Trying DMT Drug Trips Is the Wrong Way to Research Near-Death Experiences

Very many of today's neuroscientists waste endless hours and vast amounts of money doing the wrong kind of research. They spend huge amounts of time doing very poorly designed studies that are guilty of various types of Questionable Research Practices such as lack of pre-registration, use of way-too-small study group sizes, lack of adequate blinding protocols, and use of poor methods of measuring animal learning and animal fear (such as the use of unreliable "freezing behavior" judgments).  When it comes to researching human mental phenomena, neuroscientists very often fail to do their homework by adequately studying the phenomena and related phenomena. Again and again neuroscientists will rush into some harebrained neuron-related investigation into some type of mental phenomena that the neuroscientist failed to ever study in any depth. 

A recent essay by neuroscientist Christof Koch sounds like another  example of a neuroscientist doing research in the wrong way. Koch discusses near-death experiences, and then tells us he took some of the hallucinogenic drug DMT, making it sound like he did this to get insight about near-death experiences. That sounds very silly.  99% of near-death experiences occur to people who did not take any hallucinogenic drugs, but who have had experiences such as heart attacks and automobile accidents. There does not exist in the human brain more than the most minute trace amount of DMT, and speculations about DMT being released during a near-death experience are without any foundation, as I discuss here.  The question of DMT in the brain was clarified by David E. Nichols in a paper he authored in the Journal of Psychopharmocology. Speaking of DMT (also known as N,N-dimethyltryptamine) in the paper Nichols says, “It is clear that very minute concentrations of N,N-dimethyltryptamine have been detected in the brain, but they are not sufficient to produce psychoactive effects.”

Elsewhere describing his DMT experience with the words "I almost died," Koch gives this description of his DMT experience, which is internally inconsistent, and does not hold water as an accurate account of his experience:

" As I was sucked into a black hole, my last thought was that with the dying of the light, I too would die. And I did. I ceased to exist in any recognizable way, shape, or form. No more Christof, no more ego, no more self; no memories, dreams, desires, hopes, fears—everything personal was stripped away. Nothing was left but a nonself: this remaining essence wasn’t man, woman, child, animal, spirit, or anything else; it didn’t want anything, expect anything, think anything, remember anything, dread anything. But it experienced. It saw a point of cold white light of unbearable intensity, a timeless universe convulsed to a blazing, icy light. That and a profound feeling of both terror and ecstasy, the awfulness of pure experience lasting indefinitely—for there was no perception of time. The experience wasn’t brief or long. It simply was."

This account is self-contradictory. On one hand, Koch records having memories of experiencing intense emotions, but on the other hand he claims that he had "no memories" and "no more self."  If you had memories of an experience, then it can't be accurate to say you had "no memories" and did not "remember anything." And the only way you can have intense emotions is as a self, not as a total non-self. We need not take very seriously any claims Koch has made about temporarily becoming a non-self by using DMT. Such claims may be  just subjective interpretations of an unusual experience he had. 

Very strangely, Koch attempts to insinuate that his DMT trip had some relevance to explaining near-death experiences. He sounds like someone who has never very seriously studied such experiences. The Greyson Scale (widely used in research on near-death experiences) is a list of the common features of near-death experiences. Some experience of having "no memories" is not one of the items on such a list. Some experience of having "no self" is not one of the items on such a list. Quite the opposite often occurs in near-death experiences. People have experiences of being a kind of "realer-than-real" version of themselves, and have very distinct and very vivid memories of such experiences, describing them in great detail. For example, in the account of a near-death experience here, a woman says, "I was more of a person than I had ever been before." And instead of finding themselves with "no memories," people having near-death experiences very often report having a "life review" experience in which they vividly review or re-experience some of their most important life experiences. Here is a typical account:

"It was a scene from my life. It flashed before me with incredible rapidity, and I understood it completely and learned from it. Another scene came, and another, and another, and I was seeing my entire life, every second of it. And I didn’t just understand the events; I relived them. I was that person again, doing those things to my mother, or saying those words to my father or brothers or sisters, and I knew why, for the first time, I had done them or said them. Entirety does not describe the fullness of this review. It included knowledge about myself, that all the books in the world couldn’t contain. I understood every reason for everything I did in my life. And I also understood the impact I had on others."

People having near-death experiences also report forming vivid new memories during such experiences, such as memories of contacting deceased relatives or encountering some mystical realm of existence. 

Koch gives some language which sounds like he is trying to make people guess that he had something a little like an out-of-body experience, saying, "My mind gradually returned to my body." But he does not describe anything like the out-of-body experiences that so often occur during near-death experiences. In such an experience an observer will see their physical body from a viewing position outside of their body. Koch reports no such thing. It sounds like he was merely kind of spaced-out by the drug he took, and then very gradually got back to normal, as the effects of the drug very gradually diminished.  That isn't having an out-of-body experience. People who have out-of-body experiences during near-death experiences do not report gradually returning to their body, but instead report very suddenly returning to their bodies.

The type of accounts we get in near-death experiences

We may wonder: what was this "point of cold white light" Koch describes seeing which he describes as having "unbearable intensity"? This sounds nothing like what is reported in near-death experiences. In such experiences people often report encountering a Being of light, which they describe as having enormous warmth and love, rather than a cold point of light. An honest title for Koch's essay would have been, "I Tried a DMT Trip, and It Was Nothing Like a Near-Death Experience."

