a study like this need to have to provide credible evidence of thought-reading by a neural device? For one thing, you would need to test at least 15 subjects. Also, steps could be taken to prevent subjects from doing something like attempts at muscle movements in tests in which pure thought was required. You could have the subjects wear a mouthpiece that would prevent muscle movement in the mouth. Or you could have subjects wear in their mouth a device that would detect faint muscle movements or attempted muscle movements when a subject was supposed to be engaging in pure thought. Whenever such a detection was made, that response would be removed from the data, with a warning flashed not to whisper the displayed word. You would also make sure to have a decent time interval between each word test, such as 30 seconds. You might have the display of each word preceded by a warning such as "Now make sure not to speak the next word -- just THINK it."

Don't be fooled by claims of mind-reading technology in the science news. Today's "Science News" pages and sites are a boastful cesspool of glitzy goofy semi-true clickbait-infected razzle-dazzle razzmatazz that largely serve to promote the vested interests of corporations, elitist institutions, click miners and glory  seekers. 

Postscript: In an article we learn about the person who has received the first Neuralink chip. He is a person paralyzed from the shoulders down, who can speak and move his head normally (as we can see from the video here).  We read that he could play Civilization VI (a PC strategy game) for hours before having the brain chip implanted. There are a variety of ways in which technology could pick up intended game movements from such a patient.  Without even having a chip inside the brain, you could have technology that could translate head muscle movements into the equivalent of game controller movements.  We should not be impressed by the ability of such a patient to play a video game after having a brain chip implant. What is probably going on is that some system is receiving a variety of inputs, only some of which are signals from the motor cortex.  Calling such a thing a case of "reading thoughts from the brain" is very misleading. 

What would be impressive would be if someone were to have a brain chip implant, and were then to silently imagine some novel scene, such as a blue sphere sitting on top of a green cube, resting on a red table, with a computer then creating exactly such a scene.  You'll never see that, because brains are not the source of our thinking and imagination.  

The latest untrue news on this topic comes in the form of an untrue headline at www.thedebrief.org, a headline of "ROUNDBREAKING NON-INVASIVE UNIVERSAL BRAIN-COMPUTER INTERFACE LETS PEOPLE PLAY VIDEO GAMES USING ONLY THEIR MIND." The story recycles an untrue press release issued by the University of Texas, one claiming "Universal Brain-Computer Interface Lets People Play Games With Just Their Thoughts."  A look at the scientific paper  tells us that "Subjects were instructed to mentally rehearse the kinesthetics, not the visualization, of a movement without overtly causing any contraction of their muscles."  Given such instructions, people will make small muscle movements corresponding to how they want to move in a video game, and it is those small muscle movements that are being mined, rather than "just thoughts."  The subjects were wearing EEG caps, and it is well known that EEG signals are very sensitive to muscle movements.  Lacking controls and laden with statistical fog, the paper does not even give clear intelligible evidence the subjects performed above chance.