Examining the Evidence-Poor Blog Archive of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 2020 to 2025

An organization called the Cognitive Neuroscience Society has an annual meeting and a blog that you can read here. At the page here you can very conveniently get a single page showing the titles of all of the blog's posts over the past 13 years. Below are comments on posts I examined in this archive, while trying to find posts written in the past five years that might be the best evidence for the explanatory dogmas of cognitive neuroscientists, such as the dogma that your mind is made by your brain, and the dogma that brains store memories. 

• "Tapping into the Rhythms That Lead to Predictions in the Brain." We have a quote by neuroscientist Andre Bastos, claiming, "We’ve really seen in the last few years a total revolution in our tools and our methods, and, increasingly, in our concepts and models,” That is not true, and experimental neuroscientists keep using the same old bad methods, easy-to-discredit concepts and Questionable Research Practices that they have been using for decades.  The unreliability and low statistical power of their methods has been pointed out to them over and over again in the past ten years, but neuroscientists have turned a deaf ear to such complaints. Referring to the epiphenomenon that is brain waves, Bastos senselessly states, "I was totally fascinated by the idea of brain rhythms being this orchestra in the brain, conducting activity between one part of the brain with one type of wave and another part of the brain with another type of wave."  This is as silly as claiming that the scent from your cooking controls what type of meal you are making, given that brain waves (as picked up in EEG readings) are an epiphenomenon like the scent from cooking, and not any controlling mechanism. Bastos also engages in the emptiest and skimpiest of hand-waving by claiming that "the integration of these activities may form the neural basis of consciousness." We have these misleading statements by Bastos: "The proposed neural implementation of that is that the predictions are associated with different rhythms in the brain. The rhythm most associated with prediction is the beta frequency range, oscillations around 20 hertz. The beta rhythm coordinates neurons and can form plastic, dynamic ensembles or groupings of neurons, and that is what learning is – forming new connections between neurons that didn’t exist before." Brain waves do not coordinate neurons and do not form ensembles or groupings of neurons;  instead the electrical activity of billions of neurons give rise to brain waves.   The claim that learning occurs from forming new connections between neurons is empty hand-waving, untenable as a theory of memory creation that can occur instantly (much faster than the time it takes to build brain connections) and memory storage that can last 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of proteins in brain connections. There is no evidence that brain waves are associated with predictions or that they do anything to produce learning. Bastos makes another unwarranted claim: "We now have evidence that what we thought was a ubiquitous code for predictions is actually a sparse code, with the main driver being neurons in higher-order areas utilizing beta rhythms (rather than sensory areas, which were previously hypothesized to compute prediction 'errors'). And we now call that predictive routing." There is no evidence for any neural code for predictions.  The post has no reference to any specific studies or papers, except for a reference to a 2001 paper that does not substantiate any of the claims of Bastos. His claims are not well-founded. Nowadays neuroscientists are notorious for their pareidolia in analyzing brain waves as picked up in EEG readings, and the analysis of such waves is a cesspool of junk science. Again and again we see neuroscientists making unfounded claims after analyzing the noisy, ever-fluctuating data of brain waves recorded by EEG readings. In this regard neuroscientists are acting like someone who claims to see the face of Jesus in his toast after carefully scanning his toast endless times. Looking for research papers by Bastos on Google Scholar, I find nothing demonstrating his claims. I find some poor-evidence papers like the one here using a way-too-small study group size of only three monkeys, and the one here using a way-too-small study group size of only two monkeys. 
• "How Threats Shape the Organization of Our Memories."  We have a mention of some paper behind a paywall. The abstract of the paper does not list any study group size, and when that happens, it's a pretty safe bet that the study group sizes used were way too small. The article does not mention any physical organization of memories in a brain, and says basically nothing about the brain. 
