60+ Aspects of the Human Mind, and Whether Brains Explain Them

Below is a table listing many aspects of the human mind. In the right column I consider whether brains help us explain such aspects of human mentality. 

Aspect of the Human Mind	Description	Is There a Brain Explanation?
Abstract thinking	Example: creating a new idea	No one understands how a brain could create an idea
Apparition sightings	An apparition may often be seen by more than one person, and many see an apparition of someone they did not know was dead, shortly before learning the person died at the same time (link)	All the better cases of apparition sightings are not explicable by brain activity, and cannot be credibly explained as hallucinations, with the sightings generally occurring to people who had no other hallucinatory experiences
Attention	An example is focusing on one person speaking in a room where ten are speaking	Eyes have a physical focusing mechanism, but brains seem to have no such mechanism, lacking any moving visible parts
Appreciation	This includes the ability to appreciate natural beauty, and things such as the ability to appreciate great works of art and literature	There is no brain explanation and no evolutionary explanation for appreciation
Auditory Perception	Perceiving some sound you heard	A region of the brain seems to aid this
Belief origination	A new belief may arise instantly	No one has any understanding of how a belief could ever arise from a change in a brain state, and there is no evidence that a brain changes when someone forms a belief
Belief persistence	Once formed a belief may persist for 60+ years	Given rapid protein turnover and the relatively short lifetimes of dendritic spines and synapses, lifelong beliefs cannot be explained as brain effects
Calculation, normal	Examples include counting, multiplication, probability estimation	Despite people constantly comparing the brain to a computer, the brain has none of the main characteristics of a computer; so normal calculation cannot be explained as brain activity
Calculation, exceptional	There are many known examples of math marvels who could compute with enormous speed and accuracy, such as autistic calendar calculators	Extremely fast and accurate math calculation cannot be explained as brain activity, particularly given the relatively slow average speed of brain signals (caused by factors such as cumulative synaptic delay), and the relatively low reliability of synaptic transmission (estimated to be as low as 10% to 50%)
Clairvoyance	We have two hundred years of evidence for clairvoyance, with serious scientific study beginning in 1825, and producing very strong cases described here, here, here, here and here	Obviously not explicable by brain activity
Concentration	The ability to mentally focus on some particular topic or problem	Eyes have a physical focusing mechanism, but brains seem to have no such mechanism
Comprehension	This includes the ability to understand very subtle concepts such as philosophical theories	There is no understanding of how a brain could understand anything
Consciousness		Scientists cannot even explain the most simple consciousness
Creativity	Includes common creativity and heights of creativity, shown in geniuses such as Picasso, Shakespeare, and Wagner	There is no understanding of how the brain could cause creativity
Curiosity	Can be a major motivator of human behavior, but has no survival value benefit	There is no brain explanation
Desire	The longing to possess something you do not possess, or to experience something you have never experienced or do not experience as much as you wish	There is no brain explanation for desires not involving sex, appetite or thirst
Dreaming		There is no brain explanation for dreaming, and experiments such as the Dream Catcher experiment show that brain scans are insufficient to predict whether someone was dreaming
Emotions – fear, anger		It is claimed that there are brain structures or chemicals that can contribute to fear or anger
Emotions – guilt		No brain explanation for guilt
Emotions – hate		No brain explanation for hate that persists for years
Emotions – joy		No brain explanation
Emotions – love		No brain explanation for love that persists for years
Emotions – sadness		Despite endless efforts, no brain basis for depression has been found. Frequent "chemical imbalance" claims have been debunked.
Emotions- wonder	Wonder or awe is a subtle emotion occurring when someone encounters grand or impressive but not threatening.	No brain explanation.
Empathy, compassion and sympathy	Often involves the subtle skill of "putting yourself in someone else shoes," and imagining how they feel	No brain explanation
Esthetic abilities	Includes the ability to enjoy art and music	No brain explanation
ESP (telepathy)	The evidence for ESP (psi) is very massive, and includes a wealth of very convincing experimental evidence and a huge amount of anecdotal evidence (discussed in the 66 posts you can read here by continuing to press Older Posts at the bottom right)	No brain explanation
Fascination	May be healthy or unhealthy (as in the case of obsessive-compulsive disorder)	No brain explanation for syndromes such as obsessive-compulsive disorder
HSAM (hyperthymesia)	Rare people with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory can remember every day of their adult lives	No brain explanation. The memory abilities of ordinary people are not explicable by brain activity, and HSAM cases multiply the explanatory shortfall.
Happiness	The biologically superfluous state of enjoying your existence	No brain explanation
Hypnosis	The 19th century produced endless very detailed accounts of the most inexplicable mental effects occurring during hypnosis (summarized here).	No brain explanation
Humor, laughter		No brain explanation
Insight	An extremely subtle and high-level mental ability allowing someone to perceive the essential nature of some phenomena with many forms, or a likely common cause of a large class of events	No brain explanation
Interest	A person's interests (topics they are interested in) may last for 50 years.	No brain explanation. High component turnover in the brain makes very long-lasting interests beyond any brain explanation.
Imagination, normal	Includes the ability to visualize things you've never seen, such as a big room filled with pizza pies, from floor to ceiling	No brain explanation
Imagination, exceptional	Includes the ability to imagine realities vastly different from any humans live in, such as strange worlds of fantasy and science fiction	No brain explanation, and no evolutionary explanation
Introspection	Someone's ability to ponder and analyze his own feelings, moods, goals and motivations	No brain explanation
Mediumship	Some spectacular  examples well-documented by scientists and doctors include examples of mental mediumship and physical mediumship (see here, here, here, and here for examples)	No brain explanation
Memory formation – episodic		No brain explanation. No neuroscientist can explain how life experiences could ever be stored as neural states or synapse states. "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?"
Memory formation – conceptual, factual	Examples include all the facts and skills you learned in school	No brain explanation. No neuroscientist can explain how school-learned knowledge could ever be stored as neural states or synapse states. "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).
