No, They Didn't Find in a Brain "3 Copies of Every Memory," and They Never Even Found One

In my post "Why the Academia Cyberspace Profit Complex Keeps Giving Misleading Brain Research Reports" I discussed the economic reasons why we keep getting misleading research about brains, and misleading headlines about brain research. The analysis in that post holds true not just for brain research, but for scientific research in general. We live in an economy in which misleading stories about scientific research and groundless but interesting-sounding scientific speculation are highly incentivized. To give a short synopsis of what I discussed at much greater length in that post, the economic motivations are like this:

(1) Scientists are judged by how many papers they publish and how many citations such papers get.

(2) Because of publication bias (in which papers reporting positive results and particularly interesting-sounding positive results are more likely to be published), scientists are strongly motivated to publish papers claiming positive results and also claiming interesting-sounding results.

(3) Wishing to make themselves appear like sources of important research breakthroughs to help justify their exorbitant tuition, universities are motivated to produce press releases exaggerating the importance of research papers published by their professors.

(4) Since science news is published on web pages with ads that generate revenue for the people running or funding the web pages, with revenue proportional to how interesting-sounding a story is, those running science news web sites or science analysis web sites have an enormous economic motivation to create clickbait headlines that generate higher numbers of page views, and more advertising revenue. Science news sites these days are almost always built in the form of headlines that you must click to read the story, and each time this causes a web page with ads to appear, the people running or funding the site get money from views of the ads displayed on the page you opened up.

The result of all of this is a very wacky world we might call the world of scitainment, to coin a word that combines the words "science" and "entertainment." Scitainment is a part of the internet that blends science and entertainment. Very much of what we read in this strange world of scitainment is true, and very much of it is false. The world of scitainment blends fact and fantasy, always trying its best to produce entertaining stories and clickbait headlines. It's all about luring you in to click on the stories, so that you go to pages that generate ad revenue for the people running the web sites. 

One of the web sites involved in pushing scitainment is the ad-heavy site www.livescience.com, where we have many science headlines that simply are not true. To give some examples:

• On the Livescience site we had the utterly untrue headline "Building blocks of life' discovered on Mars in 10 different rock samples." The story discusses some observations of biologically irrelevant chemicals on Mars, none of which are ingredients of life or building blocks on life.  
• The same Livescience site had an article claiming a woman was hit by a meteorite while drinking coffee outside, although a space.com story tells us no such thing happened. 

• A story at the LiveScience site was entitled " 'This might be the seeds of life': Organic matter found on asteroid Ryugu could explain where life on Earth came from." The story was rubbish for several reasons: (1) Scientists do not believe that life ever existed on the asteroid  Ryugu or on any other asteroid. (2) There is no scientific concept of any such thing as a "seed of life," in the sense of something causing life to arise from non-life (with the exception of plant seeds, and plant seeds were not found on Ryugu).  (3) No actual components of life were found on the asteroid Ryugu, and most organic molecules are not components of life. 

• Another story at the LiveScience site referred to a claimed discovery of the simplest amino acid (uracil) on an asteroid, in the faintest trace amount of only 13 parts per billion. The headline at the LiveScience site made the very untrue claim that this "could explain the origin of life." Living things require twenty types of amino acids, which must be massively arranged in very specially ordered arrangements to make many types of the very hard-to-achieve molecules called proteins.  The discovery of one type of amino acid in the faintest trace amounts no more explains the origin of life than the discovery of a twig on the ground (making the letter "I") explains the origin of books consisting of vey much well-constructed prose. 

• Another article on the LiveScience site was devoted to selling the groundless idea that there is a "dark mirror" universe inside ours. 

• Another article on the LiveScience site had the nutty title "The 1st life in the universe could have formed seconds after the Big Bang."  Anyone familiar with the incredibly high temperatures and density at such a time (preventing all chemistry and even the existence of atoms) should understand how crazy such a claim is. 

• Another article on the LiveScience site had the phony title "Here's what we learned about aliens in 2020," a reference to extraterrestrials. Of course, we did not learn anything about extraterrestrials in that year. 

• Another article on the LiveScience site had the phony title "These weird lumps of 'inflatons' could be the very first structures in the universe."  We saw a visual of some strange structure that looked like a planetary nebula. The caption read, "Shown here, one of the dense clumps of inflatons that emerged during the inflation phase of the Big Bang, in the infant universe."  The caption led the reader to believe he was looking at some photo of something in space.  But the photo was not a photo of anything observed in space.  It was merely a photo of some junk generated by an entirely speculative computer program. No actual "inflatons" have ever been observed, and the program was based on one of the innumerable speculative models of the unproven cosmic inflation theory.

As the examples above show, you should not assume a claim is true merely because you read a headline suggesting it is true at the LiveScience site at www.livescience.com.   The latest example of a misleading headline at the site is an article with the groundless headline "The brain stores at least 3 copies of every memory." Human beings recall things, but no scientist has ever discovered even one memory in a brain. 

