Brains Show No Physical Signs of Reading or Retrieval When You Recall Something

There are three neutral words you can use to describe remembering:

(1) You can use the neutral word "remembering," which does not imply anything physical occurring. 

(2) You can use the neutral word "recall," which does not imply anything physical occurring.  That's a good word to use in describing a case when someone recites facts after hearing a single word or name, or answers a question. 

(3) You can use the neutral word "recognition," which does not imply anything physical occurring. That's a good word to use to describe cases in which you see a photo or face, and identify a person, place or object. 

There is another common word used to refer to remembering: the word "retrieval." The word implies some act involving going and getting something, and bringing it from one position to another. For example, the word "retrieval" is used for what goes on when a dog owner plays the game of "fetch," by tossing a stick, and then watching his dog go get the stick and bring it back to the owner.  When I search for the definition of "retrieval" the first definition I get is: "the process of getting something back from somewhere." The Cambridge Dictionary defines "retrieval" as "the process of finding and bringing back something."

A reality with very big implications is this: when a computer retrieves some information, there can be definite physical signs of both reading and retrieving; but when a human being remembers something, there is no physical sign in the brain of any such thing as either reading or retrieval. 

To help explain this contrast, let us first look at a simple case of information retrieval using a somewhat old-fashioned desktop computer of the type that was predominant around the year 2010.  We may consider a very simple case of someone at a keyboard typing something that commands the computer to display some image stored on the computer. Normally a mouse would be used as part of the retrieval, but the same thing can be done with the keyboard only. For example, if  my computer shows a Windows folder on the screen, I can use keys such as the arrow keys to navigate to a particular image file, and then press the Enter key to cause some particular image file to be displayed on the monitor. 

The visual below illustrates part of what is going on. The red arrows signify data or signals that are passing around from one part of the system to another. 

1. First, an electronic signal is sent from the keyboard to the computer, a signal corresponding to a request that a particular image file be displayed. 

2. Then the image file is read from the hard drive of the computer, by an act that requires that the read/write head of a hard drive lines up with a particular spot on the hard drive.

3. Then an electronic stream of bits passes from the computer to the monitor, causing the image to be displayed on the screen. 

This involves real reading, and real retrieval. Just like a set of human eyes that focuses on some particular line of text while it is reading, the read/write head of the hard drive focuses on one tiny spot of the spinning hard drive disk, to do some reading. Real retrieval is going on because some chunk of data is found, and is also copied from its source location (in the computer) to a destination location (the monitor).  The only quibble you could make about the use of the word "retrieval" to describe this is that rather than the original data being moved from its original location to its target location, the data is actually copied, leaving the source data unchanged. The resulting act is kind of like what would happen if you retrieved a book from a shelf, but magically got a copy of the book when you touched the original, leaving the original on the shelf. 

Now, let us consider the interesting question: is there any evidence of a physical process anything like this in the brain when someone remembers something? There is not. 

We can imagine some extraterrestrial being with a brain that might act in a manner similar to the computer just described. That being's brain might work such as this:

(1) The extraterrestrial's brain might have some "attention center" part that is inactive whenever the extraterrestrial being is not thinking or remembering, but active when the extraterrestrial being is thinking or remembering.

(2) The extraterrestrial's brain might have some "roving cursor" feature that served as a memory reading unit. 

(3) When the extraterrestrial remembered something, the "roving cursor" unit might move to some particular part of the brain where the information was stored, and read from that part.  Then the "roving cursor" might bring back that information from that spot to the "attention center" of the extraterrestrial's brain, causing the extraterrestrial being to have a thought corresponding to the memory. 

But the human brain seems to have nothing whatsoever like anything I have imagined above. In particular:

(1) There is no sign of anything like some "attention center" in the brain which is inactive during mental inactivity and only active during thinking or retrieval. 

(2) There is no mobile unit whatsoever in the brain that moves around to cause some act of memory retrieval. 

(3) There are in the brain no indexes, sorting or addresses that might allow some item of information to be instantly found, such as occurs when you are asked a question of who was some historical figure, and you immediately state a few sentences describing that figure. 

The four pillars of instant knowledge retrieval in physical systems

(4) Other than the mechanism for reading genetic information that is not learned information, a mechanism existing throughout the body, there is no known mechanism by which an act of reading stored information can occur in the brain.  The brain has nothing like a read/write head in a computer. While the eye has a focus mechanism allowing it to focus on some particular spot in space, the brain has nothing like some focus mechanism allowing it to focus on some particular group of cells in the brain. 

(5) When someone remembers something, there is no evidence of some transfer of data from a storage place to some "attention place" when someone remembers something. When someone remembers something, there is no evidence of any transfer of data corresponding to the memory recall.  Chemicals are constantly traveling around the brain, as are changes in electrical charge; and at any second a large fraction of all neurons fire.  There is no evidence that such activity increases when someone remembers something. A web page states, "Our best guess is that an average neuron in the human brain transmits a spike about 0.1-2 times per second." So a person wishing to claim that nerve impulses (action potentials) travel from one area of the brain to another when you remember will not be telling an outright lie. But if he merely says that, he is telling a half truth. The fact is that if we compare a moving bubble to a nerve impulse, the brain is like a  pot of boiling water in which bubbles are constantly traveling around all over the place. 

The visual below schematically diagrams the relation between neurons and action potentials. We see what represents a group of neurons, with individual neurons represented as black dots. The red arrows represent electrical charges or chemicals that are travelling around between neurons. Since a neuron fires randomly about once a second, we have a "signal traffic" arrangement that is random.  

The diagram above represents just a billionth of the neurons in the brain. With such a situation, there is no impression of data traveling from one place to another in any organized way when memory recall occurs. What we have all over the brain is electrical and chemical noise. 

There is no way of tracking all of these electrical and chemical impulses going around between neurons. There is no way to eavesdrop on the traffic passing around. The idea of doing such a thing is as impractical as listening to all the notes of the birds singing in New York City. What scientists can do is to scan brains using fMRI scanners, and look for differences between mental rest activity and some type of cognitive activity. Such scans show differences in different parts of the brain no greater than about 1 part in 200 from one area to another.  We would expect such differences from mere chance variations. Such differences are not any evidence that memory retrieval occurs by brain activity. 

Besides failing to find any readable memories from a microscopic examination of brain tissue, scientists are unable to "eavesdrop" on a brain or "wiretap" a brain to listen on something like a memory retrieval, and to figure out what a person was recalling from activity in his brain. Nor has anyone ever produced robust evidence of any type of increased electrical transmission or signal transmission occurring in a brain when a human recalls something.  Any claim to have produced evidence of such a thing will be another example of the Questionable Research Practices that today's experimental neuroscientists are so massively guilty of, and will also probably be an example of the pareidolia so commonly occurring among such neuroscientists. Pareidolia typically occurs when someone examines a large, ambiguous, rapidly fluctuating data set, and see whatever he hopes to see (like someone scanning the clouds looking for faces or animal shapes). 

There is no retrieval-related arrow diagram we can make for the brain corresponding to the retrieval-related arrow diagram above showing what goes on when you request the retrieval of an image from your computer. Brains show no physical signs of reading or retrieval when you lie with your eyes closed and recall something. The physical characteristics of the brain and the flow of energy and matter within the brain is perfectly compatible with the belief that the brain is not the storage place of human memories, and that memory recall does not occur through brain activity.