Memory formation – instantaneous	Humans can instantly form new memories. If you learn your child or parent died, you will instantly form a new memory that will last the rest of your life.	No brain explanation.  All of the sketchy, hand-waving attempts to explain memory formation by brain activity appeal to processes (such as synapse strengthening) that would require at least minutes, and probably many minutes.
Memory loss: Alzheimer's disease, amnesia	Amnesia can sometimes occur without corresponding brain injury	Not well-explained by brain effects. As discussed here, many Alzheimer's patients have healthy brains, and many people with good memories have damaged brains.
Memory persistence, lifelong		No brain explanation. The short lifetimes of synaptic proteins and the high component turnover in the brain should make it impossible for a brain to store memories for decades
Memory persistence, despite massive loss of brain tissue	Surgically removing half of brains in hemispherectomy operations does not seem to cause loss of acquired memories, and there are countless cases of little memory damage after very large brain damage	No brain explanation. Appeals to "plasticity" (one part of the brain taking over the job of a lost part of the brain) do not explain dramatic cases in which acquired memories persist despite massive brain tissue loss
Memory recall, instantaneous	Example: you hear the name of some obscure historical figure you haven't heard about in years, but instantly remember some facts about that person	The lack of any addresses or sorting in the brain means instant recall cannot be credibly explained as brain activity. "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.
Memory recall, eidetic	Some people have exceptional memory sometimes called photographic memory or eidetic memory (see here for examples)	Eidetic memory examples multiply the failure of the brain to explain human memory
Memory recall, massive sequential recall	Examples: many  Moslem scholars can recall the entire Quran with 6000+ verses; Aitken and JB  memorized epic poems of about 10,000 lines; and Hamlet actors can recall 1,422 lines in one evening.  Young Leste May Williams memorized 12,000+ biblical verses including the whole New Testament. The New Testament has about 180,000 words, so the feat of Leste May Williams would seem to be far more impressive than the memorization of Virgil's Aeneid, a work with only 63,719 words. An old newspaper article says this: " 'Far more noteworthy,'  thinks American Medicine, 'is the memory of an expert piano player, who will play an entire season's concerts without a note of printed music before him. His memory is so perfect that hundreds of thousands of notes must be at the orderly and instant disposal of the will, and this is combined with a multiplicity of synchronous recollections of timbre, tempo, expression, etc.' "	No brain explanation, as discussed in my post "Why Brains Are Not Suitable for Storing Long Sequences Like Humans Remember."
Morality		No brain explanation
Muscle skill learning	Examples: learning to swim, learning to ride a bike	May be partially explicable by imagining a strengthening of certain brain areas used when such skills were acquired
Navigation	Example: your ability to navigate back to your home from some spot far away	No brain explanation. Claims of "place cells" in the hippocampus are legends of neuroscience, not supported by well-replicated studies using adequate study group sizes.
Near-death experiences		No brain explanation. Near-death experiences are commonly very vivid experiences occurring when the heart has stopped and brain waves have flatlined. According to "brains make minds" ideas, such experiences should be impossible.
Out-of-body experiences	In such experiences a person will often report viewing his body from a position outside of his body	No brain explanation. According to "brains make minds" ideas, such experiences should be impossible.
Pain (physical)		The reception of pain signals is explicable by pain sensors in the central nervous system
Pain (mental)	Example: anguish about a poor choice you made	No brain explanation
Personality	Humans may have particular long-standing mental tendencies that tend to persist for decades (for example, a person may tend throughout adulthood to be shy or outgoing or boastful or modest or adventurous or timid)	No brain explanation. The short lifetimes of synaptic proteins and the high component turnover in the brain should make it impossible for someone to have stable personality characteristics lasting throughout adulthood. See my post "Study Finds No Robust Link Between Brain Structure and Personality."
Pleasure (physical)		Gustatory and sexual pleasure is partially explicable by sensors in the central nervous system
Pleasure (mental)	Example: the pleasure you get from reading a good book or thinking about a pleasant outcome in your future	No brain explanation
Recognition, visual	Example: recognizing a face as belonging to some particular person	No brain explanation. Claims of a "fusiform face area" helping to explain face recognition are not-well founded, and are based on low-quality, poorly replicated studies.
Recognition, verbal	Being able to recognize the meaning of 100,000+ words in the language you speak	No brain explanation
Selfhood, self-awareness	You have a single unified self, and feel like a single person, not like some concentration of nerve impulses	No explanation of why two brain hemispheres each consisting of billions of neurons would give rise to a unified sense of self. When the nerve fibers connecting the hemispheres are severed, there remains a single self, not two selves (contrary to what we would expect from the idea that the brain makes the mind).
Sexuality		No brain explanation for many aspects of sexuality, such as why one person may be gay
Social behavior, social needs	Humans are extremely social, forming social groups of many sizes, including simple two-person marriages, families with children, clubs, national organizations, nations, etc.	No brain explanation
Speech abilities		Only partially explicable by muscle activity aided by brains.  The ability of people to speak as fast as they do is beyond any brain explanation, particularly given the slow average speed of brain signals.
Spirituality	A very important factor in the behavior of large fractions of the human population	No brain explanation
Volition (will)	Volition may be physical (deciding to move in a particular direction) or mental (a decision that you will do something in the future)	No brain explanation. Neuroscientists cannot explain how even the simplest of decisions can occur.
Writing abilities	Average humans can type accurately at a speed of about 60 words per minute, with some humans reaching speeds of more than 200 words per minute	While the muscle movement occurring during writing is aided by brains, there is no brain explanation of how humans are able to write as fast and accurately as they can write, particularly given the relatively slow average speed of brain signals (caused by factors such as cumulative synaptic delay), and the relatively low reliability of synaptic transmission (estimated to be as low as 10% to 50%).

