More Indications That Scientists Have No Understanding of How a Brain Could Think

Several of my previous posts have examined the unsuccessful attempts of neuroscientists to give credible answers to basic questions that might be asked by a person believing their claims that brains produce minds and that brains store memories:

• In my previous post "Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Store a Memory," I examined an article by a neuroscientist in The Guardian, one entitled "What happens in your brain when you make a memory?" I showed the lack of credibility in the supplied answer, which wasn't even a self-consistent one, with the author switching from a claim that memories are stored in synapses to the different claim that memories are stored in neurons. 
• In my previous post "Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Retrieve a Memory," I looked at the answers given at an expert answers site to the question "How are memories retrieved in the brain?" In general we got the impression that none of the writers had a credible story to tell. 
• In my previous post "Exhibit B Suggesting Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Retrieve a Memory," I looked at the glaring inadequacies of a paper entitled "The neurobiological foundation of memory retrieval."  I pointed out the authors simply ignore the whole speed problem of explaining instant memory recall.  Their paper makes no mention of such a thing, and doesn't use words such as "speed" or "quick" or "fast" or "instant" or "instantaneous."  The authors also ignore the issue of how a brain could decode (during memory retrieval) encoded information stored in a brain. Their paper does not use the words "decode," "decoding" or "translate."  The paper merely refers in passing to some research they claim has "potentially interesting translational implications," but give no details to clarify such a claim.  Nor does the paper have any discussion of some theory of a read mechanism that could be used to read memories from brains. Searching for the word "read" in the paper produces no relevant sentences. 
• In my previous post "Exhibit A Suggesting Scientists Have No Understanding of How a Brain Could Imagine Anything"  I discussed why a long essay by neuroscientist Andrey Vyshedskiy failed to supply any neural explanation for how imagination can occur. 
• In my previous post "More Indications Scientists Don't Understand How a Brain Could Think or Remember" I discussed the failures of neuroscientists to give any credible neural theory of thinking, creativity, or recall. 

Let us look at the latest indication that scientists have no credible story to tell of how neural processes could explain basic actions of the mind. It is an article in The Conversation entitled "How Does the Brain Think?" We have an answer by Jennifer Robinson who says, "As a professor of psychology and neuroscience, I have studied the brain for almost 20 years."  Robinson goes astray immediately by making the false claim that the brain is like a computer. She states, "The brain is like a supercomputer inside your head that helps you think, learn and make decisions." 

Let's look at what is in a computer, and whether that matches anything known to exist in the brain. No one can ever give any explanation of how a material thing could produce an abstract idea. We do, however, have some idea of how certain machines are able to process data in a way that some attempt to compare to thinking.  Although they are incapable of conscious thought, computers can do logic and data processing by means of things such as these:

(1) a central processing unit, a small part of a computer with a unique architecture unlike any other part of the computer;

(2) an operating system, an extremely complex library of software functions of general usefulness (UNIX, Linux, Android and Windows are examples), one requiring man-years of purposeful labor to produce;

(3) application programming code that follows various syntax rules so it can be executed by an interpreter or a compiler (nowadays all computers have on them application software that required years of human effort to produce);

(4) things such as "if/then" logic, variables that store text or numbers, and programming control structures such as loops.

No such things exist in the brain. With the exception of the genetic processing apparatus that exists throughout the body, which processes only lists of amino acids in DNA, there is no place in the brain where some sequence of instructions is processed the way a computer processes sequential instructions. The brain has nothing like a computer operating system, and no application programming code. There is no place where we see "if/then" logic being processed, and we can find no place in a brain where variables store values such as numbers and text strings. We cannot detect in the brain anything like the engineering that a computer uses to process information.  It has been pointed out by one expert that current neuroscience theories are not even able to explain how a brain could store a single number. Except for genetic information that does not contain learned knowledge, there is no sign of anything in the brain that could store or retrieve information. Examining brain tissue with the most powerful microscopes, no trace can be found of anything a person learned or any memory of an experience. 

