Neuroscience News Stories May Contain Flagrant Absurdities

The writer of a typical neuroscience news story seems to take an "anything goes" attitude in which the underlying assumption seems that any kind of boast is allowed, no matter how loony-sounding. As an example to support this claim, I offer a recent BBC news article with a headline of "Fly brain breakthrough 'huge leap' to unlock human mind."

                        Neuro-nonsense, BBC style

Here is an excerpt from the story:

"Now for the first time scientists researching the brain of a fly have identified the position, shape and connections of every single one of its 130,000 cells and 50 million connections. It's the most detailed analysis of the brain of an adult animal ever produced.

One leading brain specialist independent of the new research described the breakthrough as a 'huge leap' in our understanding of our own brains. One of the research leaders said it would shed new light into 'the mechanism of thought'."

The claim at the end of the quote is obviously very absurd.  Fruit flies don't think. So there is no conceivable study of the brain of the fruit fly that could shed light on what allows humans to think. 

The study of human brains has shed no light at all on how human beings are able to think, imagine, analyze and plan. Here are some relevant quotations, all quotes of scientists:

• "Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience.” -- Donald D. Hoffman Department of Cognitive Sciences University of California, "Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem."
• "Little progress in solving the mystery of human cognition has been made to date." -- 2 neuroscientists, 2021 (link). 
• " 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). 
• "And so we are forced to a conclusion opposite to the one drawn earlier: that consciousness cannot be due to activity in the brain and that cerebral activity is an inadequate explanation of mental activity."  -- Raymond Tallis, Professor of Geriatric Medicine, University of Manchester, "Brains and Minds: A Brief History of Neuromythology" (link). 
• "My own view of a secular universe, devoid of consciousness and intelligence 'beyond the brain' (Grof 1985) gave way little by little over several decades and now seems quite absurd." John Mack MD, Harvard professor of psychology (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).
• "Many who work within the SMC [standard model of consciousness] assume that a nervous system is necessary and sufficient for an existential consciousness. While this is a common stance...we have yet to see a coherent defense of this proposition or a well-developed biomolecular argument for it. For most, it is simply a proclamation. Moreover, we have not seen any effort to identify what features of neural mechanisms 'create' consciousness while non-neural ones cannot. This too is simply a pronouncement." -- Four scientists, "The CBC theory and its entailments," (link).
• "But when it comes to our actual feelings, our thought, our emotions, our consciousness, we really don't have a good answer as to how the brain helps us to have those different experiences." -- Andrew Newberg, neuroscientist, Ancient Aliens, Episode 16 of Season 14, 6:52 mark. 
• "Dr Gregory Jefferis, of the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge told BBC News that currently we have no idea how the network of brain cells in each of our heads enables us to interact with each other and the world around us."  -- BBC news article (link). 

Study of the human brain has shed no light on how humans are able to think, write, plan, analyze and imagine. The idea that we might get some great insight on such a topic by studying the brains of fruit flies (that do not  think, write, plan, analyze and imagine) is absurd. 

We are given only this example of some insight from studying the fruit fly brain:

"The researchers have been able to identify separate circuits for many individual functions and show how they are connected. The wires involved with movement for example are at the base of the brain, whereas those for processing vision are towards the side. "

Yes, there is a motor cortex that helps in moving muscles, and a visual cortex that helps in vision. But scientists have known that for fifty years, and we sure didn't learn that by mapping all the neurons and connections in the brain of a fruit fly. 

No progress has been made here in understanding the human mind, contrary to the bogus headline that there occurred a "huge leap" in understanding the human mind. But don't blame the writer.  Blame the neuroscientist quoted as making the bogus claim that this "huge leap" occurred.  Who was that? We'll never know, because the story has merely said "one leading brain specialist" said such a thing, without ever identifying who that scientist was. 

The story epitomizes the BBC's tendency to uncritically parrot the most groundless and silly-sounding claims whenever they are made by scientists. BBC science journalists covering scientists act like North Korean journalists covering North Korean dictators.