You can pretty much figure out that the story is baloney the moment you read that the research discussed is merely research based on mice rather than humans.  Letting our imaginations run wild, we can imagine some investigator of human brain tissue confirming the claim that brains keep three different copies of each memory. For example, an investigator might keep scanning the brain of a dead person, and then announce something like, "I found the words 'the battle of Hastings occurred in 1066' in three different spots of the brain." But we can imagine no possible observations of mice brains that would ever justify the claim that a memory was stored in a mouse brain.  For example, a researcher could never announce that he found the words "mouse traps are dangerous" in some part of a mouse brain, simply because mice don't use language. 

Misspeaking both in its headline and in its text, the article says, "The scientists found that, in rodents, the brain stores at least three copies of a given memory, encoding it in multiple places in the organ." No, scientists found no such thing. The article refers to the junk-science paper "Divergent recruitment of developmentally defined neuronal ensembles supports memory dynamics." It is true that in the abstract of the paper the authors claim " we discovered that memory encoding resulted in the concurrent establishment of multiple memory traces in the mouse hippocampus."  But because the authors used very bad research practices, they provided not the slightest bit of robust evidence for such a claim. 

The paper is behind a paywall, but anyone can read a preprint of the paper that allows us to see the Questionable Research Practices that were used.  The defects are as follows:

(1) The study group sizes were way-too-small, consisting of groups such as only 4 mice or only 5 mice or only 8 mice or only 10 mice. No one should take seriously any experimental rodent research study using fewer than 15 rodents in each study group, and for most effect sizes a larger study group size such as 30 mice is needed. The authors would have discovered the inadequacy of their study group sizes if they had done a sample size calculation like good scientists, but they failed to do that. The paper "Prevalence of Mixed-methods Sampling Designs in Social Science Research" has a Table 2 giving recommendations for minimum study group sizes for different types of research. The minimum number of subjects for an experimental study is 21 subjects per study group. 

(2) We hear no discussion of the following of a detailed blinding protocol, something that would need to exist for a study like this to be taken seriously. The only mention of a blinding procedure is the mere remark that "To reduce potential bias in the analysis, the researcher conducting the analysis was blind to the experimental

group to which animals belonged until after the data analysis was completed."  When you are using very small study group sizes such as only 4 mice or only 8 mice, it is typically the case that mice can be recognized visually, meaning a researcher can tell things he was not told, such as whether a mouse was in a control group.  Serious use of a blinding protocol requires a careful protocol that would require at least a long paragraph to state, and we have no evidence of such a thing in this paper. 

(3) The experiment was thoroughly entangled with the use of a worthless technique for measuring memory recall in mice, the defective technique of trying to judge "freezing behavior" in mice.  The preprint paper uses the word "freezing" 77 times, to show how the experiments were thoroughly dependent upon the use of such a technique. All experimental neuroscience papers depending on such judgments of "freezing behavior" are junk science papers. 

"Freezing behavior" judgments work like this:

(1) A rodent is trained to fear some particular stimulus, such as a red-colored shock plate in his cage. 

(2)  At some later time (maybe days later) the same rodent is placed in a cage that has the stimulus that previously provoked fear (such as the shock plate). 

(3) Someone (or perhaps some software) attempts to judge what percent of a certain length of time (such as 30 seconds or 60 seconds) the rodent is immobile after being placed in the cage. Immobility of the rodent is interpreted as "freezing behavior" in which the rodent is "frozen in fear" because it remembered the fear-causing stimulus such as the shock plate. The percentage of time the rodent is immobile is interpreted as a measurement of how strongly the rodent remembers the fear stimulus. 

This is a ridiculously subjective and inaccurate way of measuring whether a rodent remembers the fear stimulus. There are numerous problems with this technique:

(1) There are two contradictory ways in which a rodent might physically respond after seeing something associated with fear: a flight response (in which the rodent attempts to escape) and a freezing response (in which the rodent freezes, not moving). It is all but impossible to disentangle which response is displayed when the rodent is presented with a fear stimulus. A rodent who remembers a fear stimulus might move around trying to escape the feared stimulus. But under the "freezing behavior" method, such movement would not be recorded as memory of the feared stimulus, even though the fear stimulus was recalled. 

(2) Rodents often have hard-to-judge movement behavior that neither seems like immobility nor fleeing behavior, and it is subjective and unreliable to judge whether such movement is or is not "freezing behavior" or immobility. 

(3) Movement of a rodent in a cage may be largely random, and not a good indication of whether the rodent is afraid and whether the rodent is recalling some fear stimulus. 