Our "sounds like he didn't do his homework" neuroscientist makes these untenable claims:

"All three classes of transformative experiences that I described—religious or mystical, psychedelic-induced, and near-death experiences—probably have a common underlying neurobiological mechanism. One possibility is a lull of neural activity in the posterior hot zone, especially in the visual, auditory and somatosensory cortices, posterior cingulate, and precuneus cortices."

Near-death experiences typically involve very vivid visual imagery. Under the "brains make minds" hypothesis, it makes no sense to be trying to explain very vivid experiences by imagining a "lull" or decrease in neural activity in the visual part of the brain.  It is nonsensical to claim that an experience produced by psychedelics has a "common underlying neurobiological mechanism" with experiences that are not produced by psychedelics. That's like saying that cars raised in the air by cyclones are raised by a "common underlying mechanism" as cars raised in the air at auto shops. Near-death experiences commonly occur to people during cardiac arrest, when electrical activity in the brain has shut down. As discussed here, EEG readings show that electrical activity shuts down within a few seconds after the heart stops. When that happens, you do not have a mere "lull of neural activity" but a cessation of neural electrical activity. It is just such a cessation that rules out neural explanations for near-death experiences. 

The study here discusses EEG readings taken during DMT trips. Those taking DMT trips have not-very-unusual brain waves that are nothing like the flatlining of brain waves that occurs during cardiac arrest. So Koch's claim of a "common underlying neurobiological mechanism" in near-death experiences and DMT trips is untenable. A brain with its electrical activity shut down is in a totally different state than a brain with near-normal EEG readings. 

Instead of taking a DMT trip, Koch should have seriously studied near-death experiences and related paranormal experiences for insights. But alas, most neuroscientists these days seem to be not-very-diligent scholars of human minds and the full spectrum of human mental experiences.  Koch is a proponent of the extremely misguided theory called integrated information theory, which you can read about in my posts here.  The theory relies on shadow-speaking about human minds, in which human minds are typically described using the "make it sound like a mere shadow of itself" term "consciousness," an approach that we tend to get from lazy scholars of human minds and human mental experiences, who don't want to go to the trouble of deeply studying and analyzing the full spectrum of human mental experiences and human mental abilities. 

A 2023 paper by Christof Koch has the misleading title "Do not go gently into that good night: The dying brain and its paradoxically heightened electrical activity." Making use of a vague term "end-of-life" (a term which is not clear about whether it means before or after a heart stops) Koch states this:

"These end-of-life EEG surges were initially believed to be artifacts but are now recognized as reflecting high-frequency brain activity. They are common (46% in ref. 3) in critically ill patients who die but, importantly, are not found in brain-dead patients."

See the appendix of this post for why the study he references does nothing to show surges in brain activity after the heart stops. The title of Koch's paper is misleading. There is no robust evidence of "heightened electrical activity" after the heart stops in a dying person. To the contrary, the evidence shows unequivocally that brains shut down and flatline within about 10 seconds after a heart stops. That fact is one that prevents any credible neural explanation for near-death experiences, which are often long, vivid experiences that occur after a person's heart has stopped. 

The person who has thoroughly studied near-death experiences may understand why such experiences destroy the credibility of claims that the brain is the source of the mind. In near-death experiences many people whose hearts have stopped and brains have shut down (in a flatline effect) report having extremely vivid "realer than real" experiences, totally contrary to what we would expect from claims that the brain makes the mind.  In such near-death experiences people often report floating above their bodies, seeing them from something like three or four meters away. Such reports should never occur if the brain is the source of the mind. And often in near-death experiences people will report observing earthly things that they never should have been able to observe if the brain is the source of mind. You can read about such reports here and here.

Then there's the reality of incredibly fast memory recall in near-death experiences. In such experiences people will often report some incredibly fast recall in which they recalled very quicky all of the major life experiences they had had. The ordinary fact of instant recall is the gravest problem for all claims that memory recall occurs through brain activity, for reasons I fully explain in my post "Why the Instantaneous Recall of Old Memories Should Be Impossible for a Brain." There is not a neuroscientist in the world who can give a halfway credible explanation as to how a human can instantly recall facts as quickly as people do when they play the game show Jeopardy.  Such instant recall should be impossible in a brain, which has none of the things that computers have which allow fast retrieval of information: things such as addressing, indexing and sorting.  The near-death experience vastly exacerbates the instant recall problem, by giving us countless cases of people who claimed to have "seen their whole lives flash before their eyes," as if they could suddenly recall all of their main life events instantly -- with this often occurring in shutdown brains when such recall should be the least likely thing to ever occur.  I will explain this point more fully in my next post. 

Because near-death experiences blast into smithereens the credibility of claims that neuroscientists like to make (that the mind is merely the product of the brain and that memories are a neural effect), I can understand why all the reports of near-death experiences might cause a kind of panic mode in neuroscientists, leading them to start throwing desperate Hail Mary passes such as trying to go on DMT drug trips in hopes of resolving their dilemma.  

I  myself am a lifelong non-drinker and non-smoker who has never used any kind of illegal drugs or so-called mind-expanding drugs. I have never even tried marijuana. Now, I hear quite a few people claiming that the use of certain substances such as LSD or DMT or psilocybin can be "mind-expanding." And I have written very much about certain types of experiences that seemed mind-expanding such as near-death experiences and experiences under hypnotic trances. So, you may ask, why don't I try adding to my body of knowledge and study by experimenting with such substances?  Let me try to answer in a way that I hope will not sound "holier than thou," but which is mostly peculiar to my situation, rather than any invocation of a general principle. 