The thorough list above helps show the dehumanizing and depersonalizing folly of trying to describe minds mainly with the word "consciousness," which is a type of shadow-speaking in which human beings are depicted as mere shadows of what they are.  We do not have any mere "problem of consciousness," but instead have a vastly bigger problem of explaining human minds and human mental experiences in all their diverse richness, an incredibly rich reality far beyond any explanation that merely refers to brains. 

The idea that most of the aspects of mind listed above are top-down effects arising from some mysterious external reality is necessary because of the many severe failures of bottom-up explanations.  But such an idea may seem unthinkable merely because we have been "bottom-up brainwashed" all our lives to believe that mind must be a bottom-up effect with a merely molecular explanation. To gain some insight on how we have been conditioned to favor a bad type of explanation, let us consider a hypothetical planet rather different from our own: a planet in which the atmosphere is much thicker, and always filled with clouds that block the sun. 

Let's give a name to this perpetually cloudy planet in another solar system, and call this imaginary entity planet Evercloudy.  Let's imagine that the clouds are so thick on planet Evercloudy that its inhabitants have never seen their sun.  The scientists on this planet might ponder two basic questions:

(1) What causes daylight on planet Evercloudy?
(2) How is it that planet Evercloudy stays warm enough for life to exist?

Having no knowledge of their sun, the top-down explanation for these phenomena, the scientists would probably come up with very wrong answers. They would probably speculate that daylight and planetary warmth are bottom-up effects.  They might spin all kinds of speculations such as hypothesizing that daylight comes from photon emissions from rocks and dirt, and that their planet was warm because of heat bubbling up from the hot center of their planet.  By issuing such unjustified speculations, such scientists would be like the scientists on our planet who wrongly think that mind can be explained as a bottom-up effect bubbling up from molecules. 

Facts on planet Evercloudy would present very strong reasons for rejecting such attempts to explain daylight and warm temperatures on planet Evercloudy as bottom-up effects. For one thing, there would be the fact of nightfall, which could not easily be reconciled with any such explanations. Then there would be the fact that the dirt and rocks at the feet below the scientists of Evercloudy would be cold, not warm as would be true if such a bottom-up theory of daylight and planetary warmth were correct.  But we can easily believe that the scientists on planet Evercloudy would just ignore such facts, just as scientists on our planet ignore a huge number of facts arguing against their claims of a bottom-up explanation for mind (facts such as the fact that people are just as smart and still maintain their memories when you remove half of their brains in hemispherectomy operations, the fact that the proteins in synapses have very short lifetimes, the fact that people who lost the great majority of their brains due to disease can be above average intelligence, and the fact that very large numbers of people report floating out of their bodies and observing their bodies from meters away, which should be impossible if minds are produced by brains). 

Just as the phenomena of daylight and planetary warmth on planet Evercloudy could never credibly be explained as bottom-up effects, but could be credibly explained as effects coming from some mysterious unseen reality unknown to the scientists of planet Evercloudy who had never seen their sun, the phenomena of mind on planet Earth can never be credibly explained as bottom-up effects coming from mere molecules or brain components, but can be credibly explained as top-down effects coming from some mysterious unknown reality we cannot currently fathom. The minds of humans must come not from some part less than a human (a brain), but from some reality greater than any human. 

She Didn't Seem to Need the Right Half of Her Brain, and Losing It Did Not Seem to Dim Her Memories

The 2021 paper "Preserved Cognition After Right Hemispherectomy" is another example of a case that should have been "the talk of the town" in the world of science, but which instead seems  to have received almost no attention from the press.  The paper by Mark Bowren, Jr,  Daniel Tranel and Aaron D. Boes tells us the fairly recent case of a woman who had almost the entire right half of her brain removed, but is apparently suffering very little cognitive damage from this removal. 

