Surprising Studies on Memory Loss or IQ Changes After Brain Surgery or Brain Damage

Neuroscientists typically claim that memories are stored in the brain. There are some very complex ways and very simple ways in which such a hypothesis can be tested. A very complex way would be to use dissection to see whether any sign of human memories can be found. You could do this in two different ways: (1) by dissecting the brains of people who had recently died, looking for learned information such as facts learned in school; (2) by analyzing tissue removed from the brains of living people, to look for  learned information such as facts learned in school. There are plenty of opportunities for the second of these methods, because brain tissue is often removed to treat diseases such as epilepsy. Sometimes an entire half of the brain is removed in an operation called a hemispherectomy, to treat very severe and frequent seizures. Epilepsy is also treated by less severe operations that involve removing much less than half of the brain. 

Examining removed brain tissue has never produced any support for the claim that memories are stored in brains. No one has ever seen any words or letters by looking at brain tissue through a microscope. No one has ever used a microscope to look at brain tissue of some particular person, and seen images corresponding to sights that person  previously saw. No one has ever seen any sign of encoded information by looking at brain tissue through a microscope,  other than genetic information which is not information that anyone learns through school or experience.  

The method described above is a very complex method that might require the use of very sophisticated equipment such as electron microscopes. But there is a very simple way of testing the hypothesis that memories are stored in brains. You can simply do what may be called a  "loss of learned information" test, testing someone both before and after the person had surgery to remove some of their brain tissue. You can look for loss of memories and learned information that had been acquired before the operation. 

Such a test would be different from a typical memory test. A typical memory test might measure how well someone can remember some new information he was asked to memorize. But a "loss of learned information" test would only test whether something learned or remembered before some brain surgery had been lost by the act of surgery itself. 

You would think that scientists eager to prove their claims that memories are stored in brains would often do such a "loss of learned information" test.  But it seems very hard to find examples of such tests in the scientific literature. 

Let us look at some papers that may be relevant to discussions of whether human brains store memories.  We must carefully distinguish between two types of tests:

(1) A "performance on new learning" memory test will test how well some person can still acquire different types of new memories after having lost some brain tissue.

(2) A "loss of old memory" test will test whether a person lost some memory he had acquired, because of some loss of brain tissue.  

The second type of test is more relevant to whether the brain stores memories.  Removal of some brain tissue might damage your senses or perception in a way that might decrease your ability to learn new things and acquire new memories. But that would not show that your previous memories acquired before such a removal were stored in your brain. Similarly, if you make a person blind, that will reduce his ability to learn, but that does nothing to show that brains store memories. 

We must also carefully distinguish between a random pool of brain tissue loss subjects, and a pool of subjects who have been selected because they showed symptoms of memory loss. I have looked at quite a few papers in which we are told that some pool of subjects was selected for both brain tissue loss and also memory problems. Tests of the extent of memory loss in such persons may be giving a very misleading impression, because only subjects having memory loss were selected for the tests. Such studies may merely show that "people with memory problems have memory problems." 

It seems that our medical professionals are usually bad about testing preservation of memories after doing operations that remove half of a brain or a large fraction of the brain. I think this may be because they do not want to do a test that will produce results that contradict their dogma that memories are stored in brains. But here and there in the scientific literature you will be able to find some tests that serve as tests of how well memories were preserved after half of the brain was removed. In some other cases, we will be able to infer that there was  little or no loss of memories acquired before the operation, either because of a lack of mention of any such thing (which would be noteworthy and worthy of mention if it occurred), or because of some general assurance that the operation usually produced "no serious complications," a claim that should only be made if previously acquired memories were well-preserved.  

Let us look at some of the papers that might be relevant. 