The first reason I avoid all alcohol and all mind-altering substances has to do with my long-time history as an observer of spooky phenomena and paranormal-seeming phenomena. My observations of spooky phenomena have long been published on my "Orb Pro" blog you can read here. Mostly these observations consist of photographs and videos. But an important subset of the observations involve my  frequent eyewitness testimony of spontaneous spooky events that I was not able to photograph, typically because of an event occurring so quickly. Now, for me it is important that my reports of such spooky events have high credibility. And I think that the credibility of such reports might be weakened if I were the type who sometimes uses substances that might distort a person's perception or judgment, or substances that might produce a hallucination.  I wish to always be a Grade A witness to anything paranormal-seeming that I report, with all observations occurring when I was as sober as a judge. I don't wish to engage in consumption of alcohol or mind-altering substances that might make me less than a Grade A witness of such phenomena. 

Another reason I avoid all alcohol and all mind-altering substances has to do with my long-standing role as a trying-to-be-objective analyst of minds, brains, human mental phenomena, biology, psychic phenomena and grand philosophical topics such as whether our universe is a mere accident or the product of some transcendent will.  I want for my analysis of such topics to be based on solid reasoning, solid evidence and solid scholarship rather than subjective feelings that might be produced by mind-altering drugs or mind-affecting drugs.  I want my reasoning on such topics to always be very level-headed reasoning, and I wouldn't want to ever publish some post that had a "trippy" or soggy-headed sound to it. When I state a conclusion on one of my blogs, I want my readers to have confidence that my conclusion was based on the calmest reasoning, rather than some emotional state created by drug use or alcohol use.

I hear that some people use mind-altering drugs or leisure drugs or alcohol to reduce stress or the effects of trauma. I would not criticize someone for doing that. In my own case I have been very lucky to have led a mostly low-stress life with no great stress or trauma in the past 40  years (with the exception of the World Trade Center bombing). So having had the great fortune of having had no great stress or trauma for decades, I have had no need to ease pain through the use of drugs or alcohol. 

But, you may ask, are you not interested in one day "opening the doors of perception" and taking a sojourn that may offer the thrill of some higher state of consciousness?  I am actually very interested in doing just that. But I figure I will not have to wait terribly long before experiencing such a thing. My studies of near-death experiences and many other types of psychic phenomena lead me to think that death is the doorway to a higher state of consciousness and a much greater state of perception. Given my advanced age, I figure that I will not have to wait terribly long before passing through such a doorway, without having to use mind-altering drugs.  I can see how it might be very different for some young person. A person who was, say, age 20, might think, "I'm not waiting 60 years for my doors of perception to open." 

Appendix:  I mention above how Koch has a paper that states this:

"These end-of-life EEG surges were initially believed to be artifacts but are now recognized as reflecting high-frequency brain activity. They are common (46% in ref. 3) in critically ill patients who die but, importantly, are not found in brain-dead patients."

The study that Koch refers to in Reference 3 is the 2017 study "Characterization of end-of-life electroencephalographic surges in critically ill patients." There are quite a few problems with that study. First, it did not use the type of EEG device used by neurologists, but a much cheaper device called the SEDLine device, one "developed as an assessment of hypnosis during anesthesia." The manual of the device tells us that it computes a single number, something called a Patient State Index which it defines as the likelihood that a patient is anesthetized. The devices were not designed for the purpose the paper authors used them for. The SEDLine device does not measure pulse or heart rate. Some dubious-sounding data analysis is described:

"Raw data files from SEDLine devices were de-identified and analyzed with the assistance of engineers from Massimo Inc. Files with adequate data integrity were then analyzed for EEG frequency and waveform characteristics." 

That sounds like something that could easily have gone wrong. The paper defined an "end-of-life electroencephalographic surge" as any increase of 50% above baseline, but the paper authors did not have heart-rate data corresponding to their brain wave data, as they were analyzing solely from a head-only device (SEDLine) that does not take pulse or heart rate measurements (according to its manual). So we do not  know how many (if any) of these so-called "end-of-life electroencephalographic surges" were things occurring after someone's heart stopped. The term "end of life" (which the paper authors fail to precisely define) is a vague term that could refer to any of the last hours of someone's life. Since it has no combination of brain wave (EEG) data and heart rate data, the paper provides no actual evidence of brain wave surges after a heart stops.

Contrary to the insinuations of this paper,  the evidence shows unequivocally that brains shut down and flatline within 10 seconds or 20 seconds after a heart stops. That fact is one that prevents any credible neural explanation for near-death experiences, which are often long, vivid experiences that occur after a person's heart has stopped. 

HSAM Memory Whiz Subjects Scored 25 Times Higher on a Random Dates Test

 In my previous post on this blog "The Rare 'Total Recall' Effect That Conflicts With Brain Dogmas," I discussed some fascinating cases of what is called hyperthymesia or Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). People with this rare ability have an extraordinary ability to recall things that happened in their lives -- an ability seemingly many times greater than that of the average person.  Some have suggested that HSAM cases can be explained as being merely the result of superior mnemonic techniques. Others have suggested that press reports about this topic are just exaggeration or sensationalism. But a scientific paper documents the dramatic reality of  Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). The paper documents that certain people have memory about past events that is literally dozens of times better than the average person has. 

