Neuroscientists Offer Only the Most Hazy Hand-Waving When Trying to Explain Memory

"Scientific journals have reported cases of persons whose injuries have necessitated the removal of a large portion of the brain, and whose memory and power of thought were unimpaired by the loss of much cerebral matter, or by damage to centers which are supposed to be necessary to memory and consciousness. Dr. Troude writes:  'As M. Bergson foresaw in 1897, the hypothesis of the brain as conservative of memory images, must be renounced once and for all, and other ideas as to the nature of its role in the act of memory must be accepted. ' "

--- Helen C. Lambert, A General Survey of Psychical Phenomena, p. 49.

Dictionary.com defines "hand waving" as "insubstantial words, arguments, gestures, or actions used in an attempt to explain or persuade." When neuroscientists attempt to explain memory by referring to the brain, they offer only the most hazy hand-waving. Typically what occurs is the repetition of empty slogans and catchphrases.  

For example, a neuroscientist may claim that memories are formed by "synapse strengthening." There is no substance in this claim, which is mere hand-waving. We have many examples of the storage of knowledge in human-made things such as books, drawings, computer files, messages, handwritten notes and electronic data.  Such knowledge storage never occurs through strengthening.  Instead what typically happens when knowledge is stored in books, films, messages, notes and computer files is that there occurs a repetition of symbolic tokens by some kind of writing process, and the use of some encoding system in which certain combinations of symbolic tokens represent particular words, things or ideas.  That is not strengthening.  

To give another example of empty hazy hand-waving, a neuroscientist may vaguely claim that memories are formed by "the formation of synaptic patterns." There is no substance in this claim, which is mere hand-waving.  It is possible to store information by the use of pattern repetitions. For example, you might consider each word in the English language as a pixel pattern, and then say that each use of the word "dog" in a printed book is a pattern repetition. But synapses do not form any recognizable repeating patterns. And if synapses did form such patterns, there would need to exist some synapse pattern reader to read and recognize such patterns; but no such thing exists.  Instead of being anything that could consist of stable repeating patterns, synapses are unstable "shifting sands" kind of things. Synapses are built from proteins that have an average lifetime of only two weeks or less.  The maximum length of time that humans can remember things (more than 50 years) is 1000 times longer than the average lifetime of the proteins in a synapse. So synapses cannot be the storage place of memories that can last reliably for so long. 

Last year we had an example of the type of empty hazy hand-waving that occurs when neuroscientists attempt to explain memory. It was a paper entitled "Consciousness” as a Fusion of the Global Neuronal Network (GNW) Hypothesis and the Tripartite Mechanism of Memory." The paper made quite a few uses of the word "mechanism" but it described no memory mechanism at all. All we got was the most hazy hand-waving. 

I may note that biologists are notorious for abusing the term "mechanism," and often claim to be describing "mechanisms" when they are discussing no such things.  The term "mechanism" is only properly used for an exact description of material things working closely together in time and space. The pumping of blood by the heart and the circulation of blood in the body is an example of a mechanism. But when you are describing things that are not closely working together in a mechanical way, you have no business using the term "mechanism." It is a glaring abuse of language to refer to so-called "natural selection" as a mechanism of evolution, given that the main imagined things (random mutations scattered across vastly separated times and places) are not anything like a mechanism. 

We have in the paper a section entitled "Evolving Memory Mechanism" which fails to describe any mechanism, giving us only the most hazy hand-waving. Then we have a section entitled "Tripartite Mechanism of Emotive Memory" which states only this:

"For the neural emotive memory, we proposed that the cognitive unit of information (cuinfo) is realized materially (sic. chemically [13,28,29]. Thus, a chemically based code permits the achievement of an emotive state instigated by neurotransmitters (NTs) released by neurons/glial cells and the recall of such [1-11]. The proposed tripartite mechanism for encoding memory involves the interactions of neurons with their surrounding extracellular matrix (nECM/PNN). It has been experimentally verified that neurons are not 'naked', but are enshrouded in a web of glycoaminoglycans [44-49] which we propose serves as a 'memory material' [13,28,29]. Incoming perceptions are encoded with trace metals +neurotransmitters (NTs) to form metal-centered cognitive units of information (cuinfo). We have developed a chemographic notation for the tripartite mechanism which captures the essence of this regarding emotive memory (Figure 2)."