• The paper here ("Unexpected amnesia: are there lessons to be learned from cases of amnesia following unilateral temporal lobe surgery?") tells us that "Cases of amnesia following unilateral temporal lobe surgery are rare." It tells us that "Davies and Weeks (1993) did report one case of postoperative amnesia in a series of 58 cases of unilateral temporal lobectomy, whereas Walczak et al. (1990) found one case of marked deterioration in memory from a preoperative normal state in their series of 100 patients who underwent such surgery." The authors state, "We were able to locate nine definite cases of amnesia following unilateral temporal lobe surgery in the English language literature." But the paper gives us no interesting accounts describing amnesia in any of these cases. We do have a Table 3 that has "before" and "after" columns for seven of the nine cases. The table fails to mention much of anything backing up claims that the patients had amnesia in the sense of loss of memories or learning they had acquired before the surgery. We have "before and after" IQ scores for the first five subjects, which show no significant difference (there sometimes being an increase).  For patient 6 there is no data, and for patient 7 we read "postoperative scores on executive and language function similar to preoperative scores." In the column labeled "Post-surgery memory functioning" we hear of some declines in memory performance tests for some of the subjects, but we hear nothing about a loss of memories that they had acquired before the operation.  And some of the results in that column involve tests taken years after the surgery, so we don't know whether any declines reported were the result of the surgery. In short, the paper fails to provide any good evidence that memories or learned information can be lost by temporal lobe surgery for epilepsy. 
• The paper "Memory outcome after temporal lobe epilepsy surgery: corticoamygdalohippocampectomy versus selective amygdalohippocampectomy" fails to discuss any measurements or observations about how acquired memories or learned knowledge declined after brain surgery that removed substantial tissue. It does tell us that for 63 patients IQ went up by about five points after such surgery, and that for another 60 patients IQ increased by nearly five points. The paper tells us that "General intelligence increases after epilepsy surgery." 
• Almost the same claim is made by the paper here ("Psychiatric and Neuropsychological Problems in Epilepsy Surgery: Analysis of 100 Cases That Underwent Surgery"), which tells us, "The full IQ score of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale–Revised (WAIS-R) was increased after temporal lobectomy in 75% of the cases (p < 0.01; n 4 44)." 
• The paper "Retrograde amnesia in patients with diencephalic temporal lobe or frontal lesions" has some interesting graphs showing memory tests in a group of subjects that included "15 patients with dicephalic lesions, 15 patients with temporal lobe lesions, 15 with frontal lobe lesions and 20 healthy control subjects." We have graphs showing performance on tests that include tests of autobiographical incidents, news recall and famous faces. All of the patients with lesions are able to produce scores ranging from about 70% to 30% of the scores produced by control subjects.  This is not a very impressive result, considering that the paper says, "The patients were selected in all cases on the basis of their having significant anterograde memory impairment in association with clinical and CT scan evidence of pre- dominantly focal lesions in either the temporal or frontal lobes or the diencephalon."  Since both having brains lesions and being not good at remembering the past was a requirement for being chosen in the study, the paper fails to show a link between the lesions and the memory performance. Similarly, if you did a study that only accepted subjects who were both gay and alcoholic, that would do nothing to show that being alcoholic tends to make people gay. 
• The paper "Retrograde amnesia in patients with hippocampal, medial temporal, temporal lobe, or frontal pathology" suffers from the same shortcoming.  We have some graphs showing inferior memory performance on five patients, on tasks of autobiographical recall, recalling famous news events, and recalling famous faces. But the paper eventually tells us that these patients "were selected on the basis of significant anterograde memory loss and MRI evidence that regional brain atrophy was restricted to the medial temporal lobe structures."  So the result merely tells us that people who have trouble remembering what they learned have trouble remembering what they learned. A random sample of five subjects with the same brain tissue loss might tell a very different tale. 
• The paper "Clinical outcomes of hemispherectomy for epilepsy in childhood and adolescence" (about surgeries removing half of a brain) tells us that "the overall developmental/cognitive category was unchanged following surgery in 23 out of 27 children," and that "two children showed a >15 point improvement in DQ/IQ following surgery,"  referring to a substantial increase in intelligence as measured by IQ tests. 
• The paper here "Seizure control and developmental trajectories after hemispherotomy for refractory epilepsy in childhood and adolescence" (in Figure 4) describes IQ outcomes for 41 children who had half of their brains removed in hemispherectomy operations in Freiburg, Germany. For the vast majority of children, the IQ was about the same after the operation. The number of children who had increased IQs after the operation was greater than the number who had decreased IQs. 
• The paper "With childhood hemispherectomy, one hemisphere can support—but is suboptimal for—word and face recognition" involved tests on 15 left hemispherectomy patients, 24 right hemispherectomy patients, and 58 age-matched control subjects. A hemispherectomy typically involves removal of one-half of the brain to stop very frequent epileptic seizures. According to Figure 5, most of the patients who had a hemispherectomy were only "mildly impaired" in their ability to recognize words and faces, with a few being "moderately impaired," a few others having "average" performance, and one having "above average" performance.  The tests performed seemed to have been purely "performance on new learning" tests. We read that "Childhood hemispherectomy patients showed above 80% accuracy on tasks of face and word recognition," and the paper calls this "surprisingly good performance."
• A 2015 scientific paper ("Brain abscess: surgical experiences of 162 cases") looked at 162 cases of surgery to treat brain abscess, in which parts of the brain undergo the cell death known as necrosis, often being replaced with a yellowish pus. The article contains quite a few photos of people with holes in their brains caused by the abscesses, holes in their brains of various sizes. The paper says that “complete resolution of abscess with complete recovery of preoperative neuro-deficit was seen in 80.86%” of the patients, and that only about 6% of the patients suffered a major functional deficit, even though 22% of the patients had multiple brain abscesses, and 30% of the abscesses occurred in the frontal lobe (claimed to be the center of higher thought). Interestingly, the long review article on 162 brain abscesses treated by brain surgery make no mention at all of amnesia or any memory effects, other than to tell us that “there was short-term memory loss in 5 cases.” If our memories really are stored in our brain, how come none of these 162 cases of brain abscesses seem to have shown an effect at all on permanent memories?
• Similarly, a scientific paper ("Brain abscess: clinical aspects of 100 patients") about 100 brain abscess cases (in which one fourth of the patients had multiple brain abscesses) makes no mention of any specific memory effect or thinking effect. It tells us that most of the patients had “neurological focal deficits,” but that's a vague term that doesn't tell us whether intellect or memory was affected. (A wikiepdia.org article says that such a term refers to "impairments of nerve, spinal cord, or brain function that affects a specific region of the body, e.g. weakness in the left arm, the right leg, paresis, or plegia.")   The paper tells us that after treatment “80 (83.3%) were cured, eight (8.3%) died (five of them were in coma at admission), seven had a relapse of the abscess,” without mentioning any permanent loss of memory or mental function in anyone.
• Another paper ("Epidemiology of brain abscess in Taiwan: A 14-year population-based cohort study") discusses thousands of cases of brain abscesses, without mentioning any specific thinking effects or memory effects. 
•  Another paper ("Retrospective analysis of 49 cases of brain abscess and review of the literature") refers to 49 brain abscess patients, and tells us that "the frontal lobe was the most common site," referring to the place that is claimed to be a "seat of thought" in the brain. But rather than mentioning any great intellectual damage caused by these brain holes, the paper says that 39 of the patients “recovered fully or had minimal incapacity,” and that five died.
• A paper tested the ability to recognize faces and words in a group of control subjects and about 39 subjects who had undergone hemispherectomy, typically to remove half of their brains. Most of those who had the hemispherectomy operation performed almost as well as the normal controls.  We read, "This performance level is perhaps surprisingly high, relative to the brain volume resected  [removed] (often close to 50%), hinting at a nonlinear degradation of function with resection. Second, the patients' accuracy was not dependent on the hemisphere removed. That is, the single LH or RH of patients showed comparable performance on face and word recognition."
• The paper "Memory outcomes following hemispherectomy in children" fails to mention in its abstract any loss of episodic or conceptual memories after hemispherectomy operations typically involving removal of half a brain. It says, "Undergoing hemispherectomy was not necessarily associated with declined memory performance, with the majority of patients showing stable scores."