The paper (which can be read here) is a 2022 paper entitled "Individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory do not show enhanced creative thinking." The paper gives us this description of the memory tests given to 14 subjects with  Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), and also twenty-eight normal control subjects:

"We assessed participants’ ability to recollect public and personal past events using the Public Event Quiz and the Random Dates Quiz (LePort et al., 2012). The Public Events Quiz consisted of thirty questions, based on public events selected from five categories: sporting events, political events, notable negative events, events concerning famous people and holidays. For fifteen of these questions, participants were asked to retrieve the date of a given significant public (national or international) event (e.g., 'Please give the day of the week and precise date with day, month and year of when Federica Pellegrini, the famous Italian swimmer, won the gold medal at the Olympic game in Beijing'); the remaining fifteen questions requested participants to associate a given date with a highly significant public event (e.g., 'What happened on the 25th of June 2009?'). All questions concerned events that took place when the participants were at least 8 years old. For each question, individuals were asked to name the day of the week on which the date fell. One point was awarded for each correct response (i.e., the event, the day of the week, the month, the date and the year); the maximum total score was 88 points. The Random Dates Quiz consisted of ten computer-generated random dates, ranging from the individuals’ age of fifteen to five years before the testing. Individuals were asked to provide three details for each date: (1) the day of the week; (2) a description of a verifiable event (i.e., any event that could be confirmed via a search engine) that occurred within a few days before and after the generated date; (3) a description of a personal autobiographical event. One point each was awarded for the correct day of the week, a correct public event, and unverified personal autobiographical memory. A maximum of three points per date could be achieved (30 points total)." 

The results were spectacular.  The 14 subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) scored more than 25 times higher on the Random Dates test, scoring an average of 68.57% of the maximum possible.  The control subjects scored an average of merely 2.62% of the maximum possible on the Random Dates test. On the Public Events test, the 14 subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) scored more than 5 times higher, scoring an average of 58.20% of the maximum possible. The control subjects scored an average of merely 10.39% of the maximum possible on the Public Events test. The best-performing of the 14 subjects with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) scored 96.67% of the maximum possible, an almost perfect score. 

The diagram below (from the paper) shows the differences, with the HSAM subjects being the two tall bars, and the control subjects being the two short bars. The squares are the results for individual subjects. 

Conversely, tests on other abilities not related to memory (such as creativity) showed no big differences in performance between the two groups. 

We have in this paper proof of the claim that certain rare individuals have a dramatically superior ability to recall the past, an ability vastly better than the average person has.  Cases such as these are evidence against claims that memory is mostly a neural phenomenon.  If memory was mostly a neural phenomenon, we would expect that only vast differences in brains could produce vast differences in memory performance. But those with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory have brains that do not substantially differ from those with ordinary memories.  Read my post here for a discussion of two studies that attempted to show differences in the brains of those with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, but actually failed to show any major differences. The same post has a very interesting discussion of numerous memory marvels with recollection abilities as impressive as those with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. 

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 synapse can only transmit 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. 

Here are some relevant quotes:

• "Direct evidence that synaptic plasticity is the actual cellular mechanism for human learning and memory is lacking." -- 3 scientists, "Synaptic plasticity in human cortical circuits: cellular mechanisms of learning and memory in the human brain?" 
• "The fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them." -- Juan Alvaro Gallego, neuroscientist. 
• "The search for the neuroanatomical locus of semantic memory has simultaneously led us nowhere and everywhere. There is no compelling evidence that any one brain region plays a dedicated and privileged role in the representation or retrieval of all sorts of semantic knowledge."  Psychologist Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, "Neuroimaging studies of semantic memory: inferring 'how' from 'where' ".
• "How the brain stores and retrieves memories is an important unsolved problem in neuroscience." --Achint Kumar, "A Model For Hierarchical Memory Storage in Piriform Cortex." 
• "We are still far from identifying the 'double helix' of memory—if one even exists. We do not have a clear idea of how long-term, specific information may be stored in the brain, into separate engrams that can be reactivated when relevant."  -- Two scientists, "Understanding the physical basis of memory: Molecular mechanisms of the engram."
• "There is no chain of reasonable inferences by means of which our present, albeit highly imperfect, view of the functional organization of the brain can be reconciled with the possibility of its acquiring, storing and retrieving nervous information by encoding such information in molecules of nucleic acid or protein." -- Molecular geneticist G. S. Stent, quoted in the paper here. 
• "Up to this point, we still don’t understand how we maintain memories in our brains for up to our entire lifetimes.”  --neuroscientist Sakina Palida.
• "The available evidence makes it extremely unlikely that synapses are the site of long-term memory storage for representational content (i.e., memory for 'facts'’ about quantities like space, time, and number)." --Samuel J. Gershman,  "The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: A synthesis."
• "Synapses are signal conductors, not symbols. They do not stand for anything. They convey information bearing signals between neurons, but they do not themselves convey information forward in time, as does, for example, a gene or a register in computer memory. No specifiable fact about the animal’s experience can be read off from the synapses that have been altered by that experience.” -- Two scientists, "Locating the engram: Should we look for plastic synapses or information- storing molecules?
• " If I wanted to transfer my memories into a machine, I would need to know what my memories are made of. But nobody knows." -- neuroscientist Guillaume Thierry (link). 
• "Memory retrieval is even more mysterious than storage. When I ask if you know Alex Ritchie, the answer is immediately obvious to you, and there is no good theory to explain how memory retrieval can happen so quickly." -- Neuroscientist David Eagleman.
• "How could that encoded information be retrieved and transcribed from the enduring structure into the transient signals that carry that same information to the computational machinery that acts on the information?....In the voluminous contemporary literature on the neurobiology of memory, there is no discussion of these questions."  ---  Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience,"  preface. 
• "The very first thing that any computer scientist would want to know about a computer is how it writes to memory and reads from memory....Yet we do not really know how this most foundational element of computation is implemented in the brain."  -- Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick, "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution," page 50. 
• "When we are looking for a mechanism that implements a read/write memory in the nervous system, looking at synaptic strength and connectivity patterns might be misleading for many reasons...Tentative evidence for the (classical) cognitive scientists' reservations toward the synapse as the locus of memory in the brain has accumulated....Changes in synaptic strength are not directly related to storage of new information in memory....The rate of synaptic turnover in absence of learning is actually so high that the newly formed connections (which supposedly encode the new memory) will have vanished in due time. It is worth noticing that these findings actually are to be expected when considering that synapses are made of proteins which are generally known to have a short lifetime...Synapses have been found to be constantly turning over in all parts of cortex that have been examined using two-photon microscopy so far...The synapse is probably an ill fit when looking for a basic memory mechanism in the nervous system." -- Scientist Patrick C. Trettenbrein, "The Demise of the Synapse As the Locus of Memory: A Looming Paradigm Shift? (link).
• "Most neuroscientists believe that memories are encoded by changing the strength of synaptic connections between neurons....Nevertheless, the question of whether memories are stored locally at synapses remains a point of contention. Some cognitive neuroscientists have argued that for the brain to work as a computational device, it must have the equivalent of a read/write memory and the synapse is far too complex to serve this purpose (Gaallistel and King, 2009; Trettenbrein, 2016). While it is conceptually simple for computers to store synaptic weights digitally using their read/write capabilities during deep learning, for biological systems no realistic biological mechanism has yet been proposed, or in my opinion could be envisioned, that would decode symbolic information in a series of molecular switches (Gaallistel and King, 2009) and then transform this information into specific synaptic weights." -- Neuroscientist Wayne S. Sossin (link).
• "We take up the question that will have been pressing on the minds of many readers ever since it became clear that we are profoundly skeptical about the hypothesis that the physical basis of memory is some form of synaptic plasticity, the only hypothesis that has ever been seriously considered by the neuroscience community. The obvious question is: Well, if it’s not synaptic plasticity, what is it? Here, we refuse to be drawn. We do not think we know what the mechanism of an addressable read/write memory is, and we have no faith in our ability to conjecture a correct answer."  -- Neuroscientists C. R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King, "Memory and the Computational Brain Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience."  page Xvi (preface). 
• "Current theories of synaptic plasticity and network activity cannot explain learning, memory, and cognition."  -- Neuroscientist Hessameddin Akhlaghpourƚ (link). 
• "We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words." -- Scientists David Poeppel and, William Idsardi, 2022 (link).
• "If we believe that memories are made of patterns of synaptic connections sculpted by experience, and if we know, behaviorally, that motor memories last a lifetime, then how can we explain the fact that individual synaptic spines are constantly turning over and that aggregate synaptic strengths are constantly fluctuating? How can the memories outlast their putative constitutive components?" --Neuroscientists Emilio Bizzi and Robert Ajemian (link).
• "After more than 70 years of research efforts by cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists, the question of where memory information is stored in the brain remains unresolved." -- Psychologist James Tee and engineering expert Desmond P. Taylor, "Where Is Memory Information Stored in the Brain?"
• "There is no such thing as encoding a perception...There is no such thing as a neural code...Nothing that one might find in the brain could possibly be a representation of the fact that one was told that Hastings was fought in 1066." -- M. R.  Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "No sense has been given to the idea of encoding or representing factual information in the neurons and synapses of the brain." -- M. R. Bennett, Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney (link).
• "We have still not discovered the physical basis of memory, despite more than a century of efforts by many leading figures. Researchers searching for the physical basis of memory are looking for the wrong thing (the associative bond) in the wrong place (the synaptic junction), guided by an erroneous conception of what memory is and the role it plays in computation." --Neuroscientist C.R. Gallistel, "The Physical Basis of Memory," 2021.
• "To name but a few examples, the formation of memories and the basis of conscious  perception, crossing  the threshold  of  awareness, the  interplay  of  electrical  and  molecular-biochemical mechanisms of signal transduction at synapses, the role of glial cells in signal transduction and metabolism, the role of different brain states in the life-long reorganization of the synaptic structure or  the mechanism of how  cell  assemblies  generate a  concrete  cognitive  function are  all important processes that remain to be characterized." -- "The coming decade of digital brain research, a 2023 paper co-authored by more than 100 neuroscientists, one confessing scientists don't understand how a brain could store memories. 
• "The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’....We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not." -- Robert Epstein,  senior research psychologist, "The Empty Brain." 

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 a brain lacking any of the characteristics that would be required to allow the best examples of human memory performance, the credibility of the claim that brains store memories is inversely proportional to the highest observed speed, accuracy, duration and depth of human memory performance.  The longer humans can remember things and the more they can remember and the more quickly they can remember and the more quickly they can form new memories, the less credible are claims of brain memory creation and storage. 