We read that the woman had a brain stroke at age 29, and that doctors treated her brain problem by removing almost all of the right half of her brain, in an operation called a hemispherectomy. We read that "In the days after surgery, she was described as alert, cooperative, and having normal language and interactions with her providers." We read no mention in the paper of a loss of acquired memories.  

The failure of scientists and doctors to study the exact memory effect of removing half of the brain is a major scandal of neuroscience. Whenever a person has a large portion of the brain removed, you have a great opportunity to test the hypothesis that memories are stored in the brain. This is because if it is true that human memories are stored in the brain, you should see some great loss of memories whenever a large chunk of the brain is removed.  But senselessly, neuroscientists and medical authorities seem to fail to test a loss of acquired memories after removal of large portions of the brain. 

Doing such a test would be quite easy. For example, a person could be given a test of the definition of 200 common words and could be given a multiple-choice test involving 200 commonly known facts; and such tests could be given both before and after the removal of the large amount of brain tissue. A sharp decrease in the score on such  tests would indicate that the person had lost much of the school-learned knowledge that he previously had. Also, a person could be asked to write a 1000-word autobiographical essay, both before and after the removal of the large amount of brain tissue. From the facts in such an essay written before the surgery, you could make a set of 25 or 35 questions and answers.  This set of questions and answers could be asked both before the surgery and after the surgery.  If it was found, for example, that the person given the brain surgery could no longer answer 10 of the autobiographical questions  that the person could answer before the surgery, this would be an indication that the brain surgery had caused the person to lose some of his episodic memories. 

Senselessly, doctors and neuroscientists fail to do tests like this before and after removing large portions of the brain.  Or, if they do such tests, they fail to publish them.  So we are left having to deduce how much of an effect the brain removal had on acquired memories, using other clues, and using the failure to report a loss of acquired memories and episodic memories as evidence that no great loss of such things occurred.  In the case of this woman, we can do that. The paper has failed to mention any loss of conceptual knowledge and has failed to mention any loss of episodic memories. From this we may infer  that there was no such loss.  

Also, the paper has stated this about the aftermath of the dramatic surgery in almost all of the right half of the brain was removed: " In the days after surgery, she was described as alert, cooperative, and having normal language and interactions with her providers."  The phrase "having normal language" is a very important indication that learned knowledge was preserved after almost all of the right half of the brain was removed.  Every time a person uses language in speech, that involves a use of acquired memories. Every single use of a particular word requires a memory of the definition of that word.  

Also we read that two months after the stroke, this patient CB had "intact expressive language and reading comprehension."  The paper does not tell us how many weeks after the stroke there occurred the removal of almost all the right half of the brain. But from the timeline given we know that this sentence refers to some time less than two months after the operation occurred.  Because you cannot learn a large fraction of a language in less than two months, we can presume that the patient had "intact expressive language and reading comprehension" directly after having had almost all of the right half of her brain removed, particularly given that we are told that the patient had "normal language" days after the operation. 

While the authorities involved failed to properly test for a loss of acquired knowledge and episodic memories, they did do a good job of testing the patient's cognitive skills at a time 5.3 and 7.8 years after the operation. They have given us the visual below, which neatly summarizes in a single visual the loss of brain tissue that occurred and the results of the cognitive tests:

As you can see from the visual above, the patient scored in the "Average" range for almost all of the 29 tests. In only two of the dozens of tests did the patient get an "Impaired" score: a test involving symbol search and a test involving copying figures.  We read this:

"Neuropsychological test performances (data collected 5.3 and 7.8 years after the onset of the stroke; figure)4 were notable for normal performance on most tests, including on most nonverbal tests, such as the Block Design test, the Matrix Reasoning test, the Visual Puzzles test, the Judgment of Line Orientation test, the Benton Visual Retention test, the Spatial Span test, and the Faces I and II tests. In addition, she performed within normal limits on several tests of executive functioning, including the Wisconsin Card Sorting test, part B of the Trail Making test, the Color-Word Interference test, and the Similarities test (a test of abstract verbal reasoning and comprehension of implied meanings). Regarding attention, she performed within normal limits on the Line Cancellation test, a test of hemispatial inattention (neglect), and there was no evidence of hemispatial inattention on other neuropsychological tests. Focused and complex attention were within normal limits on parts A and B of the Trail Making Test, respectively."

So how does this data fit in with the claim that your brain makes your mind? It doesn't.  The data defies such a claim.  The case also defies claims that the brain is the storage place of memories.  The paper has failed to mention any loss of acquired knowledge or episodic memories from the removal of half a brain, and has given us some indications that no big loss of that type occurred. 

The Lack of Bodily Addresses Crushes the Credibility of Mechanistic Biology and Mechanistic Psychology

 Accounts of the history of science love to follow a convention of discussing some important discovery, and then telling how that discovery led to some important new understanding about nature. For example, we are often told about the discovery of the red shifts of galaxies, and how this led to the important conclusion that the universe is expanding. But some of the most important insights about nature follow from observation failures -- cases when things were not observed.  