• The paper "The Cognitive Outcome of Hemispherectomy in 71 Children" describes outcomes of operations typically removing half of a brain to stop very frequent seizures. The paper gives us in Table 7 the pre-operation and post-operation IQ scores for 31 different children. The decline in IQ is only small. The children went from an average IQ of  80.5 to an average IQ of 75.7. 26 of these children were given a test called the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. For these 26 children the average score increased from 79.0 to 82.1. This test is very important because it is effectively a test of previously acquired knowledge. In the test a person is shown a series of four pictures, and is asked a question such as "Which picture shows laughing?" The test therefore measures previously acquired knowledge. The increase in the score on this test is most remarkable. It is not at all what we would expect if the human brain stores memories. Under the hypothesis that the brain stores memories, removal of half of a brain should cause a sharp decline in performance on this test. Similar results are shown in Table 9. We have pre-operation and post-operation IQ scores for 15 different children (not the ones described in Table 7). The decline in measured IQ is less than a single point. Scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test rose from an average of 43.0 to an average of 51.7. Another paper summarizes these results by saying, " Pulsifer et al. ... reported cognitive outcomes in 71 children who underwent hemispherectomies and found little changes in cognitive performance pre- and post-surgery."
• The paper "Long-term functional outcomes and their predictors after hemispherectomy in 115 children" did not test for IQ or memory, but reports on things such as speech ability, walking ability and reading ability. We read this: "In this cohort of 115 children, at a mean follow-up of 6.05 years after hemispherectomy, 83% patients walked independently, 73% had minimal or no behavioral problems, 69.5% had satisfactory spoken language skills, and 42% had good reading skills."
• The paper "Hemispherectomy in adults patients with severe unilateral epilepsy and hemiplegia" discusses "25 adults who presented severe unilateral epilepsy and hemiplegia and underwent anatomic or functional hemispherectomy in between 2006 and 2011."  16 of these were "anatomic hemispherectomies" apparently involving removal of half of the brain, and the other nine were "functional hemispherectomies."  Very remarkably, we are told "All of the patients’ postoperative scores of overall QOL, full IQ, verbal IQ and performance IQ improved compared with pretreatment scores."  We don't read anything about before-and-after tests of memory retention, but we read that "Hemispherectomy is a safe operation for epileptic adults with hemiplegia and serious seizures and seldom leads to severe complications."  We may presume that the people having these operations still preserve almost all their memories, seeing that the loss of much of your memories would certainly be a "severe complication." 
• The paper here ("Retrograde amnesia after traumatic injury of the fronto-temporal cortex") tells us of a man who suffered severe brain damage after falling from a horse. He was in a coma for 6 weeks, and his MRI showed very extensive brain damage in multiple areas. The man was given various tests of how good his acquired memories were preserved. He scored 33 out of 60 on the Famous Faces Test, and 70 out of 100 on the Semantic Knowledge Test.  He was able to remember 8 of 16 objects from his past. He scored 100 on an IQ test. Since the test was done four years after the fall, we don't know how much of this decline was caused by the fall. 
• The paper "The Effect of Early and Late Brain Injury upon Test Scores, and the Nature of Normal Adult Intelligence" is behind a paywall. But from the freely available first page we get the interesting information that after searching for IQ scores recorded about brain surgery, the author found 15 subjects, and found that they had an average post-operative IQ of 108.   The author also found another group of 23 brain surgery patients who had an average post-operative IQ of 107. We are told "in none was there postoperative loss" of IQ.
• The paper "When only the right hemisphere is left: Studies in language and communication" reports on the case of a patient BL of "above normal intelligence" who underwent a left hemispherectomy at age five. Despite lacking the left half of his brain, BL "attended regular elementary and high school and graduated from college with a Bachelor's degree with a double major in business and sociology," he "played the baritone horn in a band," and worked "several years as an accountant in international business." The paper reports BL scoring normally on most of the cognitive tests he took.
• The paper "Functional consequences of hemispherectomy" gives us in Table 1 before-and-after IQ scores for 12 children who had half of their brains surgically removed. The worst result was a decline in IQ of 11 points, occurring for only one of the subjects. The best result was an increase in IQ of 8 points, which occurred for three different subjects. Overall, there was more of an increase in IQs than a decrease.  
• The paper "Long-term outcome of hemispheric surgery at different ages in 61 epilepsy patients" examines the IQ effects of removing half of a brain.  Near the bottom of Table 2 we are told that out of 55 patients, only 5 experienced post-surgical "intellectual deterioration," with 50 categorized as "not worse" in regard to "intellectual deterioration." 21 of these 55 patients are called "better" in regard to "intellectual improvement," and 34 are called "not better."  We read, "More than 80% appeared improved or unchanged in intelligence following surgery." We don't hear much specifics on memory, but we get the claim that these "remove half the brain" operations have "low risk of adverse cognitive effects." 
• In 1994 Simon Lewis was in his car when it was struck by a van driving at 75 miles per hour. The crash killed Lewis' wife, and “destroyed a third of his right hemisphere” according to this press account. Lewis remained in coma for 31 days, and then awoke. Now, many years later, according to the press account, “he actually has an IQ as high as the one he had before the crash.” In 1997, according to the press account, Lewis had an IQ of 151, which is 50% higher than the average IQ of 100. How could someone be so smart with such heavy brain damage, if our brains are really the source of our minds?  
• In a scientific paper "Why Would You Remove Half a Brain? The Outcome of 58 Children After Hemispherectomy −−The Johns Hopkins Experience: 1968 to 1996" by Vining and others, we read about how surgeons at Johns Hopkins Medical School performed fifty-eight hemispherectomy operations on children over a thirty-year period. Eleven of these children had the left hemisphere of their brains removed; most of the rest had the right hemisphere of their brains removed.  The paper states this: "Despite removal of one hemisphere  [i.e. one half of the brain], the intellect of all but one of the children seems either unchanged or improved. " We are told "language recovers after removal of the dysfunctional left hemisphere," and the authors speculate about why it is they saw "intellectual improvement in these children after removal of half of the cortex." The authors state, "We are awed by the apparent retention of memory after removal of half of the brain, either half, and by the retention of the child’s personality and sense of humor." The final statement is very important. Although the authors do not give us the results of exact tests documenting a preservation of memory, the statement I just quoted suggests they observed a preservation of episodic and factual/conceptual memory after half of the brain was removed. 
• 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.  We have some tables that are hard to read. 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 deviates 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. There is a reason to suspect that some subjects may deliberately perform poorly in such tests. Some of the subjects (such as those injured in a crash) may have pending law suits, and may think that good performance in cognitive tests may reduce their chance of being rewarded lots of money in a law suit. 
• At the page here, we read an account of a girl who had the left half of the brain removed in a hemispherectomy operation, to try to stop severe seizures. We hear of a successful operation. We are told, "In addition to the seizures, Rehab also struggled with being able to remember things before her surgery." In the next sentence we hear one of the girl's parents saying, "Her memory was so poor, but now she remembers everything."  This is the opposite of what you would expect under the "brains make minds" hypothesis. 
• 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. There is a reason to suspect that some subjects may deliberately perform poorly in such tests. Some of the subjects (such as those injured in a traffic accident) may have pending law suits, and may think that good performance in cognitive tests may reduce their chance of being rewarded lots of money in a law suit. Moreover, we must also wonder whether the scientists selecting the subjects had a bias in looking for subjects with particularly bad memory problems. 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 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 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.  
• At the University of Chicago page here, we read, "Nordli recalled a patient whose IQ rose to 100, a normal intellect, from 80 before hemispherectomy." The patient seemed to get much smarter after they took out half of the brain. 
• The very interesting paper "Preserved Cognition After Right Hemispherectomy" gives us extensive performance tests for a woman who had almost all of her right brain removed after a severe stroke at age 29. We have a very good visual showing that her performance on a wide variety of cognitive tests is average or slightly below average. 