Below is an account of the memory of Antonio Magliabechi, from page 8 of the periodical here:

 "Magliabechi was born at Florence in 1633. His parents were of mean rank and estate. Being taken into the service of a bookseller, a passion for reading took possession of him, and a prodigious memory ensued. He read every book that came into his hands with surprising quickness, and yet retained not only the sense, but often all the words. His extraordinary talent soon obtained for him an appointment under the great Duke’s librarian. A trial of his surprising powers was once made. A gentleman in Florence had written a piece which was to be played. He lent it to Magliabechi, and some time after it had been returned he came with a long face to Magliabechi, and, seeming almost inconsolable, asked if he would try to recollect as much as he could, and write it down. Magliabechi assured him he would, and on setting about it wrote out the entire play without missing a word. By treasuring up everything he read, his head at last became an universal index both of titles and matter. When a priest was going to compose anything about a favourite saint, Magliabechi could at once tell him what everybody had written about that saint, and refer to the authors. The Grand Duke Cosmo III made him his librarian. Here he had immense facilities for reading, but ultimately he was dissatisfied, for he had read almost everything ever written or printed, it being a custom for most authors to send him a copy. He not only knew the contents of books, but the very place on the very shelf where they stood in the great libraries of Europe. The grand duke asked if he could get a certain book that was particularly scarce : ' No, sir,'  answered Magliabechi, ' it is impossible, for there is but one in the world, and that is in the Grand Signor’s library at Constantinople, and is the seventh book on the second shelf, on the right hand as you go in.' " 

Another source says this of Magliabechi: "He not only knew all the volumes in the library, as well as every other possible work, but could also tell the page and paragraph in which any passage occurred."

According to a book, "The great thinker, Pascal, is said never to have forgotten anything he had ever known or read, and the same is told of Hugo, Grotius, Liebnitz, and Euler. All knew the whole of Virgil's 'Aeneid' by heart." The famous conductor Toscanini was able to keep conducting despite bad eyesight, because he had memorized the musical scores of a very large number of symphonies and operas. 

A book tells us this: 

"The geographer Maretus, narrates an instance of memory probably  unequalled. He actually witnessed the feat, and had it attested by four Venetian nobles. He met in Padua, a young Corsican who had so powerful a memory that he could repeat as many as 36,000 words read over to him only once. Maretus, desiring to test this extraordinary youth, in the presence of his friends, read over to him an almost interminable list of words strung together anyhow in every language, and some mere gibberish. The audience was exhausted before the list, which had been written down for the sake of accuracy, and at the end of it the young Corsican smilingly began and repeated the entire list without a break and without a mistake. Then to show his remarkable power, he went over it backward, then every alternate word, first and fifth, and so on until his hearers were thoroughly exhausted, and had no hesitation in certifying that the memory of this individual was without a rival in the world, ancient or modern." 

The scientific paper "Extremely long-term memory and familiarity after 12 years" documents an ability of some people to remember trivial sensory experiences after many years, experiences they should have forgotten under common ideas of human memory. In 2016 the study authors rounded up 25 subjects who had been briefly exposed to some very forgettable images in a scientific experiment done between eight and fourteen years earlier: thumbnail-sized images such as a little drawing of a coffee cup and a little drawing of a hen.  The subjects were tested with a set of images, half of which were the original images, and half of which were decoy images designed to be similar to the original images. The subjects were asked to guess whether or not they had seen the images before, when they were tested many years earlier. The authors expected the subjects to make guesses no more accurate than chance. But they found that the subjects were able to guess with about 55% accuracy.  We read this:

"In this study we found that our group of test participants was able to recognize simple colored pictures seen for a few seconds between eight and 14 years earlier. Our best performer, who had been exposed to the pictures at most three times, was able to identify 15 pictures more than the 84 pictures expected by chance. Note that no instruction to learn the stimuli was ever given to the subjects, even at initial encoding, which makes this performance even more remarkable." 

Astray Authorities #8

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

Pareidolia Helps Neuroscientists Getting Nowhere Trying to Show a Brain Basis for Memory

Our neuroscientists are getting nowhere in trying to show that there is a neural basis for human memory. But they have something they can rely on to help hide their lack of progress:  pareidolia. Pareidolia is when you see patterns that aren't really there, like some guy examining his toast every day for years, and then one day saying, "I finally see the face of Jesus in my toast."  A scientist conjuring up some pareidolia can make a nice-sounding progress report when no real progress has been made. I describe some examples of this in my post "Scientists Have a Hundred Ways to Conjure Up Phantasms That Don't Exist." Recently on a single screen of my I-Pad I saw three examples of neuroscientist pareidolia (which I identify here by using yellow text):

The first example was an article in Scientific American (copied from the journal Nature) entitled "Memories Are Made by Breaking DNA -- And Fixing It, Study in Mice Finds." The nonsense story is behind a paywall, but the Singularity Hub article here tells basically the same nonsense story.  We read this silly narrative, not grounded in any solid research:

"DNA damage isn’t always detrimental. It’s been associated with memory formation since 2021. One study found breakage of our genetic material is widespread in the brain and was surprisingly linked to better memory in mice. After learning a task, mice had more DNA breaks in multiple types of brain cells, hinting that the temporary damage may be part of the brain’s learning and memory process."

As evidence for such claims, we have a link to the  poor quality science paper "Formation of memory assemblies through the DNA-sensing TLR9 pathway."  The paper is guilty of several bad examples of Questionable Research Practices (as are most experimental papers in cognitive neuroscience these days).  One big sin of the paper is to use way-too-small study sizes such as only 5 mice, 6 mice and 7 mice.  I once pointed out that the average number of authors in a typical neuroscience paper is about equal to the number of mice used in the resulting research; and I sardonically pointed out that it was as if scientists were following the ridiculous rule of "use only 1 mouse per neuroscientist." But in this case it seems even worse.  We have 16 authors for a study that uses measly study group sizes of only about six mice per study group. 