So to say a brain is a computer is to tell a falsehood as outrageous as claiming that the brain is an interstellar spaceship.  We know the type of things that computers have, and the brain does not have such things. In a poll of neuroscientists, they were asked whether they agreed with the claim that the brain is like a computer, with data collection and processing. 47% said yes, 35% said no, and 18% said they did not know. There is obviously no clear neuroscience basis for claiming the brain acts like a computer. 

Next Robinson gives us this analogy which offers no insight on how a brain could think anything:

"Imagine your brain as a busy city with lots of streets and buildings. Each part of the brain has a specific job to do, just like certain areas of a city or certain buildings serve different purposes. When you have a thought, it’s like a message traveling through the city, passing from one area to another."

This doesn't get us anywhere in the way of explanation. The question is how a thought arises, and you don't do anything to explain that by saying a thought moves around from one place to another.  There is also no neuroscience basis for claiming that thoughts are transmitted by brain signals.  Eavesdropping on brain signals by using techniques such as EEG readings, no one has ever been able to detect anything like a thought traveling around. 

Robinson then tells us this:

" When you have a thought, neurons in your brain fire up and create electrical impulses. These impulses tend to travel along similar pathways and release tiny chemicals called neurotransmitters along the way. These neurotransmitters are like the construction crew that builds the roads, making it easier for the messages to be delivered."

There is no neuroscience justifying these claims. It is not true that electrical impulses arise in the brain only when you are thinking. Instead, electrical impulses are constantly traveling all over the brain, throughout every region, regardless of whether you are thinking or not.  According to the site here, the average neuron transmits an electrical signal at the rate of between about 10 times per second and once every two seconds.  When a human being thinks of nothing at all, his brain has the same electrical activity as when he is thinking. As for Robinson's claim that neurotransmitters are like a construction crew that builds roads, it is a false and misleading claim. Neurotransmitters do nothing to construct structures in the brain. Your neurotransmitters are no more a construction crew than your emails and instant messages are a construction crew. 

The first visual on the page here shows EEG readings for a human during 10 seconds of eyes closed resting activity. We see readings from 30 different electrodes. Each reading shows a squiggly line. Such lines are brain waves that result from random firing of neurons when no thinking or recall activity occurred.  The same thing is shown in Figure 1 of the paper here. So you don't explain thinking by mentioning neurons firing. There is always a great abundance of neurons firing in the brain, even when you are not thinking about anything.  There is no evidence that neurons fire more often when you think. 

Figure 6 of the paper here ("A test-retest resting, and cognitive state EEG dataset during multiple subject-driven states") shows brain waves for subjects in five differing mental states: an eyes closed rest state, an eyes open rest state, a state of recalling in the mind a song, a state of recalling the previous days events, and a state of doing mental math by subtracting backwards from 5000. We have lines representing each of these states, with each state shown in a different color. The lines look almost identical. Figure 7 shows the same data, represented by a different technique.  We get the impression of very little difference in neural firing rates when someone changes from resting his mind to doing the thinking needed for math. 

Figure 2 of the paper here compares firing rates of hippocampus neurons in rats, during sleep and an awake state. They look about the same, varying from once every ten seconds to ten times per second.  When you do a Google image search for "neural firing rates in different activities," you will see diagrams that tend to show a bell-shaped curve, with the curve varying from about .1 times per second to 10 times per second.  The graphs are usually expressing in hertz, which means a rate of 1 time per second. 

Robinson then repeats the unfounded claim that learning results in synapse strengthening, and that brains store memories. I won't rebut that here, because it has nothing to do with the topic under discussion, which is thinking. 

We are rather clearly getting nothing in the way of a neural explanation for thinking when Robinson makes a statement like this:

"Creativity is another superpower of the brain. When you let your imagination run wild, your brain can come up with new ideas, stories and inventions. Artists, writers and scientists all use their creative brains to explore new possibilities and solve problems.