A 2020 paper gives us an indication of the appalling failure of neuroscientists and doctors to properly test for losses of pre-surgical episodic memories and pre-surgical learning in people who had hemispherectomy operations. We read this:

"Only four studies have investigated memory functioning prior to and following hemispherectomy surgery. It is worth noting that all used short-term memory tasks, typically involving immediate repetition or recognition and did not test for more challenging aspects of memory involving recall or recognition over longer delays."

The authors of a 2017 paper tell us something similar. Referring to hemispherectomy operations in which half of the brain is removed, it says this:

" Physicians have long wondered about the surprising finding that one can lead a normal life with only one hemisphere....

The discrepancy between cerebral and cognitive functioning in these cases is strikingly highlighted by the fact that most patients, even adults, do not seem to lose their long-term memory such as episodic (autobiographic) memories. Even so, this puzzle, and possible explanatory models for this retention of long-term memory, is only rarely

discussed in the medical literature dealing with hemispherectomy. Although memory features are sometimes assessed by using the Wechsler Memory Scale (e.g., Loddenkemper et al., 2004), we were unable to find a single peer-reviewed publication in which the peculiar retention of the patient's autobiographic memory was explicitly addressed. That said, this remarkable phenomenon was at least casually mentioned by authors such as Dandy (1933) and Bell and Karnosh (1949), who stated that their patient's memory seemed unimpaired after hemispherectomy. Similarly, Vining et al. (1997) were surprised by the apparent retention of memory after the removal of the left or the right hemisphere of their patients. Dorman (1991) described the extraordinary case of a subject who was able to perform brilliant calendar calculations, although his left hemisphere had been removed several years before."

Despite this appalling failure to properly test whether episodic memories and learned information are preserved after removing half of a brain, several of the studies quoted above make statements strongly suggesting that such memories are preserved after removal of half a brain, contrary to the dogma that memories are stored in brains. And when studies such as the ones above tell us that there are usually no major cognitive effects of removing half of a brain, we can regard this as being a rather clear indication that episodic memories and learned information are well-preserved after removal of half of a brain, as any major loss of such  episodic memories and learned information would be a severe cognitive effect that should be reported. 

The quote above refers to Dandy. Here is the basis of the reference. The case of Dandy's patients are reported in the American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Jul., 1934), pages 500-503. We read this: 

"Dandy has completely removed the right cerebral hemisphere from eight patients. He has performed total extirpations of one or more lobes much oftener... There are tabulated below certain generalizations on the effects of removing the right hemisphere.... The operation was the complete extirpation of the right frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes peripheral to the corpus striatum. The weight of the tissue removed varies, with the pathological conditions involved, from 250 to 584 grm [grams].Coherent conversation began within twenty-four hours after operation, and in one case on the afternoon of the same day. Later examinations showed no observable mental changes. The patients were perfectly oriented in respect of time, place, and person; their memory was unimpaired for immediate and remote events; conversation was always coherent; ability to read, write, compute, and learn new material was unaltered. Current events were followed with normal interest. There were no personality changes apparent; the patients were emotionally stable, without fears, delusions, hallucinations, expansive ideas or obsessions, and with a good sense of humor; they joked frequently. They showed a natural interest in their condition and future. They cooperated intelligently at all times throughout post-operative care and subsequent testing of function." How could the memory of patients be "unimpaired for immediate and remote events" if memories are stored in brains?

The quote above also refers to the Vining paper I quote from above. The quote also refers to Bell and Karnosh, who in 1949 referred to 4 operations they had done, stating, "In all cases the relative freedom from severe physical handicap and gross mental defect after removal of almost half the cerebrum was striking" (pages 285-286). That is not a quote anyone would make if patients had lost their episodic or learned memories. 

All in all, the results discussed above are consistent with the idea that the human brain is not the storage place of human memories and is not the source of the human mind.  The results are not the results we would get if brains stored human memories and brains produced minds. 

Astray Authorities #7

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

"Cells With Minds" Theory Is As Bad As "Brains Make Minds" Theory

Everywhere there is a massive explanatory failure of the theory that brains make minds. For example:

• There is no place in the brain suitable for storing memories that last for decades, and things like synapses and dendritic spines (alleged to be involved in memory storage) are unstable, "shifting sands" kind of things. An individual synapse and a dendritic spine do not last for years, and consist of proteins that only last for weeks.  A 2019 paper documents a 16-day examination of synapses, finding "the dataset contained n = 320 stable synapses, n = 163 eliminated synapses and n = 134 formed synapses."  That's about a 33% disappearance rate over a course of 16 days. The same paper refers to another paper that "reported rates of [dendritic] spine eliminations in the order of 40% over an observation period of 4 days." 

• The synapses that transmit signals in the brain are very noisy and unreliable,  in contrast to humans who can recall very large amounts of memorized information without error.