• "What Our Memories Made Of?"  We have a mention of a keynote address by neuroscientist Sheena Jocelyn, but no link to that address. No answer is suggested to the question. If you look up Jocelyn's papers on Google Scholar, you will fail to find any original research by her or anyone else that provides robust evidence to support her claims about memories being found in rodent brains. What you will be most likely to find are bad examples of low-quality research guilty of Questionable Research Practices, such as way-too-small study group sizes, and the use of unreliable techniques for judging whether a mouse recalled, typically the utterly unreliable method of trying to judge whether "freezing behavior" occurred. An example is her low-quality 2024 paper here, which used way-too-small study group sizes such as only 8 or 9 rodents, and also used the utterly unreliable method of trying to judge recall in rodents by judging "freezing behavior." Another paper by her (the 2023 paper here) has the same defects, and is just as poor quality. 
• "Watching a Memory Unfold."  The post is a question and answer interview with the neuroscientist Jocelyn discussed above. We have this completely untrue claim: "Viral vectors, optogenetics, and live imaging have all enabled neuroscientists like Josselyn to explore how cells activate and interact to create specific memories in real time." We have no references to particular papers, at least none that give a name of the paper or a link. Jocelyn makes the very misleading claim that "We can literally watch a brain that’s thinking, that’s encoding a memory and then recalling it." No one has any understanding of how a brain of any type could think or form a memory or recall, and there are no observations of brains that can honestly be called examples of viewing such things.  Jocelyn makes this claim: "An engram is a theoretical concept that’s been around for over 100 years. The thinking is that if there’s an experience, I must have some sort of trace of that experience in my brain, because I may need to recall it at some point. Nowadays, we think that a memory is stored in a bunch of cells that get together to form a circuit. And these cells are part of  an 'engram circuit,' with the engram storing the memory. So if we artificially turn these cells off in a mouse, it is as if the mouse has forgotten this memory. On the other hand, we can get the mouse to seemingly recall the memory if we turn these cells on. We’ve shown all these different ways of identifying these specific memory circuits in mice."  Her grandiose boasts about having done such things are unfounded, because the research work she is referring to consists of examples of low-quality research badly guilty of Questionable Research Practices, research like the two studies of hers I refer to above. We have no references in the post to named scientific papers, and there are no well-designed high-quality scientific papers backing up the claims that Jocelyn made in the post. There is no robust research backing up Jocelyn's boasts in the second half of this statement: "You can see what’s happened to that cell or that circuit of cells once you’ve trained an animal, once you’ve asked them to recall something, once you extinguish their memory, and once you’ve changed your memory." Scientists cannot locate, extinguish or change a memory in any animal, and claims to have done such things are not backed up any robust well-designed research with a high statistical power. 
• "When Our Brains Trick Us With a False Memory." We have an interview with a neuroscientist about some paper she wrote, the paper here. The paper was some study doing fMRI brain scans on subjects while they did some memory task. The paper fails to mention any good evidence of a neural correlate of memory.  Looking for the percent signal change indication typically found in such papers, we find nothing. 
• "Using Virtual Reality to Explore the Neuroscience of Out-of-Body Experiences."  We have an interview with a neuroscientist who did some research that is irrelevant to explaining out-of-body experiences.   The research involves putting people in some virtual reality setup unlike anything nearby when people have out-of-body experiences. The title of the post is misleading, because no research has been done on out-of-body experiences. The neuroscientist misleadingly claims that her research "provides a proof-of-concept for studying the phenomenon of out-of-body experiences in laboratory settings."  No it does not, because people do not wear virtual reality goggles when they have out-of-body experiences. 
• "What do Math Skills Look Like in the Brain?" We have an interview with neuroscientist Xueying Ren, discussing some paper she wrote. In that paper we read this: "Studies with adults did not reveal correlations between cortical thickness and math competence (Heidekum, Vogel, & Grabner, 2020; Torre, Matejko, & Eden, 2020). For instance, in an MRI study with 89 typically developed adults, Heidekum et al. (2020) investigated the associations between brain structures and math competence. However, they did not find associations between cortical thickness and math competence in math-related brain regions such as IPS." The quote contradicts the idea that you do math by using your brain. Nothing in the post provides any evidence that there is such a thing as some brain activity that looks like someone doing math, so the title of the post is misleading. 