Have you ever experienced a 'eureka' moment when a brilliant idea pops into your head out of nowhere? That’s your brain’s way of connecting the dots and coming up with a solution."

The rest of the article is entitled "Keeping Your Brain Healthy," and offers nothing in the way of an explanation of how brains could think. We are left with nothing in the way of any explanation of how a brain could think. 

In the business world there is a widespread phenomenon that commonly goes under the name of "fake it until you make it."  A person may be given a job that he is unable to do very well with the knowledge he starts with when taking the job, and the person is asked to become skillful in some system or technology or method he does not understand. The private slogan of many such people is "fake it until you make it." This involves trying to give the impression that you know much more than you do, until you reach the stage when your relevant knowledge has greatly improved. 

Normally "fake it until you make it" is a fairly short-term thing.  But for most cognitive neuroscientists it seems that "fake it until you make it" is a "throughout your career" type of thing.  Addressing a reader's question of "how does a brain think," what Robinson should have answered is something like: "I have been studying brains for twenty years, and I still don't have any credible tale to tell of how a brain could produce a thought." 

Below are some relevant quotes by scientists:

• " We don't know how a brain produces a thought." -- Neuroscientist Saskia De Vries (link). 
• "You realize that neither the term ‘decision-making’ nor the term ‘attention’ actually corresponds to a thing in the brain." -- neuroscentist Paul Ciskek (link). 
• "We know very little about the brain. We know about connections, but we don't know how information is processed." -- Neurobiologist Lu Chen. 
• "Computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms. Humans, on the other hand, do not — never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?" -- Senior research psychologist Robert Epstein.
• "The neuroscientific study of creativity is stuck and lost." -- Psychologist Arne Dietrich,  "Where in the brain is creativity: a brief account of a wild-goose chase."
• "How creative ideas arise in our mind and in our brain is a key unresolved question." -- nine scientists (link).
• "The central dogma of Neuormania is that persons are their brains....Basic features of human experience...elude neural explanation. Indeed, they are at odds with the materialist framework presupposed in Neuromania. Many other assumptions of Neuromania -- such as that the mind-brain is a computer -- wilt on close inspection. All of this notwithstanding, the mantra 'You are your brain' is endlessly repeated. This is not justified by what little we know of the brain, or more importantly, of the relationship between our brains and ourselves as conscious agents."  -- Raymond Tallis, Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester, "Aping Mankind," page xii (link). 
• "The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Were we able even to see and feel the very molecules of the brain, and follow all their motions, all their groupings, all their electric discharges if such there be, and intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem,...The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable."  -- Physicist John Tyndall (link).

In the article here, we have neuroscientists confessing that they do not know how a brain could produce thinking. The subtitle says, "Thoughts, memories, sensations -- why are we still in the dark about how they work?"

The article is full of silly statements by neuroscientists claiming that we know that the brain produces the mind, followed by confessions that they don't know how that works. In general it is stupid to claim that one thing is causing another if you lack an explanation of how that works.  Do you not understand how extraterrestrials could be manipulating the stock market? Then don't claim that they do. Ditto for claiming that brains produce minds and memory when you don't know how that could happen. 

Contrary to the claims in the article, scientists understand brain anatomy very well. The really mysterious cells in the body are those that reproduce, because scientists don't understand how cells are able to reproduce. But brain cells in adults probably don't reproduce, contrary to the dubious claim of adult neurogenesis. Because neurons probably don't reproduce in adults, the brain is arguably one of the least mysterious parts of the body. The reason people claim the brain is mysterious is because they attribute to brains all kinds of actions that brains don't do, such as producing selves and producing thoughts and storing memories and retrieving memories.  Since such people don't understand how that could work, they keep saying the brain is very mysterious.  Similarly, if someone thinks his little wood wand can perform mighty feats of magic, he might say, "My wand is very mysterious; I don't know how it works."  But the wand is not really mysterious at all; it's just a little piece of wood. 