• Signal transmission in the brain must mainly be a snail's pace affair, because of very serious slowing factors such as synaptic delays and synaptic fatigue (wrongly ignored by those who write about the speed of brain signals), meaning brains are too slow to explain instantaneous human memory recall.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for reading memories.

• The brain seems to have no mechanism for writing memories, nothing like the read-write heads found in computers.

• The brain has nothing that might explain the instantaneous recall of long-ago-learned information that humans routinely display, and has nothing like the things that allow instant data retrieval in computers.

• Brain tissue has been studied at the most minute resolution, and it shows no sign of storing any encoded information (such as memory information) other than the genetic information that is in almost every cell of the body.

• There is no sign that the brain or the human genome has any of the vast genomic apparatus it would need to have to accomplish the gigantic task of converting learned conceptual knowledge and episodic memories into neural states or synapse states (the task would presumably required hundreds of specialized proteins, and there's no real sign that such memory-encoding proteins exist).

• No neuroscientist has ever given a detailed explanation of how such a gigantic translation task of memory encoding could be accomplished (one that included precise, detailed examples).

• Contrary to the claim that brains store memories and produce our thinking, case histories show that humans can lose half or more of their brains (due to disease or hemispherectomy operations), and suffer little damage to memory or intelligence (as discussed here). 

A wise response to such failures is to suspect or assume that minds must be the product of something beyond the human body, or to suspect or assume that the mind must be the equivalent of something beyond the human body. That would be moving in the right direction. But a recent paper touted some theory that attempts to deal with the failure of "brains make minds" by marching in the wrong direction. The paper ("The CBC theory and its entailments: Why current models of the origin of consciousness fail") tries to sell a "CBC theory" that tries to explain minds by assuming something material that is less than a brain: mere cells. The CBC stands for cell-based consciousness. A brain is basically very many cells (neurons) and very many connections between those cells (axons and synapses).  You sure don't make the "brains don't explain minds" problem any better by trying to explain things using only cells. It's kind of like someone writing a long book entitled "My Grand Explanation for Life's Origin," and then responding to a critical review of that book by ripping out all of the pages but one, and then saying, "Now I have an explanation for life's origin." 

The paper misinforms us badly by claiming this: "

Prokaryotes, the simplest unicellular species, display behaviors that are clearly cognitive in nature including associative learning, stable memory formation, route navigation and decision-making." The paper provides no good evidence to back up this claim, which is not true under the normal definition of "cognitive." Cells do not display behaviors that demonstrate any such things (although using a stripped-down shrunken definition of "navigation" you might be able to claim that cells do some navigation). An individual cell can't learn anything, cannot form a memory, and cannot make a decision. 

As references to back up the claim above, all we get immediately are some self-citations by the authors. One of the self-citations is to this paper, which states:

"We posit that subjective awareness is a fundamental property of cellular life. It emerged as an inherent feature of, and contemporaneously with, the very first life-forms." 

This is the same kind of nonsense which is a pillar of panpsychism, in which mind is spoken of as if it is only the measliest shadow of itself, something that is then called a mere property. Similar nonsense would be going on if you described human beings as mere "noise makers,"  and then offered a "theory of noise occurrence" to try to explain the origin of humans. 

You could probably find some study you could cite to try to support a claim of cell learning, but the study you found would probably show little. Imagine a scientist who has 1000 cells in a beaker, and tries to test learning by the cells. First he gives the cells  some task, and records how well they do. Then he tries the same task again, and records how well the cells do. There will be a 50% chance that on the second try the cells will do better, and that's merely chance at play.  If a scientist files away in his file drawer unsuccessful tests, and writes up for publication a successful test, he might do 100 experiments trying to show cell learning, and a few might get results that would be only expected in one test in 20.  That would be enough to claim "statistical significance," which would be probably be enough to get the paper published.  There is no well-replicated evidence that an individual cell can learn something. 

A recent article cited the paper "Associative Conditioning Is a Robust Systemic Behavior in Unicellular Organisms: An Interspecies Comparison" as evidence that cells can learn. I don't think the paper is robust evidence of any such thing. We have some scientists claiming that after some cells were prodded to move in a particular direction by an electrical stimulus, that they will be more likely to move in that direction without the stimulus.  But the paper is not a pre-registered study, and it failed to follow any blinding protocol. A blinding protocol is an essential for a study like this to be taken seriously. The effect reported is one that could very easily have occurred by chance. By chance a group of cells may have some kind of herding effect, and may tend to move in any of four directions with a probability of about 25%.  The authors seem to have made the dubious assumption that each cell in a rather dense group of cells would move randomly in any direction, an assumption that ignores various factors that might tend to create a herding effect by which a rather dense group of cells will tend to move in the same direction. 

Cells do often act in a purposeful manner, as if guided by some higher agency interested in achieving grand end results such as the construction of a human body. But that does not entitle us to claim that cells themselves have minds. The authors are just spouting unjustified and implausible speculations when they make these claims: 

"All cells are sentient, exhibit self-referential awareness, and are fully capable of decision-making and problem-solving....each cell is a conscious 'self', combining three essential elements necessary for cogently explaining multicellularity. In order to collaborate in their trillions, each self-referential cell must 'know that it knows', 'knows that others know', and be aware that other cells 'know in self-similar patterns'. These aspects of consciousness are essential to the collaboration, cooperation, and co-dependencies that cells demonstrate for multicellular decision-making and united contingent problem-solving."

Note all the uses of words in quotation marks. For example, we don't get a claim that cells have a self, but a claim that they have a "self," and we don't get a claim that a cell knows that it knows, but that it "knows that it knows."  Always suspect you are being fooled and word-tricked when you read statements like this using words in quotation marks. Similarly, be very suspicious if someone says, "I have a nice 'computer' I'd like to sell you" rather than "I have a nice computer I'd like to sell you."