The study fails to mention any rigorous blinding protocol, and merely mentions that behavioral tests were performed blindly. For a study like this to be taken seriously, you would need to have much more of a blinding protocol, one also involving data analysis.  Then there is the ridiculous use of "freezing behavior" judgments to try to judge whether memory recall has occurred in mice. For a full explanation of why all neuroscience papers that use this technique are unreliable, see my post "All Papers Relying on Rodent 'Freezing Behavior' Estimations Are Junk Science." 

The title of the paper refers to "memory assemblies," but nothing has been done to show that any such thing was found. Here are all of the paper's references to "assemblies":

"Memories of individuals’ experiences are represented across assemblies of neurons in hippocampal and cortical circuits.  Several mechanisms of formation and maintenance of these assemblies have been proposed...Recent focus has also been on the role of the interneuronal perineuronal nets (PNNs) in the stabilization of memory circuits through tightened control of inhibitory inputs to dedicated neuronal assemblies. Here we explored whether an overarching process could integrate stimulus-dependent and pre-existing mechanisms that underlie the commitment of neurons to memory-specific assemblies...The recruitment of individual neurons to assemblies is essential not only for encoding individual memories, but also for protecting them from streams of incoming information over time, ensuring stability and persistence of memory representations....Given the association of dsDNA damage with neurodegeneration, neurons undergoing learning-induced dsDNA breaks might be expected to be excluded from memory assemblies."

It is rather clear from these sparse and not-very-substantial uses of the word "assemblies" that nothing has been done to establish the existence of "memory assemblies" in the brain. Our authors are merely seeing some sort of something happening somewhere in the brain, and calling that a "memory assembly," without any justification of such a claim.  The claim in the headline of the Scientific American article ("Memories Are Made by Breaking DNA -- And Fixing It") is a nonsensical-sounding claim that does not match any robust research. DNA does not store memories, and does not have any structure that could support the storage of human learned knowledge or human episodic memories.  If scientists thought that DNA stored memories, they would try very hard to preserve the brains of dead people, and try and scan them to extract what the dead people had learned or experienced.  Instead (except for rare cases) the brains of dead people are left for burial or cremation, just as if scientists thought that a dead brain was worthless. Thousands of human brains have been stored after death and studied, but no evidence has been found from such activity that memories are stored in brains, not in brain DNA  nor anywhere else. For details, see my post "They Stored and Studied Thousands of Brains, But Still Failed to Show Brains Store Memories." 

The next bunk story shown on the visual above is an NBC News story entitled "How the brain chooses which memories are important enough to save and which to let fade away."  The story gives us this  nonsensical claim: "Experiments in mice revealed that during waking hours, cells in the brain’s hippocampus spark in a specific pattern called 'sharp-wave ripples,' which tag important experiences for movement into long-term memory storage during sleep."   We read this:

"As part of the research, Buzsáki and his colleagues put mice through a maze that had a sugary reward at the end for those that successfully reached it. Meanwhile, the researchers were monitoring the activity of nerve cells through electrodes implanted in the rodent brains that fed data into computer programs.  They observed that as the mice paused to eat their treats, their brains sparked sharp-wave ripples that were repeated as many as 20 times. The daytime pattern of sharp-wave ripples was replayed during the night, a process that moved the experience into long-term memory."

Many people familiar with the drawbacks of EEG analysis will chuckle at the claims made above. The EEG is a device that can detect electrical activity from parts of the brain. When an EEG device is used, electrodes are placed next to different parts of the skull. The device will pick up a dozen or more different lines that show electrical activity in different parts of the brain. 

Brains have a great deal of signal noise, and the abundance of such noise is one of several major reasons for disbelieving that the brain is the source of human thinking and recall which can occur with incredible accuracy, such as when people perfectly recall very large bodies of text and perfectly perform extremely difficult math calculations without using tools such as computers, pencils or paper. The analysis of brain waves obtained by EEG devices is an area of science where bad methods, pareidolia and junk analysis is very abundant.  There is an abundance of people trying to use fancy statistical methods to try to extract identifiable "signals" or "signs" from data that is very noisy and polluted. Muscle movements abundantly contaminate EEG readings. 

What seems to be going on in the research mentioned by NBC News is mainly pareidolia. Having lots of EEG data that appear as an abundance of squiggly lines, anyone can find as many "ripples" as he wants.  EEG ripples or squiggles are not any mechanism for storing memories.  The people who have done this research are like someone wishing to believe that the ghosts of dead animals live in the clouds, and who (after examining thousands of photos of clouds) says that he sees something that looks like the shape of an animal.  Anyone eagerly hoping to find some kind of pattern in a stream of noisy random data will be able to find a few cases that he can believe are instances of some pattern that he was hoping to find. This is pareidolia, not robust science. 

The NBC News story has no link to a paper, but it is almost certainly referring to this 2024 paper co-authored by György Buzsáki (mentioned in the story), the paper "Selection of experience for memory by hippocampal sharp wave ripples." That's a poorly designed Questionable Research Practices study using a study group size of only six mice.  A study like this should be taken seriously by no one unless it used a  rigorous blinding protocol. But the text of the paper fails to use the word "blind" or "blinding." Because the study is not a pre-registered study, all of its analytics are just arbitrary post-hoc stuff meaning little. Anyone analyzing the constantly varying squiggles of brain wave data can pretty much see anything he  wants to see. Studies of this type have little value unless they are pre-registered studies that follow a rigorous blinding protocol and have large study group sizes, and this study fails to be any of these things.  The paper has a nonsensical title.  Brain waves (sharp wave ripples or any other type) do not select anything. Brain waves are an epiphenomenon of brain activity, like cooking smells are an epiphenomenon of cooking activity. Claiming that brains waves select memories is as nonsensical as claiming that the scent from your cooking soup selects something. 