• "Forget About It: Investigating How We Purge Thoughts from Our Minds." The post has almost no reference to neuroscience, making only the groundless claim that "Their work suggests that when the brain suppresses a thought or clears thoughts entirely, the frontoparietal control network likely plays a prominent and distinct role." We get no mention of a scientific paper backing up any such claim. Scientists actually have no understanding of any neural basis of forgetting. 
• "Looking Forward to Understanding Working Memory." No claim is made about any neural basis for working memory. 
• "When Philosophical Questions Turn to Neuroscience Experimentation." We have no discussion about philosophical questions. We have a neuroscientist claiming without warrant that "Attention function is controlled by populations of neurons in the frontal and parietal cortex. "  We have no reference to a paper backing up such a claim. For a discussion of why brains cannot explain an act of a mind focusing on some topic or question, read my post here. 
• "Groups Decisions Less Burdensome to the Brain Than Solo Ones."  We have a reference to a paper doing some experiment in which people made different types of decisions while having their heads hooked up to EEG machines that read brain waves. You cannot actually detect a greater burden on the mind by looking at brain wave readings of people in healthy states. Although useful for a few things such as monitoring the effectiveness of anesthesia and detecting signs of epilepsy, EEG brain wave readings are basically just noise; and all that seems to be occurring in this paper is a little noise-mining, similar to someone looking at thousands of cloud photos, and saying this one or that one looks like an animal. The paper did not test a pre-registered hypothesis, and failed to use a blinding protocol. 
• "Brain Structure Is Key to Understanding Human Cognition."  The post does not say anything to back up this claim, and does not refer to any particular paper. The post does have a graph from the paper here. That paper is a not-very-impressive paper that analyzes brain scans from different subjects doing different things, and gives us some arbitrary statistical analysis to create some table showing certain brain areas more active than others during certain types of activity.  But we get no clear specifics about how much the differences were. Such a table could be created regardless of whether the brain is responsible for creating the mind. 
• "Quantifying and Getting to the Heart of Human Learning." We read no claims of an understanding of a neural basis for learning, and no reference to any paper. 
• "Getting to Know You: New Insights in Facial Recognition." We have a reference to the review article here, which fails to explain how a brain could ever recognize anything, but merely discusses studies trying to show which brain regions are most active when someone is recognizing something. For a discussion of why such studies are not impressive as evidence for brains causing recognition, see my post here. 
• "Disentangling Overlapping Memories in Older Adults." We have a reference to a neuroscience paper which had people perform different memory tasks while having their heads hooked up to EEG machines that read brain wave. Brain wave readings are just noise, and all that is occurring here is a little noise-mining, similar to someone looking at thousands of cloud photos, and saying this one or that one looks like an animal. The paper did not test a pre-registered hypothesis, and failed to use a blinding protocol. The analysis is "keep torturing the data until it confesses" kind of work. 
• "Modeling Learning Across the Lifespan." We do not hear of any neuroscience research that can explain how a brain could learn. 
• "Revealing the Cognitive Sorcery of Human Intelligence." We have an interview with a Harvard neuroscientist  who fails to reveal any brain mechanisms that might explain cognition. There is no link to a specific paper. 

So examining all the posts on this site from January 2020 to March 2025 that had headlines sounding like they might be some substantive evidence for "brains make minds" and "brains store memories" claims, I find no such substantive evidence. We have lots of cognitive neuroscientists claiming to know things they don't know. But a close look at their research always fails to find robust evidence in support of the dogmas that cognitive neuroscientists keep chanting. 

The very existence of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society should remind us that the academia authorities behind "brains make minds" claims and "brains store memories" claims are members of a guild, a society, and a belief community. The utterances of such people at annual meetings of such a society are largely "preserve the faith" utterances comparable to the speeches at Protestant revival meetings or the sermons in Catholic churches, except that a different type of old creed is being taught.