What is going on in the paper is largely some equivocation sleight-of-hand. The very slippery word "consciousness" (which can mean a hundred different things) is being used in different ways: on one hand to mean some hypothesized tiny little shadow of a thing that isn't anything like a human mind, and on the other hand to refer to the vast mental reality of a human mind.  So the authors try to make a jump from some claimed "consciousness with a microscopic small c" (claimed to exist in a cell) to consciousness with a giant capital C (human minds), not telling us how the use of the word "consciousness" is vastly changing from one part of the paper to another. Similarly, all kinds of verbal tricks are being employed in which the words "intelligent," "self," "know," "conscious," "sentient" and "cognition" are being used in strange ways outside of their normal definitions. This all smells like a type of equivocation and language misuse similar to what goes on when Darwinists refer to "natural selection" that is not actually selection (not being a choice made by conscious agent), and when they talk about evolution with a microscopic "e," some mere tiny variation in a gene pool, and try to use that as a justification for claims of evolution with a giant sky-high capital E, such as claims of macroevolution or common descent a trillion times harder to prove  than such a tiny gene variation. Similar equivocation trickery is used by theorists of panpsychism, as I discuss in my post here. 

The idea of a conscious cell might at first glance seem to be a promising one to someone who considers the vast unsolved problem of morphogenesis, the problem of how there occurs the progression from a speck-sized zygote to a full human body.  The progression cannot be explained by the idea of cells reading a body blueprint stored in DNA, because no such blueprint exists in DNA, contrary to the many lies that have been told on this topic. Now, a person might think that you could make progress on this problem by assuming that each cell is conscious, and that a cell has a goal of moving things towards greater order.  

But deeper reflection should lead you to conclude that this idea leads nowhere in helping to explain the origin of human bodies. An individual cell could never understand the grand purpose served by the construction of the human body: the end result of having large, mobile, tool-manipulating, seeing and food-gathering (or food-catching or food-growing) organisms such as adult humans that can survive well on the surface of planets like our planet. The construction of a human body and the purpose of such a result are ideas that would be 1000 miles over the heads of some little barely conscious cell floating about in the body.  Such a cell could never have any idea such as "Aha, let me try to reach exactly the right place in one of the chambers of the heart, where I might serve some purpose in helping this large mobile organism pump its blood so that it will be able to live for years on the surface of its planet."  So we wouldn't actually help to explain the origin of human bodies by imagining conscious cells. 

If human bodies were merely a heap-like blob of cells, then we might be able to help explain how we got such bodies by some idea that cells are conscious, and like to stick together, like lonely people seeking crowds on a Saturday night. But human bodies are no such blobs. Human bodies are fantastically organized systems consisting of a suitable arrangement of organs, muscles and bones that allow humans to live, reproduce and walk around on the surface of a planet while breathing, pumping blood, and finding, eating and digesting plants and animals. No cell would ever understand what was needed for a human body to fill such role, nor would such a cell understand how it could position itself in the right way to serve such a role.  

Part of the reason why "cells with the slightest shadow of a mind" cannot explain the origin of a human body is the vast amount of component interdependence in the human body, very often requiring that things mutually dependent on each other be constructed simultaneously rather than sequentially. 

It is true that cells combine in magnificent ways, just as if some mysterious higher agency was driving them towards purposeful goals. From such a reality you have no warrant for suspecting that individual cells are conscious, and that the vast amount of organization that occurs when a body forms is a result of a billion tiny little decisions made by conscious cells.  Similarly, if you see some miracle of organization at a beach in which a swirling whirlwind of sand forms itself into a giant beautiful well-arranged sandcastle, you have a reason for suspecting that some mysterious unseen causal agency is at work; but you have no warrant for suspecting that such an effect occurs because individual grains of sand are conscious. 

The idea of conscious cells is also worthless in explaining the human mind. You would not get anything like the experience of what it is like to be a human mind by adding up tiny little experiences of what it is like to be a cell. This type of problem is one of the main reasons for rejecting panpsychism.  Panpsychists claim that individual atoms or subatomic particles are conscious. But trillions of little experiences of being an electron or an atom would never add up to being the experience of being a human with a single self. In a book dealing with the philosophy of mind, J. P. Moreland discusses an objection to panpsychism just like that I just stated, which he describes like this:

"Combination Problem—Sub-minds, such as those of atoms, cannot be conceived to combine or sum into complex, unified minds such as humans have. Hence, panpsychism is not an adequate account of mind."

A few pages later he says this about this Combination Problem: "I take this to be the Achilles heel of panpsychism." He discusses some attempts to evade the problem, none of which are credible. The same Combination Problem that rules out panpsychism as an explanation for human minds also rules out individually conscious cells as an explanation for human minds. 

If there were trillions of bodily cells (none having the slightest knowledge of history, politics, science, art or human culture, and none having the slightest ability to produce speech, thoughts, novel ideas, abstract generalizations, literature, art, philosophy, culture and science), and they had some kind of shadow consciousness, no combination of such cells would ever add up to make the minds of humans who do understand facts and subtle truths of history, politics, science, art and human culture, and do have the ability to produce speech, thoughts, novel ideas, abstract generalizations, literature, art, philosophy, culture and science.  And if trillions of tiny cells each had a tiny bit of awareness of their cell surrounding,  that total body of knowledge would be a body of biology internals knowledge not matching the knowledge of humans, 99% of whom have no appreciable knowledge of biology internals, but instead have an entirely different body of knowledge: knowledge of topics such as friends, family, school subjects, history, politics, local geography, sports and celebrities. 

Contrary to the claims quoted above, cells do not have selves; cells do not know; cells do not know that they know; and cells do not know that other cells know. There are not 37 trillion selves in my body, but a single self. The unified self of a human mind could never arise from some combination of 37 trillion cell selves. 

The paper I have criticized does at least give a good quote that I have added to my long list of revealing quotes by scientists in which they make confessions that undermine confidence in the achievement legends so commonly stated by scientists. The quote is this:

"There is a growing sense of unease among biologists that there are serious shortcomings in the Neo-Darwinian framework, in particular that several of its central assumptions are wrong and that, as a result, it lacks explanatory power. The problems are many and likely fatal. For one, epigenetic effects are not only real, they are critical for the evolution of cells. Epigenesis had been largely excluded from the Darwinian paradigm due to Lamarckian theory having been deemed in error. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that the central assumption of Neo-Darwinism, that mutations occur randomly and that natural selection operates to fix the most adaptive variations, is simply wrong (Miller et al, 2023)." 