(4) Rodents encountering a fear-provoking stimulus in human homes (such as a mouse hearing a human shriek) almost never display freezing behavior, and much more commonly display fleeing behavior. I lived in a New York City apartment for many years in which I would suddenly encounter mice, maybe about 10 times a year. I never once saw a mouse freeze when I shrieked upon seeing it, but invariably saw the mouse flee. 

(5) Freezing behavior in a rodent may  last for a mere instant, as in humans. So it may be extremely fallacious to do something such as trying to observe 30 seconds or 60 seconds of rodent movement or non-movement, and try to judge whether fear or recall occurred  by judging a "freezing percentage" over such an interval. Almost all of that time may be random behavior having nothing to do with fear in the rodent or memory recall in the rodent. 

For experiments not involving recall of a fearful stimulus, the Morris Water Maze test can be used to reliably measure recall in rodents. There are two reliable ways to measure fear recall in rodents. The first is to measure heart rate, which very dramatically spikes in rodents when they are afraid. The second is to measure an avoidance of a fearful stimulus.  The simple technique is illustrated in the visual below:

But instead of using such reliable techniques, our neuroscientists continue to use the very unreliable technique of trying to judge recall of fear-related memories in animals by making subjective judgments of "freezing behavior." Why would they continue to use so stupid and unreliable a technique? I can think of two reasons:

(1) Neuroscientists are People of Custom just like Roman Catholic priests are People of Custom. So neuroscientists may keep using some very old and ineffective technique as a matter of "clinging to the old custom," rather like the way Roman Catholic priests kept reciting the Mass in Latin very long after almost no one understood Latin. 

(2) Neuroscientists may prefer to use an unreliable technique for measuring fear-related memory recall in rodents, because using that bad technique increases the chance of them producing research papers that report invalid but interesting-sounding results consistent with "brains store memories" dogmas.  Similarly, if a researcher uses an unreliable technique for detecting heat traces in clouds, it will increase the chance that he can end up with some paper claiming to show heat blips in clouds that he may claim as evidence for extraterrestrial spaceships in the sky. The unreliable measurement technique is the best friend of the person trying to support untrue claims. 

Thoroughly dependent on a bad measurement technique for judging whether rodents recalled a fearful stimulus, and also involving way-too-small study group sizes such as only 4 or 5 rodents, the low-quality science paper "Divergent recruitment of developmentally defined neuronal ensembles supports memory dynamics" has provided zero robust evidence that there is a copy of a memory in any brain. No such robust evidence has ever been provided by neuroscientists. As discussed in my post here, the quickly-preserved brains of thousands of people have been thoroughly studied by different "brain bank" projects, and by microscopic examination no one ever found the slightest evidence of a memory stored in a brain. Never through microscopic examination of a brain has even a single piece of information as small and humble as "birds fly" or "dogs bark" or "Earth has a moon" ever been found. nor has anyone ever found in any brain by microscopic examination even the crudest or blurriest  image of anything anyone saw. 

Click on the image to read it better

Postscript:  When "freezing behavior" judgments are made, there are no standards in regard to how long a length of time an animal should be observed when recording a "freezing percentage"  (a percentage of time the animal was immobile). An experimenter can choose any length of time between 30 seconds and five minutes or more (even though it is senseless to assume rodents might "freeze in fear" for as long as a minute).  Neuroscience experiments typically fail to pre-register experimental methods, leaving experimenters free to make analysis choices "on the fly," after they have gathered data. So you can imagine how things might work. An experimenter might judge how much movement occurred during five minutes or ten minutes after a rodent was exposed to a fear stimulus. If a desired above-average amount of immobility (or a desired below-average amount of immobility) occurred over 30 seconds, then 30 seconds would be chosen as the interval to be used for a "freezing percentage" graph. Otherwise,  if a desired above-average amount of immobility (or a desired below-average amount of immobility) occurred over 60 seconds, then 60 seconds would be chosen as the interval to be used for a "freezing percentage" graph. Otherwise,  if a desired above-average amount of immobility (or a desired below-average amount of immobility) occurred over two minutes, then two minutes would be chosen as the interval to be used for a "freezing percentage" graph. And so on and so forth, up until five minutes or ten minutes. Such shenanigans drastically depart from good, honest, reliable experimental methods. 

The paper discussed above did not pre-register any methods, so after gathering data the experimenters were free to analyze the data in any way they pleased. Some of their "freezing behavior" graphs are made using a time interval of three minutes, and others are made using a time interval of five minutes. Genuine fear-freezing in an animal would be something lasting only a few seconds. The longer the interval of time used as a basis for a "freezing behavior" graph, the more unreliable freezing behavior judgments are as a measurement of fear recall. When an interval of longer than 30 seconds is used as the basis for a "freezing percentage" graph, then you have a particularly unreliable and particularly deplorable use of such a technique; and the longer the time interval is above 30 seconds, the more unreliable and deplorable are claims that such graphs are measurements of how well an animal recalled something.