An example was Louis Pasteur's famous experiment regarding spontaneous generation. Pasteur took two goose flasks and filled them with broth. He heated them both to a high enough temperature to sterilize any microbes in them. One flask was left sealed, and the other other flask was left unsealed.  The flasks were left for months. After months, the unsealed flask had developed microbes inside the broth. But the sealed flask had no such microbes. Tending to discredit claims of spontaneous generation, the experiment at least showed something very important: that life cannot easily arise from non-life.  That was a very important insight. Now we understand some of the reasons why life cannot easily arise from non-life, such as the fact that even the simplest forms of life are extremely complex systems requiring a special arrangement of 100,000+ atoms, an arrangement so improbable that its chance occurrence would be like ink splashes writing many pages of well-written prose.

Another example of an important observational failure has been the failure of all attempts to receive radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. Scientists have been trying to receive such signals for more than 50 years, but have not got anywhere. The failure of such a search tells us something important: that our galaxy is apparently not abundant in technological civilizations that are eager to communicate with strangers. Apparently we don't live in a Star Trek type galaxy in which there's a civilized planet in roughly every parsec.  

Another example of an important observational failure has been the failure of all attempts to detect in DNA anything like a blueprint, recipe or program for making a human body or any of its organs or any of its cells. DNA contains only low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up particular proteins. The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003, and by now the genomes of more than 3000 species have been cataloged. No one ever found in any genome any such thing as a specification of anatomy or how to build an organ or even how to build a cell. 

The implications of this observational failure are vast. The lack of high-level anatomical information in DNA and the lack of DNA instructions on how to build cells means that the origin of every adult human body is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the heads of today's biologists.  There is not a biologist in the world who can explain how it is it that a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to the state of vast hierarchical organization that is the human body, without telling us lies such as the lie that DNA has a blueprint or recipe or program for making the human body. The lack of anatomy information in DNA and the lack of cellular specifications in DNA is such a show-stopper for mechanistic biology that mechanistic biologists have dealt with the problem by lying to us for decades, telling us the phony myth that DNA has a blueprint or a recipe or a program for making a human body.  For a long list of biology and medical authorities who have told us the truth about this topic (saying that DNA is no such thing as a blueprint, a recipe or program for making a human body or any of its cells), read my post here. 

There is another observational failure of scientists that has the most gigantic implications: the failure of scientists to ever detect any such thing as addresses within the human body. The human body has no such thing as an internal coordinate system.  There is no part of the body that has any such thing as an addressing system.  There is no body addressing system. There is no brain address system. There is not even an addressing system within DNA. The lack of any address system in the human body has gigantic implications. 

One implication of the lack of any addressing system in DNA is that scientists are unable to give any credible mechanistic explanation for the origin of any protein molecule. 

Cells are constantly creating new proteins to replace proteins that disappeared because of the short lifetimes of proteins. The page here discusses the lifetimes of human proteins, and we see a reference to a scientific paper listing the average human protein as having a half-life of only 6.9 hours. A muscle protein might live for three weeks, but a liver protein might live for only a few days. To create new proteins, a cell uses a process called gene transcription. In this process a particular gene in DNA will be converted to a messenger RNA molecule that helps to build the new protein. 

Cell transcription occurs quickly. The source here lists a time of ten minutes for a gene to be transcribed by a mammal, but another source lists a speed of only about a minute. The great majority of that is used up by the reading of base pairs from the gene, with typically more than a 1000 base pairs being read each time a gene is transcribed. The finding of the correct gene to read in DNA seems to occur in only seconds, not minutes, or at most a few minutes. 

Descriptions of DNA transcription fail to explain a huge issue: how does a cell find the right gene in DNA so quickly? Human DNA contains more than 20,000 genes, each of which is just a section of the DNA. The DNA is like an extremely long necklace of many thousands of beads, and a typical gene is like a group of several hundred of those beads. We should actually imagine multiple such necklaces, because DNA is scattered across 23 different chromosome pairs. Now if genes had gene numbers, and DNA was a set of numbered genes in numerical order, it might be easy to find a particular gene. So if a cell knew that it was trying to find gene number 4,233, it could use a binary search method that would allow it to find that gene pretty quickly. Such a method might sound like Bob using a binary search method efficiently in the dialog below:

Jane: Okay, I picked a date in world history. Try to guess it. 

Bob: Was it after the first century AD?

Jane: Yes.

Bob: Was it in the past thousand years?

Jane: Yes

Bob: Was it in the past 500 years?

Jane: No.

Bob: Was it between 1250 and 1500?

Jane: Yes.

Bob: Was it between 1375 and 1500?

Jane: Yes.

Using such a binary search method, Bob will find the correct year within several more guesses. 