The authors imagine a replacement for the Neo-Darwinian framework:  

"We anticipate a shift from a gene-centric Neo-Darwinism and SMC to a cognition-centric CBC framework (Miller et al, 2023). The result will be an evolutionary biology based on systematic, natural learning carried out by intelligent and sentient cells—not on random genetic errors."

But that would just be replacing one mythology with a different mythology, because claims of intelligent cells are as mythical as the "DNA is a body specification" myth that is a pillar of Neo-Darwinism.  And you could never credibly explain how you got the fantastically organized structures of large multicellular organisms such as mammals by imagining that it happened by cells learning something, which would be an idea almost as silly as claiming that skyscrapers get constructed because parts such as steel beams, pipes and windows learn things.

Postscript: An earlier post of mine ("Why Imagining 'Cognition All the Way Down' Does Nothing to Explain Morphogenesis') refutes a previous paper arguing along the lines of the "The CBC theory and its entailments" paper. Here is a quotation from that post:

 "Consider a male newborn baby. He has the following features:

(1) arms that are very useful outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb;

(2) legs that are useful for walking around outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb;

(3) eyes that are useful for seeing things outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb (where everything is so dark that nothing can be seen even if you have eyes);

(4) ears that are useful for seeing things outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb;

(5) a penis and testicles that will one day be useful for reproducing outside of a womb, but are useless inside a womb;

(6) a mouth that is useful for eating and speaking outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb (where a developing baby gets all nutrients through an umbilical cord); 

(7) a nose and lungs that are useful for smelling and breathing outside of a womb, but useless inside a womb (babies take their first breath after being born).

If we imagine conscious cells inside the womb, we have no explanation as to why such conscious agents would ever band together to make a human body that is optimized for living not within a womb but in the utterly different environment outside of the womb. Such cells would know nothing about existence outside of the womb and would know nothing about the requirements of organisms outside of the womb.  We cannot imagine any leap of creativity or imagination in such cells that would cause such cells to assemble into a human body optimized not for living inside the womb, but for a totally different environment outside of the womb. Similarly, if there were people living on some extraterrestrial planet perpetually covered in very thick clouds, and such people had no knowledge of outer space or any bodies outside of their world, such beings would never build some kind of rocket like the Apollo 11 system, one capable of reaching outer space, traveling through outer space, and also capable of landing a spacecraft on the surface of a body very much smaller than their own planetary body.  

If cells in the human body were conscious, this would not at all explain how cells end up in the right place for there to arise a gigantically organized human body.  Such a cell would also lack any idea of what was the right place for it to go to, for the cell would not understand such grand ideas as human anatomy, and also would not understand what proper role it should play in such a grand scheme.  A conscious cell would also lack any senses, meaning it could never use visual information to navigate to the right place.  The cell would be like a blind, dumb and speechless man stumbling around in New York City, one that didn't know where its house or apartment building was." 

MIT Magazine Misses Mark on Epilepsy and a GABA Gamble

The world of science and technology journalism sometimes seem to operate under a rule of: "Hype first, and think later."

The MIT Technology Review magazine recently had an article that was a bad example of reporting about a risky new treatment.  The article had the title "Brain-cell transplants are the newest experimental epilepsy treatment," and sounds as if it was written by someone trying to raise the stock price of a company called Neurona Therapeutics.  We hear about some new technique tried on only five  people, in which an attempt is made to treat epilepsy by inserting brain cells into one of the most sensitive parts of the brain. 

The approach mentioned is one that takes the exact opposite path that physicians have been using for decades in treating epilepsy. Epilepsy is a mysterious brain disease that causes seizures, which are like electrical storms in the brain.  The exact cause of epilepsy is unknown. Nowadays most epilepsy is successfully treated by prescribing medications.  A minority of patients have what is called drug-resistant epilepsy. The standard treatment for very bad drug-resistant epilepsy is surgical removal of part of the brain. 

In the most severe cases of epilepsy, doctors can perform a hemispherectomy that may involve removal of half of the brain.  But most of the times a much less drastic operation is performed.  Since most epilepsy is what is called temporal lobe epilepsy (in which seizures come from the part of the brain called the temporal lobe),  drug-resistant epilepsy can usually be treated by an operation called a temporal lobectomy. Such an operation involves removing much of one of the temporal lobes of the brain. Several thousands of such operations occur every year in the US.  Most of the the time the operation works very well, without serious side effects. 

Since doctors have a good surgical treatment for drug-resistant epilepsy, why would the MIT Technology Review be promoting some scantily-tested experimental treatment taking a "Johnny-come-lately" approach that is the exact opposite of the standard medical technique, a treatment involving adding brain cells rather than removing them?  The author article tells us this about mainstream surgery for epilepsy:

"While this kind of surgery can stop seizures permanently, it comes with the risk of 'major cognitive consequences.' People can lose memories, or even their vision."

The article gives us no references or quotes backing up this statement, which seems to be very misleading in regard to the claim about losing memories.  Removal of one of the brain's temporal lobes to treat epilepsy was done thousands of times a year in the decades before the year 2003, and also in the past two decades. Reports of severe memory problems following removal of the temporal lobe are actually rare.  A 2003 scientific paper tells us how rare how such cases are:

"Davies and Weeks (1993) did report one case of postoperative amnesia in a series of 58 cases of unilateral temporal lobectomy, whereas Walczak et al. (1990) found one case of marked deterioration in memory from a preoperative normal state in their series of 100 patients who underwent such surgery. Rausch and Langfitt (1992) estimated that, on the basis of their series, 'the prevalence of patients at risk for postoperative amnesia who otherwise met criteria for surgery fell between one and four out of 218’ (p. 508), and Jones‐Gotman et al. (1993) noted that 'the base‐rate of post‐resection amnesia, were all patients operated on without prior screening with the amobarbital procedure, may be less than 1%, (p. 447).' "

The authors of the 2003 paper state, "We were able to locate nine definite cases of amnesia following unilateral temporal lobe surgery in the English‐language literature." This is not very worrying, given that (1) many thousands of operations of this type were done before the year 2003; (2) doctors or scientists often loosely use the term "amnesia" for any of a large variety of memory performance problems, and typically use such a term for cases that are something other than a severe loss of learned or episodic memories; (3) there are many reasons why a person may have memory problems, and a few people having memory problem after a particular operation does not show the operation caused such a memory problem. 

