Neuroscientists are getting nowhere in trying to find any neural basis for human memory. Nothing could be less surprising, considering that the human brain bears not the slightest resemblance to a device for permanently storing and instantly retrieving memories. Because humans manufacture devices that are capable of permanently storing and instantly retrieving newly acquired information such as visual information, we know the kind of things that such devices require. They include things such as this:
(1) Some component for writing transient visual or auditory signals into some information storage format capable of being permanently stored.
(2) Some component capable of permanently storing such converted data once it has been captured.
(3) Things such as indexes, addressing or sorting that would allow a particular piece of data to be found, given only a name.
(4) Some component capable of reading the stored data once it was found.
Nothing like this is found anywhere in the brain. No one has any credible theory of how something you see or hear could ever be converted into neural states or synapses states where it could be permanently stored. Nothing in the brain looks like any type of component for writing information. Nothing in the brain looks like any type of component for reading information. Nothing in the brain looks like a place where human memory information could be permanently stored. The proteins in the brain have short average lifetimes of less than two weeks.
So what do you if you are someone trying to keep alive the unfounded notion that the human brain is the storage place of human memories? One of the things that you can do is deceive and misinform. Part of the deception that goes on is when neuroscience studies unrelated to memory are passed off as studies telling us something about a neural basis for memory.
An example is a story promoted today by the science news page of a major news provider, where we find too many untrue "science news" headlines. The story is from the Neuroscience News web site, a frequent source of bogus untrue headlines. The bogus headline is "Brain Cells Use Muscle-Like Signals to Strengthen Learning and Memory."
In this case you can tell the headline is misleading without even reading the paper being touted. You can simply look for the old trick in which we get a conversion from a headline asserting something as matter-of-fact to an article telling us it is really only a "maybe."
Headline: "Brain Cells Use Muscle-Like Signals to Strengthen Learning and Memory.
Article Text: "New research led by the Lippincott-Schwartz Lab shows that a network of subcellular structures similar to those responsible for propagating molecular signals that make muscles contract are also responsible for transmitting signals in the brain that may facilitate learning and memory."
We then have the "sheds light" trick. It works like this: some type of low-level research having no clear significance is discussed, and the claim is made that this "sheds light" on blah blah blah, where blah blah blah is some dogma that neuroscientists like to teach, typically a groundless dogma having no good basis in fact, and often a groundless dogma ruled out by facts about the brain that have already been discovered.
The trick is used when the article says, "It also sheds light on the molecular mechanisms underlying synaptic plasticity – the strengthening or weakening of neuronal connections that enables learning and memory." There is no credible theory under which learning or memory can be explained by "the strengthening or weakening of neuronal connections." The phrase "synapse strengthening" is the vague hand-waving phrase neuroscientists use when asked how memories could be stored in brains. The theory that memories are stored by synapse strengthening is untenable for the 30 reasons discussed here. Synapses are 50 times too unstable to explain memories that can reliably persist for 60 years or more. Synapses have been well-examined by electron microscopes, and no trace of any learned information can be found there, or anywhere else in the brain.
We can see how "there's no there there" (at least to regard to memory) by looking at the scientific paper being promoted by the Neuroscience News article, the paper here. The paper has no substantive uses of either the word "learning" or the word "memory." The paper's only use of the words "learn" or "learning" is an unsupported claim that some area is "a key area for associative learning in the fly brain." The text of the paper makes no use of the word "memory" or "memories."
So we have a paper that is making basically no claims about learning or memory being promoted by the Neuroscience News site as if it discovered some big important thing about the brain handling memory or learning. It's a typical type-of-event in articles classified as "neuroscience news," where it seems you are just as likely to find a big untruth as you are to find an important fact.
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