But no such method can be used within the human body. Genes do not have gene numbers that can be accessed within the human body, and DNA is not numerically sorted. DNA has no indexes that might allow a cell to find some particular gene that it was trying to find within DNA.  So we have an explanatory "needle in a haystack" problem.  Or we might call it a "needle in the haystacks" problem, because human DNA is scattered across 23 different chromosome pairs, as shown in the diagram below:

A scientific text tells us some information that makes this explanatory problem seem more pressing:

"One might have predicted that the information present in genomes would be arranged in an orderly fashion, resembling a dictionary or a telephone directory. Although the genomes of some bacteria seem fairly well organized, the genomes of most multicellular organisms, such as our Drosophila example, are surprisingly disorderly. Small bits of coding DNA (that is, DNA that codes for protein) are interspersed with large blocks of seemingly meaningless DNA. Some sections of the genome contain many genes and others lack genes altogether. Proteins that work closely with one another in the cell often have their genes located on different chromosomes, and adjacent genes typically encode proteins that have little to do with each other in the cell. Decoding genomes is therefore no simple matter. Even with the aid of powerful computers, it is still difficult for researchers to locate definitively the beginning and end of genes in the DNA sequences of complex genomes, much less to predict when each gene is expressed in the life of the organism. Although the DNA sequence of the human genome is known, it will probably take at least a decade for humans to identify every gene and determine the precise amino acid sequence of the protein it produces. Yet the cells in our body do this thousands of times a second."

We have here a very severe navigation problem. A cell is somehow able to find the right gene in only seconds or a few minutes when a new protein is made, even though DNA and chromosomes seem to have no physical organization that could allow for such blazing fast  access to the right information. In an article on Chemistry World, we read this:

"How does the machinery that turns genes into proteins know which part of the genome to read in any given cell type? ‘To me that is one of the most fundamental questions in biology,’ says biochemist Robert Tjian of the University of California at Berkeley in the US: ‘How does a cell know what it is supposed to be?"

Biochemist Tjian has spoken just as if he had no idea how it is that a cell is able to navigate to the right place to read a particular gene in DNA. Later in the article we read this:

"For one thing, the regulatory machinery ‘is unbelievably complex’, says Tjian, comprising perhaps 60–100 proteins – mostly of a class called transcription factors (TFs) – that have to interact before anything happens. ....As well as promoters, mammalian genes are controlled by DNA segments called enhancers. Some proteins bind to the promoter site, others bind to the enhancer, and they have to communicate. ‘This is where things get bizarre, because the enhancer can sit miles away from the promoter,’ says Tjian – meaning, perhaps, millions of base pairs away, maybe with a whole gene or two in between. And the transcription machinery can’t just track along the DNA until it hits the enhancer, because the track is blocked. In eukaryotes, almost all of the genome is, at any given moment, packaged away by being wrapped around disk-shaped proteins called histones. These, says Tjian, ‘are like big boulders on the track’: you can’t get past them easily.... ‘Even after 40 years of studying this stuff, I don’t think we have a clear idea of how that looping happens,’ says Tjian. Until recently, the general idea was that the TFs and other components all fit together into a kind of jigsaw, via molecular recognition, that will bridge and bind a loop in place while transcription happens. ‘We molecular biologists love to draw nice model schemes of how TFs find their target genes and how enhancers can regulate promoters located millions of base pairs away,’ says Ralph Stadhouders of the Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. ‘But exactly how this is achieved in a timely and highly specific manner is still very much a mystery.’ "

Later in the article Tjian says he was shocked by the speed at which some of the process occurs. He expected it would take hours, but found something much different:

"The residence times of these proteins in vivo was not minutes or hours, but about six seconds!’, he says. ‘I was so shocked that it took me months to come to grips with my own data. How could a low-concentration protein ever get together with all its partners to trigger expression of a gene, when everything is moving at this unbelievably rapid pace?’ "

The rest of the article is just some speculation, which Tjian mostly knocks down, and the article itself calls "hand-wavy." We are left with the impression that no one understands how cells are able to instantly find the right gene. 

On page 100 of the very interesting work "Theory of Directed Evolution" scientist Alexey V. Melkikh asks this:

"How does a protein during genome regulation find its only place on the DNA molecule? If it is based on the key-lock principle, how does the protein not confuse its binding site with someone else's? How many erroneous attempts at linking should it make until it finds its site? Why does it not get stuck in someone else's deep potential hole? All these processes should drastically reduce the efficiency of genome regulation."

The question I raise in this section of this post is a question raised, but never answered, by the latest (32nd) edition of Harper's Illustrated Biochemistry, which states this:

"The question 'How does RNAP [RNA polymerase] find the correct site to initiate transcription?' is not trivial when the complexity of the genome is considered....The situation is even more complex in humans, where as many  as 150,000 distinct transcriptions sites are distributed throughout [three billion base pairs] of DNA."

The textbook gives us a very detailed discussion of things such as promoters, but the discussion fails to answer the question of how this "finding the needle in a haystack" could occur so quickly. 

The lack of any addressing system within DNA means that the fast  construction of a protein molecule is something beyond any mechanistic explanation. Furthermore, the lack of any addressing system within the body implies that the arrival of a protein molecule at a suitable place within a cell is beyond mechanistic explanation. 

Let us consider how fantastically complex human cells are. Humans cells are constantly misrepresented by profoundly misleading diagrams that make them look many thousands of times simpler than they are. A typical human cell has thousands of times more organelles than depicted  by a typical cell diagram.  A human cell is so complex it has been compared to a city. For newly constructed protein molecules to do their jobs, they must arrive at the right places. An analogy might be a worker who arrives at a city to start working.  He can't just start working anywhere. He has to arrive at the right place in the city, to do his specialized job. Workers can successfully arrive at the right place to their jobs because cities have addresses. So, for example, a worker may be told to start working at 353 Maple Street on August 8. 