The last of the three bunk stories is a Popular Science story entitled "How these feathery ‘memory geniuses’ remember where they stashed their food."  The subtitle of the story has the groundless claim that "Chickadee brains make neural ‘barcodes’ to help recall thousands of hiding spots." We have a repetition of the false claim that "Scientists have long known that the brain's hippocampus is necessary for storing episodic memories like where a car is parked or food is kept."  Read my post "Studies Debunk Hippocampus Memory Myths" for why that claim is untrue. We then have a reference to a mistitled paper "Barcoding of episodic memories in the hippocampus of a food-caching bird." It's one of endless scientific papers with a title that is not justified by anything reported in the paper. We have a misleading visual showing barcodes next to some chickadee birds, but this is just suggestive artwork not matching any data collected. 

No discovery was actually made of anything like barcodes in the brain of these birds, and we can tell that funny business is going on by the paper's use of the word "barcodes" in quotation marks, as if to suggest "they're not really barcodes."  In the caption to Figure 3 (which looks nothing like a barcode) we have this statement:

"Activity of neurons across caches after subtraction of the place code and the average cache response. We refer to this activity as the 'barcode.' ” 

No robust research has occurred here. We have some arbitrary statistical invention (as arbitrary as calculating someone's weight in kilograms divided by his height in centimeters multiplied by his shoe size), and this is misleadingly referred to as a "barcode." The authors haven't found any evidence of anything like a barcode used by an animal brain.  What is going on here is pareidolia, in which people see some pattern that isn't really there. 

No study like this should be taken seriously unless a rigorous blinding protocol was followed, but no such thing was done. We merely hear that someone was blind to the sex of the birds, which is not the type of blinding that needed to be done. 

Here (in Figure 4) is the best the authors can do to try and get some evidence of what they call "barcode reactivation." They claim that the two visuals on the left are similar, and that the two visuals on the right are similar. Probably the data was carefully filtered, massaged and selected to try and give the best match that could be found. But it's no good match at all. There's not even a repetition of a distinctive detailed pattern. 

We should take this about as seriously as someone photographing thousands of clouds hoping to find the reappearance of an animal ghost, and showing us two clouds that both look like a tiny bit like a cat, and saying that this is evidence of an animal ghost reappearance.  The visuals above aren't barcodes, and they don't look anything like barcodes. Here is what a barcode looks like:

Also without any merit is a recent press release with the headline "Researchers discover dynamic DNA structures that regulate the formation of memory."  The press release is referring to the  low quality paper "DNA G-quadruplex is a transcriptional control device that regulates memory."  It's another mouse study, one using only a way-too-small study group of eight mice. Besides failing to use any blinding protocol (an essential for a paper like this to be taken seriously), the paper is another paper that hinges on subjective judgments of "freezing behavior" to try to measure fear in mice. Read here for why all such papers are junk science.  In general, biology papers that refer to something chemical and use the word "regulate" are using unjustified and misleading language. Biochemical processes are incredibly complex, and individual chemicals are not regulators. The paper uses the word "control" rather than "controls," seemingly indicating that only one control animal was used.  A well-designed  experimental study would have used a minimum of 15 subjects per study group, and 15 subjects in the control group. The fact that major publications such as Newsweek did stories based on this low-quality research tells you something about the appalling lack of standards these days in science journalism. 

We have only 8 mice in a study that has 19 authors. We should laugh whenever we encounter "One Mouse Per Scientist" researchers, and suspect any research they produce is poor research. 

Our scientists are getting nowhere trying to back up the erroneous claim that memories are stored in the brain. No such memories can be found by microscopic examination of brain tissue, although we would have found them about 70 years ago if memories were stored in the brain, at about the same time DNA and the genetic code were discovered. To prevent us from noticing the dismal lack of progress in backing up claims that memories are stored in brains, we have a flow of poorly designed neuroscience studies on memory, studies failing to follow high standards of experimental science and honesty. That flow of studies is like a sewer pipe. 

A kind of "anything is allowed" lying goes on these days in neuroscience press releases.  A recent news story was entitled "Neuroscience Breakthrough Unveils How We Learn and Remember."  The story was about some analysis of low-level changes in dendrites,  and was promoting a paper that made no serious effort to link such changes to learning or memory.  Previously scientists have usually claimed that learning occurs by changes in synapses, not dendrites. Chemical changes in both dendrites and synapses are slow, and cannot explain human learning, which can occur instantly.

When reading stories about neuroscience research, always assume that any uses of the word "breakthrough" or the phrases "unveils how" or "reveals how" or "shows how" are totally unjustified. 99% of the time such an assumption will be correct.  A 2022 paper says this about neuroscience research: "The current landscape is characterized both by a lack of robust, validated standards and a plethora of overlapping, underdeveloped, untested and underutilized standards and best practices." The truth is: bad practices and poorly designed studies are more the rule than the exception in experimental neuroscience. 

We should also remember that these days science-related clickbait is big business. Science-related stories with untrue but interesting-sounding claims lead to web pages with ads, and such ads make much revenue for the people funding the websites.  So it's more than just pareidolia and paper-count-building  and citation-count-building that explains all these junk stories: greed also plays a large part in it. What I call the scitainment industry (a mixture of science and entertainment) is very big business.