How High-Speed Life Reviews in Near-Death Experiences Discredit "Brains Make Minds" Claims and "Brains Store Memories" Claims

Many people recognize that reports of near-death experiences tend to contradict materialist claims about the mind and the brain, such as the claim that the mind is merely the product of the brain and that memories are stored in brains.  But I think that few realize just how thoroughly such experiences contradict such claims. As I discussed in my previous post, there are several facets of near-death experiences that  discredit claims that brains make minds and claims that memories are stored in brains. In this post I will consider only one of these: the experience of high-speed life reviews. 

A common characteristic of near-death experiences are so-called life review events in which someone may recall the events of life in very rapid succession and great vividness.  Claims that such life-review events occur in near-death experiences go back more than a hundred years before Raymond Moody's 1975 book Life After Life.  For example, on page 267 of the June 4, 1875 edition of The Spiritualist, we have a first-hand account of such an experience, told by William Stainton Moses. He states this, describing a life-review during a near-drowning:

"It never occurred to anybody, I suppose, that a man who could venture in a little cockleshell such as I was sculling, was unable to swim ; and so no particular effort was made to rescue me. I went down dazed and confused with the upset, and the shouts and objurgations of the crowd. I remember the shout of the coxswain, more forcible than polite, and then I floundered about until I suppose I became unconscious. At any rate a strange peacefulness took the place of my previous feeling. I recognised fully that I was drowning, but no sort of fear was present to my mind. I did not even regret the fact. By degrees, as it seemed—though the process must have been instantaneous—I recollected my life. The link was—well, I am drowning, and this life is done with. It has not been a very long one. . . . And so the events of it came before my mind, and seemed to shape themselves in outline and move before me. It was not that I thought, but that objective pictures of events seemed to float before me, a moving tableau, as though depicted on the mass of water that weighed upon my eyes. I seemed to see the tableau, but not with the eye of sense: with that mysterious inner vision with which I have since discerned spiritual things. The silky, velvety appearance of the tableau, which seemed as I say to float before me, was very prominently impressed upon me. The events were all scenes in which I had been an actor, and no very trivial or unimportant ones were depicted, though they were not all serious, some indeed laughable enough. Nor was my frame of mind particularly solemn. I was an interested spectator ; little more. One incident of which I had no previous knowledge was recalled to my mind on that occasion, and has never again left it. My memory of it is now as clear as of other things. The next thing I remember was the interruption of this peaceful state by a series of most unpleasant sensations which were attendant on resuscitation."

Similarly, on page 410 of the 1870's book The Marvellous Country by Samuel Woodworth Cozzens, we have an account of a near-death experience occurring when the author fell from a high height:

"All this time I was acquiring greater momentum, until it seemed as though I was fairly flying into the very arms of the horrible death which stood staring me so steadily in the face. Not a bush or shrub could I see growing upon the precipitous sides; there was nothing, absolutely nothing, for me to cling to, and the stones and earth which I disturbed in my descent were falling in a shower around me.

Convinced that death was inevitable, I became perfectly reconciled to the thought. My mind comprehended in a moment the acts of a life-time. Transactions of the most trivial character, circumstances the remembrance of which had been buried deep in memory’s vault for years, stood before me in bold relief; my mind recalled with the rapidity of lightning, and_yet retained a distinct impression of every thought.

I seemed to be gliding swiftly and surely out of the world, but felt no fear, experienced no regret at the thought; on the contrary, rejoiced that I was so soon to see with my own eyes the great mystery concealed behind the veil; that I was to cross the deep waters and be at rest.

I thought I heard the sound of many voices, in wonderful harmony, coming from the far-off distance, though from what direction I could not tell.