But cells have no addresses, and no coordinate system. So it can't be that a protein molecule arrives at the right place in a cell because it was told to go to some particular address in a cell. So how do protein molecules arrive at the right places in cells? Mechanistic biology has no general explanation to offer. 

There's another similar problem of equal immensity: the problem of how newly constructed cells arrive at the right places in the human body. Consider the origin of a human body. The beginning of human development is a single cell called a zygote. That somehow progresses to become the vast state of hierarchical organization that is the human body. Along the way, something like 200 types of cells must originate, each in massive numbers. All those cells must find the right places to exist. It doesn't do a body any good, for example, if heart cells end up in the foot or liver cells up in the stomach. 

How do cells find the right place to go to? Mechanistic biology has no credible answer to offer. Part of the reason a mechanistic answer is impossible is the lack of any addresses in the body. 

We may consider some of the difficulties. On a two-dimensional surface, there are two ways in which addresses might work. In the first way, no map is needed, but the addresses must be numerically ordered. For example, in general (with some exceptions) you don't need a map to navigate around in Manhattan. That borough of New York City is sensibly organized so that streets are numbered in numerical order. So if you are on, say, 2nd Avenue and 14th street, you do not need a map to navigate to 5th Avenue and 22nd Street.  Conversely, a city may have streets in no numerical order. In that case, to find a particular house there must exist both street addresses and maps people can use to find a particular street.  You can't just use simple math to navigate your way to Roosevelt Avenue and Maple Street. 

Now, in a human body growing from a speck-sized zygote to a baby of ten pounds and eventually an adult of maybe 180 pounds, it would never be practical to use numerically ordered addresses; and such numerical addresses don't exist in the body.  So what you would need for a cell to navigate around in the human body would be something like both addresses that are not numerically ordered, and also a map storing all the addresses. But neither of these things exist in the body.  Organelles in cells don't have addresses; cells don't have addresses; and particular spots of the body don't have addresses. So how could a cell ever find the right place to go to in the body? Mechanistic biology has no credible answer. 

There are are two additional reasons why the problem of cells finding the right locations in the body and protein molecules finding the right locations in cells is actually far greater than I have suggested above:

(1) Instead of requiring merely navigation to the right place on a flat surface (like a person navigating to the right address in a city), the problem of navigating to the right place in a cell or the body is exponentially more difficult, because we are dealing with three-dimensional space rather than a flat two-dimensional space. 

(2) City streets are conveniently designed with sidewalks and streets allowing you to go anywhere you want, but cells and bodies are filled with existing matter blocking navigation, and existing flow pathways making it all the more harder for protein molecules and cells to find the right places. An analogy might be a city in which very heavy traffic, blocked roads and streets, and a raging flash flood makes it so much harder to get around to where you are trying to go. 

For reasons such as these, a lack of addresses in the body crushes the credibility of mechanistic biology as an explanation for the origin of the human body. The lack of addresses in the body also crushes the credibility of mechanistic psychology, the idea that human mind and memory can be explained as mechanistic brain processes. 

Humans routinely display the ability to instantly recall learned information, given a name, date or image. So, for example, if you say "death of Lincoln," I will instantly be able to recite various facts about the death of Abraham Lincoln, such as that it occurred because John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln through the back of his head at Ford's Theater on April 15, 1865.  If we believe that a memory is stored in some tiny little spot in the brain, such as storage spot 186,395 out of 950,000, then we have the problem: how was the brain able to instantly find that exact tiny spot where the memory was formed? This difficulty is a "show stopper" for all claims that a memory is stored in one exact spot of a brain, an insuperable difficulty.  

We cannot get around such a difficulty by imagining that a brain uses the type of things that a book or a computer use to allow instant retrieval.  Books and computers use information addressing, sorting and indexes to allow instant access of a particular data item.  The brain has neither addressing nor indexes nor sorting.  Unlike houses that have street addresses, neurons don't have neuron numbers or any other addressing system. Storing a memory in a brain would be like throwing a little 3" by 5" card into a giant swimming pool filled to the top with a million little 3" by 5" cards.  Just as it should take you a very long time to find a specific piece of information stored in such a swimming pool, it would take you a very long time to find in the brain some particular piece of learned information, if it was stored in one tiny spot, like a book stored in one spot on the shelves of a huge library.  

You do not at all get around this difficulty by suggesting the idea that a memory or a piece of learned information is scattered or distributed in multiple locations across the brain. The main difficulty is explaining instantaneous recall. If a brain has to search scattered storage locations in the brain, that would not be any easier than finding a single storage location; it would instead be harder. We would then have the same problem: how is it that those exact locations can instantly be found? Similarly, if  a family is somewhere in New York City, and you don't know their address, without an electronic device you won't be able to find the family very quickly; and it's not going to be any easier if the family is scattered across three different apartments in different parts of the city, which would make finding the family even harder. You do not solve a "how was the needle instantly found in the haystack" problem by converting it to the even harder problem of "how were just the right few needles instantly found in multiple haystacks?" Moreover, the idea of a brain instantly bringing together scattered fragments to instantly make a unified conceptual whole creates an "instant reassembly" problem that would be an additional explanatory nightmare, with such a thing being some miracle of instant assembly as implausible as someone instantly assembling cut-up pieces of a photo after the pieces had been scattered in pages of different books on different bookshelves.  