In fact, in Table 3 of the paper we are given the details of the impairments of these nine cases of claimed amnesia; and none of them sound like a case of loss of knowledge or episodic memories (with the possible exception of case 5, which is not well-described). We hear about what seem like rather minor memory performance shortfalls.  A 2009 study carefully testing "before and after" memory results for 82 patients who had surgery for temporal lobe epilepsy tells us this: "The main finding of this study is that, at variance from the picture emerging from short-term follow-up studies, longer-term memory outcome after TLE [temporal lobe epilepsy] surgery seems to be good, as after 2 years memory performance was equal to or better than baseline [before surgery] in most patients." A review of 911 surgical operations for epilepsy (looking for bad effects) mentions no case of amnesia or memory loss or memory deterioration. 

There is no robust evidence that surgical treatment for temporal lobe epilepsy causes loss of memories. Trying to justify some radical surgical treatment that is the opposite of the approach doctors have long taken for treating epilepsy (an experimental technique involving adding brain cells rather than removing them), our MIT article seems to have missed the mark. The facts about how taking out large chunks of the brain are even more shocking than those discussed above. It seems that contrary to the dogma that your brain stores your memories, you can remove not just the temporal lobe, but even an entire half of the brain without causing people to lose their memories.  See my post here for a justification of that claim. 

We get some hype in the MIT article, not justified by any published research results of the study mentioned. We read this:

"The treatment, developed by Neurona Therapeutics, is shaping up as a breakthrough for stem-cell technology. That's the idea of using embryonic human cells, or cells converted to an embryonic-like state, to manufacture young, healthy tissue." 

Ironically, to the left of this claim we have to a link to an article entitled, "After 25 years of hype, embryonic stem cells are still waiting for their moment."  The MIT article is part of that 25 years of hype. The only evidence it gives is to cite a group of only five people who have had these Neurona Therapeutics cell implants. We hear that for four of these people their seizures have decreased through some brain cell implants that did something involving a chemical called GABA. 

But these are self-reports, which are often unreliable. And reporting the frequency of seizures is particularly unreliable, given that when a seizure is finished, a person may be left with no memory of it occurring. (Most seizures are much less severe than the type of dramatic seizures that used to be called "grand mal" seizures but are now called tonic-clonic seizures.) The self-reports are also anecdotal word-of-mouth stuff, rather than published research results. 

One of the quotes in the MIT article is a misleading slur about people with epilepsy. The article states, "People with epilepsy have a hard time remembering things, but some of the volunteers can now recall an entire series of pictures."  That leaves us with the impression that people with epilepsy have very bad memory, and cannot even recall a series of pictures. That is misleading prose that is defaming 1% of the population. 

In scientific studies (often using too-small samples for reliable results), people with epilepsy tend to perform almost as well on memory tests as people without epilepsy.  Often the epileptic patients chosen for such studies are those with particularly severe epilepsy, which may create a misimpression about the general population of epileptics.  There is reason to suspect that a study randomly selecting 1000 patients prescribed epilepsy medication (and using IQ-matched controls) would show little difference in memory scores. One scientific paper says, "There are, however, reports that suggest that memory may not be affected in PWE [people with epilepsy] when compared with controls if the PWE and controls are matched with respect to intelligence quotients."  One of the studies on this topic that used a larger sample size was one doing cognitive tests on 176 children with epilepsy, comparing with 113 control subjects; it was entitled "Educational Underachievement in Children With Epilepsy: A Model to Predict the Effects of Epilepsy on Educational Achievement."  The study reported, "The children were assessed with a test battery consisting of tests for educational achievement, cognitive tests and tests for reaction time, and tests for memory and intelligence....For memory, none of the analyses showed statistically significant effects."

Can we imagine what an uproar would be created if some article tried to claim that people of some racial minority have trouble remembering things? But it seems that without any uproar a mainstream article can do defamatory stereotyping of  1%  of the population by saying "people with epilepsy have a hard time remembering things."  The vast  majority of people with epilepsy have good memories and  function well in school, work and society.

The link here takes you an FDA page describing the clinical trial being done. We are told the study will be completed in May of 2026. We are told subjects will "take medicines to partially suppress their immune system (aimed to prevent the body from rejecting the cells) for 1 year,"  which sounds like a significant  risk. We are told no results have been posted for this clinical trial. So why is the MIT Technology Review hyping this study, which has not even published any results?

The MIT Technology Review story tells us something that makes no sense under "brains make minds" claims. It tells us that a few people were given "inhibitory interneurons" and that "the job of these neurons is to quell brain activity."  But we are also told (without any specifics) that for the handful given such cells there have been "improvements in cognitive tests." If your brain makes your mind, why would quelling brain activity result in improvements in cognitive tests?

A story last year in the MIT Technology Review describes 25 years of hype about stem cells, and tells us, "Yet today, more than two decades later, there are no treatments on the market based on these cells. Not one." It seems we've been grossly misinformed for decades about stem cells.  And quite a few other scientific topics. By now an FDA page entitled "Approved Cellular and Gene Therapy Products" lists a small number of  treatments, some of which are supposedly stem cell treatments; but they are all cancer treatments or blood treatments.  

I can imagine a conversation that might occur between a hypothetical scientist Smith and a hypothetical scientist Jones working at some company that is testing stem cell implants:

Smith: Don't think of an embryo as a "developing human being" but merely as a bank of cells we can rob. 

Jones: So what's the plan?

Smith: We will take cells from an embryo, grow them in our lab, and then inject them into a sensitive part of the body, to see what happens. 

Jones: But that will require some very sick human "guinea pigs" willing to roll the dice. 

Smith: They can always be found.

Jones: But you know, this fooling around with stem cells has never worked very well.  They've been playing with stem cells for 25 years, and there is still almost nothing in the way of treatments.  What if our sizable investments in this company fail to pay off? 

Smith: Don't worry. To keep stock prices high, we can always feed the right type of gossip to certain "pushover" journalists eager for a "science gloriously marches onward" story. 

Jones:  But you can play that game only so long. One day you have to publish results. 

Smith: Don't worry. Large stock investments can be conveniently sold BEFORE the first results are published, when the stock price is still high.