My momentum had become so great that I seemed to experience much difficulty in breathing; and I remember that I was trying to explain to my own satisfaction why this should be so, when the heel of my right boot struck the corner of a small stone that chanced to be firmly imbedded in the earth and therefore offered so much resistance to my descent, that upon striking it I was thrown forward upon my face. This stone without doubt saved my life."

The book includes this illustration of what happened:

In 1892 Albert Heim produced a paper in German entitled "Notizen über den Tod durch Absturz," which can be translated as "The Experience of Dying from Falls" or "Notes About Death from Falling."  The original German text of the paper can be read here. Below is a translation I got using Google Translate. First Heim notes how he got his accounts of people who had close brushes with death after falling:

"In mountaineering and other literature we come across relevant stories here and there, although rarely. In the Hamburg Laza-rethen in the war year 1870, as well as on various later occasions, I interviewed war wounded. Several doctors who had a lot of contact with victims were able to tell me about their statements. I researched several bricklayers and roofers who had fallen from scaffolding and roofs, half-injured workers in mines, on railway lines, etc. A large number ...who fell without losing their lives were able to give me precise information. Those who were thrown away by the air strike during the Elm landslide and became unconscious told me their experiences. I also received detailed reports from some club members who had crashed and were rescued, from three fellow professionals, etc. A fisherman who had been swept deep under water when the Zug bank collapsed told me his experiences. We have some good accounts of the Mönchenstein railway accident from those who narrowly escaped with their lives, e.g. from a locomotive driver, from some passengers, etc. etc. But what has caused me not to miss an opportunity to write such notes for more than 25 years collect, were my own experiences." 

Then Heim notes a remarkable similarity in the accounts:

"For the vast majority of those who have had an accident - probably 95% - regardless of their level of education, the symptoms are exactly the same, only experienced slightly differently in degree. In the face of death due to a sudden accident, almost everyone experiences the same mental state - a completely different state than in the face of a less sudden cause of death. It can be briefly characterized as follows:

No pain is felt, nor is there any paralyzing shock that can occur in the event of minor danger (fire outbreak, etc.). No fear, no trace of despair, no pain, rather calm seriousness, deep resignation, commanding spiritual security and speed. The activity of thought is enormous, increased to a hundredfold speed or intensity, the conditions and the eventualities of the outcome are objectively clearly seen far away, no confusion occurs. The time seems very extended. You act quickly and think carefully. In many cases this is followed by a sudden look back into one's entire past. Finally, the faller often hears beautiful music and then falls into a wonderful blue sky with little rose-colored clouds. Then consciousness disappears painlessly - usually at the moment of awakening, which is only heard and never painfully felt. Of the senses, hearing is probably the last to disappear."

Heim discusses a strange increase in the speed of thought:

"Anxiety paralysis does not occur, thought activity appears to be enormously increased, and time is lengthened in the same proportion. The judgment remains clearly objective, and as far as the external circumstances allow it, the person who falls remains able to act at lightning speed."

Heim quotes a first-hand account by one person who nearly died in a terrifying fall:

"Meanwhile, a whole flood of thoughts had time to move through the brain in a clear way: The next blow will bring you a grim death, it was said. A series of pictures showed me in quick succession all the beauty and love that I had experienced in this world, and in between them the sermon that I had heard from Mr. Obersthelfer that morning sounded like a powerful melody: God is almighty, heaven and earth rest his hand; We must remain silent about his will. Infinite calm came over me at this thought, in the midst of all the terrible turmoil. The car was thrown up twice more; then the front part suddenly drove vertically down into the Birs, and the rear part with me was thrown sideways over the embankment down into the Birs. The wagon was shattered."