This "speed of human recall" problem becomes much worse when we consider that brain signals have an average transmission speed much slower than the "100 meters per second" figure that is commonly given (which is the fastest speed that any nerve signal can travel over any part of the brain)  A typical brain signal traveling from one part of a brain to another would have to pass across many chemical synapses, and each time that happens there would be a delay. The effect of cumulative synaptic delays would mean that brain signals must typically travel from one area of a brain to another at a sluggish speed of something like about one centimeter per second or less. Even if a brain somehow knew exactly where to find some information it needed, the retrieval of such information would be too slow to explain instant human recall. 

The failure to ever observe addresses in the brain is one of only two observation failures that crush the credibility of mechanistic psychology. The second failure is the failure to ever observe human learned information by microscopic observation of the brain. 

Despite microscopically studying more than 14,000 brains (a large fraction of which were cryogenically preserved within a day after death), scientists are unable to read any memory from any of these brains, and are also unable to find any evidence of some neural code that could be used to translate learned information into brain states. The brains are saying "storing memories is not something brains do," but our scientists refuse to listen to what the brains are telling them.  

Below is a diagram from the paper "Materials Advances Through Aberration-Corrected Electron Microscopy." We see that since the time the genetic code was discovered about 1953, microscopes have grown very many times more powerful. The A on the left stands for an angstrom, a tenth of a nanometer (that is, a ten-billionth of a meter). 

Currently the most powerful microscopes can see things about 1 angstrom in width, which is a tenth of a nanometer. How does this compare to the sizes of the smallest units in brains? Those sizes are below:

Width of a neuron body (soma): about 100 microns (micrometers), which is about 1,000,000 angstroms.

Width of a synapse: about 20-30 nanometers, about 200-300 angstroms.  

Width of a dendritic spine: about 50 to 200 nanometers, about 500 to 2000 angstroms.

Clearly the resolution of the most powerful microscopes is powerful enough to read memories stored in neurons or synapses, if such memories existed. And more than 14,000 brains have been microscopically studied in recent years. The failure to microscopically read any  memories from human brain tissue is a major reason for thinking that brains do not store human memories.  

Besides failing to find specific memories and items of learned knowledge by microscopically examining brains (such as the information that the New York Yankees belong to the American League of US baseball), scientists can find no evidence of a mechanism for storing learned information in brains.  If such a mechanism existed, its fingerprints would be all over the place. Since humans can learn and remember so many different types of things (sights, sounds, feelings, facts, beliefs, opinions, numbers, smells, tastes, physical pains, physical pleasures, music, quotations, and so forth), any brain mechanism for storing all of these things would have a massive footprint in the brain and in the genome. No sign of any such thing can be found. The workhorses that get things done in the body are proteins, and humans have more than 20,000 types of proteins. No one has ever identified a protein that helps to write a memory of experiences or numbers or words to the brain or neural tissue, in any kind of way that helps explain how memories or knowledge could be stored in brains.  Of course, you can find studies maybe showing that protein XYZ was used when someone learned something, but that does nothing to show a mechanism of memory storage. 

There is a very important lesson to be learned here. For insight into the true nature of things, pay the greatest attention not merely to what scientists have discovered, but also to what they have not discovered. 

Let's define "morphogenesis" as the process that leads from a tiny speck-sized zygote to the full organization of a human body. The topic of morphogenesis tends to be senselessly ignored by philosophers of mind. The topic of morphogenesis is of very great relevance to the issue of whether brains make minds. A hazard of making a deep study of the topic of morphogenesis is that the literature on the topic is infested with lies, mainly the lie that DNA (the human genome) is a blueprint or program or recipe for making a human body. DNA and its genes are no such thing. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 

The diagram below gives us an idea of what DNA and its genes do and do not specify. The internal parts (but not the 3D shape) of a protein molecule is specified by a gene in DNA. 

Once we sweep away the "DNA is a body blueprint" myth, we get closer to the shocking truth: the physical origin of every adult human body is a miracle of organization a thousand miles over the head  of every scientist. Although the main reasons for thinking that our minds and memory cannot be explained by neural causes are separate from considerations of morphogenesis, the truth that our bodies are beyond any "bottom-up" mechanistic explanation helps to bolster the idea that our minds and memory are beyond any "bottom-up" neural explanation. For more on why that is so, read my post here. 

You were told for much of your life the lie that the gigantic wonders of bodily organization kind of "bubble up" from genes that are mere lists of amino acids. That was a big lie of biologists eager to crown themselves as grand lords of explanation. You were also told for much of your life the falsehood that the innumerable wonders of the human mind are caused by a kind of bubbling up of largely random electrical and chemical activity from mere noisy neurons. That was a big myth told by biologists eager to crown themselves as grand lords of explanation. When you understand how you were misled by the first of  these myths, you will be more likely to perceive how you were misled by the second of these big myths. It was a similar deal in both cases: scientists putting themselves on pedestals by peddling self-serving unwarranted achievement legends, telling socially constructed tall tales that do not hold up to critical scrutiny and the most careful pondering of the relevant facts.