This is merely the most hazy hand-waving, decorated by some references to neural anatomy, along with the tiniest sprinkling of chemistry jargon. The Figure 2 referred to is utterly unimpressive. It merely shows a few circles that are labeled as "cations." We have a groundless reference to "addresses" that is not justified. The brain has no actual addresses anywhere in it. The lack of addresses in the brain is one of the major reasons why there can be no credible theory of instant recall occurring by brain activity. Addresses, sorting and indexes are some of the things used by devices human manufacture to allow them to instantly retrieve information. But brains have no addresses, no sorting and no indexes. References 13, 28 and 29 in the quote refers to papers here and here and here, which are not  papers referring to biological memory storage, but papers referring to some type of electronic memory storage in human-made devices. Our authors have vaguely referred to some type of chemical as being a "memory material," and have supplied only references to papers not referring to biology, giving us the incorrect impression that there is some biological foundation for their vague reference. 

We read this conceptually empty piece of hazy hand-waving:

"In a binary-formatted computer memory, the individual bits (or bytes) are stored in a matrix. But comprehensive memory results from the collective activity of a group of neurons, not only from the cuinfo of an individual neuron. Thus, a working model of how the brain generates emotive memory needs to meld physiologic effects with electro-biochemical processes. The GNW hypothesis suggests a 'brain cloud' that permits the neural net to consolidate the contribution of individual neurons in different anatomic compartments into comprehensive recall, effectively an integration of units of dispersed units of cognitive information [52]." 

This does not describe a mechanism, and does not contain any specifics. Next to this hand-waving paragraph, we are given a diagram that fails to depict any specific theory of memory.  The diagram is below:

There is no substance here. The gray circles merely represent regions of the brain. The little "c" squares represent memories that the authors claim are stored in the brain. This isn't a depiction of a memory, nor is it a depiction of any real theory of neural storage of memories. All that we have represented is the vague idea of a brain storing memories. 

In their Conclusion section, we have nothing that summarizes any actual theory of brain memory storage or brain memory recall or brain memory preservation.  Three times in the section the authors claim to have described a mechanism, but no such mechanism was described. All that has gone on is a claim of memory storage, and some references to different parts of the brain, sprinkled with the tiniest bit of chemistry jargon (by use of the word cation).  Nothing but the haziest hand-waving has gone on here. 

And so it is throughout neuroscience literature. You will never find a single paper that even attempts to give a precise description of how a brain could store the simplest bit of knowledge such as "my dog has fleas." Another example of the empty hand-waving of neuroscientists in regard to memory can be found in the paper here, entitled "Why not connectomics?" We have this example of conceptually empty hand-waving about memory storage:

"Brains can encode experiences and learned skills in a form that persists for decades or longer. The physical instantiation of such stable traces of activity is not known, but it seems likely to us that they are embodied in the same way intrinsic behaviors (such as reflexes) are: that is, in the specific pattern of connections between nerve cells. In this view, experience alters connections between nerve cells to record a memory for later recall. Both the sensory experience that lays down a memory and its later recall are indeed trains of action potentials, but in-between, and persisting for long periods, is a stable physical structural entity that holds that memory. In this sense, a map of all the things the brain has put to memory is found in the structure—the connectional map."

The first sentence is groundless dogma. There is no evidence that brains "can encode experiences and learned skills in a form that persists for decades or longer."  There is merely the fact that humans can have experiences and learn skills that they remember for decades.  The second sentence is a confession that there is no understanding of how such a brain storage of memories can happen. The authors confess that "the physical instantiation of such stable traces of activity is not known,"  The claim that memories are stored by "the specific pattern of connections between nerve cells" is empty hand-waving, and the speculation stated is unbelievable. No one who has ever studied the connections between nerve cells (neurons) has ever seen anything like some symbolic pattern that could encode a record of human experiences or human learned skills or learned conceptual knowledge such as school learning.  The brain does not have any such thing as a connection pattern reader that could read and interpret such patterns if they existed. Moreover, the connections between brains are structural units too short-lived to explain human memories that reliably persist for decades. Synapses and the dendritic spines they connect to do not last for years, and the proteins they are made of have average lifetimes of only a few weeks.