Heim gives this first-hand account of a fall he experienced, noting that his thought seemed greatly speeded-up:

"Then I saw, as if on a stage from a distance, my entire past life played out in numerous images. I saw myself as the main character playing. Everything was as if transfigured of a heavenly light and everything was beautiful and without pain, without fear, without torment. The memory of very sad experiences was also clear, but still not sad. No fighting or strife, the fight had also become love. Sublime and reconciling thoughts dominated and connected the individual images, and a divine calm passed through my soul like wonderful music. More and more a wonderfully blue sky surrounded me with little rosy and especially delicate violet clouds - I floated out into it without any pain and gently, while I saw that I was now flying freely through the air and that there was still a field of snow below me. Objective observation, thinking and subjective feeling occurred simultaneously side by side. Then I heard my thud and my fall was over."

Below is a similar account from the 2023 paper "Near-death experiences and the change of worldview in survivors of sudden cardiac arrest: A phenomenological and hermeneutical study ":

"Anders was married and 74 years of age. He had ended his working career in a leading position for a company with 20 employees. He viewed himself as an easy-going man who, for the most part, had a bright outlook on life. He experienced an NDE during an SCA [sudden cardiac arrest] that lasted nearly two minutes. He said that the NDE started with a brightly lit, joyful meeting with his parents when he was about two or three years old, followed by a life review, where he re-experienced his life at intensely high speed. He said that if he had compared it to the world’s fastest computer, the computer would have been slow in contrast. To him, the experience was clear and vivid, featuring memories and people from his past who were alive again. He also explained that before the experience, he did not believe in any form of continuation of life after death, although he said he had thought about it previously."

In another paper on near-death experiences, we read of someone who says, "I reviewed 15 or 20 years of my life in perhaps two seconds." One person's modern account of a near-death experience states this:

"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."

Another person who had a near-death experience stated this: 

"Every detail of every second, every feeling, every thought while I had been alive on Earth was displayed before me in perfect chronological order, from my birth until my electrocution. At the same time, to my amazement, I was re-living my entire twenty-eight years simultaneously!"

What does all this have to do with whether the brain is the source of the mind, and whether memories are stored in brains?  The credibility of claims that memory recollections come from brains is inversely proportional to the speed and capacity at which things can be recalled. There are numerous signal slowing factors in the brain, such as the relatively slow speed of dendrites, and the cumulative effect of synaptic delays in which signals have to travel over relatively slow chemical synapses (by far the most common type of synapse in the brain). As explained in my post here, such physical factors should cause brain signals to move at a typical speed very many times slower than the often cited figure of 100 meters per second: a sluggish "snail's pace" speed of only about a centimeter per second (about half an inch per second).  Ordinary everyday evidence of very fast thinking and instant recall is therefore evidence against claims that memory recall occurs because of brain activity, particularly because the brain is totally lacking in the things humans add to constructed objects to allow fast recall (things such as sorting and addressing and indexes).  The more evidence we have of very fast thinking and very fast and very capacious recall (what a computer expert might call high-speed high-throughput retrieval), the stronger is the evidence against the claim that memory recall occurs from brain activity. 

What we have in the "life reviews" of near-death experiences is evidence of enormously fast and capacious "high throughput" memory recall. Often in a very short span of time people are able to recall with great clarity and vividness the most important moments of their life. Such recall should be absolutely impossible from a brain, given all of the physical shortfalls of the brain which should prevent it from being able to produce extremely rapid recall -- factors such as a total lack of sorting and addressing and indexing, and a relatively slow rate of signal transmission caused by factors such as relatively slow chemical synapses and cumulative synaptic delays. 

In the paragraphs above I mention only signal speed time. Then there is the fact that if memories were stored in a brain, there would have to be some system (unlike any ever discovered or ever even described by any detailed theory) by which sensory experiences were encoded as brain states or synapse states, through some chemical translation process, with the opposite (a decoding) occurring during recall. The decoding part would be a sluggish affair, which would never allow experiences such as a person very rapidly recalling in a flash many things that had happened in his life.  We know of a decoding process that occurs in cells, DNA translation decoding involving an encoding scheme (the genetic code) vastly simpler than any system that would be required for encoding and decoding stored human memories. DNA translation occurs at a fairly sluggish rate of about one minute per protein. 

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."